Ways forward.(labor unions and reforms amidst the global economic crisis)

THE POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC SETTING facing the union movement today is the most difficult since the Great Depression. Unions have already confronted two decades of unrelenting assault from neoliberal policies of labour-market flexibility, austerity and political conservatism. Then, the global financial crisis ripped across the entire world market. Many forecasts for 2009 are projecting negative growth for the world economy as a whole for the first time since the 1930s.

The extent of the economic slowdown already makes for sober reading. In the fourth quarter of 2008, economic output fell by six per cent in both the U.S. and Euro zones, and an astonishing twelve and twenty per cent in Japan and Korea, respectively. Chinese economic growth has also been cut in half, and exports have fallen by forty to fifty per cent across East Asia. No zone of the world market is being insulated. Canada's economic growth has also turned negative, and forecasts suggest negative growth in the order of two to three per cent for 2009.

The financial chaos is causing untold damage to workers. The ILO has suggested that global job losses could reach as high as 51 million for 2009. In Canada, the devastation in the labour market is already immense. Unemployment has already climbed to 7.7 per cent, with almost 300,000 jobs being lost since October alone, and with almost all new jobs created being part-time.

Capitalist Strategies

The employer offensive of today follows a three-decade offensive begun in the late 1970s, as capitalists attempted to restore profitability and control over the Labour process after considerable erosion of the post-war boom. The rate of profit had fallen by about half, over the post-war decades, across virtually all zones of the world market. The fall was especially sharp in North America. The decline in profit rates coincided with a push by unions and workers to gain an increasing share of output, to …