Die Neue Zeit
18th April 2010, 02:42
Education and Experience Recognition Against Immigrant Underemployment
“To start with, it is important to realize that the was not initiated by Karl Marx. As it turns out the British trade union movement played a key role in getting it off the ground and, as might be expected, had very little interest in revolutionary socialism. Indeed, one of their primary motivations was to find a way of preventing foreign workers being used as scabs in British strikes […] Accepting at face value that British trade unionists were only opposed to scabs and not foreign workers ‘stealing jobs’, it is necessary to note that the American trade union movement did exhibit naked racism in this period, all within the framework of the IWA.” (Louis Proyect)
Since the 1990s, what economist Stephen Roach calls “global labour arbitrage” has become more common. With significantly less barriers to international trade and capital mobility comes offshore outsourcing of jobs to places where the costs of identical labour and other business costs are significantly lower, thus yielding an increased business need to measure the import content of exports. However, the benevolent masks of free trade in the markets of consumer goods and services, when lifted, reveals much less benevolent phenomena in the markets of labour and capital. Decreases in consumer prices are more than matched by underemployment and sometimes even long-term unemployment, hence the disproportionate immiseration of labour under even under the “trickle-down” best of times.
Conversely, there is an increased mobility of labour globally, most notably from the more labour-immiserated, less developed countries to the more developed ones. This can take the form of traditional immigration, but more and more can take the form of guest work programs like those in the United States or Western Europe. In the case of the latter, money transfers derived from guest workers’ wages go towards their respective countries of origin, such as in Latin America or Eastern Europe, thus depriving the more developed countries of what could have domestic consumption.
At least some of the opposition to this two-fold global labour arbitrage has been channelled into the wrong areas, most notably immigrant scapegoating. Upon closer examination, however, many skilled and unskilled immigrants are merely taking up whatever underemployment is available to them, even during better times. Consider immigrant health care professionals (physicians, dentists, nurse practitioners, therapists, paramedics, and others) and guest workers working “under the table.” Because of the continued existence of monopolistic or oligopolistic guilds-in-all-but-name (legally controlling the labour supply at the national and regional levels with their pre-entry closed shop modus operandi and petit-bourgeois apprenticeship requirements) – be they in medicine, securities trading, real estate brokerage, public accounting, law, or engineering – the former group of immigrants have to settle for underemployment or at least a “career change” upon rejection of their education and experience credentials by these privately controlled and mostly private-sector guilds, even when facing labour shortages. For their part, governments can easily reject mere degree education due to the lack of standardization. Meanwhile, guest workers doing under-the-table work are already underemployed by not being employed in some other unskilled but formal work that pays more. The more desperate ones may once have had skilled but not guild-certified work. All in all, underemployed immigrant labour is an integral component of the newest, cross-sectoral, and growing part of the working class that is the “precariat.”
[Note: In my earlier work, the precariat is the proletarian section of the so-called “class of flux,” a strata outside the wage-labour system that enables class mobility.]
Part of a pro-worker policy alternative to the two-fold global labour arbitrage (a bigger component being discussed in the next chapter) is in calls for mandatory private- and public-sector recognition in full of professional education, other higher education, and related work experience “from abroad,” along with the wholesale transnational standardization of such education and the implementation of other measures to counter the underemployment of guest workers and all other immigrants.
Does this reform facilitate the issuance of either intermediate or threshold demands? Again, the mention of full, mandatory recognition by these mostly private-sector guilds is meant to pose intermediate questions about their continued existence, starting with their petit-bourgeois apprenticeship requirements.
Does this reform enable the basic principles to be “kept consciously in view”? The most obvious principle addressed here is transnational politics, and the next obvious is elevating class strugglism over parochial “stolen jobs” sentiments. The principle of social labour is the least obvious, but can be addressed by the directional method discussed in Chapter 2. Reconsider first the post-modernists’ fetish of the ethical concept of right and its application towards freedom of movement. They call for things like “the right to remain,” “the right to legalisation,” and “the right to (equal) rights.” Again, the missing links between these and the principle of social labour are calls for a transnational bill of workers’ rights and especially the related establishment of a globalized equal standard of living for equal work, thereby eliminating global labour arbitrage.
REFERENCES
[i]History of the Marxist internationals (part 1, the IWA) by Louis Proyect [http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/history-of-the-marxist-internationals-part-1-the-iwa/]
More Jobs, Worse Work by Stephen Roach [http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/22/opinion/22roac.html]
It is not enough to call for abolition of anti-union laws by Mike Macnair [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1003878]
Immigrants, scabs, and the "middle class" [http://www.revleft.com/vb/immigrants-scabs-and-t100826/index.html]
“To start with, it is important to realize that the was not initiated by Karl Marx. As it turns out the British trade union movement played a key role in getting it off the ground and, as might be expected, had very little interest in revolutionary socialism. Indeed, one of their primary motivations was to find a way of preventing foreign workers being used as scabs in British strikes […] Accepting at face value that British trade unionists were only opposed to scabs and not foreign workers ‘stealing jobs’, it is necessary to note that the American trade union movement did exhibit naked racism in this period, all within the framework of the IWA.” (Louis Proyect)
Since the 1990s, what economist Stephen Roach calls “global labour arbitrage” has become more common. With significantly less barriers to international trade and capital mobility comes offshore outsourcing of jobs to places where the costs of identical labour and other business costs are significantly lower, thus yielding an increased business need to measure the import content of exports. However, the benevolent masks of free trade in the markets of consumer goods and services, when lifted, reveals much less benevolent phenomena in the markets of labour and capital. Decreases in consumer prices are more than matched by underemployment and sometimes even long-term unemployment, hence the disproportionate immiseration of labour under even under the “trickle-down” best of times.
Conversely, there is an increased mobility of labour globally, most notably from the more labour-immiserated, less developed countries to the more developed ones. This can take the form of traditional immigration, but more and more can take the form of guest work programs like those in the United States or Western Europe. In the case of the latter, money transfers derived from guest workers’ wages go towards their respective countries of origin, such as in Latin America or Eastern Europe, thus depriving the more developed countries of what could have domestic consumption.
At least some of the opposition to this two-fold global labour arbitrage has been channelled into the wrong areas, most notably immigrant scapegoating. Upon closer examination, however, many skilled and unskilled immigrants are merely taking up whatever underemployment is available to them, even during better times. Consider immigrant health care professionals (physicians, dentists, nurse practitioners, therapists, paramedics, and others) and guest workers working “under the table.” Because of the continued existence of monopolistic or oligopolistic guilds-in-all-but-name (legally controlling the labour supply at the national and regional levels with their pre-entry closed shop modus operandi and petit-bourgeois apprenticeship requirements) – be they in medicine, securities trading, real estate brokerage, public accounting, law, or engineering – the former group of immigrants have to settle for underemployment or at least a “career change” upon rejection of their education and experience credentials by these privately controlled and mostly private-sector guilds, even when facing labour shortages. For their part, governments can easily reject mere degree education due to the lack of standardization. Meanwhile, guest workers doing under-the-table work are already underemployed by not being employed in some other unskilled but formal work that pays more. The more desperate ones may once have had skilled but not guild-certified work. All in all, underemployed immigrant labour is an integral component of the newest, cross-sectoral, and growing part of the working class that is the “precariat.”
[Note: In my earlier work, the precariat is the proletarian section of the so-called “class of flux,” a strata outside the wage-labour system that enables class mobility.]
Part of a pro-worker policy alternative to the two-fold global labour arbitrage (a bigger component being discussed in the next chapter) is in calls for mandatory private- and public-sector recognition in full of professional education, other higher education, and related work experience “from abroad,” along with the wholesale transnational standardization of such education and the implementation of other measures to counter the underemployment of guest workers and all other immigrants.
Does this reform facilitate the issuance of either intermediate or threshold demands? Again, the mention of full, mandatory recognition by these mostly private-sector guilds is meant to pose intermediate questions about their continued existence, starting with their petit-bourgeois apprenticeship requirements.
Does this reform enable the basic principles to be “kept consciously in view”? The most obvious principle addressed here is transnational politics, and the next obvious is elevating class strugglism over parochial “stolen jobs” sentiments. The principle of social labour is the least obvious, but can be addressed by the directional method discussed in Chapter 2. Reconsider first the post-modernists’ fetish of the ethical concept of right and its application towards freedom of movement. They call for things like “the right to remain,” “the right to legalisation,” and “the right to (equal) rights.” Again, the missing links between these and the principle of social labour are calls for a transnational bill of workers’ rights and especially the related establishment of a globalized equal standard of living for equal work, thereby eliminating global labour arbitrage.
REFERENCES
[i]History of the Marxist internationals (part 1, the IWA) by Louis Proyect [http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/history-of-the-marxist-internationals-part-1-the-iwa/]
More Jobs, Worse Work by Stephen Roach [http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/22/opinion/22roac.html]
It is not enough to call for abolition of anti-union laws by Mike Macnair [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1003878]
Immigrants, scabs, and the "middle class" [http://www.revleft.com/vb/immigrants-scabs-and-t100826/index.html]