© Sanjiv Pandita

There’s a war going on in Asia – and it’s one that, unlike ISIS in Iraq or the chaos in Syria, is failing to make the headlines. It’s the war on workers that is taking place across much of the continent, according to the Director of the Asia Monitor Resources Center in Hong Kong, Sanjiv Pandita.

The geographer David Harvey has termed this process ‘accumulation by dispossession’. Across the continent, workers are being forced off their land to make way for plantations, mining, or even real estate. They’re resisting – but employers and police are using the age-old methods of repression.

The recent surge in attacks on citizens has been propelled by the expansion of neoliberal policies in Asia, including controversial ‘export processing zones’ which lack any labour or environmental standards. In such areas, ‘everything is a commodity,’ according to Pandita, particularly when inequality has soared in Asia – especially in China – over the last 20 years.

And the figures are astonishing: 300 million people – almost as many as the entire population of the US – are currently on the move in Asia, forced from rural land into the cities. This scale is ‘unprecedented at any time in the history of the industrial world,’ according to Pandita.

Of course, some end up in factories whose names have become infamous, such as the Yue Yuen factory in China, where 80,000 shoe workers recently went out on strike, or Foxconn, where your iPhone was probably made. Most workers, however, don’t end up there.

Vulnerable workers, dangerous work

Most will find themselves in an even more unregulated informal economy – picking shells, working on construction sites, gathering rubbish, and sex work. Informal work like this ‘employs’ up to a quarter of Asia’s total population – one billion people. That’s 70 per cent of total vulnerable employment in the world. It’s dangerous work, too. Over one million people die every year from work-related deaths in the region, according to conservative estimates.

Sanjiv Pandita

These workers are not only dispossessed from their land and resources – forced out by transnationals with the help of the local state – but from their rights. And with very often no identifiable employer – whether because the supply chains are so long or because they are ‘self-employed’ – organizing for better conditions is hard. But it can be done.

Following the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in Bangladesh, the past year has seen some of the largest strikes in Asia’s history. Again, the numbers are eye-watering: 100 million workers in India went on strike last year – in one day. Millions stopped work in Hong Kong, Indonesia and Bangladesh, the latter winning a 50-per-cent wage hike in the textiles sector. Cambodia similarly saw a major general strike last December, which was met with a violent crackdown. And in Korea, mostly informal workers took radical action, particularly bricklayers.

Within these struggles, the question of unity between ‘formal’ and informal work has to be addressed. ‘We have to believe all working people are one – no matter what they are doing,’ Pandita says. The question is how to bring all of them together. New ways of organizing are occurring – the challenge, with no or secretive employers, is how and where to bargain. Instead, the bargaining must be political.

Even where informal workers are organizing, however, it is often separately. Home-based workers, sex workers and street vendors are getting organized – but not as one.

In such situations, the question of leadership also emerges, somewhat problematically. Movements often draw external middle-class organizers who take over. Yet, says Pandita, ‘the agents of change have to be workers themselves. We have to just be catalysts.’ Perhaps the current situation is just a temporary phase while grassroots leadership develops.

From Western workers, solidarity has to be genuine – ‘it can’t be based on pity’. Movements against accumulation by dispossession are rising up, and the challenge for those in the Global North is to offer solidarity without co-opting them. One thing is certain, however – with living standards in the West being crushed by austerity, all of us are workers now. It’s time to start organizing like we believe it.

Josiah Mortimer is reporting on the Global Labour Institute’s third International Summer School for trade unionists at Northern College from 7-11 July. You can follow all of the conference online Union Solidarity International, and on Twitter: #ISS14. This article draws on the plenary ‘The Fall & Rise of Labour?’

• Discover unique global perspectives
• Support cutting-edge independent media
• Magazine delivered to your door or inbox
• Digital archive of over 500 issues
• Fund in-depth, high quality journalism

Subscribe today »

Among the many students occupying the entrance to the Provost’s office at the University College London (UCL) is Justine Canady, a History undergraduate and the UCL Women’s Officer. The occupier’s demands are simple, for President and Provost Michael Arthur to stand in opposition to teachers’ pension cuts and support striking staff.

The proposed reductions will result in lecturer’s pensions being decreased by up to £10,000 (USD$13,875) a year. As a result, lecturers at more than 60 UK universities are taking part in intermittent industrial action which began 22 February and will escalate up to 16 March. The UCL student occupation began on the evening of 26 February and is in direct support of the University and Collage Union (UCU) strikes. I spoke to Justine about the reasons for the occupation and why she thinks it is important, as a student, to stand in solidarity with the workers at UCL.

Why are you taking part in the occupation?

We decided to occupy this space, at this time, to draw attention to and put pressure on the Universities UK negotiations happening on the 27th of February and publicly show that there was student support. We also wanted to put pressure on the university and encourage more student activists to get involved.

We decided to take direct action because this is the way you are going to win stuff like this. We know that lobbying isn’t working, university staff are taking part in 14 days of industrial action; that’s their form of direct action and students can do other stuff.

I think it’s nice that lots of students are signing petitions. I think that comes from a really meaningful place, but if we really want to oppose these pension changes we need to be doing more than that. That’s occupations, that’s sit-ins, that’s what we need students across the country to be doing because asking nicely isn’t going to help.

Also, student worker solidarity is something that we need to be building. Particularly as Women’s Officer I regularly get asked ‘why are you getting involved in workers’ issues, is that really about women?’ But it is a feminist issue. With the UCU stuff specifically, because of the gender pay gap, when the changes go through, women will have less access to money, even more so. A lot of the women taking part in the UCU strikes don’t even qualify for the pension scheme because they don’t earn enough, but they are still taking part which is a pretty amazing sign of solidarity.

If we want to change our education system this is how we are going to do it. I am a free education campaigner and I do a lot of stuff around marketization, we are always talking about building these links with our cleaners, with our lecturers. The things that screw them over, screw us over. Particularly with higher education reforms that were passed by the Tories last year, we are seeing a wave of marketization and cuts happening, and these pension changes are just one form of it.

For example, we do a lot of campaigning for funding of mental health services at UCL, they don’t fund these essential services properly, but they pay the provosts and managers really well and continue to build multimillion pound buildings. They want to attract more students and make the university look really cool on the outside without actually supporting their students and staff.

What is the impact of the pension cuts on the quality your education?

Having a casualized workforce is obviously going to result in crappy teaching. You have the Teaching Excellence Framework that the Tories passed in which they talk about excellence in teaching and getting value for money. However, if you don’t pay staff properly and you don’t let them retire on time obviously you are not going to have excellence in teaching. There is no logic to what is happening here.

What message do you think that the UCU strike sends?

Education is not a consumer good, it is a right for everyone, and if you want to change things they are not just going to give it to you, you have to stick out your neck a bit and fight for it. I’m really happy to see the strikes, it’s great that the university staff are standing up for themselves.

What else should people know about the occupation and what it stands for?

This isn’t about students and students need to stop making it about themselves. This is about the workers, it’s a bummer to miss lectures because you want to learn, but the people that are missing out the most are the people that are on strike and we can’t forget this.

We want our education system to be democratic, run by the people that study and work here, let’s scrap the Vice-Chancellor position and have proper democratic bodies that make decisions. It’s not up to Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn to come in to office and fix this, we need to hold on to the vision of education that we want; we need to start having these conversations. People need to stop waiting for others to do things on their behalf.

• Discover unique global perspectives
• Support cutting-edge independent media
• Magazine delivered to your door or inbox
• Digital archive of over 500 issues
• Fund in-depth, high quality journalism

Subscribe today »

I am what’s called an ‘early career scholar’, which means more is expected of me as I grow older.

I work at the University of Edinburgh, and I am lucky enough to be on a proper contract. I have been a union member since the day I could be, and I will be until the day I can’t. Like so many of my colleagues across the UK, I have recently been on strike over proposed cuts to our pensions.

Striking was a strangely therapeutic experience; long hours standing in the cold, talking to colleagues, tending a fire in an old metal bin. It was a surreal routine, and not one without its tensions, its strain to my emotions, my muscles, and my bank balance. But now we’re in an awkward interim.

The first wave of strike action has ended; the next round looms. The first offer put to us by Universities UK (UUK) was resoundingly and angrily rejected. The second – more ambiguous, more slippery, more promising – will be put to members early next week, and I for one will be rejecting it. We went into this to stop the attack on our pensions, and until we get a trustworthy offer that will achieve this, we must not give up.

It’s worth pausing to take stock of how much this strike action has already achieved. It is, by far, the largest and most severe strike in the history of British higher education. By some estimates more work-hours have been lost in this single action than in all UK strikes in 2015 and 2016 combined. And this has been achieved in a sector characterized by working conditions that enforce individual competition, reward self-exploitation, and incubate a hierarchical division between colleagues (divisions that all-too often reinforce distinctions of race, class, age, and gender). Despite this, picket lines held firm for the duration.

In Edinburgh, some 500 staff members have joined the union since this dispute began, a trend replicated across the country. And perhaps most importantly of all, the students have rallied to us in ways I could not have imagined. One student would slog up the hill to our department gate every morning, her own supply of tea and coffee in tow. Others would bring us pasties, porridge, and hot water bottles. The first offer from UUK came through on a cold Tuesday morning. It belittled us, offering nothing but a delay. And it insulted us, demanding we rearrange all our teaching for free. Just as spirits were beginning to dip, news hit that a group of students, inspired by others across the nation, had occupied the main lecture theatre on our central campus. They have since conducted themselves with astonishing maturity and focus, hosting an ever-evolving curriculum of talks and workshops.

We can’t be complacent about this. The feeling of standing together is fragile; it begins to dissipate as soon as we lock back into the grooves of everyday work, and it takes effort to keep it alive. It also begins to dissipate as soon as victory becomes less-than-certain.

UUK have offered their latest solution on condition that all further industrial action is suspended. This might have worked a month ago, but they have since misled us repeatedly. We have lost trust in them and gained trust in each other, and this is illustrated neatly by their insistence that we retreat from a position of strength to a position of compliance while they commit absolutely nothing.

As Jo Grady, a lecturer in Employment Relations at the University of Sheffield, has pointed out, the members of UUK stand to lose nothing if we win; they will continue to earn six-figure salaries while harvesting the prestige created by the history of those institutes they claim to ‘lead’. We, on the other hand, will be hit hard if we lose.

It is imperative we do not bow out of this until we have a victory we can depend on, not one that disintegrates under scrutiny. As UCU members, we’re struggling on both sides: keeping the pressure on UUK requires us to keep the pressure on our union leadership, who have been known to wilt before. But ‘before’ was an era of fewer members, less anger, and less determination.

We need to win this for our pensions, that much is obvious. But for an increasing number of precariously employed academics, retirement remains a fantasy. Across the UK, around 54 per cent of all academic staff are on insecure contracts, and this adversely effects those lower down the career ladder.

There is often a galling disconnect between the money invested in us and in the things that aren’t people; to give one example, the University of Edinburgh is currently investing £120 million in something called the ‘Edinburgh Futures Initiative’, a high-tech research hub that defies disciplinary categorization. Designed ‘to ask what the future could look like’, it is being built at the same time as 67.4 per cent of all academic staff here are subject to insecure work contracts.

The university’s laudable commitment to ‘tackling society’s most pressing needs’ should start by looking in the mirror.

Precarious employment is by no means confined to Edinburgh, or higher education more broadly (in excess of seven million British workers are now on precarious contracts of various forms), but it rots the heart of universities. Those who teach and research are increasingly doing so while stressed and tense, overworked and underpaid. There’s no point fighting for our retirement if we’ll never get there, and it’s important to acknowledge that these two processes – insecurity of work now; insecurity of retirement later – are fundamentally linked. Victory now will inspire victory later (the inverse is also true, as UUK well know).

At a recent rally in Glasgow, one speaker urged us to demand the status quo and settle for no less. Each offer of a solution is to be measured against the benchmark of what we already have: is the new proposal worse, and if so, by how much? Collectively, how much worse do we feel is tolerable?

In such a formulation, the status quo takes on the sheen of a radical demand. But when bellowed through a megaphone, it falls rather flat. This strike has made clear that a return to the status quo on the issue of pensions requires an almighty upheaval of the status quo more broadly. The entire gamut of high student debt, low teacher pay, and undemocratic oversight needs to be done away with (or, in management-speak, ‘reformed’).

Each of these struggles is strategically separate, but intimately connected nonetheless. Capitulation on one issue will make the cause of fighting the others so much harder.

• Discover unique global perspectives
• Support cutting-edge independent media
• Magazine delivered to your door or inbox
• Digital archive of over 500 issues
• Fund in-depth, high quality journalism

Subscribe today »

Tomorrow I and my fellow workers at McDonald’s in in Cambridge will go on strike for the second time. Last time we went on strike there were only two locations participating. This time around that number has nearly tripled with workers at five locations walking out. We’ll be striking for £10 an hour, for an end to zero hour contracts and for union recognition. It doesn’t sound like a lot – it’s not – but it has the power to change lives.

Too many McDonald’s workers struggle to get by every week. They don’t know if they’ll earn enough to pay their rent or bills. Everyone’s living with constant stress and it’s time for that to change. Ten pounds an hour is not much, especially considering– McDonald’s makes billions in profit. A modest increase in wages would recognize the contribution that our work makes toward those the profits.

Today’s low pay is made worse by how McDonald’s uses zero hour contracts. They are a cause of such instability in workers’ lives. When you rely on your shifts to survive, you are forced to beg for the shifts you need. You never know if you’ll be able to eat week to week.

McDonald’s claim that they’ve offered fixed hour contracts to everyone, but that was entirely for show. It wasn’t a serious offer. They made it too difficult for workers to access the new contracts.

That’s why we need a union, so we can solve problems like these. So we can come together to support each other, and make McDonald’s a better place to work. It’s really about respect. We’re standing up for ourselves. Bullying is present in too many McDonald’s locations. It comes from a lack of respect for each worker’s individual needs and wants but it’s by coming together as a union that we can fight back against it. Together we can ensure that no worker has to go onto shift worried about being bullied or disrespected.

When we stand together we’re no longer alone. When we stand together as McDonald’s workers we are powerful. We can support each other, and work together to solve our problems.

The support for our strike in Cambridge has been overwhelming. Teachers, lecturers, firefighters, other trade unionists, community and campaign groups like War on Want have all sent messages of encouragement. It’s been an incredible boost. It’s been great to have the support of my family as well, having them understand the importance of what we’re doing.

We’re not asking people to boycott McDonald’s – it’s about holding McDonald’s accountable for how it treats its workers. It’s about saying to Steve Easterbrook, the global CEO of McDonald’s, that he needs to listen to workers and respect our right to a union.

Eventually we will win. When we do it will change lives for the better. I’ll be able to spend a little less time focusing on McDonald’s and more on pursuing my studies. With £10 an hour in my pocket, I’ll have a bit more time to enjoy my social life. Our movement is growing and it’s growing really quickly. McDonald’s, watch out. We’re standing up for ourselves and others.

Annalise Peters is a 20-year-old McDonald’s worker in Cambridge, United Kingdom.

• Discover unique global perspectives
• Support cutting-edge independent media
• Magazine delivered to your door or inbox
• Digital archive of over 500 issues
• Fund in-depth, high quality journalism

Subscribe today »

Julian has worked in exhibition centres in Australia for several years. The Latin American whose employment has always been on a casual basis, with no contract, lost all of his work as coronavirus hit and doesn’t expect any more for eight months. With no income, he can’t pay his rent for the shared Melbourne house he lives in, so has joined nearly 18,000 other people in Australia on rent strike.

Across the world significant amounts of people have stopped paying rent, and in some places mortgage payments, in the wake of Covid-19. Many simply don’t have the money and now face homelessness. Rent strikes are taking place in the US, Spain, Canada, France, Britain, South Africa and elsewhere as activists call for a stop to rent payments and evictions and for everyone to have shelter and space to get through the pandemic.

Informal workers have been badly hit and usually get no protection from the state. The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that almost 1.6 billion informal economy workers globally, have been ‘significantly impacted’ by Covid-19 restrictions and that their rate of relative poverty is set to increase by almost 34 per cent.

‘Most people have been forced into positions of even more precariousness – international students, migrant workers, refugees – these are the people that obviously capitalism would not take account of at all. It’s people like me who are left on our own,’ explains Julian. ‘They bring us here as cheap labour. That’s how they create wealth.’

Gentrification, escalating house prices, austerity, poor tenant’s rights and precarious employment means that many renters were already teetering on the edge of being able to make their monthly rent payments, even before coronavirus.

‘Over the course of the recent years, surging house price across the country have been accompanied by surging rents,’ explains Charlie, an organizer with Rent Strike Aotearoa. ‘That’s a chronic problem, along with the ensuing issues around mental well-being; we are seeing anxiety stress and depression as people struggle to pay rents and have to incur debts in order to meet rent payments.’

Organizers with Rent Strike South Africa also stress that there was a huge housing crisis there before Covid-19. ‘Our perspective is that the virus is not the problem so much as our political system that failed and continues to fail us,’ the group said in a statement. ‘State-capitalism, and the effects of ongoing colonial and apartheid geographies play out everywhere in issues surrounding housing and land.’

Informal workers in South Africa had already begun to lose their income in early March and so rent strike organizers started planning the campaign a couple of weeks before the nationwide lockdown began on 26 March: ‘We acted as quickly as possible to inform people that if it comes down to feeding yourself or paying your landlord’s bond, you could choose to feed yourself... our response has been based on understanding Covid to be a long-term problem that will not be alleviated simply by the lifting of the lockdown.’

In the UK, where more than one-third of private renters already live in relative poverty, London is the epicentre of the absurd housing market, and the country’s Covid-19 outbreak. Many renters in the capital were already spending over half of their income on rent – more for those on lower incomes, or working in the gig economy.

‘What we really want to press home is that this crisis wasn’t really caused by coronavirus,’ says J, an organizer with the London Rent Strike. ‘The virus pushed it that little but extra over the line to make everyone in crisis at the same time. It’s not really Covid that’s the issue here; it’s capitalism being used to dictate whether someone has a roof over their head or not.’

When he spoke with New Internationalist in early May, the 25 year-old was on furlough (a government scheme which means he gets 80 per cent of his salary paid) from his job working with charities. This was tiding him over, but he didn’t know for how long. ‘I don’t know where our finances will be in three months. Yes, I could pay the rent in May and probably in June, but after that I could be penniless because redundancy is coming after that for sure.’

According to a poll carried out in the UK in mid-May, one in five renters had been forced to choose between food and bills or paying rent, and one in four said they had already had to leave their home because of coronavirus. 

‘I’m trying to do the right thing’

This most recent rent strike wave has included thousands of university students. Alfie Brepotra is an organizer with the campaign at Warwick University. When New Internationalist spoke to him he was cramming in media interviews between exam revision fir his management degree. ‘It’s quite a tough time at the moment’, he said.

At the end of March he lost his job and the paid work he had lined up for the Easter break. He followed the government advice and spoke to his landlord, who owns multiple properties, about his situation: ‘She said, “you are either going to pay me or I am going to take you to court”.’

He has few options for financial support and is stuck paying rent for a house he is not even living in. ‘I’m trying to do the right thing by social distancing, so I can’t go back to my place.’

Full-time university students in Britain are not usually eligible for social security payments and so those who need to supplement their incomes do so through part-time work – often in sectors such as hospitality, hit hard by Covid-19.

Students can get loans to cover their living costs but in more expensive cities these are not enough to cover rent. For those without financial support from family, their ability to carry on with their studies could now be in question. ‘Landlords have suggested that students get personal credit cards’ said Brepotra.

International co-operation seems to have been in short supply lately but housing activists have been getting organized across borders. For many, this energy has given them optimism for the international tenants’ rights movement.

For Neville Peterson, a member of the Communicare Tenants Union, joining the Rent Strike South Africa campaign was also about being part of an international movement. Communicare is a housing provider which owns over 1,300 in Cape Town. Tenants have been in a long battle over exorbitant rents and utility charges. It is thought that just over 1,000 Communicare tenants are now withholding their rent.

‘People are scared, people are vulnerable. People don’t have money for lawyers and to appear in court [to defend against eviction],’ says Peterson. ‘We are upset with government because they are not coming to the fore with assistance and even the rental holidays that they are mentioning – yes you can stop it for a period of time, but if you have to pay it back in three months time or two months time it will have to be double the rent. Rental holiday periods, we are not happy with that. We won’t accept that. We want an unconditional freeze to rentals that you don't have to pay rent.’

As governments seek to ease off Covid-19 restrictions, open courts and pull back financial support, mass evictions and repossessions could be just around the corner. UK housing charity Shelter has warned of a ‘tsunami of evictions’ there once the lockdown ends.

This is why rent strike organizers are looking beyond Covid-19 lockdowns. ‘We don’t want any sense of back to normal because normal was shit for 99 per cent of people,’ says J. ‘We want complete change in how the rental sector works. We could be looking at entirely new ways to deal with housing. Most of us would want to see housing entirely taken out of the market and be treated as a human right like it should be. That’s the dream anyway. And it’s the first time that something like that has ever felt possible with the level of upheaval that we’re seeing.’

‘I’d like us to win a rent and mortgage amnesty,’ says Farida, another organizer with Rent Strike Australia. ‘Whether or not we win that I think what we’re building is something very important. We’re building a community of people. We’re building a grassroots fighting community of people for the rights of tenants and mortgage holders. This hasn’t happened on this scale in this country in ages. We’re going to need this community in the years to come.’

‘We are reaching a tipping point,’ says Julian. He is hopeful that out of this crisis can grow something more positive. ‘When it gets rough people actually see the need for solidarity. Solidarity is something that we should extend and it should be a value that we all have.

‘I’m hoping for hope. Not hope on the gods, not hope in the government – hope in humankind, hope in the solidarity that we can extend to each other. That’s what I’m hoping for and that’s what I would like to see that we come through these tough times and that we move to another period where we can actually be more aware of what’s going on, what is being done to most of humanity.’

• Discover unique global perspectives
• Support cutting-edge independent media
• Magazine delivered to your door or inbox
• Digital archive of over 500 issues
• Fund in-depth, high quality journalism

Subscribe today »