http://www.monthlyreview.org/0605gapasinyates.htm

Labor Movements: Is There Hope?
by Fernando E. Gapasin and Michael D. Yates

Home
Subscribe

Notes From
the Editors

A Note on the Death of Andre Gunder Frank (1929-2005)
by Samir Amin

Made in Venezuela: The Struggle to Reinvent Venezuelan Labor
by Jonah Gindin

Fernando E. Gapasin is a former professor of industrial relations and Chicano/a studies. He was the primary researcher for the development of the AFL-CIO’s Union Cities program. He has forty years of activism in the American union movement and is presently a local union president and president of a local Central Labor Council.

Michael D. Yates is associate editor of Monthly Review. For many years he taught economics at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. He is the author of Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global System (2004), Why Unions Matter (199, and Longer Hours and Fewer Jobs: Employment and Unemployment in the United States (1994), all published by Monthly Review Press.


For the past thirty years, the class struggle has been a pretty one-sided affair, with capital delivering a severe beating to labor around the globe. When economic stagnation struck most of the world’s advanced capitalist economies, beginning in the mid-1970s, capital went on the offensive, quickly understanding that the best way to maintain and increase profit margins in a period of slow and sporadic economic growth was to cut labor costs. Governments and global lending agencies such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund began to implement policies that made workers increasingly insecure.

A list of the actions taken by labor’s class enemies makes for depressing reading: slashed wages and benefits, lean production (with its attendant increase in injuries and health problems, seldom addressed these days by public agencies), closed plants and ruined communities, successful ideological warfare by the right, the dismantling of the social welfare state, privatization of public services, deregulation, regressive taxation, structural adjustment programs, outsourcing and offshoring of work, antiworker trade agreements, and direct violence against workers. A special mention must be made of the situation in the former “East Bloc.� These countries have seen a massive theft of what had been social property and its conversion into private property. This along with the elimination of nearly all forms of socialized consumption have resulted in the unemployment of tens of millions of persons, the marginal employment of tens of millions more, and the death of tens of millions of workers and pensioners before their time. And China has seen drastic blows to the rights of labor and the growth of gross exploitation.

Besides damaging workers directly, the class war waged by employers has also radically restructured employment. Worldwide, there are many hundred million persons who are either openly unemployed or engaged in extremely marginal informal employment. This group includes millions of displaced peasants living in the sprawling urban slums surrounding the great cities of the global South. Among the rest of the working class, various kinds of contingent employment have spread rapidlyâ€â€