|
Conference on Organized labour
Responses to the Conference Paper
Gyoergy Széll
University of Osnabrueck, Dept. of Social Sciences, Germany
13 August 1998
Thanks for your kind invitation to cooperate at the network. Enclosed you will find as a first quick reaction I prepared recently exactly to the questions you raised.
Democratic Industrial Relations in a Global Perspective
The paper proposes to analyse in the first part the developments since 1989 in a global context for its main world regions. The different models of industrial relations as practised in North America, Europe and Asia - with some discussion of Latin America as well - give the background for a societal approach. In the second part I propose the thesis that the critique of political economy was never as valuable as today to understand the main tendencies in the economy and society. This thesis will be exemplified with some case studies from Japan, India, China, Australia, Europe, Canada, United States and Brazil. The last, concluding part will discuss alternatives which are developed within each of the world regions and which converge partly but which also take culturally specific ways. The future of world society and industrial relations will be a pluralistic one.
Work has been questioned over the last couple of years, as not being any more the central aspect of societal reproduction. Already in the early eighties André Gorz proclaimed the dual society with a heteronomous and an autonomous sector. Dependent work should be reduced to a minimum in the first sector, whereas the society - one could say with a modern term again the civil society - is reproduced in a self-determined way in the second sector. „Ways to paradise" or the communist dream seemed technologically and politically feasible. The German author Ulrich Beck recently pointed out that the employment crisis questions the social contract between the state and its citizens and touches therefore all of us. He proposes in a similar way to Gorz a new third sector where free, socially useful work is shared by job owners and unemployed.
The globalization of markets, the concentration of capital, the European integration, the technological revolution, Lean management set the productive forces free and led to an enormous increase of productivity on the one hand and to a redistribution of productive forces around the globe. Flexibility is the slogan by management, short-term, part time and non-standardised jobs spread more and more. These job-owners rarely are unionised.
These developments led to a very unequal distribution of benefits. Not only as the Germans Horst Kern and Michael Schumann named it in 1984 the group of rationalisation winners, sufferers and losers on the side of the work force. But the same holds true for the capital side. Whole industries in Europe close down where at the same time banks and insurance companies have the highest profits in their history. There is more capital than ever chasing around the globe in search of new extra-profits.
At the same time Europe has reached the highest unemployment figures since the Second World War - though also very unequally distributed. We find regions with official unemployment figures of more than fifty percent, others with less than five percent. The European Commission reacted with the White Book on Employment by Jacques Delors and the Essen summit in December 1994 to this challenge. It was envisaged to reduce the unemployment rate until the year 2000 by half through the creation of new jobs mainly in new innovative sectors. But nothing has happened since then. The unemployment figures even increased.
As neo-classical as the governments may be the biggest employer in all societies remains the state. Even in Germany with a conservative government which started its take-over in 1982 with the promise to reduce the state quota below 45 % of the GNP we had instead a steady increase. Through bad government not only the Eastern European states, but all Western states as well are in heavy financial crisis now. The answer to this is a severe rationalisation policy with the reduction of state employment. Had the public service in former years also the function to absorb the redundancies out of the agricultural and industrial sector and to increase by this the social services, it is now said not to be able anymore for this. (Though the social demands are expanding due to unemployment and the crisis.) But the cuts go also deep into the „social net" - as we call it in Germany. This leads to the crisis of the welfare state as well.
The former socialist countries try "capitalism without capital" - except the Mafia which has enough money. The result is that social disintegration and polarisation in Eastern and Central Europe as well as the former Soviet Union has reached never known degrees. Europe is faced with new social barriers and walls which seem sometimes to be higher and harder than the former so-called Iron Curtain. This all is a heavy challenge for industrial and labour relations. Employment as the basis for social reproduction and tissue is not guaranteed anymore in Europe. We approach American or even Third-World relations. Naturally this is also a challenge for research and namely for the trade unions.
In many countries - like France - the trade unions are in heavy water. Young people rarely join them any more, and the older are often made redundant. Their old strategies of sharing the increase in productivity and counter-balancing the inflation rate and at the same time defending the jobs is attacked by employers.
One of the union strategies to stop unemployment over the last couple of years has been the shortening of working time. Some countries like Germany have been relatively successful. Otherwise we would have some 2 million more unemployed. But on the whole unions seem to be rather disarmed in face of the return of capitalism 19th century type. So, what are the perspectives for the employment relationship at the eve of the twenty-first century in a global perspective? There are - as mostly - two main options:
1) The neo-conservative "pure" capitalism is more and more successful in accumulating on a world wide scale and in dividing workers. The results will be more and more a two tier society where a stable and well paid employment seems to become a privilege. This system can go ahead as long as it finds a majority of voters. (In the USA as in most East European countries and in the former Soviet Union the majority of the adult population even does not take part in elections.) In the worst case authoritarian structures and national chauvinist movements will lead to new forms of conflicts and possibly civil wars as Ex-Yugoslavia demonstrated us.
2) The alternative to this can only be a New social contract which overcomes national and gender cleavages, which protects the natural environment as well as human values. A cultural revolution - as even the Club of Rome termed it - is necessary. Otherwise the chances are rather good that our economic, social, political and cultural systems will break down around the year 2040 (Müller 1989, 1991). The recreation of a civil society instead of mass entertainment is a precondition for survival. This includes the strengthening of democracy. Participation and co-management are the means for this in the field of work and employment. This presupposes a change from defence to constructive strategies where not the saving of often stupid and harmful jobs is the target but the development of socially and ecologically useful activities. The trade unions as still the biggest democratic organizations in our societies have to play a prominent role in this regard. Democratic industrial relations are under pressure again. The break-down of the Soviet Empire and its state socialism seemed to have opened a new era of democratisation. But in the same historic moment new fundamental and authoritarian regimes are hitting on democratic movements and unions putting pressure on industrial relations within the context of globalization to have a competitive edge. At the same time in the West the victory over socialism seemed to have weakened unions. The desyndicalization took not only effect within the trade unions but within the employers associations as well. So social partnership which was seen as a model of social peace within Industrial Relations is in a deep crisis.
Neoliberal policies - as propagated by conservative governments mainly in the United States and Great Britain and exported to the former COMECON countries - declared that there is only the market and the individual, no such thing as society, and tried and partly successfully implemented to destroy collective structures and action as hindering the so-called free-market forces.
The role of science in this situation - where at the same time radical ecological problems pose new challenges for the economy and its social actors - is to make a critical assessment of the situation and to work out together with the concerned democratic alternatives to mainstream economism.
| 
