Morrocan Workers: Lessons for us All

Colleagues,

My first post of the new academic year and written with an expression of solidarity with Moroccan workers following a great holiday there in August. By sheer coincidence I happened across the offices of the Union Marocaine du Travail (Union of Moroccan Workers - http://www.umt.ma/ar/) whilst on a trip to Marrakech. Sadly though the offices were closed, so I had no opportunity of meeting with sister and brother trade unionists and expressing my support for their work.

The ITUC’s 2012 Survey of Violation of Trade Union Rights presents Morocco in the bleak, customary picture of labour movement repression across North Africa and the Middle East, underlining heavily that these two regions represent the worst violators of both limited national labour rights and ILO core labour standards.

If you examine the Survey detail for Morocco it does though reveal a degree of tenacity and resilience on the part of the Morrocan labour movement. What is particularly interesting is that, despite the ability of the royalist regime to avoid a popular uprising during the wave of the Arab spring, it has not diminished an increase in strike action across the country, nor attempts by workers to unionise. Read the Survey here: http://survey.ituc-csi.org/

As with many other North African nationals Moroccan workers are historic migrants and I have written before on the exploited state of Moroccan workers in Gibraltar who have been denied basic civil and human rights for over 40 years. In 2010 the UK-based International Centre for Trade Union Rights (ICTUR), backed by UNITE, undertook an extensive survey of the treatment of Morrocan workers employed in Gibraltar.

The detail of this work is linked here: http://tinyurl.com/cqvmg77. I am proud to record that this activity was also supported by Denis Gregory long-standing trade union tutor at Ruskin College and Rupert Griffin, who at the time was a BA labour studies student at Ruskin, and who now works for IDS Research Services.

The ICTUR report, written by the respected labour rights scholar Keith Ewing, documents the tragic circumstances of the lives of Morrocan workers. You can read the report ("Britain's dirty little secret") via the link above but this passage is taken from it:

"Moroccans pay full taxes and in all the time they have been there they have contributed considerably to the growth and economy of Gibraltar. However, despite an extensive campaign by our union, the International Centre for Trade Union Rights (ICTUR) and campaigning groups such as the Moroccan Community Association in Gibraltar and the Moroccan Workers Association, they are still treated as 2^nd class citizens. Very few Moroccans have been given citizenship rights; they have little access to public housing; they are denied the right to vote in the European elections; they have problems with travelling to visit family in Morocco and restrictions on family visiting them in Gibraltar and they are still denied access to some public services."

These workers are of course part of the global story of exploited migrant workers, denied citizenship and full civil and political recognition for their contribution to, for example, the re-building of economies in the post-war era. The respected Marxist writers on migration Castles and Kosack have written extensively of this phenomenon and in particular of the impact on the indigenous working class of migrant workers.

They acknowledge that, whilst migrant workers typically join the ranks of the working class, the come to form a sub-culture differentiated on the basis of employment status, housing etc. This historical theoretical and practical understanding of the exploited status of migrant workers is a critical factor naturally in the reason why established, national labour movements have sought to organise migrant workers – but with differing levels of success.

Thus the plight of Moroccan workers, both at home and internationally, is emblematic of those challenges facing organised labour globally. Progress is not however, beyond our grasp, and despite the embattled position of the Moroccan labour movement, its obstinacy is not just celebrated but analysed and understood.

In this spirit I’ll leave you with a passage from the debut novel by Kevin Powers (The Yellow Birds) which draws on his experience as a US solider in Iraq, and which defiantly declares that little in the world is the way it is because it should be, and that something better is always realisable.

"The rest is history, they say. Bullshit, I say. It's imagination or it's nothing, and must be, because what is created in this world, or made, can be undone, unmade; the threads of a rope can be unwoven. And if that rope is needed as a guideline for a ferry to a farther shore then one must invent a way to weave it back, or there will be drownings in the streams that cross our paths. I accept now, though in truth it took some time, that must, must be its own permission."

In Solidarity

Ian

Gendering and Diversifying Trade Union Leadership

Colleagues,

A fitting last item to be posted before the start of my holiday with my family in Morroco.

Later this year my colleague Sue Ledwith (who created the MA in international labour and trade union studies that I run at Ruskin) is to launch a new book, co-edited by Lise Lote Hansen. The book builds on the significant scholarship and published work of Sue as a leading expert in the field of gender and labour movements. This new book, Gendering and Diversifying Trade Union Leadership, builds significantly on this output and, as the publisher states:

Women; In the majority of trade union membership

Examining the experiences of leadership among trade unionists in a range of unions and labor movements around the world, this volume addresses perspectives of women and men from a range of identities such as race/ethnicity, sexuality, and age. It analyses existing models of leadership in various political organizational forms, especially trade unions, but also including business and management approaches, leadership forms which arise from fields such as community, pedagogy, and the third sector.
This book analyzes and critiques concepts, expectations, and experiences of union leaders and leadership in labor organizations, while comparing gender and cultural perspectives. Contributors to the volume draw on empirical research to identify key ideas, beliefs and experiences which are critical to achieving change, setting up resistance, and transforming the inertia of traditionalism.

More book details are here (http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415884853/) and if you email me I will happily invite you to the book's launch event at Ruskin College in October.

I am also pleased to report that my colleague Jo Cain, who heads the Learning and Organising Services department of UNISON (and who teaches on the MA) has contributed a chapter based on her combined background/exerience of teaching and researching around leadership and two-year period where, on a part-time basis, she ran the Webb Institute for Leadership and Democracy (http://www.webbmemorialtrust.org.uk/), which was based at Ruskin aimed at providing education around leadership to young men and women from civil society institutions across middle and eastern Europe. Jo's chapter is Emerging from ‘Deep, Dark Forests’ – Women Leaders as Learners in Eastern and Western European Trade Unions.

Both in the UK, and globally, the majority of members of trade unions are women yet women remain excluded from positions of leadership. This book, and Sue's others have helped shape, explore and extend our understanding of this, but critical change within trade unions remains elusive.

Frances O'Grady

It is of note that this book is published in the same year that the UK TUC has elected its first woman, Frances O'Grady into the post of General Secretary, and this is reflective of some change. Quite critically however, what appears resistant to change are cultural attitudes and organisational structures. These are issues explored by Helen Nolan who completes the MA at Ruskin  this year having completed her dissertation on issues around attitudes towards gender and leadership amongst male and female trade unionists in the UK and Spain.
The issues underlined by the new book are central to the future of trade unions globally, much like the debate around trade unionism and young workers, this analysis is not simply necessary, it is vital. Buy the book!

In Solidarity

Ian

Union Rights as Human Rights

Colleagues,
For some time now I have felt that the language of the UK labour movement needs to change, and that this change needs to take account of the impact of austerity and the stark, daily manifestations of the naked exposure of greed and cover up across the private sector from Barclays to G4S.

In a nutshell, I feel that we should argue not for justice for workers, but for social justice on the basis that it builds a common cause with the plight of all those facing inequality, discrimination and injustice of some form as a result of bankrupt systems of government and finance.

In their new book Richard D. Kahlenberg and Moshe Z. Marvit advance a similar argument, although their concern is that the basic right to organise in the US should be enshrined within an amendment to the Civil Rights Act.

As the book review posted on In These Times outlines: The authors propose amending the Civil Rights Act to bar discrimination on the basis of exercising the right to unionize, just as employers are currently prohibited from discriminating against employees on the basis of race, gender, religion, marital status, physical ability and – in some jurisdictions – sexual orientation. They write, “The statute would effectively shift the basic right of an employee to join or organize a union from what has long been conceived of as a collective right to an individual right.”

Although I first came across the book on this site, there is a fuller review, with accompanying videos with the authors on The Century Foundation website: http://tcf.org/publications/2012/4/why-labor-organizing-should-be-a-civil-right-rebuilding-a-middle-class-democracy-by-enhancing-worker-voice

In a deft rebutall of a negative review of the book, Kahlenberg reminds us in a subsequent article (http://tcf.org/blogs/botc/2012/07/response-to-u.s.-unions-uncivil-on-civil-rights) of the principle argument that he and Marvit are making and if you read the thrust of this paragraph, you'll see where (I hope) there is an overlap with my position of the notion of social justice advanced earlier:

The proposal to make labor organizing a civil right will be difficult for opponents to mischaracterize because Americans have an almost intuitive sense of what civil rights mean. Unlike labor law, civil rights have become so legitimated in American culture that it is difficult to mischaracterize the issue. From Ann Coulter’s bizarre response that civil rights only apply to African-Americans (and not to other racial or ethnic groups, sex, or religion) to this response that the true civil right is to lower the minimum wage for workers, conservatives have been unable to formulate a coherent and credible response to the idea that workers have a civil right to organize. Instead of debating labor rights in the arena of labor law, where conservatives have seized and controlled the upper hand for decades, workers’ rights should be fought on the field of civil rights, where progressives have retained the moral high ground and power.

Any comments, questions, feedback welcome.

In Solidarity

Ian



Scranton PA: Organised Labour, Poverty and the US Elections

Colleagues,

The role for organised labour has never been greater than in this depressing and depressed era caused, in the words of Marx, when an unleashed and unbridled capitalism ultimately eats itself, leaving workers, their families and communites nakedly exposed in an era of austerity to a second wave attack as the state uses the failed economy as a guise to hammer workers even further.

The town of Scranton, Pennsylvania is written of in this context and appearing over the past few days. First appearing as a blog item 'Screwed in Scranton' in the impressive In These Times website (http://tinyurl.com/bl6n2bn) and then today in the The Observer in an equally engaging piece by Paul Harris (http://tinyurl.com/7hy8cso).

The central message of both articles is the same which is that, in one of a number of US cities facing certain bankruptcy, the terms and conditions of public sector workers are seen as first and legitimate means by which deficits can be cut. Naturally also we are witnessing the offshoot of the successful attack on public sector trade unions in Wisconsin being played out under the guise of austerity.

As the In These Times piece argues this short-term vicious assault threatens the-long possibility of emergence from the current era of low growth and joblessness:

Scranton’s problems are actually typical of the financial death spiral facing many mid-sized towns in Pennsylvania and across the United States after three decades of deindustrialization and a halting economic recovery with continuing wage cuts. "Cities like Scranton have been hit hard by the loss of manufacturing and a loss of population, so that they are left trying to maintain services with a smaller tax base," economist Stephen Herzenberg, director of the Keystone Research Centre, a progressive think tank in Pennsvlvania, says. "But when the quality of services like education fall, better-off families will move out, and these cities won’t attract industry."

Harris agrees:

Instead, recovering from an era of huge borrowing by cities and citizens alike, and the bursting of one of the biggest bubbles in economic history, it seems easier to find people to blame rather than face up to some solutions.

Both articles chronice the response of the trade unions and their members caught in their descent to poverty and chaos as all public sector workers' salaries are slashed to the minimum wage.

Naturally, the plight of Scranton and the many other US cities like it will feature in the foreground of the US elections, not least as Mitt Romney continues to champion smaller governing and the kind of belt-tightening that he has never had to experience himself. Of greater interest will be the response of Obama - particularly in the context of being seen to side, or not, with the response of organised labour to the plight of cities like Scranton. His distancing from the recall vote in Wisconsin was notable.

By sheer coincidence I have been reading a book by Stephen Lopez on the industrial decline of Pennsylvania and what it meant for the future of US unions. Although the book was written in 2005, three years before Marx's prediction comes to life, it's focus on the crisis of organised labour is particularly relevant in its aftermath.

The sharp difference however, from the era of which Lopez writes, is the contrastingly rapid, advanced and naked attack on the position of US workers, particularly those in the public sector. A key difference also from prior periods of economic decline is that in which the impact on organised labour was secondary, not a pre-concceived feature.

Reorganising the Rust Belt: An Inside Story of the American Labor Movement is also well worth a read for those interested in the emergence of social movement unionism as a key renewal and revivial strategy for US labour.

There is a book review from the ILR department at Cornell here
http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1157&context=ilrreview

A key message from this post is that solidarity with US unions - and others globally - is as important now as ever, and that evidence of the debilitating, degrading effects of workers/families/communities must consistently be used as part of the case for an alternative to austerity.

In Solidarity

Ian

African Struggles Today: Social Movements Since Independence

Colleagues,

I encourage you to read a new book co-edited by my Ruskin colleague Peter Dwyer, our tutor in radical economics. This book has been edited by Peter and Leo Zeilig, Research Associate at the Center for Sociological Research in Johannesburg and a Senior Lecturer in the department of sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand.

What this book does is updates our understanding of the forces that have helped push and shape social movements across Africa, but with a particular focus on the southern African states of Zimbabwe, South Africa, Zambia, Malawi, Namibia and Swaziland.

What the book provides is a deep-rooted critical analysis of the range of opportunities and challenges facing social movements and other civil society organisations in the context of globalisation and the grassroots struggle for social justice.

The first review of the book has been posted by Socialist Review and written by Charles Kimber:

This is a book about the potential for social transformation from below in Africa, and therefore a rejoinder to the vast majority of writing on the continent. It is self-consciously designed as "a corrective to the tendency to see Africa's postcolonial half-century as one dominated by political repression, economic decline, and ethnic conflict" which can be solved by the intervention of various outside agencies - stretching from multinationals to imperialist armies to NGOs. The book is rooted in "the history of protest and resistance over the last six decades - as manifested in strikes, marches, demonstrations, and riots". But the major focus of the book is on developments over the last 20 years.

Almost unnoticed by the mainstream press, a series of democracy movements swept across Africa from about 1990. In four years some 30 regimes, many of which had ruled for long periods, were brought down by revolt. However, although these movements could topple ancient dictators, they did not fully develop into social revolutions. Instead they were generally brought under the wing of neoliberalism. This experience of explosive movements for change therefore has to be set against their limitations - including the question of political leadership and organisation and the ideological underpinning of the revolts. Such questions are not of importance for Africans or people who are interested in African politics alone: they concern questions that face activists everywhere. Therefore this history and analysis deserves much wider circulation. Readers who may have knowledge of one part of Africa will gain from the detailed analysis of countries that they are less familiar with. Dwyer and Zeilig helpfully discuss the role of the employed working class and its relationships to other social groups - peasants, the unemployed, "informal" workers and so on. They put forward a subtle understanding of the central role of workers (broadly conceived) but say, "There is no division between labour-based struggles and myriad acts of resistance' - they are in practice mutually reinforcing." Finally there is a good discussion of the "social forums" process in Africa .

Zeilig and Dwyer "hope that activists who read this book - both African and Western - will see struggles and movements as messy, ideologically confused, and inherently contradictory - but that the book will also help them navigate through the mess, clear up confusion, and expose contradiction."

They have done much to fulfil that hope.




Peter and Leo are happy to promote the book via a guest talk - email Peter to arrange this: pdwyer@ruskin.ac.uk

You can buy the book here: http://www.haymarketbooks.org/pb/African-Struggles-Today

In Solidarity

Ian

International Labour & Trade Union Studies at Ruskin College, Oxford

Colleagues,

A video has been put together for us by a new company Aeonetic Video.

It is short and to the point and gives a good understanding of why Ruskin College is the place to be for trade unionsts who want to play a role in the building the future of labour movements globally.

I have struggled to embed the video into the post,so here is the you tube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBgnWJ-mb-8&feature=youtu.be

The dynamic young team behind the video, are just starting out and have been established with sound ethical and political credentials: http://aeonetic.com/ - please consider using them for any video/audio projects.

In Solidarity

Ian

History tells us otherwise

Colleagues,
Here's a link to a letter from me which appeared in yesterday's Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jun/29/bankers-point-of-no-return?newsfeed=true

As you'll see it is a rebutall of Simon Jenkins suggestion in the Friday edition of the paper (link below) that there was some form of moral and historical equivalence between the behaviour of Barclays Bank and British trade unionism.

Jenkins' piece: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/28/banking-lobby-financial-crisis

I won't labour the point that I made in my short, terse response, but it is plaintively obvious that British trade unionism (with all of its inherent historical and contemporary faults) serves entirely different aims and ambitions from that within the rotten core of modern financial services.

As a simple illustration of the deep faultline in Jenkins' logic I spent a highly rewarding day yesterday in the company of fellow and sister black trade unionists (pictured above) who had come together to attend a day school organised by the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU).

We came together in the Birmingham office of UNITE (hence the TGWU banner in the background) to discuss how best black trade unionists could serve the goals of the UK labour movement by ensuring the wider interests of black workers and communities were at the centre of what UK trade unions campaigned on and fought for.

The concerns around lingering racism, high levels of unemployment in black communities, attacks on employment and trade union rights etc., were discussed in detail as were approaches to community activism based on an analysis of succesful campaigns of the US civil rights movement.

I am not sure where the Barclays Bank investment bankers were yesterday, perhaps Simon Jenkins could find out, but I am pretty sure that it wasn't spent given up time voluntarily and willingly in the goal of shaping and building solidarity with communities in the UK increasingly exposed to economic and social exclusion woven by the ugly sisters of Coalition policy and the raw greed of corporate financiers.

In Solidarity

Ian