labor

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Why Have the Workers Failed to Unite?

Published in Dawn, August 13th, 2022

TRADE unions invariably grow from the political system in a country. The structural nature of a country’s political system deeply influences trade union membership, coverage and impact. Primarily, it is the internal political system of a country that gives or curtails space to trade unions to either institutionalise and become stronger, or remain fragmented and marginalised. The impact of external, or global, factors is secondary, though crucial.

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Nobel Prize and Minimum Wages

Published in Dawn, October 27th, 2021.

The Nobel Prize for Economics for the year 2021 awarded to David Card for his contributions to scholarship on minimum wages has vindicated trade unions, labour and human rights advocates and pro-labour economists the world over. Card’s work in 1994 refuted the long-held hypothesis that increases in minimum wage reduces employment. At the time, 90 per cent of professional economists believed that a hike in minimum wage was bad for the economy. In Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage, Card and Alan Krueger presented evidence that minimum wage hike has either no effect or a positive effect on employment.

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Migrant Smuggling

Published in Dawn on January 15th, 2017

“There are many horizons that must be visited … and white pages in the scrolls of life to be inscribed…” Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North.

IT was 1991 and I was travelling by road in a small group to Iran, Turkey and Greece. In Maku, a city in a mountain gorge in west Azerbaijan province, 22 kilometres away from the Turkish border, we met two Bangladeshis who were travelling to Turkey onward to Greece “on mules”, they told us.

I was flabbergasted. “We travel by night, lest we are caught,” they shared with us, their fellow South Asians. Once they would reach Greece, they planned to slip away to greener pastures — Germany or France. Later, in a small pension in Istanbul, overlooking the Bosphorus, we were served by a young man from Punjab who told us his tale of woe: his agent, also a Pakistani, had robbed him of his passport and dollars.

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Core and Periphery

Published in Dawn on December 31st, 2016

“People resist exploitation. They resist as actively as they can, as passively as they must.” — Immanuel Wallerstein

IN his world system analysis, Wallerstein speaks of a multiplicity of political systems which gives capitalists a “freedom of manoeuvre that is structurally based”.

This analysis explains how the system works when the core (rich) countries export waste to peripheral (poor) economies in the shape of decaying ships. It is the core (industrialist-state) nexus in the peripheral country itself which benefits at the expense of its peripheral (marginalised) labour. A follow-up of the disaster at the Gadani ship-breaking yard in Balochistan validates the premise.

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