Anumeha Yadav interviews labour historian Marcel Van Der Linden on workers’ rights
There are fundamental
changes underway in the world of work, driven by technological experiments,
climate change, shifts in scale and organising of production, increasing
inequalities, and demographic differentials of different regions. At an international
symposium on the Future of Work organised in Geneva in April by the International
Labour Organisation, which completes its centenary next year, labour
historian Marcel Van Der Linden traced the historical causes of some of these
shifts in the world of work. Van Der Linden is the
former research director of the International Institute of Social History at
the University of Amsterdam, and is the author of Workers of the World.Essays toward a Global Labour History, and the co-author of several books
on working class history in India.
The historian, who is recognised for his approach
of a “global labour history”, developed in the 1990s, which stresses on a
global perspective rather than national, spoke of how the current changes
affect the relationship of the individual as a worker or a migrant to society
and political structures.
He also spoke of the
specific situation of Indian workers caught in increasingly precarious forms of
employment, and what possibilities of collective action exist even as tighter
restrictions are imposed on freedoms to organise. Edited excerpts from
the interview:
We are seeing the
rise of so-called non-standard forms of employment, precarious forms of wage
labour, or self-employment, including in developed countries. How can we
understand this phenomenon from a historical perspective?
Casualised wage labour is not only a phenomenon of the modern era. It has existed for thousands of years, and we read about it in the New Testament, probably written around 200 AD. In 15th and 16th century western Europe, the number of landless labourers working in enterprises outside the manorial system and outside the guilds were very large. Only the highest strata of the working class could escape from the existential insecurity. It was much later, among the 19th century skilled labourers, that the ideal of the male breadwinner [or the family wage] became popular – the idea that the wage of the husband should be sufficient to support a wife and small children.
After the Second World
War, when capitalist economies experienced unprecedented growth and when the
expansion of social security became possible, a large part of the working
classes in western Europe, North America, Australasia and Japan obtained a
standard employment relationship. It was an effect of the recognition by large
corporations that the creation of stable labour relations required “making
long-term investments in employee good will”. A gendered division of labour
tended to emerge: Standard employment mainly concerned men, while in other
kinds of labour relationship of unpaid, precarious work, women were
over-represented.
But standard
employment is again becoming scarcer even in the advanced capitalist countries
too. And it seems to be becoming even more of a male privilege than was the
case previously.
The difference between
earlier and now is that precarious labour before the Second World War was an
effect of a temporary oversupply of labour. Now, precarious labour
in the developed and developing countries looks to be much more persistent and
structural due to a rapid growth of the productive forces worldwide, which
enables much more output to be produced with much less labour… read more:
see also
