Larry Elliott — World Bank recommends fewer regulations protecting workers

Reminder whose interests international institutions represent and open what basis. This time it's the World Bank, but it includes the IMF, Bank of International Settlements, and other institutions upholding market-centric interpretation of the Washington Consensus that favors "capital formation" as the foundation for growth. Workers are just another commodity priced in the market based on their monetary worth as the market determines the value of the labor power they offer.

The World Bank is proposing lower minimum wages and greater hiring and firing powers for employers as part of a wide-ranging deregulation of labour markets deemed necessary to prepare countries for the changing nature of work.

A working draft of the bank’s flagship World Development Report – which will urge policy action from governments when it comes out in the autumn – says less “burdensome” regulations are needed so that firms can hire workers at lower cost. The controversial recommendations, which are aimed mainly at developing countries, have alarmed groups representing labour, which say they have so far been frozen out of the Bank’s consultation process.….

Peter Bakvis, Washington representative for the International Trade Union Confederation, … added that the WDR’s vision of the future world of work would see firms relieved of the burden of contributing to social security, have the flexibility to pay wages as low as they wanted, and to fire at will. Unions would have a diminished role in new arrangements for “expanding workers’ voices”.

The paper “almost completely ignores workers’ rights, asymmetric power in the labour market and phenomena such as declining labour share in national income,” Bakvis said....

The Guardian

World Bank recommends fewer regulations protecting workers

Larry Elliott | Economics Editor

Chinese Workers Demanding Better Wages, Conditions, Real Union Protections

The first signs of real trade unions and factory strikes may signal the end of China's low cost, low human rights advantage.

Read it at AlterNet
Chinese Workers Demanding Better Wages, Conditions, Real Union Protections
By Lijia Zhang
Repost from The Guardian (UK) | Comment Is Free

When I became a worker at a rocket factory back in 1980, aged 16, workers enjoyed cradle-to-grave social welfare and a much higher status. We were hailed as "the masters of the nation".

During the free-market era, the state-owned factories laid off excess workers. Those who kept their jobs complained about low salaries, rising labour intensity and the lack of job security. But they are generally better off than workers in the private sector, which now employs 70% of the workforce. The employees at Foxconn worked up to 16 hours a day, in silence (talking was forbidden), with only a few minutes for toilet breaks. Socialism's "masters of the nation" have been reduced to cheap commodities in this cold-hearted capitalism.

Commoditization of labor versus workers as the dominant factor rather than capital.