Tuesday, July 7, 2020
Why We Need a Global Green New Deal Right Now
Michael Galant July 3, 2020
https://citizentruth.org/why-we-need-a-global-green-new-deal-right-now/
The rules of the global economy got us into this mess. But rules can change.
(Common Dreams) The global economy is collapsing. When the pandemic began, experts at the International Monetary Fund predicted that we would see the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. This week, they announced that it will be even worse than they thought.
This disaster comes into a world already facing record inequality, desperate poverty, and a growing climate crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed a precarious world economy over the edge. This moment offers a rare opportunity to rethink the path that led us here and chart a new course out: a Global Green New Deal.
We have a tendency to treat the global economy as something natural—beyond our control.
We may understand that poverty, epidemics, and environmental destruction within the United States are not inevitable. There are certain rules in place that benefit some over others. People are not poor because they fail to lift themselves up by their bootstraps. People are poor because wages are too low, because we don’t invest in public goods, because the wealthy are too powerful.
But when it comes to the world economy, we forget. We forget that there are rules that determine how it all works. We forget that these rules were created not by God but by man. We forget that they can be changed.
The current rules are actually rather new. Born out of the financial crisis of the 1970s, these mirrored on the global level what Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were doing at home—crushing labor unions, slashing environmental protections, and empowering corporations.
The World Bank and International Monetary Fund lent recklessly to poor countries, saddling them with debt and imposing deregulation, austerity, and labor suppression. Trade agreements like the infamous NAFTA set corporations free to search the world for profits without added protection for workers or the environment.
Nations were forced into a competitive “race to the bottom” in wages, taxes, and regulations in an attempt to lure desperately needed investment. Multinational corporations began to outsource jobs to countries where wages were lower and environmental regulations lax—and outsource profits to a shadowy network of tax havens.
The suppression of worker power deepened inequality. The decimation of environmental standards fueled the climate crisis. Decades of budget-slashing left us all unprepared to confront a pandemic. The rules that govern the world economy were not inevitable. They were intentional, and they led us to where we are today.
To escape the global recession and build a more resilient world on the other side, we need to rewrite the rules. We need a system of trade that puts workers and the environment before corporate profits. We need enforceable global floors on wages, labor laws, and environmental protections. We need global coordination to end the scourge of tax havens, debt relief for countries in crisis, and massive global redistribution.
In short, we need a Global Green New Deal.
This ambitious agenda will be hard to achieve. But if there was ever a time for big change, it is now. It was after the devastation of World War II that the United Nations was born. It was from the recessions of the 1970’s that the latest world order emerged. It is out of a catastrophe as profound as COVID-19 that a new trail can be forged.
When Margaret Thatcher was setting the world on course to the present crisis, she had a slogan: “There is no alternative.” For too long, we believed it.
Now, there’s reason for the phrase to come back into use: There is no alternative. To rebuild the global economy, to prepare for the next pandemic, to confront the climate crisis, we have no choice: we need a Global Green New Deal.
Afghan Bounty Scandal Comes at Suspiciously Important Time for US Military Industrial Complex
https://citizentruth.org/afghan-bounty-scandal-comes-at-suspiciously-important-time-for-us-military-industrial-complex/
The latest scandal, like others before it, is based on scant testimony by anonymous officials and has had the effect of pushing liberal opinion on US foreign policy into a far more hawkish direction.
(By: Alan Macleod, Mintpress News) Based on anonymous intelligence sources, The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal released bombshell reports alleging that Russia is paying the Taliban bounties for every U.S. soldier they can kill. The story caused an uproar in the United States, dominating the news cycle and leading presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden to accuse Trump of “dereliction of duty” and “continuing his embarrassing campaign of deference and debasing himself before Vladimir Putin.” “This is beyond the pale,” the former vice-president concluded.
However, there are a number of reasons to be suspicious of the new reports. Firstly, they appear all to be based entirely on the same intelligence officials who insisted on anonymity. The official could not provide any concrete evidence, nor establish that any Americans had actually died as a result, offering only vague assertions and admitting that the information came from “interrogated” (i.e. tortured) Afghan militants. All three reports stressed the uncertainty of the claims, with the only sources who went on record — the White House, the Kremlin, and the Taliban — all vociferously denying it all.
The national security state also has a history of using anonymous officials to plant stories that lead to war. In 2003, the country was awash with stories that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, in 2011 anonymous officials warned of an impending genocide in Libya, while in 2018 officials accused Bashar al-Assad of attacking Douma with chemical weapons, setting the stage for a bombing campaign. All turned out to be untrue.
“After all we’ve been through, we’re supposed to give anonymous ‘intelligence officials’ in The New York Times the benefit of the doubt on something like this? I don’t think so,” Scott Horton, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com and author of “Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan,” told MintPress News. “All three stories were written in language conceding they did not know if the story was true,” he said, “They are reporting the ‘fact’ that there was a rumor.”
Horton continued: “There were claims in 2017 that Russia was arming and paying the Taliban, but then the generals admitted to Congress they had no evidence of either. In a humiliating debacle, also in 2017, CNN claimed a big scoop about Putin’s support for the Taliban when furnished with some photos of Taliban fighters with old Russian weapons. The military veteran journalists at Task and Purpose quickly debunked every claim in their piece.”
Others were equally skeptical of the new scandal. “The bottom line for me is that after countless (Russiagate related) anonymous intelligence leaks, many of which were later proven false or never substantiated with real evidence, I can’t take this story seriously. The intelligence ‘community’ itself can’t agree on the credibility of this information, which is similar to the situation with a foundational Russiagate document, the January, 2017 intelligence ‘assessment,’” said Joanne Leon, host of the Around the Empire Podcast, a show which covers U.S. military actions abroad.
Suspicious timing
The timing of the leak also raised eyebrows. Peace negotiations between the U.S. and the Taliban are ongoing, with President Trump committing to pulling all American troops out of the country. A number of key anti-weapons of mass destruction treaties between the U.S. and Russia are currently expiring, and a scandal such as this one would scupper any chance at peace, escalating a potential arms race that would endanger the world but enrich weapons manufacturers. Special Presidential Envoy in the Department of the Treasury, Marshall Billingslea, recently announced that the United States is willing to spend Russia and China “into oblivion” in a new arms race, mimicking the strategy it used in the 1980s against the Soviet Union. As a result, even during the pandemic, business is booming for American weapons contractors.
“The national security state has done everything they can to keep the U.S. involved in that war,” remarked Horton, “If Trump had listened to his former Secretary of Defense James Mattis and National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, we’d be on year three of an escalation with plans to begin talks with the Taliban next year. Instead Trump talked to them for the last year-and-a-half and has already signed a deal to have us out by the end of next May.”
“The same factions and profiteers who always oppose withdrawal of troops are enthusiastic about the ‘Bountygate’ story at a time when President Trump is trying to advance negotiations with the Taliban and when he desperately needs to deliver on 2016 campaign promises and improve his sinking electoral prospects,” said Leon.
What kind of monstrous country would fund and recruit fighters to attack occupying troops from an adversary country? It's an unprecedented breach of international ethics in all cases, but it's especially morally grotesque to do it against a foreign military in Afghanistan.🇺🇸🇷🇺 pic.twitter.com/D6XdzMONaZ
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 28, 2020
If Russia is paying the Taliban to kill Americans they are not doing a very good job of it. From a high of 496 in 2010, U.S. losses in Afghanistan have slowed to a trickle, with only 22 total fatalities in 2019, casting further doubt on the scale of their supposed plan.
Ironically, the United States is accusing the Kremlin of precisely its own policy towards Russia in Syria. In 2016, former Acting Director of the C.I.A. Michael Morell appeared on the Charlie Rose show and said his job was to “make the Russians pay a price” for its involvement in the Middle East. When asked if he meant killing Russians by that, he replied, “Yes. Covertly. You don’t tell the world about it. You don’t stand up at the Pentagon and say, ‘We did this.’ But you make sure they know it in Moscow.”
Like RussiaGate, the new scandal has had the effect of pushing liberal opinion on foreign policy to become far more hawkish, with Biden now campaigning on being “tougher” on China and Russia than Trump would be. Considering that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists recently set their famous Doomsday Clock — an estimation of how close they believe the world is to nuclear armageddon — to just 100 seconds to midnight, the latest it has ever been, the Democrats could be playing with fire. The organization specifically singled out U.S.-Russia conflict as threatening the continued existence of the planet. While time will tell if Russia did indeed offer bounties to kill American troops, the efficacy of the media leak is not in question.
Alan MacLeod
Workers Accuse Tesla of Coronavirus Cover Up
Alec Pronk July 3, 2020
https://citizentruth.org/workers-accuse-tesla-of-coronavirus-cover-up/
“This is a dire health and safety emergency because the state is not taking care of workers at Tesla”
Tesla employees and members of a workers’ rights group accused car company Tesla of a coronavirus cover up, with over 30 employees testing positive at Tesla’s Fremont plant. According to Courthouse News, Tesla employees Carlos Gabriel and Steve Zeltzer protested in front of the Alameda County Health Department.
The employees allege Tesla is conducting their own private contact tracing for employees, and Tesla said all thirty cases were contracted outside of work. But, Gabriel and Zeltzer believe Tesla is hiding information from workers and putting employees at risk.
The news comes on the same day as Tesla stock prices soared after strong production and sales numbers compared to competitors. In early May, Tesla CEO Elon Musk publicly feuded with local health officials over the continued closure of Tesla car plants.
Musk said of a proposed closure until June 1, “the unelected & ignorant “Interim Health Officer” of Alameda is acting contrary to the Governor, the President, our Constitutional freedoms & just plain common sense!”
Currently, Alameda County, home of a Tesla production plant, is experiencing a spike in coronavirus cases, seeing a daily average case increase from 44 to 107 a day.
Worker Safety
At the outset of the coronavirus pandemic, cases spiked in factories related to essential services such as agriculture and meatpacking. Mexico’s coronavirus crisis was also fueled by factory workers contracting the virus in industries deemed essential.
The protesting Tesla workers are demanding public health officers to investigate the Tesla plant in Fremont and determine if the company is hiding the true number of cases and their origin. The demonstrators also want an expansion in OSHA workers to ensure better worker safety during the pandemic.
“This is a dire health and safety emergency because the state is not taking care of workers at Tesla,” Zeltzer told Courthouse News.
Musk has repeatedly downplayed the threat of the virus on Twitter and threatened to move Tesla’s production facilities to Texas if the Fremont plant was not allowed to reopen.
Despite reopening the Fremont plant early against public health advice on May 11, Tesla and Musk faced no penalty. President Donald Trump tweeted support for Musk’s decision to reopen the production plant.
With coronavirus once again spiking in California and multiple states, workers face increased risk of exposure to the virus and localized closures will be seen as the death toll to the virus creeps back up to peak levels.
Coronavirus Cover Ups?
Tesla is not the only company to face increasing coronavirus cases and scrutiny for their handling of a return to work.
Amazon has also been accused of covering up the number of coronavirus cases in its extensive network of warehouses. The tech giant said its data regarding employees and the virus were not very useful and mirrored the general public. But, an internal memo revealed that a study of one warehouse detailed a much higher infection rate than would be expected in the general public.
The extensive study broke down one warehouse based on department and employee country residence, and as of May 18 the warehouse in Shakopee, Minnesota had an infection rate 17 times higher than the general public in the same county.
Internationally, Amazon warehouse workers went on strike in Germany after more than 30 employees tested positive for coronavirus. At the outset of Europe’s coronavirus lockdown, Amazon employees also went on strike in France, Italy, Spain, and Poland over unsafe working conditions related to coronavirus.
Amazon worker strikes have also taken place in the United States, and Amazon has been accused of and is under investigation for retaliating against workers for speaking out against unsafe working conditions.
Much like Tesla, Amazon and other large companies have been reluctant to share detailed information about coronavirus in their companies, only fueling accusations that big business is facilitating a coronavirus cover up to benefit their bottom line.
Healthy June Jobs Report Hides Reality of Economic Situation as Coronavirus Lingers
Daniel Davis July 2, 2020
https://citizentruth.org/healthy-june-jobs-report-hides-reality-of-economic-situation-as-coronavirus-lingers/
“More than ever, we’re concerned about the worsening health situation and its impact on the burgeoning recovery. Rebounding mobility and poor use of protective equipment will make for a dangerous summer cocktail.”
At a White House press conference Thursday, President Trump alongside his two chief economic advisors celebrated a healthy June jobs report. Although the report did include 4.8 million job gains, spinning it in a positive light hides the reality of the American economic situation.
Trump Celebrates Healthy Jobs Report
“These are historic numbers in a time that a lot of people would have wilted. They would have wilted, but we didn’t wilt and our country didn’t wilt, and I’m very honored to be your president,” Trump said in a transcript published by Rev.
The president claimed it as a victory, declaring it “the largest monthly jobs gain in the history of our country.” The unemployment rate now sits at 11.1%, down from a peak of 14.7% in April.
“Today’s announcement proves that our economy is roaring back. It’s coming back extremely strong,” Trump said.
As the US continues to set new daily records for COVID-19 case, the president maintained that America has the situation “under control.”
“If you look, we were talking this morning, something to think about. China was way early, and they’re getting under control just now. And Europe was way early, and they’re getting under control,” Trump said. “We followed them with this terrible China virus. And we are likewise getting under control. Some areas that were very hard hit are now doing very well. Some were doing very well and we thought they may be gone and they flare up and we’re putting out the fires.”
Coronavirus Cases Continue to Threaten Economy
While the healthy June jobs report portrays a nation on the rebound, a surge of new virus cases in new regions of the US has forced states to reconsider their phased opening plans, Reuters reported.
“June may be the calm before the storm,” said Chris Rupkey, chief economist at New York-based MUFG. “We cannot be sure the labor market recovery will continue at a speed that is sufficient to put the millions and millions of Americans made jobless in this recession back to work.”
Notably, the June jobs report hides the reality of the economic situation because it lags two weeks behind; data was collected mid-June, before the new spike in virus cases.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said the economic situation is predicated upon controlling the spread of COVID-19 and declared the future “is incredibly uncertain.”
Analysts at Oxford Economics and Goldman Sachs painted a more pessimistic outlook of the economic situation based on the rise in coronavirus cases.
“More than ever, we’re concerned about the worsening health situation and its impact on the burgeoning recovery. Rebounding mobility and poor use of protective equipment will make for a dangerous summer cocktail,” Oxford Economics analyst Gregory Daco wrote.
Similarly, analysts for Goldman Sachs expressed concern about the virus surging in nearly every state, Reuters reported. Consumer spending data beginning collected by Unacast and Chase also reflected a less-than-rosy picture. Although consumer spending seemed destined to return to 2019 levels, by June 20 it had receded once more as it became clear the virus continues to loom.
Is Another Stimulus Coming?
Trump’s economic advisors, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Director of the US National Economic Council Larry Kudlow, were on-hand for the presser over the healthy June jobs report.
“I think, as you know, people thought we would have 30 million people unemployed. Fortunately, we never got to that,” Mnuchin said.
Mnuchin admitted that the jobs data isn’t enough for the administration and that “our work is not done.” To that end, he referenced CARES 4 legislation, another stimulus bill the administration is focusing on in July. However, the secretary said it would be more focused toward businesses, leaving the possibility of a second stimulus check up in the air. Mnuchin only said the White House is “going to serious consider” the idea.
The economic situation is not improving in every aspect, though. Minority unemployment continues to remain higher, The New York Times reported.
“We already knew that there were structural inequities,” said Mary C. Daly, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.“Covid-19 made them much, much worse — it put a spotlight on them, but it also exacerbated them.”
Expanded unemployment benefits are also scheduled to end this month, meaning many Americans will receive $600 less per week, CNN reported. The lack of income and rise in cases could prevent unemployed workers from returning to work, a scenario that could have ripple effects across the economy.
New ICC Complaint Filed Over US-Israel War Crimes in Palestine
Brett Wilkins July 2, 2020
https://citizentruth.org/new-icc-complaint-filed-over-us-israel-war-crimes-in-palestine/
Prominent international critics have called the ongoing Zionist colonization of Palestine an act of ethnic cleansing and the exclusively Jewish settlements a form of apartheid.
(Common Dreams) A prominent Canadian human rights lawyer has submitted a request to the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate senior US and Israeli officials for alleged war crimes committed against the Palestinian people.
William Schabas, a professor of international law at Middlesex University in London, filed a lengthy Article 15 communication with the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) on Tuesday asking for an investigation of the architects of the so-called “Deal of the Century,” also known as the “Trump Peace Plan.” The scheme would result in a nominally independent but effectively disjointed Palestinian “state” that would be established through land swaps with Israel and Israeli annexation. It would leave Palestinians cut off from each other in what some have called a “Swiss cheese state” and other have called “modern-day Bantustans.”
The new complaint, filed on behalf of four Palestinians directly impacted by the plan, names President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law who was placed in charge of brokering the deal despite having no experience in foreign policy or the Middle East. The four Palestinians named in the filing are: Ahmad al-Khaldi, Gassan Khaled, Hasan M. Masan and Abderrahman F. Zaidan.
Palestine’s leaders and people have roundly rejected the US plan. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called it the “slap of the century,” while chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat called it the “fraud of the century.”
“The threatened annexation of parts of the West Bank by Israel is an international crime defined in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court,” Schabas said at a virtual press conference announcing the new filing. “It is intricately linked to the war crime of changing the population of an occupied territory.” Schabas added that ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda “needs to address this as part of her ongoing investigation, casting the net beyond the Israeli leaders to their partners and accomplices in Washington, including Trump, Pompeo and Kushner.”
Under Article 15 of the ICC Rome Statute, any person or organization can send information regarding alleged war crimes to the OTP. The ICC prosecutor then determines whether the situation warrants a formal investigation. The new Article 15 communication asserts that the proposed US plan will lead to an increase in crimes which the OTP is currently investigating. The new complaint states there is credible evidence that Trump, Pompeo, Kushner and other senior US officials are complicit in what could be war crimes under international law, including Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which states that an “occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own population into the territories it occupies.”
Since illegally occupying the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip in Palestine and the Golan Heights in Syria during the 1967 Six-Day War, over 200 Jews-only settler colonies have been built in the West Bank. There are currently more than 600,000 Israelis living in these settlements, in which Arabs cannot reside or often even enter, and which are also illegal under international law.
Israeli settler colonists continue to illegally seize land, expel inhabitants and destroy their homes. Settlers sometimes attack and brutally murder Palestinians, including children, who stand in their way. Palestinian movement is restricted by Jews-only roads, ubiquitously oppressive Israeli military checkpoints and a separation barrier — known to Palestinians as the apartheid wall — that cuts Palestinians off from each other, their land and their livelihoods.
Prominent international critics have called the ongoing Zionist colonization of Palestine an act of ethnic cleansing and the exclusively Jewish settlements a form of apartheid.
Last December, after years of delays and backtracking, the OTP announced it would investigate alleged war crimes committed by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops against Palestinian civilians, including intentionally launching disproportionate attacks, willful killing and injury of Palestinians, intentionally attacking Red Cross and other medical personnel and facilities, unlawful transfer of Israeli civilians into illegally occupied Palestinian territory and construction and expansion of illegal Jewish-only settler colonies. In announcing its decision to investigate, ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said she believed that “war crimes have been or are being committed in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.”
Netanyahu responded to the announcement by saying that the ICC “has no jurisdiction in this case” because the court “only has jurisdiction over petitions submitted by sovereign states,” and that “there has never been a Palestinian state.” Israel has not joined the ICC but the Palestinian Authority—which has limited autonomy under Israeli military occupation—is a member.
The Israeli government is pushing ahead with its own plan to annex up to 30 percent of the West Bank with or without coordinating with Washington. However, despite suggestions from Netanyahu that the imminent annexation would occur on July 1, the plan has apparently been delayed. “It seems unlikely to me that this will happen today,” Israeli Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi told reporters on Wednesday.
Aside from the United States, most of the world opposes Israel’s annexation plan. A group of 47 experts appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council recently accused Israel of “profound human rights violations,” calling the annexation plan “a vision of 21st century apartheid.” Amnesty International condemned what it called Israel’s “cynical disregard for international law.” Last week, the Belgian parliament overwhelmingly approved a resolution calling for punitive measures, including sanctions, against Israel if it annexes more of Palestine.
Meanwhile, President Trump continues to attack the ICC over its March decision to open an investigation into war crimes committed by all sides during the 19-year war in Afghanistan, including alleged torture, rape and other crimes by US troops and intelligence agents. Last month, the Trump administration announced it would sanction ICC officials involved in probing US crimes, imposing a travel ban on them and their families. The administration also said it would launch a counter-investigation into alleged ICC corruption.
Sweatshops and monopsony power – a reviewby michael roberts
Leicester is a medium-sized city in the centre of England. It has come into the limelight in the last few weeks because of an outbreak of COVID-19 in the city, forcing a local lockdown, while the rest of England starts to ‘come out’. Leicester has a relatively high British Asian community and many are concentrated for work in the garment industry. And it is here that the COVID outbreak seems to have emerged.
The reason is clear. Garment workers in Leicester work out of tiny, unsafe factories or even homes, employed for below poverty wages ($5 an hour!) and they have worked throughout the coronavirus crisis lockdown. These small businesses had to carry on because there was really only one buyer, the online retailer, British Asian owned BooHoo. Like Amazon, Boohoo has made a fortune during the pandemic with shop-based retailers in lockdown. Its profits are registered in the tax haven island of Jersey. And it dominates the Leicester garment industry. It’s a classic example of monopsony power.
We often see the concept of ‘monopoly’ in political economy and leftist circles as a relevant category for modern capitalism. We don’t usually recognise ‘monopsony capitalism’. But we should. This is where Ashok Kumar’s book, Monopsony Capitalism Power and Production in the Twilight of the Sweatshop Age fills a gap.
Whereas, monopoly implies a dominant or hegemonic seller in the market for goods and services, controlling prices and keeping out potential rivals, monopsony implies the control of the market by a dominant buyer over many smaller sellers. The capitalist labour market is one key example, where capital exerts relative monopsonic power over workers, unless they are organised in unions etc.
The Boohoo monopsony in Leicester is repeated on an even larger scale with major retailers like Walmart in the US or Amazon globally, or manufacturers like Nike or Apple or food producers like Nescafe or Del Mar, which exert huge monopsonic power over their suppliers (in farming, garment and footwear, electronics etc).
Kumar is a lecturer in International Political Economy at the School of Business, Economics and Informatics at Birkbeck University. His book takes us to the heart of the monopsonic capitalism globally through the value chain of cheap garments and shoes in the shops of the ‘global north’ to the sweatshops of Bangladesh and other countries under the domination of the multi-nationals.
Monopsony Capitalism argues that the garment value chain globally relies on the unequal power dynamic of many suppliers and few buyers – monopsony. The result is a low level of surplus value capture at the production phase of the supply chain, which ensures chronically low capital investment in the peripheral countries’ industry. Cheap labour and many suppliers are preserved, as opposed to the use of machinery and fewer, larger companies. Fragmentation and low capital investment in garment and footwear value chains creates low barriers to entry, resulting in bidding wars between thousands of smaller firms from around the world. Indeed, a ‘sweatshop’ can be defined as a workplace where labour has essentially no bargaining power.
The Rana Plaza tragedy of 2013 when a massive garment factory in Bangladesh collapsed, floor upon floor, crushing many of its occupants was a catalytic moment. “The Rana Plaza disaster proved a monument to the complete and utter failure of Western activism: 1,134 workers perished.” Consumer boycotts and campaigning in the global North against ‘sweatshops’ proved to have had no effect.
But what has happened since shows another way out of this nightmare. After Rana Plaza, the Bangladeshi unions demanded new safety conditions, similar to the way in which reduced hours and better safety was fought for in cotton sweatshops of mid-19th century Britain that Marx records. By August 2013, 45 garment factory unions had been registered with the Bangladeshi government. The unions used a ‘hot shop’ organizing model, following the trail of labour unrest from case to case, factory to factory, establishing and strengthening union footholds. An almost endless pool of small garment firms across the globe began to steadily disappear, absorbed into larger rivals or forced to merge. Thus, Kumar argues the monopsony power of the multi-national retailers increasingly faced oligopolistic companies, driven by their workforces to demand better prices and terms.
Kumar's book analyses workers’ collective action at various sites of production primarily in China, India, Honduras, and United States, and secondarily in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. Action by labour in these countries have “tested the limits of the social order, stretching it until the seams show, and forcing bosses to come to the proverbial table, hat in hand, to hash out agreements with those who assemble their goods.”
In these case studies Kumar reveals that there has been increasing supplier-end consolidation, raising the surviving suppliers’ share of value, and so facilitating self-investment and higher entry barriers. Workers struggles over wages and conditions have altered the balance of economic power between the multi-nationals and the domestic suppliers.
Kumar reminds us that Marx and Engels argued that global capital would generate a global proletariat that would ultimately be its undoing. But perhaps collective worker action is the exception under capitalism. Maybe capital’s structural advantages in certain sectors, like garment and footwear, have effectively resolved the dialectical struggle in favour of capitalists. Kumar’s case studies suggest otherwise. The garment sector (and vertically disintegrated value chains generally) are also “animated by the logic of competition, which moves inexorably in the direction of consolidation, thereby reducing the monopsonistic power of buyers. while changes in the value chain are reflected in the bargaining power of workers.”
Kumar confirms that Marx’s law of accumulation still operates, namely that capitalism must increasingly come to rely on ‘dead labour’ (technology and so on) and less and less on ‘living labour’ (workers) and that includes the peripheral ‘emerging economies’ too. Higher levels of ‘dead labour’ start to create higher barriers to entry: Why? “Because the smaller the organic composition of capital, the less capital is required at the beginning in order to enter this branch and establish a new venture. It is far easier to put together the million or two million dollars necessary for building a new textile plant than to assemble the hundreds of millions needed to set up even relatively small steel works.”
Relying on this fundamental trend in capitalist accumulation, Kumar reckons “there is a change in the air.” In China, India, Honduras, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Indonesia many factories already have a relatively high organic composition. It becomes "possible to glimpse another world where bosses come to the proverbial table, hat in hand, to hash out agreements with those who assemble their goods. When labour unions, activists, and advocates marshal their resource – financial, moral, political, and human – to support smart, focused, bottom-up organizing in large, increasingly integrated firms, garment workers will transform their industry.”
Once barriers to entry have been established among the domestic suppliers it will be impossible to tear them down and return to monopsony power. Sweatshops occur where surpluses are limited, and production is diffuse and isolated from consumption. But competition eventually creates a centralized industry, with a few mega-firms in a few locations. Then suppliers ascend, giving workers the high ground too. But as Kumar says, “whether this is indeed the twilight of the sweatshop age or a new race to the bottom may ultimately depend on the self-organization and demands of the working people.” That applies to the garment sweatshops of COVID-19 Leicester too.
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