From global shift to global crisis: new patterns of production and labour organisation

Event Date: 29 November 2017

Speakers: John Smith, Kingston University - "From the ‘global shift’ to the global crisis" and Maurizio Atzeni, Centre for Labour Relations (CEIL/CONICET), Argentina - "Working class organisation in Argentina in the last two decades: between the union and the social movement form".

Location: CW507a, Strathclyde Business School – Cathedral Wing, 199 Cathedral Street, Glasgow, G4 0QU

Time: 4.00-6.00pm

There will be a workshop to further discuss the topic on Thursday 30th November 2017, 9.30-13.00. Details will be announced shortly. Organised by the Work, Labour and Globalisation Research Network

Abstract: From the ‘global shift’ to the global crisis

The most significant transformation of the neoliberal era is the global shift of manufacturing production to low-wage countries. Under the aegis of ‘export-oriented industrialisation’, or ‘outsourcing’, from a northern perspective, the ratio of industrial workers in Europe, North America and Japan (i.e. the imperialist countries) to those in the rest of the world moved from parity in 1980 to less than one in five by the outbreak of the global crisis in 2007-8. This vast shift was driven by the desire of transnational corporations headquartered in imperialist countries to substitute low-wage workers in countries like China, Mexico and Bangladesh (i.e. the global South) for relatively high waged workers at home, generating gigantic south-north flows of wealth from that are visible everywhere except in trade and capital flow statistics, to which also must be added the proceeds of ongoing plunder of the South’s agriculture and mineral resources. The result is that profits, prosperity and social peace in the imperialist countries have come to depend more than ever on super-exploitation of low-wage workers in the global South. The neoliberal era, therefore, marks not the passing of imperialism into history, as most liberal and ‘left’ critics of neoliberalism argue, but the intensification and indeed culmination of capitalism’s centuries-old imperialist trajectory. This presentation argues that the global shift of production was decisive to capitalism’s escape from systemic crisis in the 1970s, explains why the return of systemic crisis was postponed until 2007-8, and is fundamental to understanding the nature and dynamics of this crisis, which is still in its early stages

Abstract: Working class organisation in Argentina in the last two decades: between the union and the social movement form

The reformist and progressive governments that have dominated the political scene of Argentina between 2003 and 2015 have overall improved the condition of the Argentinean  working class but within a political economic model that has left unchanged the conditions of precarity and informality in which a third of Argentinean workers still live, questioning the forms of workers’ representation. In the last decades, following the rhythms of economic crises and recoveries, Argentina’s labour conflicts and struggles have been alternatively led by social movements and trade unions and have been characterised by a pendula oscillation between the territory and the workplace as the spatial focus of the organisation. The relevance of trade unions as workers’ collective forms of organisation par excellence has been revitalised in the last decade in coincidence with economic growth. However, these organisations have traditionally excluded all informal and precarious workers, which are often territorially dispersed and involved in non-value producing forms of work, leaving the field open to the emergence of new organisations.

The recent history of working class mobilisation and organisation in Argentina can be useful to reflect on a number of open questions/methodological issues that should be central to future’s research on labour: the articulation of processes of class formation to the shifting productive structures/models of capital accumulation; the need to go beyond the comfort zone of the capital labour relations and think of work and the working class in broader terms; the need to focus on processes rather than on trade unions as forms of workers’ representation; the need to rethink the role of the State and its policies and politics in taming and controlling working class organisation and resistance strategies.

Published: 8 November 2017