Prime numbers: Work in, work in, die!
01/13/2021
Member of the Labor Front Oleg Komolov with the author's transmission
(video(in Russian) at link.)
Hello everyone! We bet this video gets fewer views? Well, much less than the other episodes of the program where we criticize modern capitalism: we tell how business and the state rob us, violating the rights of an employee at every step. As a rule, the more vividly the social antagonisms of the market society are shown in the materials - inequality, exploitation, the enrichment of speculators on the general grief - the more they collect views, reposts and comments. But when it comes to the practical issues of the workers' struggle for their class interests, the audience's enthusiasm disappears somewhere.
As if out of superstitious considerations, our people avoid words like rally, strike, trade union, political party.

Intro of the video of the channel "Bulletin of the Buri"
The Vestnik Buri channel recently released a very useful video about the history of independent trade unions in modern Russia , which had serious successes in confronting enterprise owners. People sought to raise wages, improve working conditions. Andrei Rudoy shared his practical experience of organizing a strike, described in detail the legal obstacles that the bourgeois state puts in the way of the strikers and how to overcome them correctly. In general, take it and do it. But the material turned out to be not at all popular, gaining significantly less views than exposing the blessed journalist Parfyonov on the same channel.
In this video we will also talk about trade unions, so you can turn it off immediately. Well, we will still sacrifice airtime for the sake of a social experiment, suddenly everything is not as bad as it seems to us.
The theme of the labor movement is really not very popular these days. But it's worth paying attention to. For me, the success of the working people of different countries in the organized and solidarity struggle for their rights is one of the few factors that allow me to look with optimism to the future of mankind. It may seem surprising, but strikes in the world occur daily and continue even in the face of a pandemic.
In Chile , health workers are on strike, demanding normal working conditions and decent wages for overtime during the pandemic.
Polish nurses want the same , promising the government to stop working throughout the country.
And in South Korea , workers at the Kia plant are preparing to stop production in response to management plans to carry out massive staff reductions.
Workers in other countries for whom self-esteem, collectivism and solidarity are not empty words deserve admiration. Especially against the background of Russian society, where indifference and paternalism still dominate, and truly militant and independent trade unions are still a rarity.
However, the flow of news from abroad hides the true state of affairs in the international trade union movement, which clearly indicates its crisis. It began several decades ago and is expressed in the fact that the number of trade unions around the world is gradually decreasing.

Graph of changes in the share of workers in trade unions / Source: oecd.org
For example, in the UK in 1980 , every second worker was unionized, and in 2017 , only one in four. A twofold reduction in the membership base of trade unions also occurred in Germany, Japan, and the United States.
At the same time, the number of workers who participate in the conclusion of collective agreements with employers has also decreased - and this is one of the important signs of the effectiveness of the trade union. On average across the OECD countries, this indicator has decreased by almost 20 percentage points over 50 years.

Graph of changes in the number of employees participating in collective bargaining / Source: oecd.org
Strike activity also fell both in the countries of the center of world capitalism and in the periphery. The statistics of the International Labor Organization provide very scanty data, but they show how in Canada, Great Britain, Korea the number of strikes has halved over the past 20 years.

Graph of changes in the number of strikes in the countries of the "center" / Source: ilo.org
In Brazil, the value fell three times , in India - 8 times , and in Mexico , where dozens of strikes took place annually in the 2000s , not a single organized workers' demonstration was recorded in 2018 .

Graph of changes in the number of strikes in the periphery / Source: ilo.org
What's happening? Maybe trade unions are no longer needed, and effective own
ers themselves, without coercion, improve the living conditions of employees? Are the class antagonisms inherent in capitalism a thing of the past? No, it didn't. On the contrary, over the past decades, social contradictions in the world have only intensified.
In the countries of the capitalist center, the growth of wages is increasingly lagging behind labor productivity. Those. people are working more and more efficiently, but their earnings are not increasing proportionately. And in some countries, workers' real incomes have declined altogether over the past 40 years.

Diagram of labor productivity growth and real wages in the period 1979-2019 (%) / Source: ec.europa.eu
It is easy to guess that these funds did not dissolve in the atmosphere, they were appropriated by the owners of capital, not without the help of the state.
Thus, in the United States, along with the stagnation of wages, the share of national income distributed in favor of 10% of the richest population grew. All this happened against the background of the degradation of the trade union movement.

US Union Membership and Inequality Charts / Source: bls.gov
On the periphery of world capitalism, everything develops in a similar way.
In a number of poor, commodity export economies with cheap labor, the poverty rate has declined slightly over the past decades, but local workers paid an unequal price for this, working in difficult conditions with minimal social protection from the state. In China, Mexico, India, South Africa, in parallel with the growth of income from foreign trade, the share of income of the super-rich minority in GDP increased.

Graphs of changes in the share of the richest 10% of the population in the national income of countries / Source: wid.world
This has resulted in a skyrocketing rise in global inequality. A study by Oxfam showed that 82% of all value added created by the global economy in 2017 was appropriated by 1% of the world's population.
So why did the growth of social contradictions and even the 2008 crisis, which put a heavy burden on the shoulders of workers around the world, not revive the trade union movement? The reason is simple: the institutions of workers' self-organization, traditional for the 20th century, have largely lost their effectiveness. This happened due to a number of circumstances.
The number of unions in the United States peaked in the 1950s and then began to decline. The hard times of the Great Depression and World War II were over, life improved a little, and the least ideological and motivated workers began to leave the trade union movement. In addition to everything, against the background of the political struggle with the Soviet Union, the American bourgeoisie was forced to make some concessions to its workers, which partly smoothed out social conflicts. However, this did not lead to the extinction of the labor struggle.

Dynamics of strike activity in the USA / Source: bls.gov
As you can see from the graph, the strike activity is clearly correlated with the cyclical nature of the American economy. It rose during the phase of economic growth, when workers reasonably demanded that the capitalists share the growing economic pie with them, and declined in conditions of recession and unemployment. However, since the 1980s, the scale of the labor movement has been declining.
Trade unions in the United States were hit hard by the neoliberal reforms of the Reagan administration . They were caused by the protracted crisis of the capitalist economy, which was accompanied by such troubles as oil shocks, high inflation amid weak economic growth. Then the return on equity fell to the lowest since the post-war years. We talked about this in detail from one of the previous videos .
Having stood up to protect business, the state sacrificed the interests of employees.

Cover of D. Kotz's book "The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism"
As the American economist David Kotz writes in his book The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism, the government liberalized labor laws and changed the policy of regulating the labor market. If earlier the National Labor Relations Council formed by the President satisfied 9 out of 10 complaints of workers about violation of their rights, then in the 80s only every second. In the case of union campaigns, the council supported only a third of them.
In 1981 , the American air traffic controllers' union went on a nationwide strike, demanding higher wages. In response, then President Reagan ordered the Federal Aviation Agency to fire 11,000 workers, and then signed a decree banning strikes among government employees.
The activity of the labor movement in the Western world was undermined by the reduction of the traditional environment of workers' self-organization - material production. This was primarily due to its large-scale transfer to regions with low wages.

Graphs of changes in the share of industry in GDP (%) / Source: worldbank.org
As a result, in the countries of the center, the share of industry in GDP has been steadily declining in recent decades.
As a result, the number of industrial workers, who either join the ranks of the unemployed, or find refuge in the abyss of meaningless professions that do not bring social benefit, are decreasing - we talked about them a few months ago. Who has not seen this video, follow the link .

Graphs of changes in the share of workers employed in industry (%) / Source: worldbank.org
Given the opportunity to exploit the cheap labor of peripheral countries, the center bourgeoisie found a strong argument in negotiations with workers. Now, in response to the demands of the trade union to raise wages and improve working conditions, the capitalist can always completely eliminate production and move it to Mexico , China , Bangladesh , Pakistan , and Nigeria .
Well, and there, if something happens, the local police will always come to the aid of His Majesty a foreign investor and put down the careless slaves, if they suddenly dare to demand something.
For example, to renovate a garment factory built in violation of all building codes or to ensure the safety of mine workers.
But no one cares about these appeals: hundreds of thousands of people die of hunger in a country that exports meat for Arab sheikhs.

The starving population of Somalia
Environmental disaster is not a problem either. Western-centric thinking will not make the world community grieve for a long time over the deaths of hundreds of half-slaves from poor countries. This is not je sui sharli .
In short, trade unions are in crisis. In the countries of the “golden billion”, being on the move becomes ineffective, and in poor regions it is simply life-threatening. But all this does not cancel either social antagonisms or the objective need to fight for their class interests. It just needs to be done differently now. It is not the labor movement that is dying, but the trade unions of the old type. They developed in the 20th century under the great influence of the October Revolution, the triumph of which forced the ruling class of capitalist countries to make concessions to the working people. After this threat was eliminated, the previous forms of struggle largely lost their effectiveness.
The response on the part of the working people of all countries must be international solidarity. It is in the 21st century that this old communist slogan takes on its true meaning. Now, if we want a better life, we really should be concerned with the struggles of the workers in India, Nigeria, Brazil and Canada. We are obliged to provide them with support and when we need to wait for help from them. The owner of the plant will not be able to get rid of annoying workers by transferring production to another country, since there he will meet the same resistance. And the police cannot easily disperse a strike if people from all over the world support it.

Brochure "Hands Off Russia" by William Paul (1919)
The international campaign of solidarity between the workers of England and America with Soviet Russia during the Civil War made a great material, organizational, informational and moral contribution to the victory of the revolution. Today these tools are in our hands more and more, the main thing is to realize the importance of their use.
After all, as the Soviet academician Aleksey Ukhtomsky rightly noted , everything really valuable in this world is earned by labor and heart pain.
https://www.rotfront.su/oleg-komolov-o-profsoyuzah/
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