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Strikes: How Covid redefined global labour market and empowered workers [1]
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Date: 2023-02
As strikes and labour disputes surge around the world, we appear to be at the beginning of a period in which the balance of power in workplaces and labour markets swings in favour of workers, having long been skewed against them.
Covid-19 has been a catalyst for this. Capital internationalised dramatically from the end of the 1970s to the late 2000s, with global trade and flows of capital growing hugely quicker than the economy as a whole. The number of labour disputes globally dropped over the same period and industrial disputes became more localised, with little correlation between the number of strikes in any two countries, and very limited international coordination of any kind.
Then came the pandemic. Its initial impact was as an immensely disturbing force to the formal structures of globalisation – the movement of goods and, more fundamentally, people were hit by lockdowns, supply chain disruptions, travel restrictions and so on.
But there has been a flipside to this impact: a profound and global medical crisis. We were all affected by the same novel virus. Our personal experiences will have varied, and our governments worked in different ways, but the biological shock was shared.
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French historian Emanuel Le Roy Ladurie once described the “unification of the world by disease”. The Black Death of the late 14th century delivered a hammer blow to European feudalism and then, as a new capitalist order arose on the back of it, European colonisation in the Americas was aided by the spread of Eurasian diseases like smallpox into an immunologically naïve population. Both these processes together, Le Roy Ladurie argued, cleared the path to a globalised capitalist economy.
What we have witnessed, by analogy, over the past few years, is something like the ‘unification of the proletariat by disease’. The same disease attacked all of us. We share a common vulnerability as a result of our common biology, and the same terrible experience happened to everyone at a broadly similar time. This necessarily common experience has worked against the tendencies towards economic divergence and deglobalisation that Covid accelerated.
There is a broader mechanism at work here. All of us are being drawn deeper into the ecological catastrophe. Extreme weather becomes more frequent, and moves from the periphery of the global system to its developed core; the prices and supplies of essential goods and services are thrown into chaos; even the most technologically advanced products of industrial civilisation, manufactured in its richest countries, are disrupted. A common experience of ecological disaster is forcibly uniting all of us, creating what sociologist John Bellamy Foster has called a global “environmental proletariat”.
Covid reinforced that process of ecological convergence. It provided a common, background standard of experience in the disease itself. However poorly or well one’s national government performed, the common experience was of a specific kind of new misery and uncertainty in the world. As inflation has surged in the wake of Covid, this, too, has provided a common experience of the ‘cost of living crisis’.
The ideological challenge
The pandemic also called into question the core ideologies of work and capitalism. The sudden challenges to commonsense beliefs about the world – that government funds were limited, that state welfare could not be generous, that the economy cannot simply be reshaped – were stark.
And there has been a jarring switch from the praise of workers on the frontlines during the first years of the pandemic, from nurses to delivery drivers, to their treatment in the years since. Real wages for many supposedly ‘key’ or ‘essential workers’ have fallen rapidly.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/covid-strikes-workers-power-change-global-labour-market/
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