Category: Social Inequality

Precarious Asia: Global Capitalism and Work in Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia

gregoryelich

By Gregory Elich

Precarious Asia: Global Capitalism and Work in Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia. By Arne L. Kalleberg, Kevin Hewison, and Kwang-Yeong Shin, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2022, xiv + 227 pp., $80.00 (hardcover), ISBN 9781503610255

By all accounts, precarious labor has been playing an increasingly significant role in global capitalism in recent years. Employment in nonregular positions tends to be of limited duration, providing low wages and little or no labor and health protections. Essentially, business offloads the risks of work onto the worker while simultaneously cutting labor costs. This trend has broader ramifications in eroding social protections even for regular workers. Indeed, the authors of Precarious Asia argue that the binary categories of regular vs. irregular work and formal vs. informal work fail to explain the complexities of developments in global labor. In their view, the term precarious work should be applied to any worker who bears the risks of employment, regardless of labor categorization. 

“Asia is the world’s factory,” the book reminds us, and what happens on the continent is directly connected to economic patterns elsewhere in the world. The shift toward precarious labor within developed capitalist countries produces competitive downward pressures on labor throughout the global value chain. In focusing on Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia, the authors intend “to understand the similarities and differences for the insights they can provide into precarious work in different national contexts and to suggest some generalizable conclusions from the three cases” (6). This global perspective is crucial for understanding the interconnected nature of labor issues.

Migration as Economic Imperialism

gregoryelich

By Gregory Elich

Numbering an estimated 169 million, [1] international migrant laborers are generally regarded in mainstream economic circles as playing a substantial role in poverty alleviation and economic development in their home countries. This is accomplished, it is asserted, through remittances sent home by migrants, reaching an estimated $647 billion arriving in low- and moderate-income countries in 2022, a total that surpasses foreign direct investment in those nations. [2] As one World Bank policy researcher explains, remittances “have a profound impact on the living standards of people in the developing countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.” [3]

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Class War Without Mercy

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greed3

By Gregory Elich

One can never have too much money. In the United States, the top one percent of the population rakes in almost a quarter of the national income and enjoys forty percent of the wealth. That privileged class sees this situation as a problem. To be precise, they are not getting enough.

For ordinary workers, the recession brought only economic hardship. But for corporate America, it meant opportunity. It was perceived as the chance to mold the economy permanently into something approximating the Third World model: vast wealth and privilege for those at the top, and unemployment, falling wages, and inadequate or nonexistent social services for the rest of society.  Read More »

Sweatshop Manufacturing: Engine of Poverty

gregoryelich

bfac

By Gregory Elich

On a global scale, the reign of free market ideology has wrought profound changes. Manufacturing jobs in the developed nations are rapidly shrinking, while abroad there has been a rise in sweatshop production, bringing with an exploitation of labor that is reminiscent of the 19th century. The effect has been to widen the gulf between the living conditions of the wealthy and those who labor for them.

Inequality has reached such an astounding level that it requires an act of willful blindness on the part of Western media not to notice it. Over half of the world’s population subsists on less than $2 a day, while the 200 richest individuals own more wealth than 41 percent of the world’s population, or in other words, more than 2.6 billion people. Such an extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of the few cannot be construed as a failure of global capitalism. Indeed, it is a mark of its success, for this is what the system is designed to do. Nor can the mass immiseration on which the system rests be dismissed as an unfortunate and unintended byproduct of the process. The system is the very engine that drives the accumulation of riches. Read More »