During lockdowns, women took on most of burden of childcare

#WAGESFORHOUSEWORK #UBI POSTPANDEMIC ECONOMICS

HEALTH NEWS
JAN. 18, 2021 / 11:50 AM


Thirty-seven percent of couples surveyed relied on the wife to provide most or all childcare, 44.5% used more egalitarian strategies and nearly 19% used strategies that were not gendered or egalitarian. File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI | License Photo

Despite being locked down during the pandemic, childcare responsibilities often fell on women's shoulders, a new study shows.

"Most people have never undergone anything like this before, where all of a sudden they can't rely on their normal childcare, and most people's work situation has changed, too," said researcher Kristen Shockley, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Georgia. "We thought this would be a chance for men to step in and partake equally in childcare, but for many couples we didn't see that happen."

In mid-March, as schools and day care centers shut down, Shockley's team surveyed couples, both of whom worked and had at least one child under the age of 6. The team researchers first surveyed 274 couples and followed up with 133 of the same couples in May.

"When the wife does it all, not surprisingly, the outcomes are bad for the couple," Shockley said in a university news release. "It's not just bad for the wife, it's also bad for the husband, including in terms of job performance although his work role presumably hasn't changed. When one person's doing it all, there's a lot of tension in the relationship, and it's probably spilling over into the husband's ability to focus at work."

Although about 37% of couples relied on the wife to provide most or all childcare, 44.5% used more egalitarian strategies and nearly 19% used strategies that were not gendered or egalitarian.

Co-parenting strategies included alternating workdays, planning daily shifts that included both work and childcare for husband and wife, and alternating schedules that changed based on the couple's work needs. These strategies actually increased the productivity of both parents.

"When you look at the more egalitarian strategies, we found the best outcomes for people who were able to alternate working days," Shockley said. "The boundaries are clear. When you're working, you can really focus on work, and when you're taking care of the kids, you can really focus on the kids. But not everybody has jobs amenable to that."

The paper doesn't include qualitative quotes, but Shockley clearly remembers the participants' comments.

"People were saying, 'I'm at my breaking point,' and this was just two weeks in. A lot of people said, 'I'm just not sleeping.' You could feel people's struggle, and there was a lot of resentment, particularly when the wife was doing it all," she said.

"This really highlights some infrastructure issues we have with the way we think about child care in this country," Shockley said. "The default becomes, 'Oh well, the wife is going to pick up the slack.' It's not a long-term solution."

Shockley noted that the couples surveyed had relatively high incomes.

The report was published in the January issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology.More information

For more on coping during the pandemic, see the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Copyright 2020 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Wages for Housework is part of more general social wage campaigns in the 1970s interested in late capitalism. These campaigns used analysis of Fordist compromises during the twentieth century to argue that family wages or social security payments had amounted to wages paid for housework in the advanced capitalist West.

The History of the Wages for Housework Campaign - Louise ...

https://www.plutobooks.com/blog/wages-housework-campaign-history

The Wages for Housework perspective was a completely original school of thought, and a toolbox for action, at the beginning of second-wave feminism. It was accused of being a simple demand for money, partial and reformist – even reactionary – that went counter to the objective of women’s equality in society. But it was much more than that.

Wages for housework - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wages_for_housework

• Overview
• History
• Relation with Global Women's Strike
• Controversies
• Early influences
• Publications
• See also
• External links

The International Wages for Housework Campaign (IWFHC) is a grassroots women's network campaigning for recognition and payment for all caring work, in the home and outside. It was started in 1972 by Selma James who first put forward the demand for wages for housework at the third National Women's Liberation Conferencein Manchester, England. The IWFHC state that they begin with those with least power internationally – unwaged workers in the home (mothers, housewives, domestic workers de…

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WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK CAMPAIGN

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INTERNATIONAL WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK CAMPAIGN Since 1972, the International Wages for Housework Campaign (IWFHC), a net­ work of Third World and metropolitan women, has been organizing to get rec­ ognition and compensation by govern­ ments for the unwaged work women do in the home, on the land and in the com­ munity, to be paid by dismantling the

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Wages for Housework Campaign Bulletin – Rise Up! Feminist ...

https://riseupfeministarchive.ca/.../wages-for-housework-campaign-bulletin

The Wages for Housework Campaign Bulletin was a publication of the Toronto Wages for Housework Committee. The International Wages for Housework Campaign was co-founded in 1972 by Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, and Brigitte Galtier, and was organized around the principle that women should be paid for performing the socially necessary labour of housework and childcare.

I founded the Wages for Housework campaign in 1972 – and ...

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/international-womens-day-wages...

2020-03-10 · Selma James is founder of the Wages for Housework campaign which coordinates the Global Women’s Strike, based at the Crossroads Women’s Centre. WS and other organisations based at …

• Author: Selma James

Wages For Housework | New Internationalist

https://newint.org/features/1988/03/05/wages

1988-03-05 · Yet the Wages for Housework campaigners remain vociferous, as do their opponents. Wages for Housework is more than a single demand; it offers a controversial perspective on a wide range of feminist concerns, and the politics and economics of housework have been debated in the context of Greenham Common, campaigns for the rights of prostitutes, campaigns against racism, campaigns against rape.

Silvia Federici reflects on Wages for Housework : New Frame

https://www.newframe.com/silvia-federici-reflects-wages-housework

18 Oct 2018. Features. 'The goal was to get wages for housework in order to raise the level of our struggle, not to end it,' says Silvia Federici. (Photograph by Luis Nieto Dickens) In 1972, Silvia Federici participated in founding the Wages for Housework campaign of the International Feminist Collective, which formed chapters in Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States to demand wages from their …

The Women of Wages for Housework | The Nation

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/wages-for-houseworks-radical-vision

2018-03-14 · From the gathering in Padua, Italy, that launched the international campaign in 1972 to the spin-off groups like the New York Committee, the women of Wages for Housework 

The digital marketplace should be a public good

 Regulating pandemic profiteers like Amazon is not enough.

 We need public ownership of essential digital infrastructure

By Daniel Kopp | 17.12.2020

 

Reuters

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is making about USD 321 million a day in 2020


As a turbulent year draws to a close, Covid-19 infections are again on the rise. In response, most European countries have entered another lockdown. And like earlier this year, politicians are trying to cushion the immediate social and economic fallout with furlough schemes, financial support for business and other massive state interventions. But despite governments deploying the fiscal bazooka to keep economies afloat, it's still impossible to fully grasp the long-term economic damage, let alone how the post-pandemic economy will look like.

One thing is clear though: the shutdown of the local brick-and-mortar economy has exacerbated pre-pandemic trends towards market concentration and monopolisation. It's the Big Tech companies in particular – such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon – that have profited and further entrenched their dominance.

Take the example of Amazon. As global protests on Black Friday have underscored, the tech giant has become ever more powerful since the start of the pandemic. As local retailers — from clothing shops to household supply and electronic stores — had to close their doors during the first and second wave (and many of them since went bust), Amazon’s e-commerce business flourished and its profits skyrocketed.

This year alone, the tech giant has increased its profits by a whopping 53 per cent compared to 2019, while its stock prices have risen by 65 per cent. Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has seen his personal fortune balloon by more than USD 73bn since the start of the crisis to a record of around USD 200bn — making him the richest man in human history.

For progressives then, the battle over who rules our economy will become ever more urgent in the near future. With a few companies having cemented their market dominance over the course of this pandemic, progressives need to put forward a vision that speaks to questions of ownership — and build up alternative, more democratic ways of organising our (digital) economies.
The starting point

Amazon was in such a uniquely powerful position when the pandemic hit because of its giant e-commerce platform and delivery infrastructure – built up over years with the explicit goal to not just monopolise one sector of the market, but to “become the market”. This was made possible by huge investments into its platform, powered by aggressive tax avoidance, almost unlimited access to global capital markets for its ‘growth before profits’ strategy, as well as its monopolisation of other sectors entirely – most notably web services. Naturally, notorious anti-worker and union-busting policies also add to the mix.


If total control over the marketplace in which it competes is the company’s ultimate goal, then this must also be the starting point of any meaningful left-wing response to rein in Amazon’s power.

In the political arena, this problem has been increasingly acknowledged. Amid Big Tech’s efforts to disrupt the EU’s regulatory efforts through an unprecedented lobbying network, Competition Commissioner Margarethe Vestager recently concluded that ‘Amazon illegally abused its dominant position as a marketplace service provider’ through collecting data on third-party retailers to cement its own retail ambitions. With a new set of rules on data usage unveiled this week, Amazon and other tech giants could face a massive fine of up to 10 per cent of its turnover.

If total control over the marketplace in which it competes is the company’s ultimate goal, then this must also be the starting point of any meaningful left-wing response to rein in Amazon’s power. While the Commission aims to ensure ‘free and fair’ competition within Amazon’s marketplace, it falls short of questioning whether one private company should be allowed to control an entire marketplace to begin with.

A recent anti-trust report in the US also recognised that ‘by controlling access to markets,’ tech giants such as Amazon ‘can pick winners and losers throughout our economy.’ But both initiatives fail to go beyond established competition measures. They don’t point towards an alternative, more democratic way of organising our increasingly digitalised economies.
Building up a local alternative

Luckily, a few hundred metres away from Vestager’s office, local politicians in Brussels’ regional government seem to have understood this. In early December, and just in time for the Christmas shopping period, the region’s Ministry for Economic Transition and Research — in partnership with two local NGOs — launched mymarket.brussels, an initiative taking aim specifically at Amazon’s usurpation of the digital marketplace.

Mymarket.brussels is essentially the digital equivalent of your weekly market. It allows local stores in the Brussels region to register on its platform — for an initial period free of charge — and promote their products to shoppers online at a price of their choice. Home deliveries are taken care of by the local bike delivery cooperative Urbike, ensuring a sustainable delivery model and decent working conditions alike.

Where small local shops often don’t have the necessary skills or financial resources to build their own online store, mymarket.brussels offers them a public digital infrastructure instead. This way, they can advertise and sell their products even if storefronts need to close during lockdown. And for consumers it creates one — surprisingly well-designed and accessible — digital space to shop more locally and sustainably.

Instead of then having a private company like Amazon dictate the terms of a monopolistic online marketplace, the digital marketplace itself could become public infrastructure.

What the initiative then realises is that, in itself, the digital infrastructure Amazon has built is not the problem. In fact, such platforms can be enormously useful, even essential, allowing for an easy and — as the pandemic has shown — safe connection between people and goods and services. It’s just that a corporate, unaccountable platform like Amazon has become a tool of economic domination — with all its negative effects on workers, small businesses and society at large. So the problem is really one of ownership.
A digital public good

To counter this, mymarket.brussels applies the idea of the public good to the digital world. In doing so, it doesn’t just show what a progressive local government — staffed with young, tech-savvy and ambitious policymakers — can do. It also points towards a bigger vision of publicly owned digital resources, focussing on social and environmental goals as opposed to pure profit maximisation. Instead of then having a private company like Amazon dictate the terms of a monopolistic online marketplace, the digital marketplace itself could become public infrastructure. Another digital world is possible.

Of course, mymarket.brussels is not perfect. Its governance model seems to not be inclusive — it’s not offering a clear way for store owners and consumers to have influence over how the platform is run. And we will have to see whether the model turns out to be successful. Even though it comes at just the right time, the odds are certainly stacked against it. But if it succeeds in establishing itself, one could easily imagine it being scaled up. Over time, it could replicated in other European cities to durably support value remaining within each local economy.

With the Covid-19 vaccination drive having just started, there’s an end to the wave of infections and lockdowns in sight. Yet it’s unclear how the post-pandemic economies we inherit will look like. Big Tech’s increasing power gives urgency to a political response that revolves around questions of ownership and the public good. One day then, perhaps, public ownership of digital infrastructure could become as normal as public ownership of the physical infrastructure that hosts our weekly markets.

Daniel Kopp

Brussels

Daniel Kopp is the Executive Editor of International Politics and Society.

ips-journal.eu | IPS Journal (ips-journal.eu)

Who will foot the bill?

Global tax havens are still siphoning off vast sums of money. As Covid-19 continues to wreak havoc, the EU needs to step up

By Eva Joly | 22.12.2020

Reuters

Did anyone really think that the club of rich countries, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), would come up with solutions to the tax abuses of multinational companies? Seven years after the G20 – the 20 leading global economies – tasked the OECD with revising the international tax system, it finally issued a series of proposals. They are as complex as they are disappointing.

At the beginning of the year, optimism reigned. For the first time, countries had agreed that companies should pay tax where their customers, production sites and employees are – and not in tax havens where they merely rent a letterbox. But as the negotiations came to a close, it all seemed to have come to nothing. That shouldn’t surprise anyone though.

The OECD tried to back up its claim to speak for everyone by including developing countries in an ‘inclusive framework’. Nevertheless, of the 137 nations with a seat at the negotiating table only the G7 countries – home to the big multinationals and their lobbyists – had a voice. As a result, notwithstanding the OECD’s proposals, tax havens continue to absorb financial flows almost unchecked. The meagre tax revenues that can be retrieved largely benefit rich countries.

It's time for the EU to step up

This situation was already scandalous. But as the corona pandemic continues to wreak havoc worldwide, it has simply become intolerable. After decades of financial austerity, government institutions are finding it hard to get on top of the situation. According to the report ‘The State of Tax Justice 2020’, recently published by the Tax Justice Network, Public Services International and the Global Alliance for Tax Justice, states are losing more than USD 427bn to tax havens every year.

Hospitals need more money. The education system needs more money. Small businesses on the brink of bankruptcy need more money.

Besides estimating financial losses resulting from tax abuses by companies and private persons country by country, the report also considers the appalling effects on healthcare spending. Worldwide, the tax revenues siphoned off in this way amount to 9.2 per cent of health care budgets. This would pay the wages of 34 million nurses and carers. Even more destructive are the effects in developing countries, where the shortfall represents 52.4 per cent of healthcare spending. The United Kingdom haemorrhages almost USD 40bn a year, an annual per capita loss of USD 607. This represents 18.72 per cent of the UK healthcare budget or the wages of around 840,000 care workers.

Hospitals need more money. The education system needs more money. Small businesses on the brink of bankruptcy need more money. And someone has to foot the bill. These revenues therefore need to be recovered from where they’ve been stashed, namely tax havens. And because the OECD is not up to the job, the European Union needs to step up to implement reforms. One example would be a minimum effective tax rate on company profits.
Ursula von der Leyen has a choice

The Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT), whose members include, besides myself, economists such as Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman, sets out from a minimum tax rate of 25 per cent. Even US President-elect Joe Biden is calling for a global minimum of 21 per cent. A lower level – some states favour 12.5 per cent – would trigger a downward spiral in corporate taxation, causing tax revenues to fall even further.

Naturally there is strong opposition even in the EU – for a simple reason. Pointing the finger at small Caribbean islands diverts attention from the tax havens right here in Europe. According to the State of Tax Justice report, the United Kingdom and its overseas territories – aptly described as a ‘spider’s web’ – are responsible for 29 per cent of the USD 245bn global shortfall because of corporate tax abuses. There are other examples in the EU, such as the Netherlands, which pockets around USD 10bn from its EU neighbours. Luxembourg, Ireland, Cyprus and Malta do the same.

For years, these states have blocked every proposed reform by exploiting the unanimity requirement on tax matters. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, however, has a formidable weapon at her disposal. Article 116 of the EU Treaty requires the same competition rules for all member states – and tax dumping is clearly a violation. That would make it possible to bypass the unanimity requirement and prevent culpable states from siphoning off tax revenues. Ursula von der Leyen has the requisite political influence and also the support of Germany, which holds the Council presidency until the end of the year and is one of the countries hardest hit by tax abuses. And if it runs out of time, Portugal, which assumes the presidency in January, can take up the baton.

Ideally, the Commission would launch a global initiative. Europe is a key market for multinational companies. If that fails, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and other countries could use the ‘enhanced cooperation’ mechanism. This requires that at least seven member states work in tandem. The European Public Prosecutor, for example, was created this way. In the teeth of the second wave of the Corona pandemic, not to mention the danger that Brexit could foster an even mightier tax haven, inaction is just not an option.

Eva Joly

Eva Joly is a member of the Independent Commission on International Company Tax Reform (ICRICT). A former Member of the European Parliament, Eva Joly was Vice-Chairwoman of the Committee of Inquiry into Money Laundering, Tax Evasion and Fraud.

 

Closing the representation gap

Centre-left parties have become too bourgeois. The ensuing representation gap lies at the heart of democratic dissatisfaction

By Sheri Berman | 07.01.2021

Pixabay

What would Karl Marx say?

Over the past decades dissatisfaction with democracy has risen dramatically. The most recent Global Satisfaction with Democracy report, for example, notes: ‘In the mid-1990s, a majority of citizens … were satisfied with the performance of their democracies. Since then, the share of individuals who are “dissatisfied” with democracy has risen … from 47.9 to 57.5%. This is the highest level of global dissatisfaction since the start of the series in 1995.’

Perhaps the most common way of understanding democratic dissatisfaction is ‘bottom-up’ — examining citizens’ economic and/or socio-cultural grievances. But it is also necessary to examine the ‘top-down’ sources—those stemming from the nature or functioning of democratic institutions themselves.

Perhaps the most influential modern statement of this perspective is Samuel Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies. Huntington argued that political decay and disorder was the result of a gap between citizens’ demands and the willingness or ability of political institutions to respond to them. Although Political Order focused on developing countries during the post-war period, its framework can help us understand democratic dissatisfaction in Europe today.

Over recent decades a representation gap has emerged in Europe — a disjuncture between voters’ preferences and the policy profiles and political appeals of mainstream parties. And, as Huntington would predict, when citizens view political institutions as unwilling or unable to respond to them, dissatisfaction, and along with it political disorder and decay, is the likely result.

Shifted profiles

Mainstream centre-left and centre-right parties in Europe have shifted their policy profiles and political appeals in ways that have moved them away from the preferences of many voters. The shift on the part of centre-left parties is well-known.

During the post-war period, European centre-left parties had relatively clear economic profiles, based on the view that it was the job of democratic governments to protect citizens from the negative consequences of capitalism. Concretely, this entailed championing the welfare state, market regulation, full-employment policies and so on. Although centre-left parties tried to capture additional votes outside the traditional working class, their identities and appeals remained class-based.

In the late 20th century this began to change, as centre-left parties moved to the centre economically, offering a watered-down or ‘kindler, gentler’ version of the policies peddled by their centre-right competitors. By the late 1990s, as one study put it, ‘Social Democracy … had more in common with its main competitors than with its own positions roughly three decades earlier’. As centre-left parties diluted their economic-policy positions, they also began de-emphasising class in their appeals and their leaders increasingly came not from blue-collar ranks but from a highly educated elite.

Although less pronounced and universal, at around the same time as centre-left parties moved to the centre economically, many centre-right parties moderated their positions on important social and cultural issues, including ‘traditional’ values, immigration and other concerns related to national identity.

In short, while examining changing economic, social and technological conditions and the grievances they have generated is crucial for understanding democracy’s contemporary problems, it is also necessary to explore why existing democratic institutions have not responded to many citizens’ concerns.

Centre-right parties had generally taken conservative stances on these issues. Christian-democratic parties, for example, had viewed religious values as well as traditional views on gender and sexuality as crucial to their identity. In addition, many of these parties understood national identity in cultural or even ethnic terms and were suspicious of immigration and multiculturalism. But during the late 20th and early 21st centuries many shifted to the centre on national-identity issues, tempering or abandoning the communitarian appeals they had made previously.

Cumulatively, these shifts by centre-left and centre-right parties left many voters, particularly those with left-wing economic and moderate to conservative preferences on immigration and so on, without a party representing their interests. Such voters were heavily concentrated among the less well-educated and the working class, comprising about 20-25 per cent of the electorate in Europe (as well as in the United States).

Representation gap

To use categories popularised by Albert Hirschman, when a representation gap emerges and voters are dissatisfied with the political choices offered to them, they have two options: exit and voice. And indeed, over recent decades, less-educated and working-class voters have increasingly exited by abstaining from voting and other forms of political participation or exerted voice by shifting their votes to right-wing populist parties. They did so because these parties shifted their profiles as well, offering a mix of welfare chauvinism, conservative social and cultural policies and a promise to give voice to the ‘voiceless’—precisely to appeal to them.

The French writer Édouard Louis described how his uneducated, working-class father’s dissatisfaction with mainstream parties, and in particular with the traditional left, led him down this path:

'What elections [came to mean for] my father was a chance to fight his sense of invisibility … My father had felt abandoned by the political left since the 1980s, when it began adopting the language and thinking of the free market … [and no longer] spoke of social class, injustice and poverty, of suffering, pain and exhaustion … My father would complain, "Whatever—left, right, now, they’re all the same." That "whatever" distilled all of his disappointment in those who, in his mind, should have been standing up for him but weren’t.'

'By contrast, the National Front railed against poor working conditions and unemployment, laying all the blame on immigration or the European Union. In the absence of any attempt by the left to discuss his suffering, my father latched on to the false explanations offered by the far right. Unlike the ruling class, he didn’t have the privilege of voting for a political program. Voting, for him, was a desperate attempt to exist in the eyes of others.'

In short, while examining changing economic, social and technological conditions and the grievances they have generated is crucial for understanding democracy’s contemporary problems, it is also necessary to explore why existing democratic institutions have not responded to many citizens’ concerns. A defining feature of democracy, after all, is that government is supposed to be responsive to citizens. This implies some correspondence between what voters want and what politicians and parties actually do.

In particular, when a representation gap emerges—when a significant section of the population feels its interests are no longer represented by traditional politicians and parties — we should expect dissatisfaction and support for anti-establishment politicians and parties to rise. Avoiding this requires closing the representation gap — which means either traditional parties will need to shift back towards voters or they will have to convince voters to shift towards them.

This article is a joint publication by Social Europe and IPS-Journal.

Sheri Berman

New York City

Sheri Berman is a professor of political science at Barnard College and author of Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe. From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day(Oxford University Press).

Just another transition

The European Green Deal won't deliver justice for workers in Europe's East — just like the economic transition 30 years ago

By Bohumil Čáp | 15.09.2020

Reuters

Miners walk out of a lift after finishing their shift around 500 meters underground at the Boleslaw Smialy coal mine


With the outbreak of Covid-19, the year 2020 will go down in history as a turning point that forced (not only) EU officials to take unprecedented steps to revive an ailing economy. For parts of Europe, especially in its east, however, it will be become known as the year when another economic transition began.

The last economic transformation in the region began 30 years ago and took place under the banner of liberating the individual and a return to liberal democracy. Economically, it was a transition from centrally planned to market economy, which resulted in an increase in social and economic inequality not only between individuals but also between entire regions. The people most affected by this transition were those in regions dependent on heavy industry. Ironically enough, 30 years ago in Czechoslovakia, it was the protests against environmental pollution in the coal regions that spurred the collapse of the one-party government and it was a workers’ general strike that struck the final blow.

Subsequent privatisations, then, often resembled a fire sale. Because of the currency devaluation, it sometimes paid off for the foreign ‘investors’ to buy a business, break it up and sell it for scrap. Unemployment and inequality were rising and life prospects declining. In this context, jobs in the fossil fuel industry were one last precarious source of social security. To this day, however, these regions have not recovered from the wild transformation of the 1990s.

Thirty years later, we are on the brink of another economic transformation, driven by the effort and urgency to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). And again, it will mainly affect the inhabitants of heavy industry-dependent regions.

What the Green Deal means for Europe’s East

As part of the ‘European Green Deal’ (EGD), the European Commission’s flagship climate policy, President Ursula von der Leyen is expected to announce an increased emissions reduction target of 55 per cent (up from 40 per cent) during her State of the Union speech on 16 September. At the same time, however, the financing of the Just Transition Fund – established to win over coal-dependent regions in Europe’s East – has been slashed from €40bn to just €10bn in the recent EU recovery fund and budget negotiations. It is no wonder, then, that the prospect of another transition raises concerns, mistrust and a rejection of the need for climate policy – even more so if national governments, too, have not given much-needed support.

Von der Leyen’s EGD is, in one sense, undoubtedly an ambitious undertaking to make the EU a global climate leader, which hopefully other major global powers will eventually join the race. It also seems ambitious in its rhetorical commitment to the social aspects of the transformation. That’s in no small part due to the trade union movement, which has successfully promoted the principle of socially just transition and made it part of the preamble to the Paris Agreement and now the cornerstone of European climate transformation policy.


If giving up on ambitious social transformation seems to be the price for climate ambition, then it is simply not truly ambitious.

Unfortunately, however, that’s about all that can be expected from the EGD, as it was introduced to only address the question of justice in the transformation. Of course, taking workers into consideration is good, but justice does not mean to only consider the wronged side. It is not just about the process, but also the result. In other words, when this transformation under the EGD takes place, the result may well be a reduction in GHG emissions, but for workers and communities it will be business as usual.

What if the redundant workers do not get a job even after reskilling (be it for their age, gender, family situation or colour of their skin)? Or they get one, but it will be paid less? Or it will be some form of precarious work? Or they will have to move and break their social ties? How will access to education, health care and social protection – which is crucial to succeed in the labour market – change? A just transition should also be a transition towards justice. The GDE dusts up old recipes relying on public-private partnerships without actually striving for a more just and more democratic society and economy.

Justice during and after the transition

The response to the current crisis, caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, gave us a glimpse of a completely different, non-meritocratic society. Everyone deserved help because not having a job and/or the means to pay the rent is often not one’s own fault. We should take seriously the lessons we learned. It means that, in the context of the just transition, it would be fairer (and more effective) to simply guarantee a steady income to workers affected by decarbonisation, instead of guaranteeing reskilling and giving it another try in the labour market. This is something that trade unionists and environmental NGOs agree on.

Another tool is conditionalities under which companies will be allowed to receive European money. These open up a whole range of measures that would mean a shift towards justice, from mandatory involvement in national social dialogue structures, greater participation of workers through more inclusive HR policies, shorter working hours to higher contributions to public services.

If giving up on ambitious social transformation seems to be the price for climate ambition, then it is simply not truly ambitious. The EGD does not require binding coal phase-out plans. The support for natural gas infrastructure is not out of the way. The GHG reduction goals are insufficient to stay within the Paris Agreement goals. And above all, the EGD completely fails to address the underlying driver of the climate crisis: an economy based on endless growth that is incompatible with the principle of sustainability.

Just another transition

Sometimes the debate on the just transition is presented as if social and climate interests are at odds with each other. In such a view, the shortcomings on both sides are a sign of compromise leading to partial progress. Apart from the fact that we cannot afford the luxury of partial progress, this antagonism is simply not true. It is the workers who carry the burden both ways.


So if the GDE is a compromise, and very little in politics is not, then it is not a compromise between social and climate justice but rather between justice and economic power.

Not being able to live a fulfilling life because of bad working or environmental conditions makes no difference in the end. It is no coincidence that 30 years ago, environmental activists and workers stood on the same side of the barricade. Those who now pit these two interests, social and climate, against each other are those who live off the exploitation of both natural and human resources – so those from whom social and climate justice needs to be demanded.

But there is no such recognition in the EGD proposal. On the contrary, it is perfectly possible that the owners of fossil fuel businesses still make money from the transformation – if not directly in the form of bail-outs (as is already happening), then through other activities related to, for instance, the winding-down fossil fuel infrastructure or public investment. So if the EGD is a compromise, and very little in politics is not, then it is not a compromise between social and climate justice but rather between justice and economic power.

In this struggle, Eastern Europe is trapped in lower tiers of supply chains than its western neighbours – and than before the last transformation. This, together with industrial relations – the balance of power between labour and capital – determines the well-being of workers. The impact decarbonisation will have on the ranking of Eastern European economies within supply chains and on the industrial relations therefore shapes the enthusiasm with which we should embrace it and the demands we should formulate.

So while it is true that there is no work nor justice on a dead planet, it is also true that unless Europe emerges more wealthy, just and cohesive from this transition, the rest of the world are not likely to follow its example. In this context, cutting the EU’s Just Transition Fund while increasing GHG reduction targets simply means wanting more for less. But unless we put money where our mouth is and think about what comes after decarbonisation, our efforts will result in just another transition that has not delivered, neither globally nor locally.

Bohumil Čáp

Prague

Bohumil Čáp is International Deputy Secretary of Czech-Moravian Confederation of Trade Unions and Vice-president of the Budoucnost political party.

'The revolution came from below'

The outcome of the constitutional referendum is a historic moment for Chile — and the expectation are high. 

Simone Reperger reports from Santiago
27.10.2020

Reuters

Celebrations after hearing the results of the referendum on a new Chilean constitution in Valparaiso, Chile


“Chile aprobó”. In a referendum, an overwhelming majority of Chileans voted for a new constitution. Why is this decision called historic?

78 per cent of Chileans voted in favour of drafting a new constitution. This is indeed a historic decision. Because even today, 30 years after the end of the military dictatorship, General Pinochet's constitution is still largely in force. He left behind one of the most neoliberal constitutions in the world. It reduces the role of the state to a minimum and prescribes the neoliberal development model, which relies on the privatisation of public goods such as health, education, pensions and water and primarily ensures the freedom of the market.

Until last year, there was no a political majority to write a new constitution. The existing one was only reformed here and there, but the market-friendly approach was never questioned. That this has now been achieved is the triumph of the protest movement. For a year now, it has been taking to the streets every day – apart from times during the strict corona lockdown – to demand more social justice and a fairer development model. One of its central demands was the referendum. So the revolution came from below.

From a left-wing perspective – what has to be written into the new constitution?

It is important that the future constitution no longer enshrines the subsidiary role of the state. The state must no longer be subordinated to the market. Private interests can no longer be placed above public rights, individual rights above collective rights.

A future constitution should guarantee social rights and enshrine that social security is the responsibility of the state. In the future, the state must be able to intervene in the market to regulate it. Education and health, for example, should be defined as a right of all people and privatisation should be reversed.

Gender equality, the rights of indigenous peoples and environmental protection should also no longer be left out of the new social contract.

In recent years, Chile has repeatedly experienced massive protests, which have been sparked in particular by social inequality and the neoliberal economic system. Isn’t hoping that the entire system will now be overhauled by a new constitution unrealistic?

The hopes are exaggerated and here lies one of the risks of the constitutional process: Many Chileans see the new constitution as a cure for all the country's problems – but in the short term, it will neither combat poverty nor reduce the enormous gap between rich and poor in Chile's two-tier society. The new constitution will not come into force before the end of 2022. According to experts, another five years will pass before it starts to show effects. So Chile is facing some exciting years! The chances for a more social democratic future and the strengthening of public goods are there, but only in the medium to long term.

The government of the right-wing conservative multi-billionaire Sebastián Piñera therefore faces the great challenge of finding short-term answers to the great social crisis and creating a political climate in which a peaceful constitutional process is possible. According to UNDP, the United Nations Development Programme, 40 per cent of Chileans today live in extreme insecurity, bordering on permanent hardship. More than one million people are suffering from hunger, 90 per cent of the people are afraid of social decline. These people cannot wait another 10 years until their problems are solved. And the pandemic is already setting Chile back decades in its level of development. Chile’s revolution is thus taking place at a socially explosive moment.

President Piñera describes the new constitution as an opportunity for greater unity in a society that has been highly polarised. How can we prevent the economic elites from boycotting the process in order to secure their benefits?

The constitution will be drafted at a difficult moment: Violence has established itself as a political tool in the last 12 months, death threats against politicians and activists are commonplace, campaigns based on fear dominate political opinion making and the economic elite seems unwilling to give up their privileges in times of a profound economic crisis. These are serious threats to the constitutional process. The areas where the rich live all voted by a large margin against the new constitution. Even the right-wing hardliners in Piñera’s cabinet have openly campaigned in recent months to preserve the old system. So there is a strong headwind.

But even the majority of the country's economic elite should be aware that they can no longer stop the constitutional process. It is the only democratic and institutional way out of the social crisis. Should it fail, many will only see the fight in the streets as an alternative. Therefore, the elite’s strategy will be that the constituent assembly should be composed of as many business-friendly members as possible, in order to formulate the contents of the future Carta Magna in their spirit.

Only the centre-left parties and the social movements can prevent this by pulling together. They face the great challenge of putting aside fragmentation, power interests and electoral calculus and agreeing on common electoral lists and common programmes. They spent the election evening at separate celebrations, it was not possible to agree on a common event. Without the formation of a progressive alliance, the united right will win most seats. There is a great risk that the conservative, pro-business political elite, which has benefited greatly from Pinochet’s legacy and the neoliberal development model since the return to democracy 30 years ago, will also dominate the contents of the New Constitution and exert much influence on the advisory bodies.

However, some also believe that parts of the Chilean oligarchy and conservative political elite will fight hard and they warn against a permanent blockade of debates in the constituent assembly, against even more political violence and the spread of campaigns based on fear.

The voters opted for the convening of a constituent assembly and against a mixed body in which half of the members of parliament would have been represented. What must the parties do now to counter the immense party discontent?

With 79 per cent of the vote, the social movements’ demand that a completely newly elected constituent assembly write the constitution has prevailed. This shows the people’s great distrust of their political class.

90 per cent believe that the parliament and the senate regularly pass laws that are not oriented towards the common good, but towards the interests of the elite. 98 per cent do not trust any single party. The distance between politicians and people is enormous. Solutions are not expected from any of the parties, but from the “people on the street”.

Therefore, Chileans do not want politicians to work out the new social contract. The parties – no matter which ideological camp they belong to – must take this warning signal seriously and reform fundamentally: More participatory, younger, more representative, more oriented towards the common good, more transparent, less corrupt – the list of improvements is long. The current crisis is also a crisis of representative democracy.

What are the next steps in the constitutional process?

On 11 April 2021, the 155 members of the Constituent Assembly will be elected. Representatives of civil society organisations as well as political parties and trade unions can submit lists. The parties would be ill-advised to try to dominate the constitutional process. It would also be important for the parties represented in parliament to agree on some ground rules for the constitutional process which would ensure many opportunities for participation and a transparent culture of debate.

Incidentally, it is a great success that a parity law is in place because of the great pressure from feminist organisations and female parliamentarians. The constituent assembly will consist of at least 45 per cent women. In no other country in the world has it been possible to involve so many women in the drafting of the Carta Magna. Chile is making history. It is still under discussion whether a quota system will also be drafted for indigenous peoples. International organisations have long criticised that the political rights and opportunities for participation of this most discriminated and poorest population group in Chile are not guaranteed.

The Constituent Assembly will start its work in May 2021. It will then have a maximum of 15 months to write the new constitution. It will be assisted by consultative bodies and constitutional experts. Decisions on the content of the new Carta Magna will be taken by a two-thirds majority, so the composition of the Assembly will determine how progressive or conservative the new Constitution will be. It is expected that by the end of 2022, Chileans will be able to vote in a second referendum on whether the new Constitution should enter into force.

Simone Reperger

Santiago de Chile

Simone Reperger is a political scientist and works as a country representative of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Chile. Previously she worked for the foundation in Uruguay and as head of the Regional Trade Union Project for Latin America and the Caribbean.

'The revolution came from below' – Interview with Simone Reperger | IPS Journal (ips-journal.eu)