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Week Twelve Notes: Labour and Informality
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Reading Notes
Reading 1: The Internationalization of Labor Politics in Africa
SOURCE: N. Bernards “The internationalization of labor politics in Africa” in Critical African Studies 7
(2015) pp. 7-25.
SUMMARY: 15 pages to 8
Introduction
● Last ten years: emergence of new international labor standards
● Much emphasis given to Africa, African governments and trade unions participate more in
multilateral forms of governance
● First, labor standards are increasingly delegated by states to international organizations (IOs) and
transnational private actors.
● Second, political conflicts surrounding labor issues are increasingly carried out in regional or
multilateral forums.
● In short, ‘internationalization’ refers to the processes by which states and civil actors increasingly
resort to resources made available by international or transnational actors to resolve the political
conflicts surrounding labor relations
● Post-colonial period: international activity by African trade unions; then, internalization closed
off by the 70s as post-colonial states gained increasing control over organized labor
Re-emergence of Internalization:
Indicative of important changes in labor politics across the region
● Significance: What it tells us about possibilities and limitations presented to progressive social
forces in Africa by processes of globalization and global governance
● Engagements in international politics have, at times, provided useful discursive and material
resources to African governments and trade unions. However, this has also often come with the
risk of committing unions to reformist strategies over potentially more effective methods of
resistance against neoliberal globalization.
● Africa embedded in wider global processes and institutions
Extraversion, World Order, and Passive Revolution
Importance of African agency in shaping Africa’s position in the world (Bayart)
● Bayart develops the concept of ‘extraversion’ in response to what he calls the ‘paradigm of the
yoke’ – the idea that colonial rule and unfavorable structural conditions in the external world
economy more broadly, are responsible for undermining African development.
● Bayart insists that African elites have in fact long maintained their own positions by drawing on
the rents made available through control over dependent external links
● Control over external political and economic links in the post-colonial period is a source of
resources → used to maintain patrimonial networks → “reciprocal assimilation of elites”
● Dependency, is as much a mode of action as an externally imposed conditions
Author: fails to capture the complex configuration of social forces and institutions making up the
“external” facing African actors
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Cox: particular configurations of production have historically been tied both to particular forms of
domestic governance and to the power of leading states in the international sphere
● Example: mid-20th century →production in the developed world was organized around the
Fordist system of relatively high wages for male breadwinners, bureaucratized management of
labor relations, and provision of social welfare by the state. This system was institutionalized at
the international level. American dominance was instrumental in developing and maintaining a
series of international institutional arrangements ensuring open trade, with stable and convertible
currencies, while leaving space for the protection of domestic social order
● ILO and other Western-dominated configurations of organized labor, were heavily committed to
Fordism and organized labor with the developing world
Author: fails to capture the significance of subaltern agency in shaping the consequences of those
institutional structures of world order on the ground
Crisis and Passive Revolution
Crisis (Gramsci): “When the old is dying and the new cannot be born”; or, a situation in which the
political balance between different social forces is stalemated, with no group or class of hegemony
Gramsci sees three possible resolutions to a crisis
Two of these are modes of restoration of the existing order.
1. Caesarism: refers to a populist figure, party, or idea emerging s a sort of arbiter between
stalemated social forces
2. Passive Revolution/Transformism: co-optation of subaltern social forces into reformist politics;
refers to the partial satisfaction of demands for change through gradual reforms, co-opting
subaltern groups without actually substantially altering the relations of production or
substantively shifting the locus of political power. Crucially, passive revolution functions by
raising expectations of some subaltern groups for progress within existing structures, and thus
re-directing subaltern political activity in ways that do not substantively disrupt the status quo
3. Revolutionary change.
● Putting passive revolution at the center and emphasizing that the product of passive revolution on
a global scale is the opening up of strategies of extraversion open up a potentially fruitful analysis
of global governance
● The concept of extraversion, meanwhile, points to the ways in which subaltern actors can
redeploy global governance to their own ends.
● Global governance as passive revolution, then, is ultimately a contingent project. It depends
heavily on the ways in which subaltern states and social actors actually take up the resources
provided.
Labour, the State and International Politics in Post-Colonial Africa
● In order to get at what this approach might mean for labor in Africa, it is necessary to map out in
broad terms the historical relationships between trade unions, labor markets, the state, and
international politics.
● The major exception to the narrative presented below was South Africa – the ILO cut off relations
with South Africa in 1964 as anti-apartheid unionists began to appeal to the ILO for help
● International union confederations → shaped the emergence of trade union activity post-WWII
(outside SA) → spread of union forms linked to imperial objectives
○ This was the case with the role of the ICFTU in British Africa and the French
Confederation generale du travail (CGT) in French West and Equatorial Africa
○ The spread of union forms was closely linked to imperial objectives → meant as a means
to stabilize conflictual labor relations and to prevent the perceived threat of communist or
American influence
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● Trade unions were employed by workers to advance varying ends
● There were significant conflicts between workers committed to nationalist agendas and workers
more concerned union rights
⇒ “Union imperialism” was always visible in the intentions of international unionists in Africa, but the
impacts of their activity owed much to the varying ways in which African workers actually made use of
their links to international unions
⇒ After independence, international labor politics presented political activity for trade unions that was
not under the control of the state → caused problems for states seeking control over labor
● A considerable conflict over the right of unions to affiliate internationally was played out in the
1960s.
● On one side, a Ghanaian-led effort to institute ‘pan-African’ unionism as an antidote to the
perceived imperialism of the ICFTU was organized around the All-Africa Trade Union
Federation. Typically, this grouping also emphasized the subordination of labor issues to national
independence and national development.
● Another group of unionists committed to workers’ rights to organize independent of the state –
including international affiliation – was organized around the African Trade Union Confederation
(ATUC).
● The crux of the conflict, in effect, was the political independence of trade unions from the state
● In 1973, the Organization for African Unity agreed to establish the Organization for African
Trade Union Unity and a ban on other international affiliations – in effect, union internationalism
in Africa was replaced by a thinly ‘panAfricanist’ unionism under state control.
“Labor Aristocracy” Thesis: Organized Labor seen as a privileged segment of the workforce, too
complicit for the machinery of the state, and too closely linked to foreign capital to serve as a progressive
social force
● Useful starting point for considerations about labor relations since 70s
● Organized labor = privileged segment of the workforce, too complicit in the machinery of the
state, and too closely linked to foreign capital, to serve as a progressive social force.
● It fails to consider
○ Material gaps between the unionized working class and other segments of labor were not
as wide as between labor and elites
○ Conflicts over the relationship between labor and the state that were brought to light in
early disputes over international links were suppressed, not resolved
○ Studies have pointed to the fact that union leaderships were fairly effectively co-opted by
the state, while rank and file members were often ambivalent about the trade-off between
security and dependence.
○ The situation was complicated even further by the fact that a considerable proportion of
unionized workers were either civil servants or employees of public corporations.
○ The state was hardly an impartial referee in industrial relations → especially with respect
to wages and union independence
○ ⇒ Organized labor was one strategically important segment of society – among others
like students, professionals, and intellectuals – that the post-colonial state needed to
incorporate into what Bayart has called the post-colonial historic bloc, but never entirely
succeeded in controlling
Organized labor and the state under structural adjustment
→ underlying situation shifted: 1980s
Two interrelated changes are significant: structural adjustment and the globalization of production.
Structural Adjustment
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● The basic dynamics of the African state have remained more or less unchanged by structural
adjustment. Nonetheless, structural adjustment required the reconfiguration of the post-colonial
historic bloc in ways that diminished the significance of labor
● Links between the state and organized labor had begun to rupture in the late 1970s – before
liberalization
○ Nigeria, successive military and civilian governments sought to reduce wages in an effort
to manage escalating budget deficits, straining the relationships between labor and the
state and culminating in a general strike in 1980
● In some cases, the process of structural adjustment itself broke the links between labor and the
state.
○ In Zambia, former trade unionist Fredrick Chiluba was elected President in 1991,
campaigning against the liberalization of the labor market, in no small part thanks to the
support of the labor movement. He very quickly moved to adopt an structural adjustment
package, distance himself from labor, and help to dismantle the labor movement once in
office
● The ejection of organized labor from the post-colonial historic bloc, in the context of privatization
and retrenchment came along with declining membership and resources
● However, it also came along with renewed political independence
● Even in places where trade union rights are on shaky legal grounds, unions are often less
subordinate to political parties
Globalization of African Production
● The globalization of production has compounded many of these trends
● Although major transnational corporations (TNCs) are rarely directly invested in Africa outside
the extractive sector, production in Africa increasingly takes place within the limits set by core
actors in the global political economy
● Production in Africa is increasingly incorporated into “buyer-driven” value chains, wherein
transnational retailers are able to set standards for the pace and cost of production, the specific
details of the finished product, and at times even substantive details of the process of production
by virtue of the control they exercise over distribution and access to markets for end products.
● ⇒ changes in organization of production
○ e.g. Quality and costs standards imposed by food retailers in fresh fruit and vegetable
sectors are often impossible for smallholders to meet → increased concentration of
production on large farms employing temporary wage labor
● Compounded at times by land grabbing
● The erosion of smallholder agriculture has led to an increase in migration for temporary wage
work on large farms, processing facilities, or urban centers. There are few year-round, permanent
jobs in these settings
● Increasing agricultural production (instead of processing, esp. export countries) because
processing facilities have struggled to meet quality and cost demands of global buyers
○ Also mining and retail
● In traditional export commodities, like cotton, cocoa, and coffee, African participation is
increasingly restricted to agricultural production, as processing facilities have struggled to meet
the quality and cost demands of global buyers
● Incorporation into global networks of production has also at times had distinct impacts on the
geographical organization within Africa
○ South African garment manufacturer: attempted to restructure the industry to be more
competitive on global markets in the 1990s, but ran up against comparatively high wage
costs in the sector. The main results were extensive layoffs and mechanization
○ Clothing production in Eastern and Southern Africa has shifted from higher-wage
Mauritius and SA to lower-wage jurisdictions., esp. Kenya, Tanzania, Swaziland
