Tag: Privatization

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.

What Free Trade Is Doing to Africa!

gregoryelich

shutterstock_118101748_2_1

By Gregory Elich

So often we are told that the free market is the path to economic prosperity. All an impoverished nation needs to do is privatize, deregulate, reduce the size and role of government, cut tariff protections and open its economy to foreign investors, and it too can become a developed model economy. This gospel is preached by the U.S. and Western European nations and enforced through international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and World Trade Organization (WTO). The neoliberal economic model, it is claimed, is beneficial for all nations and in all circumstances. But is it true? These assertions never acknowledge the actual experience of developing nations that implement these policies. To do so would dispel such notions. The effect of free trade on agricultural development in Sub-Saharan Africa provides a characteristic example.Read More »

Devastating Free Market Reforms Imposed on Serbia

gregoryelich

beggar

By Gregory Elich

Nine years ago, neoliberal political forces took power in Serbia, promising a radical transformation of the economy. Today, deep into that transformation, Serbia is foundering from its effects, exacerbated by the worldwide economic downturn. Industrial production has fallen 15 percent compared to last year’s average, while unemployment remains high. [1]

A delegation from the IMF is now in Belgrade, negotiating over Serbia’s 2010 national budget and how best to deal with the economic crisis. The two sides are not far apart in that both parties envision more of the usual neoliberal prescriptions as the way out of an economic crisis brought about in large part by those very same measures.

The probable outcome of the talks is Serbia’s further enthrallment by Western dictate. Already, the economy has been essentially placed at the service of U.S. and Western European corporate interests, and the centerpiece of that transformation is the privatization drive. At one time, Serbia’s economy was predominantly based on socially owned firms that were worker-managed and large state-owned companies. The last remaining enterprises in the former category are scheduled to be eliminated by the end of this year, while the latter category will take longer to tackle.

Read More »