Africa's Best Read
March past: A Cosatu demonstration in Johannesburg last year. The writer says that union membership has declined all over the world recently. Photo: Papi Morake/Gallo Images/Getty Imageshere is a widespread view that labour as a counter-hegemonic force has come to an end. We saw this in the notion of the network society, then the notion of the global precariat, and now the idea of a Fourth Industrial Revolution.
We identify examples where workers on the margins are beginning to cross the divide between the protected and the unprotected, the established workers and those marginalised by liberalisation. The focus of these studies has been on the strategic choice of workers in responding to new challenges and changing contexts.
Management could strengthen its hand in the struggle to speed up production, Taylor wrote at the beginning of the last century, if “managers assume … the burden of gathering all of the traditional knowledge which had been possessed by the workmen and then classifying, tabulating and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws and formulae” .
However, a clear difference from the Fordist assembly line is that workers in the digital age are often atomised into micro or individual workplaces and are not easily able to combine in large numbers to build worker power and confront employers. This points to the need to target state and other national institutions which have the power to deliver services such as pensions, unemployment benefits, and other forms of social protection.
While the gap “between rich and poor nations, powerful and powerless nations … caused by colonisation and imperialism is now slightly less substantial, a large citizen premium still exists with a lot of our income on the accident of birth” . This points to the importance of bolstering global institutions such as the International Labour Organisation and Global Unions, which are supporting the organisation of precarious workers. The ILO is the only tripartite United Nations agency that incorporates worker, trade union and employer representatives. This is crucial, since it allows nation states to adopt empowering legislation.
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