Employmentweb_low

EMployMEnT, worK, and HEalTH inEqualiTiEs - a global perspective
requirements into public sector employment practices and making
these principles a condition for government funding for
infrastructure and other “green” initiatives. Governments can also
provide support (i.e., in terms of legal recognition), facilitation and
incentives to encourage communities, unions and the like to pursue
initiatives designed to simultaneously improve working, living and
environmental conditions in the workplace, industry and community
levels. community groups and unions can also take the initiative.
There are successful examples of past collaborative community and
union struggles over health and environmental issues (such as the
“green bans” imposed by australian construction unions in the
1970s) and, more recently, there has been growing evidence of these
mobilisations (Quinlan & sokas, 2009).
Case study 102. Globalisation and labour - Michael h. belzer
globalisation, from the perspective of workers and their unions, involves the deregulation of labour relations. Just as
deregulation of industries like trucking weakened the role of institutions and subjected the industry to intense market
forces, the ideology of globalisation has meant replacing institutions protecting labour conditions more generally – removal
of the “safety net” – with competitive labour markets (belzer, 2000;preface and chapter 1).
Workers’ rights to organise unions for their self-protection, to take wages out of competition, have also been
attenuated directly by growing limitations in the right of freedom of association. in the united states, legal decisions
favouring property rights over human rights, accompanied by political regimes hostile to workers, have contributed to
drastic deunionisation (Dannin, 2006). combining deunionisation with the competitive markets resulting from
deregulation has caused workers’ bargaining power to collapse in industry after industry, with truck drivers and airline
pilots suffering the same fate.
Finally, the ideology of free trade and the development of regional free trade zones like the north american Free trade
agreement (naFta) have predictably pitted workers in wealthy countries against those in poor countries, to the detriment
of both. the World trade organization has wrought this scheme globally in response to the free market ideology (though not
necessarily the science) of neoclassical economics (samuelson, 1948; 1949) without recognising that the distribution of
gains between workers and capitalists, as well as between poor and wealthy countries, may not be equal (baumol &
gomory, 1996; gomory & baumol, 2000). advocates of radical free markets dwell on growing average wealth and avoid
talking about distribution, so they have declared success even after history has demonstrated that median wealth has
declined as average wealth has increased (Mishel, bernstein, & allegretto, 2006).
the increasingly unequal distribution of income and wealth initially fuelled a boom over the last three decades, but the
contradiction inherent in that unequal development finally brought about the collapse of the global economy and an
unwinding of the wealth created during the boom. While ordinary workers fall into destitution, the unequal distribution of
the gains of the past 30 years means that they had less to lose. the ranks of increasingly impoverished workers now reach
well into the middle and professional classes, threatening to spark a reaction that could provoke a re-examination of the
Washington consensus.
there are some indications of a growing union response. this includes community-union alliances in both poor and rich
countries, which are developing international networks as part of their campaigns. some international union federations like
the itF are also trying to develop campaigns targeting the spread of precarious employment, including the development of
global supply chain regulation. in the healthcare sector, unions in different countries (such as australia and the usa) have
run essentially parallel campaigns to combat the adverse effects of staffing level cuts in hospitals on public and workers’
health. beyond this, as already implied, there is a need for labour standards and worker input to be reinserted into the global
infrastructure that governs economic relationships.
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