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<div><div><ol><li><a href="http://cl.exct.net/?ju=fe521278726500757c16&ls=fe161d777d63077b721678&m=fefc1172766306&l=fed1157376640678&s=fe3215727764017c7d1d71&jb=ffcf14&t=" target="_blank" style="line-height: 18px; color: rgb(2, 74, 130); cursor: pointer; background-color: rgb(249, 249, 249); font-size: 14px; font-family: Arial; ">California state workers may face shorter workweeks, less pay</a> </li><li><a href="http://act.alternet.org/go/16415?akid=8779.16102.B6ZL6C&t=2" target="_blank" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 20px; line-height: 26px; color: rgb(0, 104, 207); cursor: pointer; ">What Happened When I Got a Job at a Soul-Crushing, Abusive Warehouse</a> </li><li><h2 class="ReadMsgSubject" style="line-height: 24px; font-size: 19px; font-weight: normal; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; color: rgb(42, 42, 42); font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">Labour Needs a Fresh Leader<span style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 10pt; "> </span><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Tahoma; "> </span></h2></li></ol><div><br></div></div><div>@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@</div><div><br></div><div><a href="http://www.sacbee.com/2012/05/15/4490008/california-state-workers-may-face.html">http://www.sacbee.com/2012/05/15/4490008/california-state-workers-may-face.html</a>
</div><div><br></div><div><a href="http://cl.exct.net/?ju=fe521278726500757c16&ls=fe161d777d63077b721678&m=fefc1172766306&l=fed1157376640678&s=fe3215727764017c7d1d71&jb=ffcf14&t=" target="_blank" style="line-height: 18px; color: rgb(2, 74, 130); cursor: pointer; background-color: rgb(249, 249, 249); font-size: 14px; font-family: Arial; ">California state workers may face shorter workweeks, less pay</a>
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</div><div><br></div><div><a href="http://act.alternet.org/go/16415?akid=8779.16102.B6ZL6C&t=1" target="_blank" style="line-height: 17px; color: rgb(0, 104, 207); cursor: pointer; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><img src="http://images.alternet.org/images/managed/storyimages_1330532636_screenshot20120229at11.23.13am.png_640x414_310x220" alt="" width="313px" height="196px" border="0" style="border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; "></a><span style="color: rgb(42, 42, 42); font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "></span><p class="ecxheadline1" style="line-height: 26px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; color: rgb(42, 42, 42); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 20px; "><a href="http://act.alternet.org/go/16415?akid=8779.16102.B6ZL6C&t=2" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(0, 104, 207); cursor: pointer; ">What Happened When I Got a Job at a Soul-Crushing, Abusive Warehouse</a></p><p style="line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; color: rgb(102, 102, 102); ">My brief, backbreaking, rage-inducing, low-paying, dildo-packing time inside the online-shipping machine. <a class="ecxreadmore" href="http://act.alternet.org/go/16415?akid=8779.16102.B6ZL6C&t=3" target="_blank" style="line-height: 11px; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 104, 207); cursor: pointer; font-size: 9px; letter-spacing: 0.1em; ">READ MORE</a></p><p style="line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; color: rgb(42, 42, 42); font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><span style="line-height: 13px; color: rgb(77, 77, 77); font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: x-small; "><em>Mac McClelland / Mother Jones</em></span></p><p style="line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; color: rgb(42, 42, 42); font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><span style="line-height: 13px; color: rgb(77, 77, 77); font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 8pt; "><em><br></em></span></p></div><div>@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@</div><div><br></div><div><pre style="line-height: 17px; white-space: normal; color: rgb(42, 42, 42); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">Labour Needs a Fresh Leader<br>The Hindu<br><a href="http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article3405299.ece" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(0, 104, 207); cursor: pointer; ">http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article3405299.ece</a><br>May 11, 2012<br><br>by Vijay Prashad<br><br>On May 28, a select group of delegates will enter a<br>room in the International Labour Organization (ILO) in<br>Geneva to elect the body's next Director-General. Nine<br>candidates are in line for the post. The ILO's<br>byzantine process revolves around a tripartite<br>structure, with the employers (the International<br>Organisation of Employers), the workers (largely the<br>International Trade Union Confederation, ITUC) and the<br>governments sharing the task of selecting the next<br>Director.<br><br>The governments hold 28 of the votes, and the workers<br>and employers share 14 votes each. One of the<br>candidates, the former leader of the ITUC and a long-<br>time ILO insider, Guy Ryder, has been backed by the<br>ITUC and is well-positioned to take control of the<br>organisation. But with the world economy in crisis and<br>the ILO unable to break out of a three-decade-long<br>stasis, it is clear that Ryder's leadership is not what<br>the ILO needs. Mired in ideological confusion and in<br>institutional paralysis, the ILO requires a break from<br>the past. Absent new thinking about the transformation<br>of work and the decline of unionism, the ILO will<br>continue down the path of irrelevance.<br><br>Born in 1919 out of a century of social democratic and<br>Catholic working-class organisations, as well as out of<br>fear of the Soviet revolution, the ILO promised to<br>secure the place of workers in modern society. Rather<br>than the class-conflict model of the Marxists, the ILO<br>chose the route of employer-worker collaboration to set<br>labour standards and to improve working conditions. For<br>its first 50 years, the ILO forged about two hundred<br>legally binding conventions to shape and regulate<br>national markets. The modular worker was a man with a<br>full-time union job. In 1969, at its zenith, the ILO<br>won the Nobel Peace Prize.<br><br>The Prize came just when two important processes began<br>to undermine the ILO. First, the social process we know<br>as "globalisation" broke the back of national markets<br>and rendered extinct the full-time union job.<br>Catastrophic declines in union membership across the<br>Global North came at the same time as industrial<br>production moved to the South, where union membership<br>was not low to begin with. The new worker was no longer<br>exclusively male, with women workers in "footloose<br>factories" increasingly the face of today's labourer.<br>Second, the Global North moved aggressively to defund<br>any United Nations agency that challenged the ideology<br>of neoliberalism, or privatisation of public<br>enterprises and freeing up employers against workers.<br>In the 1970s, the United States government withdrew<br>from the ILO and suspended its annual contribution (the<br>U.S. used to pay for a quarter of the ILO's budget).<br><br>A constrained ILO floundered. It was not able to come<br>to terms with the stark changes in the world economy,<br>and pressure from the U.S. pushed its secretariat to<br>make concessions to neo-liberal policymaking. The ILO<br>had to fund its programs from private foundations,<br>whose own agendas now leaked into this inter-<br>governmental body. As Guy Standing, a former senior ILO<br>official, put it, "the effect was a weary focus on<br>survival."<br><br>Rather than go headlong into an investigation of the<br>new kinds of work, the ILO has produced a set of bland<br>concepts that do not address reality: "decent work"<br>being the most shop-worn of the lot. One of the<br>problems for the ILO that Guy Standing identified is<br>that the governing body, which will chose the next<br>leader, is constituted by yesterday's economy. "Unless<br>its governance structure is made more representative of<br>today's world of work and social policy," Standing<br>said, "the ILO will drift into its dotage."<br>Unfortunately the leading candidate for the ILO post<br>was one of those who brought the current configuration<br>of the governing body into the management structure of<br>the ILO. This is precisely the kind of manoeuvre that<br>is fated to prevent any real change in the ILO.<br><br>Some of the candidacies are farcical. Tarciscio Mora of<br>the Colombian Confederation of Workers says that the<br>candidacy of Colombian Vice President Angelino Garzón<br>is a scandal while "trade unionists are still being<br>killed" in Colombia. Last year was the first time in<br>two decades that the ILO did not blacklist Colombia<br>(not long after Garzón's nomination, paramilitaries in<br>Putamayo killed Oil Worker leader Mauricio Arrendondo<br>and his wife Janeth Ordoñez Carlosama in front of their<br>children). The French candidate Gilles de Robien is a<br>nobleman from Brittany, a Count no less, which makes<br>him, as one ILO insider put it, a credible member of<br>the labor aristocracy! Sweden's Mona Sahlin comes to<br>the election after leading the Social Democratic Party<br>to its worst ever performance in the Swedish<br>parliamentary elections of 2010.<br><br>Apart from Ryder, two other candidates are from inside<br>the ILO, Benin's Charles Dan is the ILO's Regional<br>Director for Africa and Senegal's Assane Diop is an<br>Executive Director at the ILO's Social Protection<br>Sector. Two other candidates are politicians who have<br>worked intimately in the promotion of neoliberal ideas.<br>The Netherlands' Ad Melkert, a former government<br>official, was Executive Director at the World Bank<br>(where, as ethics chief, he is rumoured to have given<br>former Bank President Paul Wolfowitz a free pass with<br>his scandal). Niger's Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, a former<br>Prime Minister, was one of the architects of the New<br>Partnership for Africa's Development and of the African<br>Agenda. None of these men have a vision for the<br>revitalisation of the ILO.<br><br>The only Asian candidate is Malaysian economist Jomo<br>Kwame Sundaram, who is currently the Assistant<br>Secretary-General for Economic Development in the U.N.<br>Department of Economic and Social Affairs. While most<br>of the other candidates seem poised to treat the ILO as<br>a career post, and to allow it to slip into<br>irrelevance, K.S. Jomo's track record at the U.N.<br>promises an alternative path. When the financial crisis<br>struck, K.S. Jomo joined the process in the U.N. to<br>push its agencies to offer a "second opinion" on the<br>appropriate policy responses to the crisis. At the<br>heart of this was to rethink the neoliberal emphasis of<br>most policy. If nothing else, it is likely that K.S.<br>Jomo would bring this intellectual orientation to bear<br>on the ILO's work.<br><br>A new ILO report points out that the world has lost<br>some fifty million jobs as a result of the financial<br>crisis. Austerity regimes in Europe cannot bring<br>employment or lessen inequality. The election results<br>from France and Greece reveal the desire among the<br>people for an alternative path. The ILO is one inter-<br>governmental agency that should be capable of producing<br>the intellectual and policy leadership to tackle both<br>unemployment and inequality.<br><br>The world needs new thinking. A defence of the golden<br>age gone by might feed one's nostalgia but it does not<br>provide good ideas to move us out of the morass of the<br>present. Millions seek work and dignity. They do not<br>want platitudes. They want answers.<br><br>(Vijay Prashad is the author, most recently, of Arab<br>Spring, Libyan Winter, forthcoming and of Darker<br>Nations: A Biography of the Short-Lived Third World).<br><br>____________________________________________<br><br>PortsideLabor aims to provide material of interest to<br>people on the left that will help them to interpret the<br>world and to change it.</pre><pre style="line-height: 17px; white-space: normal; color: rgb(42, 42, 42); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><br></pre></div><div>@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@</div><div>@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@</div><div>@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@</div><div>@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@</div><div>@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@</div><div>@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@</div><div>@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@</div><div>@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@</div></div><div><br></div><br> </div></body>
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