This general introduction highlights the creation of a new section within the Irish working class in the last decade: non-unionised migrant workers on low wages in low- skilled, labour intensive occupations. The Irish labour market also attracted migrants to
21
This influence came through the staff that MRCI started to hire, which displaced the founders of the group (working on voluntary basis) in day-to-day work, as we will see in chapter 6. Unless the term ‗workers centres‘ appears in quotes I used throughout the British spelling.
high-skilled occupations, like doctors or engineers, which accounted for one quarter of job offers for migrant workers on work permits up to May 2004 (Irish Times,
14/09/2004). But these types of immigrants are not the subjects of this dissertation. I also place this dissertation within the body of literature that considers that last period of capitalist development, namely neoliberalism (flexible accumulation, lean production or post-Fordism in terms of dynamics of accumulation), which has increased class
inequalities and class polarisation.22
The new section of the Irish working class was made up mainly of Eastern European workers, particularly after May 2004, who came to Ireland due to shortages of labour in the labour market caused by the strong economic growth of the Irish economy between 1994-5 and 2007. They came to Ireland because the economy needed them. That was how government, associations of employers, and even trade unions and migrant associations presented the debate in the media. They all agreed that the national economy needed these migrant workers to fill job vacancies, three quarters of which were low skilled and low paid. Migrant workers, they argued, were also needed to maintain the competitiveness of the Irish economy, and the rates of economic growth of the second half of the 1990s, because of shortages of (cheap) labour in the Irish labour market (Irish Times, 20/11/2004). A report by the ICI (2003) even argued that migrant workers were necessary to do the dirty, dangerous, arduous and ill-paid jobs that needed to be done in any society. Employers, on their part, generally perceived migrants as cheap labour (González-Pérez et al. 2009). While that is a fact, and it could be argued that ICI was trying to put forward the case that migrant workers should be welcome, the ICI report did not question why there have to be ill-paid jobs (understood as those on the bare minimum wage). Therefore, the ICI seemed to give consent to the hegemonic political economy of capital; SIPTU also seemed to consent by linking wages to
productivity. ICTU (see below) believed that higher wages would increase consumption and stimulate the economy, but as we have seen in the case of Irish Ferries, SIPTU accepted (or felt unable to fight against) wage cuts when the competitive position of the company was compromised, according to management. We will see in this dissertation, however, how that ideology cannot be completely hegemonic as it implies a counter hegemonic-ideology, an expression of a political economy of labour, which is
manifested in the contradictory practice of trade unionism. A mechanical application of the concept of ‗false consciousness‘ to union bureaucrats‘ and workers‘ responses can be
22
In Ireland some analyses after the collapse of the ‗Celtic Tiger‘ argue that point (see Allen 2009; Kirby 2010. Before the economic crash that had been the overall assessment in other works, O‘Hearn 2003; 1998; Allen 2003; 2000)
misleading, as resignation or giving in to employers‘ demands, or framing unions‘ and workers‘ demands in employers‘ terms does not necessarily imply consent to the political economy of capital.23
The differences between employers and unions were not about the nature of labour exploitation itself; that is, about the nature of capitalism as a particular form in which surplus, or unpaid labour, is ‗extorted from the immediate producer, the worker‘ (Marx 1976: 325). Marx distinguished between necessary labour-time, or the time the worker spends on his or her own reproduction, and surplus labour-time, or the time in which the worker creates (surplus) value for the capitalist. Exploitation in Marx‘s use can be legal, based on legislation, as in Irish Ferries, or illegal, as in the case of GAMA Turkish workers. It is interesting to point out that GAMA workers were exploited because they could be paid around €3 or €4 per hour, while outsourced Irish Ferries workers on the same wages would not be. The debate over what constituted exploitation was then about labour standards and the value of labour. Either way exploitation in Marx‘s usage consists in unpaid labour; otherwise profits would not be possible. The chief difference between a political economy of capital and a political economy of labour then would be that, while the former upholds that capital is the origin of wealth and profits do not come from unpaid labour, the latter argues that labour is the origin of all economic values. Therefore, capitalism would be based on a fundamental injustice, the
appropriation of value produced by others, as any previous modes of production had done before capitalism, although in different ways. Unions generally quarrel about the share that workers are going to have in relation to profits and about labour standards (i.e. job control, length of the working day, etc.). What unions generally do in normal times is bargaining over wages, as Gramsci wrote (in Kelly 1988: 55):
... objectively, the trade union is nothing other than a commercial company, of a purely capitalistic type, which aims to secure, in the interests of the proletariat, the maximum price for the commodity labour, and to establish a monopoly over this commodity in the national and international fields. The trade union is distinguished from capitalist mercantilism only subjectively ...
That is, bargaining does not question capitalism but reproduces it. We will see, however, that within this function of trade unionism implicitly lies the political economy of
23
Union leaders such as Jack O‘Connor or Mike Jennings were quite capable, as we have seen, of challenging in meetings, in words, the political economy of capital, the hegemonic ideology. A left-wing communist interpretation would maintain that union bureaucrats are crudely dishonest and treasonous as they speak one language to workers, to let steam out and justify their posts, and another language to employers, the latter being their true ideas. Generalizing, this is a mechanical analysis that has little to do with the dialectical method that left-wing communist leaders claim to follow (see Lenin 1968).
labour because, as Gramsci said, trade unions also aim at establishing a monopoly over the commodity ‗labour‘. Harvey (2010:157-8) also argues that while a shortening of the working day and an increase in the value of labour power can help to stabilise
capitalism and economic growth, as unions tend to argue, beyond a certain point it might threaten accumulation and therefore turn revolutionary.
The idea that there is ‗dirty, dangerous, arduous and ill-paid work which needs to be done in any society‘ reflects the scenario of the hegemonic political economy of capital. It follows that wages cannot be increased above productivity; otherwise companies would have to close down or move to areas of the world where labour is cheaper.24 ICTU made the point in 2005 during the debate on the increase of NMW that a higher NMW ‗would help fuel the economic growth and close the gap between rich and poor‘ (IT, 25/01/05), and attract the migrants that Ireland needs. It is a kind of bargaining that is clearly on the side of wageworkers, but nonetheless formulated within the frame of the political economy of capital.
The logic behind that argument is that an increase in wages would stimulate consumption, and, therefore, market expansion. Capital expands by increasing
production, that is, by expanding existing consumption and by discovering new needs (Lebowitz 2003: 11), but workers‘ wages should also go up to absorb that increase of production, and expand the market for personal consumption goods.25 Workers, however, do not necessarily need an increase in their wages to raise their living standards. According to Marx (1976: 659),
The value of labour-power is determined by the value of a certain quantity of means of subsistence. It is the value and not the mass of these means of subsistence that varies with the productivity of labour. It is however possible that owing to an increase in the productivity of labour both the worker and the capitalist may simultaneously be able to appropriate a greater quantity of means of subsistence, without any change in the price of labour-power or in surplus-value.
Those who support the claim that capitalism can still improve the living conditions of the majority, and present a more human face, could use this argument to simultaneously put forward workers‘ rights and employers‘ interests. A social partnership can be
achieved on those terms, and in theory should last forever if that was the case. The need
24 The doctrine of the US Government, and its Department of Agriculture since the 1970s,
actually, is that labour-intensive crops such as fruit and vegetables should move to tropical countries where the weather is more favourable and labour is abundant and cheap. So, these countries should specialise in the production of cheap food for the more developed world. See Collins (1995: 221). This doctrine could be applied to any labour-intensive industry.
25
Other markets are for luxury goods, the personal consumption of capitalists and the rich, and for means of production.
of capital for valorisation and the need of workers for self-development must meet somehow for the forces of production to develop (Lebowitz 2003; Narotzky 1997: 163- 4).26 We can then start to understand how consent or, perhaps, unwilling acceptance of this hegemonic scenario is generated. The present economic crisis, however, calls that belief into question.
Workers (and their organisations, which reinforce that view) tend to perceive capital as the necessary mediator between them and the articles of consumption and services they need to survive and for their own self-development (Lebowitz 2003: 12). To undermine this fiction, Marx tried to demystify that role of capital as mediator by explaining that labour is the sole generator of value, and that capitalism is based on the appropriation of surplus value, the product of unpaid labour. To that end, he made the crucial distinction between labour and labour-power. Workers are paid for their capacity to work (labour-power) but not for the actual work that they perform. It is in this way that capitalists can conceal exploitation (i.e. unpaid labour). But the fact is that nearly 150 years after the publication of the first edition of Capital, Volume 1 (1867), consent, at least in appearance, to capitalism and to the market economy shows that theoretical awareness, although essential, is not enough to counteract the ideological (theoretical) hegemony of capital. The labour movement has even gone backwards in relation to previous decades.
The terms hegemony and consent have to be understood in this dissertation in the context of Antonio Gramsci‘s usage of them. Hegemony in that sense is not just about ideology, but, in Crehan‘s words (2002: 204), about ‗the power to determine the
structuring rules within which struggles are to be fought out‘. This conceptualisation of hegemony is also similar to Eric Wolf‘s concept of structural power (1999: 5): ‗The power manifest in relationships that not only operates within settings and domains but also organizes and orchestrates the settings themselves.‘ Michael Burawoy (1979) makes use of hegemony in a similar way but in the context of what he calls ‗games‘ to which the players give full consent by the mere acceptance of their rules. The hegemony of the political economy of capital then would be chiefly based on the fact that all players play according to its rules, including trade unions. Taken like that, hegemony is either internalised by all participants, particularly labour leaders and workers, or just not
26 The problem, and main contradiction in capitalism, is that capital is always struggling to
realise, in the sphere of circulation, the value added in the sphere of production. So, capital needs low wages to add more value, but high wages to realise that value. Crises of
openly challenged because opponents see no other option.27 Labour legislation, intended in the last instance to protect private property and guarantee free market exchanges (the bases of capitalist accumulation), is the frame within which workers legitimise their disputes with capitalists in normal times. We can interpret in this light the declarations of Mr Robert Berney (IT, 20/11/05), head of ISME, who considered that all migrant workers had to be treated ‗with the dignity and respect that they deserve, and afforded the same rights and opportunities available to Irish employees‘. If Mr Berney had tried to defend the opposite, even with all the power of the state behind him, his argument would not had been legitimate. So government and employers are also constrained to a large extent by the rules that are an expression of their power and interests.28 But labour standards, and with them what is considered exploitation, vary over time. Employers and government in Ireland have been able at present to impose wage cuts and more flexible working time in both the private and the public sector with trade unions‘ consent. In 2006 unions struggled to preserve labour standards, to guarantee their implementation, and to stop the ‗race to the bottom‘ that they argued an open labour market would bring about.
According to Marx (Lebowitz 2003: 82-3), capital manifests its inner-logic – accumulation by self-valorisation of capital – through the competition of many individual capitals, although this competition sometimes is harmful for the interest of capital in general and capitalists as a class. So, the state sometimes has to intervene to limit competition. That is how Marx (1976: 375-77) explains the introduction of the 10 hours bill in Britain in the 1830s: the extension of the working day to its physical limits put under risk the very reproduction of the labour force necessary for capital
accumulation. It was not a matter of humanitarian concerns, although middle-class humanitarians made the case for the limitation of the working week on those terms and had some influence in the final outcome. Marx also deals with the Chartist movement and its influence, although in Capital the agency of the working class is mostly implicit in the constant revolutionising of the means of production and in technological change aimed at cutting labour cost (including deskilling). From the point of view of capital, the most important reason to introduce limits to the working week and working day was that the reproduction of labour in the specific conditions of the first half of the 1800s in
27
Following Scott‘s analysis (1990), the key question is whether there is a backstage rejection of hegemonic ideas and rituals of consent. Only in that way can we discern whether there is true consent.
28
They are not only an expression of their power, as not all agency emanates from them, rather they are the outcome of class struggle and reflect real differentials of power.
Britain was becoming more expensive, as the commodity labour was not as generalised and not as mobile globally as it is nowadays. An excessive extension of the working day ‗produces the premature exhaustion and death of this labour-power itself‘. Therefore, its replacement had to be speeded up with the result that the value of labour increased (1976: 376-77). On the other hand, lack of regulation meant that ‗underselling masters‘ competed unfairly by adulterating products like bread and through the use of unpaid labour by making their employees work longer for the same wages as competitors (1976: 361). We will see in chapter 6 that the implementation of labour standards in the mushroom industry was possible thanks to a partnership between SIPTU and
employers, which also included a downgrading of previous standards.29
On the other hand, if capital expresses its inner logic through competition, competition among workers can only benefit capital; it allows capitalists to capture the fruits of cooperation in production; it is, therefore, the expression of competition among many capitals (Lebowitz 2003: 84, 86, 157). In a scenario of a working class hierarchically divided in segments by race, gender, skill, or nationality, workers enter into competition with each other and push wages down. Employers, for example, can put pressure on trade unions to keep wages low because of the threats of offshoring or outsourcing. By using migrant workers willing to accept lower wages than native workers, capitalists can also push wages down. Imbalances between supply and demand cause, therefore, fluctuations in the price of labour. Marx and Engels (in Lebowitz 2003, p. 159) saw this type of competition between Irish and English workers in the nineteenth century:
Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life.
The segmentation of the working class makes the development of working-class consciousness and working-class united action difficult. A political economy of wage- labour, therefore, cannot be based on competition but on the combination of all segments of the working class at a global scale. Capital, on the other hand, facilitates
29
Karl Polanyi, therefore, was not particularly original when he said that a self-regulating market ‗could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society‘ (in Munck 2002: 2). According to Munck (2002: 2), Polanyi spoke also about a double movement: an ‗ever wider extension of free-market principles generated a counter-movement of social regulation to protect society‘. So a move toward deregulation sooner or later must provoke a social reaction and a move towards regulation, but then that also would imply that the opposite movement would take place at a later stage. It is interesting, but it looks like the fluctuation of prices according to supply and demand, and in that way is a theory of equilibrium.
that process by bringing workers together in workplaces and by constant deskilling. Trade unions are the vehicles that articulate workers‘ combination. The tendency of unions to establish a monopoly over the commodity ‗labour-power‘ is one of the material bases of the political economy of labour. The obstacles are many, and this dissertation deals with those encountered by workers in the mushroom industry. An intense struggle for equal working conditions and wages for all workers in Ireland according to previously agreed standards started during the Irish Ferries dispute, and constituted a step along the way to combination.30 But SIPTU was not consistent in its approach. This dissertation looks to traditional organisations of the working class (i.e. unions) as institutions, which although set up to represent and advance the interest of the workers can develop bureaucratic structures that may also turn into obstacles for the advance of workers‘ interests as a whole. This dissertation will focus mainly on
SIPTU‘s branch in Monaghan Mushrooms Ltd., and on SIPTU‘s campaign to ‗clean up‘ the mushroom industry between 2006 and 2007, to illustrate how unions can themselves