Workers, Unions, and Global Capitalism

Lessons from India

Rohini Hensman

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780231519564
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Asia

While it's easy to blame globalization for shrinking job opportunities, dangerous declines in labor standards, and a host of related discontents, the "flattening" of the world has also created unprecedented opportunities for worker organization. By expanding employment in developing countries, especially for women, globalization has formed a basis for stronger workers' rights, even in remote sites of production.

Using India's labor movement as a model, Rohini Hensman charts the successes and failures, strengths and weaknesses, of the struggle for workers' rights and organization in a rich and varied nation. As Indian products gain wider acceptance in global markets, the disparities in employment conditions and union rights between such regions as the European Union and India's vast informal sector are exposed, raising the issue of globalization's implications for labor.

Hensman's study examines the unique pattern of "employees' unionism," which emerged in Bombay in the 1950s, before considering union responses to recent developments, especially the drive to form a national federation of independent unions. A key issue is how far unions can resist protectionist impulses and press for stronger global standards, along with the mechanisms to enforce them. After thoroughly unpacking this example, Hensman zooms out to trace the parameters of a global labor agenda, calling for a revival of trade unionism, the elimination of informal labor, and reductions in military spending to favor funding for comprehensive welfare and social security systems.

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Emancipatory Action Research Into Workers’ Struggles

This book is an account of emancipatory action research, which is “collaborative, critical, and self-critical inquiry by practitioners… into a major problem or issue or concern in their own practice” (Zuber-Skerritt 1996, 3). The problem or issue or concern in this case was the quandary in which the labor movement found itself in the early twenty-first century, both worldwide and in India: large numbers of unionized workers were losing their jobs while the overwhelming majority of the labor force consisted of informal workers subjected to extremely oppressive employment conditions. Emancipatory action research has been seen “as a way of bringing together social science theory and practice” (Weiskopf and Laske 1996, 123). As a Bombay-based participant in the labor movement who has been involved in labor research since the mid-1970s, I felt the need for a deeper and more extensive critical enquiry into the practice of this movement, one taking into account changes in the overall context resulting from globalization. My objective was to investigate our shared experience in a manner “which link[s] practice and the analysis of practice into a single productive and continuously developing sequence”; thus this book “is about the nature of the learning process, about the link between practice and reflection, about the process of attempting to have new thoughts about familiar experiences, and about the relationship between particular experiences and general ideas” (Winter 1996, 14).

My starting point was the practice of two sections of workers in India—formal workers in employees’ unions and informal workers—who had been affected by globalization in opposite ways: the former losing jobs while the latter gained them. The democratic functioning of the employees’ unions could in some ways be seen as “best practice” in the trade union movement, yet the fact that the bulk of the labor force remained unorganized posed a problem both for employees in these unions, whose jobs had been transferred in large numbers to informal workers, and for the informal workers themselves, most of whom were unable to bargain collectively in order to improve their employment conditions. The assault on labor rights was already evident by the mid-1970s and intensified with globalization, and even the most combative unions were hard pressed to defend the gains they had made in earlier periods.

This impasse resulted in considerable hardship for many workers who lost their jobs in the formal sector. While unions resisted in various ways, initially they tended to focus their struggle on an opposition to globalization and a defense of members’ jobs rather than attempting to fight for the rights of the informal workers to whom work was being transferred. A broader view revealed that a similar perspective inspired many unions in other countries, who were fighting to retain jobs through protectionist measures rather than looking for ways to defend labor rights globally. This is why I found it necessary to engage in a critique of union practice, which, like all practice, was informed by certain theoretical presuppositions that were open to question.

In this case, I will try to argue that a mistaken understanding of globalization and a failure to identify the real roots of the onslaught that the labor unions faced constituted obstacles to developing a more effective strategy. Developing a better analysis became all the more urgent in the wake of the global economic crisis, which led to massive job losses and strong downward pressure on labor standards worldwide (ILO 2009). The purpose of this “theoretical reflection with respect to practical action is… to question the reflective bases upon which the practical actions have been carried out, to offer a reflexive and dialectical critique whose effect is to recall to mind those possibilities that practice has chosen on this occasion to ignore” (Winter 1996, 25), and to help workers in different parts of the world to learn from one another.

Social-science research should not be based upon

the aspirations for objectivity which should more rightfully apply to natural science. Some of these are: reification—treatment of people and events as objects; researchers attempting to adopt a neutral, disinterested position; and researchers avoiding admission that they are constitutive of their data. These aspirations for objectivity are pursued on the grounds that to be subjective by revealing the self in research is self-indulgent or, at worst, even narcissistic.

(Hall 1996, 37–38)

In reality, on the contrary, the result of such attempts to be “objective” is that the constitutive role of the researcher remains hidden, affecting the data and analysis but making it impossible for others to assess in what way it has done so. If emancipatory action research is to have any credibility, therefore, is must adopt a reflexive approach which attempts to

account for researcher constitutiveness. This process begins with being self-conscious (to the extent that this is possible) about how one’s doing of the research as well as what one brings to it (previous experience, knowledge, values, beliefs and a priori concepts) shapes the way the data are interpreted and treated. An account of researcher constitutiveness is completed when this awareness is incorporated in the research report.

(Hall 1996, 30)

These conclusions then have to be tested in practice.

Reflexivity is especially important in action research, which by its nature is the opposite of “neutral” or “disinterested.” However, it should be emphasized that a commitment to a goal does not necessarily militate against a commitment to the truth: even in a situation of conflict, no purpose is served by misrepresenting or demonizing one’s opponent. The rest of this chapter will be an attempt to summarize the experience, knowledge, values, beliefs, and concepts underlying my research.

The first important influence on my approach to the research and interpretation of data is Marxism, understood here not as a body of doctrine but as a method and theoretical approach. Marx’s method is perhaps best summarized in his Theses on Feuerbach. According to the first three theses, there is a contradiction in conceiving of social reality as an object, as something to be contemplated, since we ourselves are part of that reality; regarding it as an object therefore amounts to dividing society into two parts, one of which (the researcher, in this instance) is outside of and superior to society. The alternative is to conceive of social reality as human activity or practice, including our own. This has the added advantage of allowing for a resolution of the dispute over whether truth can be attributed to human thinking. “The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question”: it can never be resolved. While it is true that circumstances shape people, this cannot by itself explain historical change, which requires us to recognize that human beings in turn change circumstances. The only way of proving the “reality and power, the this-sidedness” of our thinking, therefore, is through practical-critical activity, which is the “coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing” (Marx 1975a, 421–423).

From the standpoint of the overwhelming majority of the European working class in Marx’s day or the global working class in ours, motivation for changing the world appears to come from the desire to escape from starvation wages, long working hours, and unhealthy conditions of work, which lead to misery, illness, and premature death. But that is not all: working-class struggle continues even when workers are relatively well paid and their working conditions reasonably healthy. There is something about the labor relations of capitalist production that produces conflict even when workers are not struggling for mere survival. Marx begins his explanation by saying that concealed behind the categories of political economy, which seem to describe relations between things—commodities and money, for example—are relationships between people. When we buy a commodity, what we acquire is the objectified labor of the workers who have labored to produce it, including those who produced the instruments of production and extracted the raw materials that went into the commodity’s production: people whom we have probably never seen and who may be living in countries thousands of miles away. Conversely, the commodities we produce as workers might include inputs from workers in other parts of the world and may then be consumed by people we have never met. There is a relationship between workers and consumers, but it is not immediately visible, because it is mediated by the market, by money. This causes problems: others may be in desperate need of what we are producing—for example, food or medicines—yet be unable to get it because they have no money to buy it. The scandal of starvation deaths in early twenty-first-century India, which was happening while warehouses overflowed with grain that was rotting and being eaten by rats, is an apt illustration of this aspect of capitalism (see chapter 8).

However, the market is not the only barrier between workers and consumers. Most people do not themselves sell the commodities they produce; instead, they work for employers who do the selling. It looks as if the workers are selling their labor to the employer, but according to Marx, what they actually sell is their labor power, or capacity to labor, and the capitalist, having bought it, sets about making them produce more value than they will get back as wages, i.e., surplus value. The workers not only have to produce a saleable commodity in order to survive; they have to produce it under someone else’s command and work longer and/or harder than they would need to if they were simply supporting themselves and their dependants. For the capitalist, there is also a compulsion to succeed in the competitive struggle with other capitalists, which entails a constant effort to increase profits and accumulate capital (Marx 1976, 283–339). In Marx’s view, this relationship of compulsion and exploitation, the “alienation” of workers from their own labor (Marx 1976, 990), explains the conflict between workers and employers as well as the source of capitalist profit. In other words, at the heart of the class struggle under capitalism is the fact that for capital, labor power is merely a factor of production and source of profit, whereas for workers, it is inseparable from themselves as living human beings.

It is true that Marx’s work has flaws and needs to be developed and updated. But in my opinion, his basic framework still stands and is confirmed by my research. Nor is it Marxists alone who hold this view.

In October 1997, the business correspondent of the New Yorker, John Cassidy, reported a conversation with an investment banker. “The longer I spend on Wall Street, the more convinced I am that Marx was right,” the financier said. “I am absolutely convinced that Marx’s approach is the best way to look at capitalism.” His curiosity aroused, Mr. Cassidy read Marx for the first time. He found riveting passages about globalisation, inequality, political corruption, monopolisation, technical progress, the decline of high culture, and the enervating nature of modern existence—issues that economists are now confronting anew, sometimes without realising that they are walking in Marx’s footsteps.

(Wheen 2005)

And according to George Soros (1998, xxxvi):

Capitalism needs democracy as a counterweight because capitalism by itself shows no tendency towards equilibrium. The owners of capital seek to maximize their profits. Left to their own devices, they would continue to accumulate capital until the situation became unbalanced. Marx and Engels gave a very good analysis of the capitalist system 150 years ago, better in some ways, I must say, than the equilibrium theory of classical economics.

This is an important insight. I will try to argue that one of the key contributors to the crisis of 2008 was a democracy deficit: government policy was shaped by the interests of a tiny minority and not by those of the vast majority of working people in their countries, and consequently the situation became “unbalanced.” After the crisis hit, Marx’s Capital became a bestseller: “In his native Germany, copies of Das Kapital are reported to be flying off the shelves as failed bankers and free market economists try to make sense of the global economic meltdown” (Suroor 2008). And the foreword to the UN Report on Reforms of the Monetary and Financial System named Marx as among the greatest economic philosophers (UN 2009, 9).

In his early writings, Marx proposes a model of work that is satisfying both because it allows for the free exercise of the worker’s skill and creativity and because it is seen to satisfy another’s need (1975b, 277–278). However, Marx did not reject everything that capitalism had achieved: he saw the vast increase in the productivity of labor due to large-scale production and technological advances as laying the basis for his vision of the future, when the associated producers would control the means of production for the collective good, with people contributing in accordance with their abilities and receiving in accordance with their needs (Marx 1974a, 347). The working-class struggle for this vision is what he described as “communism.”

Marx produced neither a blueprint of this utopia nor a roadmap for arriving at it. Some of his writings, especially on the Paris Commune, suggest that workers would have to discover the pathway and goal for themselves (Marx 1974b, 212); this would accord with his view in the Theses on Feuerbach. Inevitably, workers make mistakes when they embark on this journey into unknown territory. One example cited by Marx is Luddism:

The large-scale destruction of machinery which occurred in the English manufacturing districts during the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century, largely as a result of the employment of the power-loom, and known as the Luddite movement, gave the anti-Jacobin government… a pretext for the most violent and reactionary measures. It took both time and experience before the workers learned to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and therefore to transfer their attacks from the material instruments of production to the form of society which utilizes those instruments.

(Marx 1976, 554–555)

This example of learning by the working class exemplifies a process going on all the time. E. P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class (1966), which gives a more detailed account not only of Luddism but also of many other working-class struggles during the late eighteenth century and first half of the nineteenth century, looks at the multiplicity of ideas and practices that existed within the working class and the process of discussion and debate out of which particular strategies emerged and were tested in practice. Michael Vester’s analysis of his account (1975) showed that this process could be resolved into phases of activity followed by phases of reflection, which together constituted cycles of learning. As Gramsci noted, the process of reflection could be carried out by new “organic” intellectuals emerging from the working class, as well as by traditional intellectuals who threw in their lot with the workers (Gramsci 1971, 9–10). In many ways, this cycle of struggle, reflection on experience, trying out new strategies, and once again reflecting on them resembles emancipatory action research in its dialectical interweaving of thought and practice.

One of the lessons learned by workers very early on was that in isolation they could never resist domination by capital: the only hope of improving their lot lay in combining into a workers’ union that eliminated competition among the workers who belonged to it. This resulted in a powerful movement—the trade union movement—which exists on a much wider scale today and has been responsible for major improvements in wages, working hours, and working conditions as well as legislation that upholds workers’ rights. It was then the capitalists who had to learn a lesson. They had been unsuccessful in opposing the right of workers to form combinations or shorten working hours, but they found other ways to increase the extraction of surplus value, through the introduction of more machinery and the intensification of labor (Marx 1976, 534).

Paradoxically, the net result of the successful struggle for the ten-hour day was that it compelled employers to make technological and organizational changes that altered the entire system and propelled industry forward at a much more rapid rate (Marx 1976, 542). Thus the actual development of capitalism is the outcome of this complex interaction between action, reflection, and learning on the part of workers and a similar process of learning among capitalists, the outcome of which might in some cases make working-class struggle easier (for example, legislation protecting the right to organize and bargain collectively) and in other cases make it more difficult (for example, casualization and informalization).

This view contrasts with a more deterministic interpretation of Marx’s critique of political economy, according to which the driving force in capitalist society is the logic of capital and the most the working class can do is to respond to this logic. It has been pointed out that many Marxists appear to make the assumption that under no circumstances do workers take the initiative in bringing about changes in capitalism (Herod 2001). But such a reading would be at odds with the Theses on Feuerbach. Even in Capital, which is most prone to this interpretation because it sets out to lay bare the logic of capital as an impersonal compulsion on both workers and owners of capital, the presence of an opposing logic of working-class struggle is evident. Indeed, from Marx’s time to our own, major changes in capitalism, such as the introduction of new technologies, reorganization of the labor process, and relocation of facilities to new sites, are often a response by capitalists to workers’ success in controlling the labor process or imposing their own rules on production in other ways (cf. Edwards 1979). Even globalization, a prime example of what is seen as a capital-driven process, is not a monopoly of capital: given the formation of organizations like the International Working Men’s Association (First International) in the 1860s, “it might even be suggested that the formal transnationalization of labor in many ways predates that of capital” (Herod 2001, 131).

Marx’s work concentrates on the logic of capital, and the logic of working-class struggle can only be glimpsed from time to time, although it is more evident in his political writings. Generalizing from his work, that of other labor historians, and my own experience, I would say that the driving force of working-class struggle, analogous to capital’s drive to accumulate, is a desire for dignity, recognition, and control over one’s own life and work rather than a struggle for mere biological survival. The conception of workers as human beings capable of making mistakes and learning from experience seems much more realistic than conceptions that see them either as born revolutionaries or as incapable of achieving a consciousness of their common interests without enlightenment from outside. Only a tiny minority of workers consciously set themselves the goal of abolishi...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1: Emancipatory Action Research Into Workers’ Struggles
• 2: Defining Globalization
• 3: Four Sources of the Global Crisis of 2008
• 4: Capital, the State, and Trade Union Rights
• 5: Employees’ Unions: An Experiment in Union Democracy
• 6: Informal Labor: The Struggle for Legal Recognition
• 7: Working Women and Reproductive Labor
• 8: Employment Creation and Welfare
• 9: International Strategies
• 10: Conclusion: Toward Global Solidarity
• Notes
• References
• Index