Solidarity to Counter Corporate Exploitation

As though in response to my previous post (!) Chris Bryant will today make a speech addressing the political economy of immigration. According to extracts published in yesterday's Telegraph, he will accuse Tesco and Next of deliberately hiring workers from other EU countries because they are prepared to put up with working conditions and terms of employment that unions outlawed for British workers several decades ago. This, at last, is Labour fighting back on behalf of labour but it comes nearly a decade too late.

Most of the public prognostications about immigration are performance rather than policy, because since the major Enlargement of the European Union in 2004, right in the middle of the last Labour government, there has been a labour-market of 500 million people but without legislation to protect working conditions. What the EU proudly calls the 'largest enlargement so far' took place in 2004 and saw ten new countries join the EU including the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Solvenia, Hungary and the Baltic States. This creation of a huge pool of surplus and low-paid Labour was inevitably going to create downward pressure on wages and cause migration from lower- to higher-paid economies across Europe.

I opposed the Enlargement because I saw that it would increase the size of the low-skilled labour-market and therefore as part of a corporate agenda to undermine the power of working people. I lived in Wales at the time and it was obvious from that vantage-point that the life-chances of those who relied on employment in the factories of multinational companies would suffer seriously if workers earning far less were to become available within the same single market. I assume that Chris Bryant, MP for the Rhondda, has a similar vantage-point but his protestations come to late and with no concrete policies attached. If trade unions, and the Labour parties that were supposed to represent labour and were in power in many of the EU countries at the time, had insisted on equal terms and conditions and a single European minimum wage then the Enlargement could indeed have spread poverty eastwards, but without this agreement it actually brought poverty and employment insecurity westwards.

The conditions of employment, democratic rights and legal protections we enjoy in the UK--the very reason that living and working here is so attractive to those overseas--were won as a consequence of long and bitter struggles. Globalisation, through the expansion of out-sourcing and off-shoring as well as the freer movement of labour, has weakened these rights. This is an issue that stems from the relative power of capital and labour rather than an argument about who us, or is not, a racist. The whole immigration debate is a classic example of divide-and-rule, distracting from the obvious truth that all workers need to be protected with basic employment rights and minimum wage rates.

In the 19th-century the attempt by those who control capital to exploit workers by moving them beyond their sphere of natural rights was recognised and the proposal was one if international solidarity: that workers of the world should unite. If Chris Bryant is to move beyond rhetoric, and to convince working people that there is some purpose in voting Labour, then he needs to get his union friends across Europe to organise that solidarity and call for uniform working conditions and a Europe-wide minimum wage.
. Tweet

The Dubious Quality of Regulatory Horseflesh

If the most enjoyable stories are those that right themselves and where the villains receive their just deserts then the sad career if Tim Smith has generated such a story. Here he is in 2005, explaining a profits warning for dairy giant Arla UK, of which he was Chief Executive. He did not explain how the corporate was part of an industry that put pressure on milk suppliers, driving families farms to the wall for the sake of increasing shareholder value. Arla Foods, the Danish parent company which is a farmer co-operative, for this or for other reasons appear to have decided they no longer needed Mr Smith's services and in April 2007 he left the company.

His appointment to head the Food Standards Agency took effect from 1 April 2008 (a hint there perhaps), although already in March 2006 was welcomed by The Grocer which noted that the FSA had previously regarded food industry appointments with suspicion and that his understanding of the 'the world of grey' would be particularly valuable. Grey food, grey morals, greyness between political and corporate power? One is left to guess what Warburton's boss Jonathan - he of the friendly personalised adverts - could possibly have meant by this. Perhaps he meant this sort of thing: Tim Smith in August 2010 assuaging our concerns about the inclusion of cloned animals flesh in meat products.

But I am losing my thread and we are close to the poetic finale of this narrative. For our hero Tim Smith left the FSA last autumn to move to Tesco, previous customer of Arla, and where he would now take the role of Technical Director, with a considerable responsibility for food safety. On his appointment, which he took up just last month, he stated his opinion that Tesco and the FSA shared the 'principle of doing the right thing by consumers'. With a great demonstration of ethical flair he had left his job at the FSA a month before his position at Tesco was announced, to avoid any suggestion of conflict of interest.

And so to the shocking revelation last month that one-third of the meat protein in Tesco value burgers was actually horsemeat. Normally the revolving door would have meant that the person who had failed to properly regulate the quality of low-grade burgers was long gone before the grossness was revealed. But in this case Tim Smith walked into precisely the wrong job, leading to a rare and therefore all the more enjoyable video of him taking responsibility and looking surprisingly ashamed of himself.  Interestingly, he fails to mention his former role at the FSA.

The question left open is the obvious one: who is checking up on the quality of the food sold in our supermarkets? When the relationships between politicians, regulators and the food industry is so close, who is protecting the interests of consumers? The Food Standards Agency was set up in 2001 in the wake of the salmonella and BSE scandals and as part of Labour's arm's-length regulatory strategy. Under John, now Lord, Krebs it took a conservative line, with Krebs also becoming notorious for attacking the quality of organic food. Their response to the horsemeat crisis? To meet with suppliers to discuss the problem.

This is the second FSA to utterly fail to protect the public. As in the case of the Financial Services Authority the reasons are clear: an ideological obsession with the right of business to control its destiny and the obligation to have free markets. The result of financial deregulation was the crisis that bankrupted the British economy. The result of deregulation of the food industry is likely to be slower and more insidious. Horsemeat in burgers is revolting but not especially threatening to our health. But what we can know about the levels of dioxins, heavy metals and other contaminants that might be finding their way into the food eaten by the poor in this country?
. Tweet

Competing definitions of a free market

The Competition Commission has found that supermarkets serve customers well. According to the limited economistic, marketistic mindset from which they see the world this is actually the correct conclusion. It is that mindset, and its political support, that we need to unpick in order to understand how they could have arrived at this frankly shocking conclusion.

The problem we face is that, as a society, we are undergoing a paradigm shift. For those of us living in the sustainable world of the future, diversity means a range of types of shopping, different shops or makers selling subtly different versions of the same product, or whose ownership structure or style suits our value system. To the Competition Commission diversity means four monocultural shopping outlets within which you can buy a range of 100 different fish all of which taste of very little. If you only have one of these you lack competition; if you have two the free market is functioning well for you.

For the proponents of supermarkets they are efficient places because you can buy everything you need as quickly as possible for as little time as possible, allowing you more time to make money to buy more. As a capitalist production-and-consumption unit supermarkets allow you to be as efficient as possible. The fact that they rely on global agribusiness which uses 10 calories of energy to make 1 calorie of food (according to Richard Heinberg) does nothing to undermine their claims to efficiency.

Although such reports can lead to unhealthy gnashing and grinding of teeth the real problem is a political one. We are building the new, sustainable, community-focused world we want to live in. Nowhere is this more evident that in the area of food, where most greenies use an alternative system of wholefood shops or have their own wholefood co-op. The producers and distributors, many organised as co-operatives themselves, provide a parallel food economy based on the values of the future.

The problem is that the political parties who operate at Westminster are united in their support of the old way of economics. An enlightened government might link support to local businesses with their positive outcomes in terms of community and sustainability. A restructuring of the market to support local businesses rather than the global businesses who free-ride on the infrastructure we all pay for, and the commons we should share, is politically possible, but only once the stranglehold of the uniformly pro-market parties is broken.

Tweet

Beware the Blandishments of the Tescopolist

Capitalism is threatened by climate change and it is responding. I offer as evidence Tesco's endowment at Manchester University of a Sustainable Consumption Institute. You will have heard arguments recently that New Zealand lamb or Kenyan cut flowers are actually more sustainable than locally grown alternatives. It is in order to produce data to support claims such as this that the Institute is being funded. Its existence proves not only that our higher education system has now become the prostitute of globalised capitalism, as Thatcher long ago intended, but also that capitalism is adapting to the strictures climate change brings.

Tesco is getting extremely good value for money. They are investing a mere £5million in return for which they will divert the energies of a sizeable group of leading UK researchers to justifying their own corporate ends. They are also using this to repair their tarnished media reputation, including by claiming magnanimity in sharing the research findings with others. So you should think yourself lucky that you will be able to use Tesco's figures to justify the globalised economy without having to pay them for the privilege.

But can capitalism ever make itself sustainable? As an economic system it relies on the extraction of the surplus value of workers and the planet to pay for all the various parasites who do no work but live from ownership and investments. As such it is a system that meets the needs of the majority in an inefficient way, because the needs of the greedy minority must be satieted. As Gandhi put this so eloquently, 'the earth has enough to satisfy every man's need but not to satisfy the greed of some'. The very nature of this unfair system of distribution puts pressure on the planet as well as on those who sell their labour.

In the globalised capitalist system most work is done in the countries of the Global South, translated from de jure into de facto colonies, their resources and their labour power still stolen by the rich West, but these days through the less unsightly mechanisms of trade treaties and financial organisations, and with armies reserved for extreme situations only.

Globalisation represents the ultimate victory of the notion of 'economies of scale' that economists love so much. Now the scale is that of the planet as a whole, with corporate barons organising who shall produce what where and fixing the prices. Failing to respect Nature's scale has led to the huge imbalances of wealth and well-being we see around us, as well as creating climate change through the unncessary production of transport-related carbon dioxide emissions.

Finally, the way capitalism creates money, through debt-based bank money, requires the constant expansion of the economy without regard to natural limits. I have blogged about this elsewhere: it is really the most fundamental explanation of the link between capitalism as an economic system and planetary destruction.

I have been in this game for a while now so I have become fairly experienced at spotting a corporate scam. Hence I was intrigued by the arguments about the distribution system of globalisation being more sustainable, not to mention more supportive of our brothers and sisters in the South. I was also depressed to notice how many good people I interact with were swallowing this line.

Sadly my own resources for investigating the assumptions on which the justification for buying New Zealand apples in the UK in September are limited. And I don't suppose Terry Leahy will be offering me money to explore my proposed alternative of bioregional distribution systems any time soon.

Tweet