Contesting Musk: Swedish Tesla strike becomes a global conflict

What began as a local strike by 130 mechanics for a collective labour agreement (CLA) in the Swedish Tesla service workshops is escalating into a global conflict, argues Roland Erne in this guest post. According to the Swedish arbitrator for labour disputes, Tesla boss Elon Musk forbade his local managers to make any concessions to the trade unions, even though CLAs have been a central component in Swedish labour relations for decades. Clearly, Elon Musk feels infinitely powerful and thinks he can bring even Europe's strongest labour unions to their knees. 

Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century through the Prism of Value: a review of the book by Carchedi and Roberts.

Guglielmo Carchedi and Michael Roberts are seasoned commentators on the changing fortunes of capitalism. In their latest, joint book Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century through the Prism of Value (Pluto Press, 2023), they bring these insights together and assess them through Marx’s theory of value and here especially the tendency of the falling rate of profit. In this blog post, I will discuss their main contributions as well as provide some critical reflections. 

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.

 

Waging war on staff: The narrative of a defeat.

When the end of the Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB) was announced on 6 September, it was finally clear that the University and College Union (UCU) had lost the struggle of the Four Fights over Pay, Workload, Pay Gaps and Casualisation. Despite 15 days of strike action across the academic year 2022/2023 as well as the MAB lasting from 20 April to 6 September, employers represented by the Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA) had not budged. Despite widespread disruption to graduations in the summer with many students either not graduating or graduating with ‘derived’, i.e. ‘guestimated’ marks, employers refused steadfast to negotiate especially over pay. A derisory below inflation proposal was presented as the best possible offer the sector could afford. Having lost large amounts of salary during the struggle, staff had to return to work and mark scripts, for which they had already had pay deducted due to the MAB. In this post, I will explore the causes of the defeat and reflect on the implications for the sector.

 

Can Global Capitalism Endure? A review of William Robinson’s latest book.

For some time, William I. Robinson has been one of the most adept observers of, and commentators on, global structural change. In his latest book Can Global Capitalism Endure? (Clarity Press, 2022), he analyses the current crisis of overaccumulation as a result of the tendence of the falling rate of profit. Most dangerously, in capital’s ever more desperate search for profitable investment opportunities, global economic crisis is spilling over into geo-political confrontation. In this blog post, I will discuss some of the book’s key contributions.

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