The impact of the labor market on the world's working class

Hartford Web Publishing is not the author of the documents in World History Archives and does not presume to validate their accuracy or authenticity nor to release their copyright.

Global jobless crisis worst since 1930s
By Jim Genova, Peoples Weekly World, 4 March 1995. In a report published Feb. 22, the ILO said that 33 percent of the world's workforce—some 820 million people—are unemployed or underemployed, the highest percentage since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The present situation is both morally and economically irrational.
Latin America: The lesson to be learned from …
IPS, 22 July 1996. After several years of operating in South Korea, Ronson decided to close its plant in Asia and move back to southern Scotland. It is motivated by the availability of cheap labor. Scottish workers earn less than the Koreans at present. This is a direct consequence of the new rules of the international work market.
Working hours—the long and the short of it
By Gaetano Greco and Lorella Di Pietro, GreenLeft News, 8 December 1996. Case of the ACTU, Australia. The idea of shorter working hours as a means of reducing unemployment. Currently, shorter working hours for many workers have meant flexible hours, i.e. job sharing, purchased leave arrangements, part-time or casual hours, contract work and on-call work, all with reduced conditions and less pay.
World unemployment at record high
By David Perez, Workers World, 12 December 1996. According to the ILO, 1 billion people are either unemployed or underemployed. While the bosses are crowing about the growth of free enterprise, a billion people are finding that the profit system is neither free nor enterprising.
How Are Wages, Profits, Prices Related Under Capitalism?
By Karl Marx, extracts from Value, Price and Profit, published in The Militant, 8 September 1997. Sheds light on the struggle for higher wages and its relation to the employers' profits and prices of commodities.
OECD backs down as finding is attacked
By Robert Taylor, Financial Times, 9 July 1999. Attacks from western governments have prompted the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to climb down from a controversial finding in its recent employment report that job protection laws have little or no effect on overall unemployment.
Unemployment and casualization: A great challenge to the left
By István Mészáros, speech given to seminar organised by Workers Left Unity-Iran, 18 March 2000. Argues that there is an equalization of rate of exploitation world wide, and this returns us to an era of an absolute exploitation of labor: sweated labor and longer hours. Suggests that only a restructuring of the economy can escape the resulting contradictions, and the battle over the workweek is the critical issue in that struggle (70 kB).