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Jane Wills
© Jane Wills 2008
In the academy we are used to thinking of labour as a pseudo-commodity. While employers buy labour power, that commodity is embodied in the messy human body. It may take some effort to extract it, and if the body breaks down for physical or emotional reasons, the employer has to wait while the worker gets fixed. Yet in the past three decades it has become much easier to extract labour power in a purer commodity form. A combination of subcontracted employment relations and the exploitation of alternative supplies of workers, make it easier to extract labour power without engaging in the complications of life. This has immense significance for the politics of labour. As I'll show by the end of this short contribution, it demands a public articulation of the life of labour. The stories of those doing the labouring have to be brought to the table of those extracting the rent. As Marx would have it, the commodity - be it cleaning services, clothing or castor oil - needs to be de-fetishised. The key task is thus to identify the institutional forms that will allow this to happen. Here, I argue that labour needs to be part of broad coalitions of actors, often bridging huge geographical distances, in order to make labour issues matter again.
Part of the problem has been that those who remain committed to 'labour' have become an obstacle to reform. Many of those who remain attached to the ideas and institutional infrastructure of what's left of 'the labour movement' have still to come to terms with the nature of contemporary capitalism and its emergent formations of class. Even though some trade union/labour activists are now trying to inject welcome energy into organising, most remain attached to the old models of organisation and inherited traditions of doing politics.
Here I outline ten propositions about contemporary class formation, its geography and its implications for politics as a journey towards a new future. If we start from the ground up, what does it tell us about the kind of labour organisation that might really make sense?
Proposition 1 or the New International Division of Labour: We are now familiar with the story that during the twentieth century, capital moved to labour in what we now know as the New International Division of Labour. Employers in labour intensive industries were able to tap supplies of cheap, willing, nimble-fingered labour in the developing world. Eager to earn rent from the labours of their citizens, such activity was encouraged by the Governments of those nations. One group of workers (in the North) were dropped as another were engaged in production (in the South) and this involved a sharp upturn in the feminisation of the world's working class.
Proposition 2 or globalisation and discarded armies of labour: This new geography of production and class has deepened exponentially during the past 30 years. Governments in the South trip over each other to offer incentives for capital, exemplified in the Export Processing Zone. At the same time, Governments in the North get periodically perplexed by their recalcitrant working class, passing legislation to 'encourage' people into low waged work, to 'improve' themselves with higher education, and if that fails, to punish them for anti-social behaviour. Such developments are no longer simply a feature of life in the North. There is an intractable problem of under-employment in most parts of the world. Increased capital mobility has increased the number of under-used workers and accelerated the speed at which workers are dumped.
Proposition 3 or the Migrant Division of Labour: Relatedly, there has been a sharp acceleration in the number of workers moving beyond their home countries to work. Increasing numbers of people from the Global South and East have found their way North and West, again increasing potential gains to employers. London now has a stark bifurcated Migrant Division of Labour. Canary Wharf exemplifies the reliance of multinational capitalism on a multinational workforce. The investment rooms and the cleaning cupboards are inhabited by extraordinarily diverse populations. Research with one cleaning contractor in one building in 2006 found that the 105 workers came from 29 different countries. Well over half the workers now doing the least desirable routine and manual jobs in London were born overseas. Research conducted for the Global Cities at Work project here at Queen Mary found that 90% of the cleaners working on London Underground were born abroad, many of them in Africa, and similar trends were found in catering, hospitality, home care and food processing jobs. Welcomed by employers, such migrants fill a gap doing work that 'natives' are unwilling and apparently unsuited to do. As this representative from the Confederation of British Industry recently put it: If you have a choice between two individuals, one of whom seems really enthusiastic about work, who wants to get on … who wants to learn and wants to move on and wants to perform well, then you are going to choose that individual with that positive attitude. If those positive attitudes are coming more from migrant workers than the UK-born, then I am afraid you are going to go for the migrant workers. We know what the solution to that disadvantage would be: a bit more enthusiasm from the indigenous worker. (Susan Anderson, CBI, quoted in House of Lords Select Committee of Economic Affairs, 2008, 33). Employers can sidestep the problems of the 'native' working class and extract more surplus, more easily, from migrants instead. Added to this, the growing competition between differentiated streams of migrants (and in the UK, particularly between those coming from the countries of the A8 and those less publicly legitimate - and racialized - groups from the Global South) to keep wages down. In a classic demonstration of Marx's arguments about the reserve army of labour, the workers who arrived - often uninvited - from Africa and Latin America during the 1980s and 1990s and kept London working are now being rejected. In the context of hostile public opinion, the Government has decided to source low waged labour from white populations in Central and Eastern Europe, stepping up workplace raids, immigration checks and deportations of those without papers. Irregular migrants have become a public policy problem and the Government is putting major resources into policing this population for the very first time.
Proposition 4 or the new employment paradigm: Since the 1980s a new employment paradigm has also developed that further increases the power of capital over labour and the potential to use spatial competition to increase the surplus extracted. Subcontracted employment now means that the largest companies don't directly employ workers and instead, they rely on suppliers. This model is endemic in raw material extraction and production, manufacturing, transportation/logistics, catering, cleaning, HR, IT, security, state services … and just about most things. Subcontracting allows big capital to squeeze their suppliers and to relocate without the geographical bind of sunk costs.
Proposition 5 or the search for the 'real employer': Under the old paradigm of factory-type employment relations, labour organisation involved workers recognising their shared interests at work, developing the capacity for collective organisation (often assisted by the agitation of radicalised colleagues as well as resources and ideas from the labour movement) and then mobilising to recalibrate the terms of employment. Labour organisation was geographically focused on the workplace. And as an aside, this is the model that is still being promoted by many advocates of the trade union organising agenda. Yet, if workers continue to adopt this model in the context of subcontracted employment relations, they simply price themselves - and their employer - out of a job. Effective labour organisation has to be able to reach the 'real employers' at the top of the chain to then change the terms of employment.
Proposition 6 or the changing role of the state: Under the old paradigm of factory-type employment relations and workplace trade union organisation, the labour movement was sometimes able to secure the political leverage required for national Government to intervene in the interests of labour. Indeed, in some instances, the state sought to regulate employment in the name of the nation. Organised labour no longer has such power and the actions of what's left of the labour movement are generally seen as sectional special interests of marginal relevance to the good of the whole. Increasingly, the labour market is a site for the exchange of labour-power as a purer commodity form (and this is most clearly exemplified in the hire of day or hourly labour).
Proposition 7 or the need to move on: If labour is to develop the capacity to act it is obviously imperative to rethink organisational structures, strategies and tactics. At a minimum, these new institutional and organisational forms would have to be able to tackle subcontracted employment; to develop a strategy for power that does not rely so heavily on the nation-state; and to deliver sufficient gains for/with workers to fuel further organisation.
Proposition 8 or the need for networked labour organisation: Pioneering work by groups like Women Working Worldwide and London Citizens, the group behind the London Living Wage, reveal a lot about what this new kind of labour organisation might look like. In the former case, WWW have developed international networks that allow workers' issues to reach the 'real employer' and in the latter, broad-based community organisation, direct action and media exposure have put the issues in front of the clients for cleaning services. In both cases, people have organised to challenge the moral economy of contemporary capitalism. Doing so has involved broad coalitions bridging the distance between frontline workers and senior managers, shareholders, beneficiaries of corporate charity, politicians, the media and consumers. North and South, workers cannot recalibrate contemporary labour relations on their own. Moreover, it is imperative to remake the coalition that allows workers issues to travel - to become community interests (with parallels to the links between the early labour movement and the Labour/Social Democratic parties at a national level in a country like Britain) - at any scale necessary.
Proposition 9 or the demand for a new moral economy: The state might feature as a target, or occasionally an ally (as in the case of the departed Ken Livingstone and the London Living Wage) but the state will not deliver on this agenda without a step change shift in organisation. At the moment, the emerging movement is being driven by a mixture of emotional commitments including a desire for human rights, social justice, fair trade, more accountable capitalism, Corporate Social Responsibility and feel good consumerism. The demand is for capitalism to develop a new moral economy. In contrast to elements of the old labour movement who saw workers struggle as a stage on the road to revolution and systemic change, this emerging movement practices solidarity for its own sake. The struggle is the end not the means to an end.
Proposition 10 or the need for flexibility: The experience of groups like WWW and LC highlights the importance of flexibility in developing new labour organisation. In some cases workers have been able to sustain workplace organisation but in others, episodic activity in the broader alliance or from a base in the community has been enough to secure change and is all workers can manage or desire. Cleaners at Queen Mary, for example, were part of the demand for a living wage which was realised last year but they were not part of a union. Indeed, the workers at Queen Mary have secured greater gains in pay and conditions than any other group involved in the living wage campaign, and this was without any formal organisation of the workers at all. The demand was made by a minority of workers supported by a broad coalition of London Citizens member groups (including my own department, local faith and community groups and trade union branches) with additional backup from the student union. Labour issues were largely articulated as community and College concerns and the issue was won by taking the stories of workers' experiences, the life of labour, to the ears of those in charge of the College. Taking the life of labour up the supply chain to the 'real employers' will take a different form in different locations. However, if the alliance is broad and strong enough, the campaign can be won.
Jane Wills is Director of The City Centre and Professor of Geography at Queen Mary, University of London J.wills@qmul.ac.uk
For more information
about the research on which this contribution is based, see: http://www.geog.qmul.ac.uk/globalcities/
http://www.geog.qmul.ac.uk/livingwage/
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