(...) Filmer concluded that the overall number of employed people worldwide was about 880 million, compared with around 1,000 million people working mainly for their own account on the land (overwhelmingly peasants), and 480 million working for their own account in industry and services. The figure for 'employed people' includes some non-workers' groups as well as workers. There is a section of the bourgeoisie in receipt of enormous corporate salaries, and below that the new middle class who get paid more value than they create in return for helping to control the mass of workers. These groups probably amount to 10 percent of the population.14 That reduces the size of the employed world working class to around 700 million, with about a third in 'industry'and the rest in 'services'.
(...) But the total size of the working class is considerably greater than this. The class also includes those who are dependent on income that comes from the waged labour of relatives or savings and pensions resulting from past wage labour--that is, non-employed spouses, children and retired elderly people. If these categories are added in, the worldwide total figure for the working class comes to between 1.5 and 2 billion. Anyone who believes we have said 'farewell' to this class is not living in the real world.
(...) Add these 'semi-workers' or 'peasant workers' to the numbers of people completely dependent on wage labour, and you get a figure which must be somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of the world's population. In other words around the core of 1.5 to 2 million proletarians there are a similar number of semi-proletarians.
(...) Industrial employment has fallen sharply in a number of countries over the last three decades--in Britain and Belgium by a third, and in France by more than a quarter. But these do not represent a deindustrialisation of the whole of the advanced industrial world, but rather a restructuring of industry within it. The number of industrial jobs in the advanced industrial countries as a whole was 112 million in 1998--25 million more than in 1951 and only 7.4 million less than in 1971. There is a great danger of looking at the world through British or French glasses, and not seeing what is really happening on a global scale. So Toni Negri's Italy may not be in the same league as the US or Japan, but the industrial workers have certainly not disappeared. There were 6.5 million four years ago, down only one sixth since 1971.
(...) But that is not all. The usual distinction between 'industry' and 'services' obscures more than it reveals. The category 'services' includes things which are of no intrinsic importance to the capitalist production (for instance, the hordes of servants who provide individual capitalist parasites with their leisure). But it has always included things which are absolutely central to it (like the transportation of goods and the provision of computer software). What is more, some of the shift from 'industry' to the 'service sector' amounts to no more than a change in the name given to essentially similar jobs.
(...) But even Rowthorn's figures considerably underestimate the size of the working class--that class whose labour is essential for the accumulation of capital. Many of Rowthorn's 'free standing services' are essential to such accumulation in the modern world. Two in particular are absolutely indispensable for capitalist accumulation today--health provision and the education service.
(...)There is a widespread myth that the 'service' workforce consists of well paid people with control over their own working situation who never need to get their hands dirty. So Guardian columnist (and former SDP member) Polly Toynbee writes: 'We have seen the most rapid change in social class in recorded history: the 1977 mass working class, with two thirds of people in manual jobs, shrunk to one third, while the rest migrated upwards into a 70 percent home-owning, white collar middle class'.37 So Hardt and Negri claim:
The jobs for the most part are highly mobile involving flexible skills. More important, they are characterised in general by the central role played by knowledge, information, affect, and communication. In this sense many call the post-industrial economy an informational economy... Through the process of post-modernisation all production tends toward the production of services, toward becoming informationalised.38
(...) Altogether there are a minimum of 42 million 'service sector workers' in manual or routine white collar occupations in the US. These, it should be added, are the occupations that have been expanding most rapidly recently with the 'creation' of a mass of low wage jobs. On top of them, many workers in other occupational categories would have been doing work which was little different--for instance, many of the 3.2 million 'sales representatives' and the 4.3 million 'technicians and related support' workers. So would many of the 'health assessment and treating occupations' (83 percent female, unlike the 'health diagnostic' category above them which is 75 percent male), and many of the 5.3 million school teachers (75 percent female). Together these groups constitute well over half the 'service sector'. Add to them the 33 million workers in traditional manual industries, and you have some three quarters of the US population made up of workers. If the 'working class' has 'disappeared from view' for people like Hardt and Negri, it is because they have been looking in the wrong direction.
(...) A central theme of all those who see the working class as disappearing is that the jobs that remain are so precarious that little remains of the permanent working class organisations and communities that used to exist. The argument has been a continual feature of 'post-Marxist' arguments for the last 15 years both from 'Third Way' social democrats and those on the 'autonomist' left.
(...) But this does not mean that in reality capital has been able to destroy workers' resistance to such flexibility, or even that it itself can keep accumulating without continually reproducing relatively permanent labour forces within particular workplaces. One recent study for Britain shows:
Many of the commonly held assumptions about today's world of work need to be seriously questioned. A wide gulf exists between the over-familiar rhetoric and hyperbole we hear daily about our flexible and dynamic labour market and the realities of workplace life. The evidence simply does not sustain the view that we are witnessing the emergence of a 'new' kind of employment relations, seen in the 'end of the career' and the 'death of the permanent job for life'.48
People often do not see the limits to what capital can achieve in terms of 'flexible labour markets' because they lump together quite different forms of employment: part time employment, temporary employment, employment on short term contracts, and self employment on behalf of firms. But part time employment can also be permanent employment--as it usually is among women in Britain. Similarly, those working on short term contracts can find them renewed month after month, or year after year. They lack long term rights and are the first to go when crises hit, but they do not move into and out of jobs all the time in between. Finally, those in genuinely temporary employment may be indispensable to production and be provided on a long term but intermittent basis by agencies which are themselves large firms and dependent on maintaining a permanent pool of labour to supply to other firms.
(...) Across Western Europe as a whole, 'one out of five jobs has been precarious during the last five years'--but that still leaves four out of five jobs as 'permanent'.
(...) The figures do, however, show that 'average job tenure has remained relatively stable since 1975'. The idea that the working class has been 'flexible-ised' out of existence is completely mistaken. Most people continue to work in the same place, and to be subject to exploitation by the same employers for quite long periods of time. By the same token, they have the time and opportunity to connect up with the people around them to fight back against that exploitation.
(...)
The claim that the 'permanent' worker is a thing of the past is often connected with the claim that employers can move production--and jobs--at a moment's notice.
So Hardt and Negri write:
The informatisation of production and the increasing importance of immaterial production have tended to free capital from the constraints of territory, and capital can withdraw from negotiation with a given local population by moving its site to another point in the global network... Entire labouring populations, which had enjoyed a certain stability and contractual power, have thus found themselves in increasingly precarious employment situations.57
This vastly exaggerates the movement of capital, and the ease with which firms can move their operations from one place to another... As I have explained elsewhere,58 capital as money (ie finance) can move at the touch of a computer key from one location to another (although determined governments can still impede its movement). But capital as means of production finds it much more difficult to do so. Physical equipment has to be uninstalled and reinstalled, transport has to be arranged for goods produced, a reliable workforce with the requisite skills found, and so on. It is a process that is usually expensive, taking years rather than seconds. What is more, physical production depends upon transporting goods to markets, and therefore closeness to markets is an advantage. The result is that most of the restructuring of industry over the last three decades has usually been within the world's existing industrial regions.
(...) There has, of course, been a shift in certain manufacturing industries to states which were not industrialised 40 years ago--otherwise the phenomenon of the Newly Industrialising Countries (NICs) and of certain expanding industries in 'underdeveloped' countries would be inexplicable. But there is little evidence to support the claim that 'advanced countries are abandoning the production of manufactured goods. Many labour-intensive manufacturing activities in the advanced economies, such as clothing or routine assembly, have been put out of business by rising imports from developing countries', but these imports have been financed 'not by the export of services' but 'by the export of other manufactures, especially capital goods and intermediate products such as chemicals'.
(...) Restructuring means that much of this production does not take place in the old industrial centres, such as those in and around Detroit, but in the 'sun belt' states of the west and south. So most US auto workers no longer work directly for the 'Big Three' of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, but for 'trans-plant manufacturers' like Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Mitsubishi and Daimler Benz, or for new parts manufacturers spun off by GM so as to weaken the union.63 This is a far cry from the picture sometimes presented of all US auto jobs disappearing over the border into Mexico.
(...) But it is not 'fluid' in being able to move effortlessly from one location to another. The general trend for capitalism today is still for production to be concentrated in the advanced countries. Some sorts of production have shifted to a few favoured areas of the Third World--the NICs of east and south east Asia, and eastern China. But capital still finds it more profitable, in general, to locate itself in the regions which had industrialised by the mid 20th century. Workers may usually be better paid there, but a combination of established skills levels and existing investments in plant and infrastructure mean they are also more productive, providing much more surplus value for the system than most of their poorer brothers and sisters in the Third World. This explains why the picture for most of Latin America has been one of very slow average growth or stagnation, and of most of Africa of absolute decline.
(...) Capitalism has created a world working class in the last century and a half. Industry and wage labour exist today in virtually every part of the globe. The industrial working class has a worldwide presence. But the combined and uneven development of the system means it is very unevenly distributed between regions. Rough calculations indicate that 40 percent of the world's 270 million or so industrial workers are in the OECD countries, around 15 percent each in China, Latin America and the former USSR, around 10 percent in the rest of Asia, and around 5 percent in Africa.
(...) Sub-Saharan Africa is the exception rather than the norm for the world system as a whole, or even for its vast, impoverished regions. In Asia and Latin America there has been a growth of wage labour. But it has often been outside what is usually called the 'modern' sector, and has often been accompanied by an equally rapid rise of self employment.
(...) Most of the self employed are by no means privileged. A survey of Ahmedabad shows only one tenth of the male self employed as having a 'separate business place'. A third worked on the streets, as vendors, rickshaw drivers, cart pullers and the like. There are 200,000 rickshaw men in Mumbai, 80,000 in Ahmedabad, and 30,000 in Bangalore, while Calcutta has around 250,000 street hawkers and Calcutta more than 100,000.
(...) In addition to--and often merging into--those in the informal sector, there are everywhere those denied any opportunities for employment by modern capitalism: the unemployed. Their numbers vary considerably from region to region and country to country--depending, in part, on the ease of people making some sort of livelihood in the informal sector.
(...) Capitalist accumulation is causing the rapid growth of cities across wide swathes of the globe, and of occupations involving production for the market. In most regions (although not in most of Africa) there is also a growth of the number involved in wage labour of a relatively productive sort in medium to large workplaces. But even more rapid is the expansion of the vast mass of people precariously trying to make a livelihood through casual labour, selling things in the streets, trying to survive through working on their own account. At one extreme this mass merges into the petty bourgeoisie proper of small employers, at the other into the desperate poverty of those who can hardly get a livelihood at all--48 percent of the urban population of Brazil live below the poverty line, and two out of five of these below the 'indigence' income needed to satisfy food needs but nothing else.
(...) There is one widespread, very simple, and very mistaken, answer. That is to see the workers with permanent jobs as 'privileged', as some sort of 'labour aristocracy'. This is certainly how it can seem to those driven into the informal sector. In the formal sector there are usually considerably higher wage rates and often sickness benefits, paid holidays, and pensions of sorts as well... Employers have not, however, provided such things out of the goodness of their heart. They need a certain stability to their labour force, particularly when it comes to skilled workers who they do not want to be poached by rivals during times of boom. States often want such stability as well, seeing welfare provision for a section of the urban workforce as a way of protecting themselves against sudden explosions of popular discontent.
(...) It often seems counterintuitive to argue that groups of workers who have better conditions than others do not benefit at their expense--whether the argument is used about Western workers and workers in the Third World, or formal sector Third World workers and informal sector workers. But in this case the 'counterintuitive' argument is correct. In many industries, the more stable and experienced a workforce, the more productive it is. Capital is prepared to concede higher wages to certain of the workers in those industries because by doing so it is able to make more profits out of them. Hence the apparent contradiction--some sections of the world's workers are both better paid than others, and more exploited. It is this alone which explains why capitalists, motivated only by the drive for profit, do not usually invest on any great scale in regions like Africa, where wages are lowest.
(...) That, of course, does not prevent capital from continually trying to hold down what it has to pay--and from seizing on new technologies and restructuring production to reduce its labour costs drastically. Hence the pattern in much of the world for the established 'formal' workforce to remain more or less intact, but for there to be some chipping away round the edges and for many new jobs to be in the 'informal' sector.
(...) [mike davis + a rejoinder to hardt/negri, more or less] The great mass of the informal workforce in 'developing' countries today are people who are new to the urban workforce--either from the countryside (as with the more than 100 million peasants seeking employment in China's cities) or women and young people seeking paid labour for the first time. But the pattern of capitalist accumulation over the last couple of decades means that the labour demands of modern, productive industry have not expanded on anything like the scale needed to absorb them into its workforce. Competition on a global scale has caused capitalists to turn to 'capital intensive' forms of production (with what Marx called a rising 'organic composition of capital') which do not require massive numbers of new workers. As a result, the only ways for most new entrants to the labour force to gain a livelihood are through the most meagre forms of self employment or through selling their labour power at such a low price and under such arduous conditions that small capitalists at the margins of the system can profit from exploiting it.
(...) That is not, however, the end of the matter. Capitalism has one important use for those it refuses to allow to make a proper livelihood. It uses them to put increased pressure on those it does exploit in the most productive areas of the economy. Far from the growth of the informal workforce benefiting the workforce in the formal sector, it has been accompanied by an increased exploitation of workers in this sector--and in many cases by a deterioration. [empirical proof follows]
(...) In both India and Latin America something else has been happening--the shifting of certain jobs in big industry from the formal to the informal sector. This allows management to cut some of their wage costs--and to put pressure on the remaining 'formal' sector of the workforce to accept worse conditions.
(...) It is wrong, as people like Paulo Singer do, to write of 'deproletarianisation'.119 Rather, what is happening is a restructuring of the workforce, with the hiving off by big firms of some tasks (usually relatively unskilled and therefore easily performed by a floating workforce) to small firms, labour-only contractors and the supposedly self employed. It should be added that this phenomenon is by no means new in the history of capitalism. Casual employment has often played an important role in certain industries--for instance, in the docks in Britain until the late 1960s. And forms of contract labour are very old--it was common in the textile factories of the industrial revolution. In the mines in both the US and Britain in the 19th century, overseers or foremen ('buttymen') would recruit workers and pay them out of a sum given to them by the mine owners. These casual groups of workers may not always have felt themselves to be part of the working class. They were often detached from the struggles of other sections of that class for years, even decades, at a time. Yet the potential for struggling with those sections was always there, and when it turned into reality the struggle could be very bitter, with an almost insurrectionary tinge.
(...) [citing engels on dock workers] The point is very important. Internationally we are just emerging from more than two decades of defeat and demoralisation for workers right across the world. This bred a fatalism about the possibility of fighting, which was reflected in a mass of studies which depicted the suffering of the poor and the oppressed, showing them always as victims, rarely as fighters. Thus there are tons of materials sponsored by the International Labour Organisation on 'social exclusion'--a theme which suits the bureaucrats who run such bodies. In these studies themes like the 'casualisation' and 'feminisation' of the workforce become stereotyped, academic ways of dismissing possibilities of struggle--even if some of those carrying through the studies try to escape from the paradigm in which they are trapped. The stereotypes then provide trade union officialdom with excuses for avoiding struggle on the grounds that it cannot work. What begins as a mistaken assessment of the possibility of struggle becomes a real obstacle to unleashing such struggle.
(...) [naomi klein on EPZs] Such accounts provide a brilliant exposure of the greed and inhumanity of those who run the multinationals. But like many orthodox academic studies on the informal workforce (especially those sponsored by the International Labour Organisation) they are too pessimistic when it comes to the possibilities of fighting back. First, the multinationals cannot afford simply to mistreat their workers. It is not as easy as the multinationals would like people to think for them to close down their facilities and move elsewhere if the workforce does explode in bitterness. Setting up the links in a global production chain takes a lot of effort by the multinational... When Henry Ford pioneered mass production, assembly line methods in the auto industry, he saw that the most effective form of exploitation lay in stabilising a handpicked workforce under tight managerial control. Thomas O'Brien has told how some of the first US multinationals to operate in Latin America took efforts to stabilise their workforces by providing minimal welfare facilities--providing accommodation in company towns, health clinics, schools, sports facilities, even paid holidays. The aim was to combine maintaining the workers at a minimal level of fitness with extending managerial discipline over workers to the home as well as the workplace...
(...) This element of stability in the workforce is important because it means such workers can fight back, and win. Conditions in many South Korean clothing and footwear plants in the 1960s were exactly as Naomi Klein describes them. George E Ogle has told of 'the sweat, blood and tears of young women who worked in the export industries during the 1960s and 1970s--textiles, garments, electronics, chemicals'
(...) [strategy matters, in other words] So, for instance, an account of the great Bombay textile strikes of 1982-1983 paints a different picture to that in Korea. The strike began as a semi-spontaneous upsurge from below (workers demonstrated outside the residence of Datta Samant, who was to become the strike figurehead, demanding that he 'lead' them) and developed into one of the biggest prolonged strikes in world history, lasting a year, involving hundreds of thousands of workers and dominating the political life of India's commercial and industrial capital. But it never spread from the 'organised' sector of the larger workplaces to the small workplaces and the impoverished self employed weavers--indeed, many strikers began working in the informal sector without anyone regarding them as scabs. This enabled the employers to hold out for a year and defeat the workers, since they were never short of finished cloth.
(...) [too easy? but important regardless] The victories in Korea show the possibility of organising informal and maquiladora workers, of pulling them behind struggles initiated by larger and more secure groups of workers. The defeat in Bombay showed the dangers for the more secure groups of not going out and bringing the informal workers into the struggle. The dangers are not simply a matter of wage cuts, job losses and deteriorating working conditions. Defeat can have a devastating impact on wider society. During the strike there was unity between the different religious and caste groups that make up the mass of Bombay's lower classes. The aftermath of defeat saw the rise to a dominating position in wide areas of the city of the Sriv Sena, a political organisation based upon turning Hindus against Muslms, culminating in murderous riots against the Muslim population in 1992. Unity in struggle had created a sense of solidarity which then exerted a pull on the vast mass of the informal workers, self employed, the unemployed poor and the impoverished sections of the petty bourgeoisie. The defeat led to the sectional attitudes and communal conflicts of the petty bourgeoisie influencing the self employed, the unemployed and wide layers of workers.
[CONCLUSION]
(...) The overall picture is not one of a disintegrating or declining working class. It is one of a working class that on a world scale has grown bigger than ever, even if the rate of growth has slowed down with the successive crises in the world economy and the tendency everywhere to 'capital intensive' forms of production that do not employ massively new numbers of people.
(...) Neither is the picture one in which working class employment is being transferred on a massive scale from the old industrial economies of the 'North' to the previously agrarian economies of the 'South'. The new international division of labour is developing mainly within the 'triad' of North America, Europe and Japan--with a lesser part being played by the NICs of East Asia and eastern China. There is also an expansion of industrial employment within some of the burgeoning cities of the 'South'--but the expansion is uneven, barely touching whole regions, and is not mainly through transfer of jobs from the North.
(...) A twofold change is taking place now. There is the growing importance of the production of certain 'immaterial' commodities which are often classified as part of the service sector, but involve forms of work very similar to those in industry. And there is the growing importance of forms of labour which do not themselves produce commodities, but which serve to maintain and increase the productivity of the direct producers.
(...) The working class is not disappearing. It is not becoming bourgoeisified. It is not turning into a privileged layer. It is not gaining somehow from the impoverishment of wide sections of the Third World, especially Africa. It is growing even while it is restructured globally.
(...) The anti-capitalist movement itself has some of the same characteristics. Its initial base, like that of the first movement of the late 1960s, has been among people not firmly rooted in the productive process--students, school students, young people not yet trapped into permanent jobs, workers who take part in its activities as individuals without any clear sense of class identity, lower professionals. As a descriptive term for such movements, 'multitude' is not completely misplaced. A disparate coalition of forces has come together to provide a new and massively important focus for the struggle against the system after two decades of defeat and demoralisation. But the glorification of disparateness embodied in the term prevents people seeing what needs to be done next to build the movement. It does not recognise that what was so important about Genoa and Barcelona was the beginning of the involvement of organised workers in the protests. It fails to locate the most important deficiency of the movement in Argentina to date--the ability of trade union bureaucracies to build a wall between employed workers on the one hand and the neighbourhood and unemployed workers' movements on the other.
(...) The mistake is to see movements of disparate social groups as 'social subjects' capable of bringing about a transformation of society. They are not. Because their base is not centred in collective organisation rooted in production, they cannot challenge the control over that production which is central to ruling class power. They can create problems for particular governments. But they cannot begin the process of rebuilding society from the bottom up. And in practice, the workers who could begin to do this only play a marginal role in them. Talk about 'rainbow coalitions' or 'multitudes' conceals that relative lack of involvement in the movement of those working long hours at manual or routine white collar jobs--and with extra hours of unpaid labour bringing up children. It underplays the degree to which the movements remain dominated by those whose occupations leave them most time and energy to be active. Fashionable theories about 'post-industrial society' then become an excuse for a narrowness of vision and action that ignores the great majority of the working class.
