Zero-Hour Contracts Keep Us Precarious

Zero-hour contracts are often toted as a win-win, one where the worker and employer can both benefit and “decide” how much they work. In reality, Niamh Illiff writes in this guest post, this flexibility is a myth – one that benefits employers, not workers. These contracts gift employers with all the power, deciding how many hours to offer while workers are left in a constant state of uncertainty, never knowing how much they’ll earn from week to week. The employer - worker power dynamic is not ‘equalised’ under zero-hour contracts, but exacerbated, representing a heightened form of exploitation leaving workers vulnerable, with little control over their employment practise or financial stability.

 

Exiting the Factor: Review of Alexander Gallas’ book on strikes and class formation beyond the industrial sector.

In his major, two-volume publication Exiting the Factory: Strikes and Class Formation beyond the Industrial Sector (Bristol University Press, 2024), Alexander Gallas asks ‘what are the class effects of non-industrial strikes – or in how far do they contribute to working class formation?’ (Vol.1, P.12). He successfully demonstrates that collective action in non-industrial sectors too results in class consciousness. Work may change in certain parts of the world towards non-industrial sectors, but workers will always struggle collectively to defend themselves against capitalist exploitation. In this review, I will highlight some of the key achievements of Gallas’ publication.

 

Confronting exploitation: What labour movement for the 21st century?

Against a back-ground of global economic crisis and heightened geo-political confron-tations, the inter-national labour movement has remained as important as ever for the defence of working people and wider society. And yet international organised labour is also in crisis. In my article ‘Confronting exploitation: What labour movement for the 21^st century’, published in the journal International Union Rights, I argue that we need to go beyond a narrow focus on trade unions as the privileged agent of workers’ interests and understand ‘class’ and ‘class struggle’ more broadly for successful resistance against capitalist exploitation.

 

Cementing neo-colonial relations: the EU – Mercosur ‘free’ trade deal.

'EU and Mercosur leaders ignore the voice of the people to push forward with toxic deal’ declared the Stop EU – Mercosur campaign alliance, a coalition of more than 450 organisations from Latin America and Europe, including trade unions, farmers organisations, social movements, animal activists and environmentalists. The alliance held a two-day meeting in Brussels on 17 and 18 July in parallel to the summit of EU leaders and leaders from the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), at which a conclusion of the highly controversial EU – Mercosur ‘free’ trade agreement was also discussed.

 

Around 80 representatives of Stop EU – Mercosur members from Latin America and Europe gathered in Brussels to discuss the problems with the proposed treaty, explore alternatives as well as co-ordinate their strategies to stop that treaty from being concluded, ratified and implemented. In this blog post, I will summarise my observations.

Organizing Amazon and the platform economy (trans)nationally

In this guest post Sarrah Kassem outlines key arguments of her recent book Work and Alienation in the Platform Economy: Amazon and the Power of Organization, in which she dives into two of Amazon’s platforms: its e-commerce platform of Amazon.com and its digital labor platform of Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). These two platforms essentially organize workers in different ways. While the former pays workers a traditional time wage and concentrates workers within a single location, the latter pays workers, who labor from behind their screens, through gig wages. MTurk workers join therefore other workers in the gig economy. By taking a closer look at these two Amazon platforms, their (digital) shopfloor and relations of alienation and exploitation, we can then grasp the different ways by which workers form solidarity (trans)nationally and the diverse ways by which they come to organize themselves, traditionally and alternatively

 

Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis - new book review

Just over four years ago, Adam D. Morton and I published our book Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis (CUP, 2018). In this book, we assess the forces of social struggle shaping the past and present of the global political economy from the perspective of historical materialism. We unravel the internal relations between global capitalism, global war and global crisis, an endeavour which has become even more important now considering ongoing capitalist crisis and the heightened geo-political conflict reflected in the war in Ukraine. 

In this guest post, Pedro Nunes reflects on some of the key contributions of this book as well as further necessary work beyond it.  

Rise UP, Notts! Organizing for Social Justice

On 3 September, about 100 local activists met in Nottingham/UK to discuss how to best organize in view of increasing injustices and global challenges. In nine panels and two plenaries, discussions ranged from how to meet the refugee crisis, the possibilities of trade unions in the 21^st century to the challenges of climate change and the crises in education and the National Health Service (NHS). The panel Outside Westminster also presented solutions, be it the charity Sharewear, a clothing scheme which offers free-of-charge clothing choices to people in economic difficulty, be it the Preston Model and its focus on local sourcing. In this blog post, I will make five observations in relation to current struggles over social justice.

Analyzing, Strategizing and Taking action: The European Summer University of Social Movements in Mönchengladbach.

From 17 to 21 August 2022, over 600 activists from more than 20 countries in Europe and beyond gathered in Mönchengladbach/Germany for the 2022 European Summer University of Social Movements, organized by Attac and other allied social movements. In dozens of Forums, workshops, excursions, exhibitions and film screenings participants analyzed the current crises in Europe and the wider world, strategized about how best to respond to these challenges and engaged in concrete actions of resistance culminating in a protest march in the coal mining area around Lützerath. In this blog post, I will provide some reflections on the summer university.   

Labour Conflicts in the Global South!

Against the background of the global economic crisis since 2007/2008 and increasing inequality across the world, the Global South has experienced widespread, large-scale industrial action, including in countries such as China, Brazil, India and South Africa, which had been hailed as the new growth engines of the global political economy as part of the so-called BRICS. In this blog post, I will introduce my recently published co-edited volume (together with Jörg Nowak) Labour Conflicts in the Global South (Routledge, 2022). 

Engaging the Imperial Mode of Living

In their powerful book The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism (Verso, 2021), Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen demonstrate how our life in the capitalist centres and its dominant forms of production, distribution and consumption can only be maintained, because the related social and ecological costs are externalised to other parts of the world. Published originally in German in 2017, this volume is now also available to the English reading audience. In this blog post, I will draw out some of the authors’ crucial findings.

 

Staff working conditions are student learning conditions – more than just a slogan!

Yet again, staff at universities across the UK are out on strike to defend their working conditions and pensions. Unsurprisingly, university management tries to pit students against staff. Students, however, are not falling for this. They realise that drastic cuts to staff pay and working conditions is mirrored in a deterioration in student learning conditions especially since the 2007/2008 global financial crisis.

 

Nothing to Lose but our Chains: reflecting on workers’ key role in resisting capitalist exploitation.

There is widespread pessimism about workers’ potential to take successful industrial action in the UK today. Structural transformation from manufacturing into services and increasing precarisation would make resistance almost impossible. Not so writes Jane Hardy in her fascinating new book Nothing to lose but our chains: Work & Resistance in Twenty-First-Century Britain (London: Pluto Press, 2021). Workers continue to organise and challenge capitalist exploitation. There are no 'no go' areas for trade unions. In this post, I will review the key contributions and major claims made by Hardy.

 

Our History is the Future: On Indigenous peoples' central role in overcoming capitalism!

In the autumn of 2016, a large alliance of Indigenous peoples and their non-Indigenous supporters blocked the path of yet another oil pipeline in North America, the Dakota Access Pipeline. At Standing Rock, people opposed the fossil fuel industry and protected water as the essential source of life. It is this moment of contestation, which is at the heart of Nick Estes' book Our History is the Future (Verso, 2019). In this blog post, I will outline several of Estes' key contributions.

 

Transformation beyond Capitalism? The case for Degrowth!

The global pandemic of the coronavirus has demonstrated the dangers of continuing economic growth. Relentless human encroachment on nature has facilitate the transfer of dangerous viruses from animals to humans. Kallis, Paulson, D’Alisa and Demaria’s new book The case for Degrowth (Polity Press, 2020) makes an important argument for why humanity can no longer pursue economic growth policies. In this blog post, I will highlight some of the authors' key contributions.

 

The cartographies of Baltic labour resistance

The conjuncture between the thirtieth anniversaries of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the USSR is an apt occasion to revisit the trajectories of change in the post-Soviet space. In their article ‘Baltic Labour in the Crucible of Capitalist Exploitation: Reassessing “Post-Communist” Transformation’, recently published in the Economic and Labour Relations Review, Andreas Bieler and Jokubas Salyga assess ‘post-communist’ transformation in the Baltic countries from the perspective of labour. The authors argue that the uneven and combined unfolding of 'post-communist' transformation has subjected Baltic labour to doubly constituted exploitation processes. First, workers in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have suffered from the extreme neo-liberal restructuring of economic and employment relations at home. Second, migrant workers from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in general, trying to escape exploitation at home, have faced another set of exploitative dynamics in host countries in Western Europe such as the UK. Nevertheless, workers have continued to challenge exploitation in Central and Eastern Europe, in Western Europe, and have been active in extending networks of transnational solidarity across the continent.

Understanding Neoliberalism

Forty years after Mrs Thatcher’s first election victory, the term ‘neoliberal’ remains the basic shorthand term for the new form of capitalism that replaced the post-1945 settlement in all parts of the world. When the global financial crisis erupted in 2008, for a brief period it seemed that this new form might be challenged, but the threat to international trade and finance was headed off by a coordinated effort in which the major powers, joined in the G20 by a wider group of states, intervened on a massive scale in the money markets.

Their success in re-establishing order, and even resuming economic growth, was however aimed at propping up the world of high finance and global corporations, with the costs imposed on the rest of us. In this guest post, Hugo Radice reflects on the following two questions: 

- First, why did so few experts predict such a devastating breakdown in financial markets? 

- Second, why were our rulers able to re-establish business as usual with such ease?

Globalisastion and Resistance: Explorations in Global Contestation

Photo by Robyn Jay

During the Spring semester 2019, students on the module Globalisation and Resistance in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham-UK carried out independent research projects. In addition to writing a 4000 word essay, they also composed shorter blog posts about their research projects for a wider audience. This post provides a brief introduction to the various posts, which are published on the blog Globalisation and Resistance.

Rupturing the Dialectic: Harry Cleaver on continuing class struggle against the imposition of work.

In his latest book Rupturing the Dialectic: The Struggle against Work, Money and Financialization (Chico/CA: AK Press, 2017), Harry Cleaver makes an emphatic case for the importance of a continuing focus on class struggle and here in particular the role of the working class rather than capital. Building on his seminal work Reading Capital Politically (1979), he re-asserts the key role of agency in our understanding of resistance against capitalist exploitation. In this blog post, I will assess the fundamental contributions of this volume. 

Holding on – The public water company Acqua Bene Comune in Naples.

In the ongoing struggles over public water in Italy, it is the municipality of Naples and its water company Acqua Bene Comune (ABC), which has played a special role throughout the years of conflict (see Privatisation by stealth). First, an attempt of privatisation was defeated in 2006, then it was the only water company, which was re-transformed into a fully public company with special status after the successful referendum on water in 2011. In this blog post, based on a set of interviews with Italian water activists, I will explore the possibilities but also tensions involved in this particular experiment.

Privatisation by stealth: ongoing struggles for public water in Italy.

On 12 and 13 June 2011, the Italian Water Movements Forum secured a clear victory in the referendum against water privatisation. More than 57 per cent of the Italian electorate cast their vote and both questions related to water had been approved by a majority of more than 95 per cent (see Road to Victory). And yet, the implementation of the referendum outcome, legally binding according to the Italian Constitution, has been slow ever since (see La lotta continua). Based on a series of interviews with water activists carried out at the end of May 2018, in this post I will assess the current situation in the struggle for public water in Italy.