Employmentweb_low

EmploymEnT, woRk, and hEalTh inEqualiTiEs - a global perspective
Key influences affecting changes to employment dimensions
over the past thirty years include the growing influence of
corporations and the abandonment of Keynesian economic policies
over the last four decades. in its place, a dominant neo-liberal
model has emerged whose fundamental mission has been to
facilitate conditions for profitable accumulation, with the
consequence of transferring assets, wealth and income towards
the upper classes and from poor to rich countries. These policies,
often built on the dismantling of post WWii regulations, have not
only increased social inequalities across countries and social
groups, but have also favoured the
ideology of microeconomic
rationality as the validating
criterion for all aspects of social
life and thereby have universalised
market dependence in society
(rupert, 1990; navarro, 2007).
neo-liberal policies and
practices stem from the belief that
competitive private markets
deliver the best social outcomes
including the following: (1) the
reduction of state interventions in
women workers sorting through coffee beans (Costa Rica).
economic activities; this theory has
source: Marc schenker (2003)
not been followed in practice since
many states have actually become more interventionist (e.g. in the
Us, with large subsidies to the agricultural, military, aerospace, and
biomedical sectors); (2) corporatisation, commodification and
privatisation of hitherto public assets; (3) reduction of public social
expenditures; (4) deregulation of financial transactions and interest
rates, and the removal of credit controls; (5) liberalisation of trade
with removal of barriers to commerce; (6) the commodification and
privatisation of land and the expulsion of peasant populations; (7)
colonial, neo-colonial, and imperial processes of appropriation of
assets, including natural resources ultimately backed by political
violence; (8) conversion of various forms of collective property rights
into exclusive private property rights; (9) more control over
organised labour and limiting the right to organise; and (10)
deregulation of labour with more "flexibility" in the labour markets,
downsizing and outsourcing/off-shoring (harvey, 2003; 2006;
navarro, 2007) (see case studies 65, 66, 67 and 68).
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