The Information Proletariat and Globalization – Hookes

The Information Proletariat and Globalization – Hookes

Submitted for the International Conference:

The Working Class: What is it and where is it?

At the Economics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Moscow, 11-12 July 2006

Introduction: The fetishisation of manual labour

It is generally recognised that the character of work has changed considerably during
the 20th Century. The classical Marxist proletariat, manual factory workers, from
being the overwhelming majority, say, 70-80 % of the workforce, are now between
10-20% in advanced capitalist countries. Those members of the workforce who
provide services, especially information processing and delivery services, are now the
majority.1 A sub-group of the ‘information proletariat’ are sometimes called
‘knowledge workers’, that is,  those who jobs require high level of knowledge input
obtained from advanced schooling. They are now about one third of the workforce in
the US, more than twice as numerous as the manual factory proletariat. They are
expected to become at least 40% of the working population, say by, 2010. [1] This
latter group can be considered to be the new core proletariat of a knowledge-based
society. It contains many highly privileged groups such as university teachers and
researchers, and so on, whose level of alienation is, let us say, tolerable, as well as
less privileged technical knowledge workers.  The information proletariat as a whole
includes many highly exploited workers such as those in call-centres and data-input
offices.

See the complete article here:

http://www.labortech.net/pdf/Moscow3.pdf

Doing: in-Against-and-Beyond Labour – Holloway

Peter Waterman sez: This is the first theoretical paper I have come across that attempts to reconceptualise labour in the light of 21^st C capitalism and the new social movements. In so far as it draws (critically) on Marxist theory at its most abstract level, it makes for heavy reading. It invites popularization. And it provokes responses. Political-economists of the world, respond! Preferably on ReinventingLabour. Now read on…

Of Human Greed – Taylor interviews Harvey

Of human greed: Laurie Taylor interviews David Harvey

The Humanist, Vol 125, Issue 4, July/August 201o

A search for the reasons for the economic meltdown has prompted a turn back to Marx. Laurie Taylor meets the “dialectical materialist” geographer David Harvey who, 40 years into his career, is suddenly being taken seriously

Organizing for Defeat – Green

from Labour/ Le Travail no. 62, Fall 2008

Organizing for Defeat: The Relevance and Utility of the Trade Union as a Legitimate Question

Brian Green

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The continuity of struggle is easy: the workers need only themselves and the boss in front of them. But the continuity of organization is a rare and complex thing: as soon as it becomes institutionalized it becomes used by capitalism…. Mario Tronti, Lenin in England

THE DECLINE AND RETREAT of the North American labour movement in the past two decades has been a matter of extensive commentary and scholarly and political debate.1 While these discussions have contributed immensely to our understanding of economic restructuring and strategic imperatives for the labour movement’s continued political viability, much of the literature is limited to either a “counting of the dead” or a focus exclusively on the aggressive strategy of capital in the post-Keynesian era. Surprisingly little has been said about unions themselves and the relationship between their organizational consolidation as partners of a once ascendant Keynesian class compromise and their subsequent paralysis in the face of the collapse of that compromise. This paper will attempt to initiate such a discussion by tackling these questions: how did the historical development of the trade union form render it particularly vulnerable to the ravages of capitalist restructuring? And what, then, might this suggest about the future viability of the union as we know it?

Peter Hall Jones, New Unionism

Interview with Peter Hall-Jones, New Unionism (2009)

Interview: Dan Gallin
Bureaucratism: Labour’s Enemy Within
By Peter Hall-Jones*, for the New Unionism Network (http://www.newunionism.net) 2009

Where does bureaucratism in the union movement come from? More to the point, how can we get rid of it? In an attempt to answer this question we interviewed the outspoken Dan Gallin, current Chair of the Global Labour Institute. Prior to holding this position, Gallin served 29 years as General Secretary of the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant and Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations (IUF). He was also President of the International Federation of Workers’ Education Associations (IFWEA) from 1992-2003, and Director of the Organization and Representation Program of Women in Informal Employment Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) from 2000-2002. (more on DG below*).

The Ideological Legacy of the Social Pact – Wahl

International labour movement

The ideological legacy of the social pact – by Asbjørn Wahl (2004)

Asbjørn Wahl is an official of the Norwegian union for municipal and health sector workers and is vice chair of the Road Transport Section of the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF). He is also the national co-ordinator of the Norwegian Campaign for the Welfare State (For velferdsstaten), a trade union based alliance fighting against privatisation and deregulation, and to protect the social achievements of the welfare state. A version of this article was published in the US socialist magazine, Monthly Review, January 2004. See also his article: World Bank Policies and Labour Rights, on the GLI web site (go to: Issues, then to: WTO/WB/IMF).
The trade union movement in Europe is on the defensive. Not only that, it is also in a deep political and ideological crisis. The general picture is that the trade unions, for the time being, are not able to fill their role of defending the immediate economic and social interests of their members. They have lost ground in all sectors and industries. The strongest and most influential trade union movement in the capitalist world in the post W.W.II period is thus today openly confused, lacks a clear vision and hesitates in its new social and political orientation. The strange thing is that it is the same theories, analyses and policies which gave it its strength in the post War period that have now become its heavy burden. The ideological legacy of the social pact policies is now leading the trade union movement astray.

New Proletarians – Antunes

MARXISM ALIVE 1 – June 2000

http://www.marxismalive.org/antunes.html

The New Proletarians of the World at the
Turn of the Century

Ricardo Antunes

This text corresponds to chapter VI of the book
“Los Sentidos del Trabajo: Ensayo sobre la Afirmación y la Negación del
Trabajo”,

Editora Bomtempo 1999, São Paulo

It is very curious that, while the numbers of social beings living
from selling their labour is increasing worldwide, there should be so many
authors who bade farewell to proletariat, defended the idea of
decentralisation of the category labour, defended the end of human
emancipation through labour. What I am going to present here is a way to
show how it is possible to go in the opposite direction with respect to
these tendencies that are very much present and very much mistaken.

Beyond ‘Social Movement Unionism’ – Ince

Beyond ‘Social Movement Unionism’? Understanding and Assessing New Wave Labour Movement Organising

Anthony Ince

Changing to Win?

“Change to Win is dedicated to the single most important task for restoring broad hope and prosperity to the American people — uniting by industry the tens of millions of workers who are now without a voice on the job and in our nation’s political life. Change to Win and its affiliates believe unionisation and collective bargaining are the foundation on which a fair and balanced economy can develop.” (Change to Win Coalition, 2006).

What is peculiar about this statement? It simply iterates the usual union rhetoric of uniting workers for a better life. The reality, however, is that it represents a tiny part of a much bigger shift in union strategies that has taken place, to greater or lesser extent, over the last decade or so. What is crucial in the statement is its context: it has been issued by a group that split from the main US trade union body in response to the massive decline in union membership over the last thirty years, and unions’ apparent inability to do anything about it. Thus where this statement may have seemed perfectly innocuous forty years ago, it is a radical call to arms today, representing one of the many ways that unions and other workers’ advocates have looked to reinvigorate the labour movement all over the globe in recent years.

Social Citizenship, Decline of Waged Labour, and Worker Strategies – Barchiesi

http://spip.red.m2014.net/article.php3?id_article=30

Social Citizenship, the Decline of Waged Labour and Changing Worker Strategies

Franco Barchiesi

Sunday 5th September 2004 posted by dionysus

Employment and social citizenship in the constitutionalisation of wage labour

The social location of labour in post-apartheid South Africa has undergone dramatic shifts that underpin a reconfiguration of the material bases of the new democracy. This chapter will analyse changes in waged employment during the first seven years of democratic government (1994-2001), with particular regard to their relationships to workers’ access to social rights and citizenship and to evolving worker identities and responses. The aim is to establish a link between a quantitative decline of stable waged employment, on which virtually all statistical indicators concur, and what can be defined as a ‘peripheralisation’ of work in the context of life strategies, forms of income, and collective organisation. Unions’ perceptions and strategies in relation to such changes will be dealt with in greater detail in other chapters of this volume. However, the aspects here under examination are decisive in the study of democratisation and of its limits in a context of high expectations for social redress faced with a legacy of extreme socio-economic inequality. Conversely, the crucial role played by the South African labour movement in the country’s democratic transition has come under increasing strains as a result of re-insertion in a globally liberalised capitalism. This is a reflection of, and it actually reinforces, two concomitant trends: first, the emergence of new vulnerabilities in the labour market as a result of employment fragmentation and instability; second, the adverse consequences in terms of workers’ income of the erosion or enduring absence of social citizenship rights. Changes in employment and crisis in the access to social rights are therefore examined here as two converging trends in explaining the decline of wage labour in the ‘new’ South Africa The relationships between work and social citizenship have provided a central theme for sociological and political analysis of labour movements in twentieth century industrialised capitalism. The rise of mass production and the expansion of waged employment, often with the active support of the state, have indeed defined ‘social citizenship’ as a new generation of rights to expand and integrate previous liberal-democratic definitions (Marshall, 1950).

Reinventing, Reimagining, Rebuilding – Labour Internationalism

ReinventingLabour is for people who organize, struggle, analyze, critique and strategize within and around the international labour movement. It is for people who seek a space to share ideas and resources regarding challenges and potentials to strengthen a vibrant, critical, plural and emancipatory movement of all kinds of working people everywhere – a movement intimately related to the new ‘global justice and solidarity movement’ (aka the anti- or alter-globalisation movement).