Trades unions and migration

hi i'm starting a new pair of videos now about trade unionism and immigration i'm hoping i'm getting the sound quality a bit better um been fiddling around a lot with it we'll see how it goes now this is basically a video based around two blog posts i produced in the week immediately after the brexit referendum prior to that i hadn't been blogging or producing videos it was these events which made me think i needed to put forward some arguments from a marxist point of view to enable people to understand what was going on about that debate so i'm speaking here as a trade union activist so i was a trade union representative for my union before i retired and i want to ask what is the purpose of trade unions well they've been there to prevent competition between workers and beyond that their aim is to create an institutional and artificial labor shortage they aim to establish the union as the monopoly supplier of labour power and by doing this they want to reduce the rate of exploitation by employers and a key instrument of this historically has been the union shop the all union or clothes shop is the key to imposing a monopoly of the supply of labour power this was commonplace when i started work in british industry there was no question that you would join a union the only question was which union you would join in order to make sure you joined the union that was appropriate for organizing the particular trade or skill that you you worked in and to prevent competition between unions over capturing members now that's the aim of unions but union activity always takes place against a background that is set by demographics union ability impose a clothes shop and to reduce exploitation is inversely related to the level of surplus population the more of us there are around the harder it is or rather the more rapidly we're growing the harder it is now marx analyzed this surplus population in terms of what he called reserve armies and he distinguished two main reserve armies one of which he called the floating reservoir and this is basically the population that's released by new technology when there is an increase in automation and workers are laid off by that all population that's released by a recession over a maybe five ten year period but these are short-term effects there have effects over the scale of the business cycle they don't have century long effects over and above that there was what he called the latent reserve army now latent basically means laying it's the population available from agriculture and it's also the population available from low wage areas and the latent reserve army has a much longer term effect it has an effect rated of the order of half centuries to centuries i've presented this graph in other videos basically it's showing how wage levels for men in england oscillated inversely with the population the bottom graph the bottom line on the graph shows the population of england in both cases the level in 1800 counts as [Music] 100. and you see that when the black death came there was a sharp decline in population there was the black death and then a series of other plagues after that which drove the population down and as the population was driven down real wages rose and real wages peaked around 1450 then population started to recover and the recovery of the population meant more competition for jobs and started to drive down wages and wages fell the little oscillations up and down caused by other plagues and it was only the vast improvement in productivity brought about by industrialization that eventually allowed wages to regain the level of the 15th century and they didn't do that until towards the very end of the 19th century and that was for men for women the decline lasted even longer so that by the mid-19th century they were still way below where what women workers in victorian industry was worth earning was way way below what women had been earning in the 1450s and these are a consequence of long long term demographic changes and in general the effect of the latent reserve army is to weaken the possibilities of trade unionisation it holds back the raises rises in wages and leads to a higher rate of exploitation you can see this effect very clearly when you look historically at the process of exhaustion of the latin preserve army in britain and this occurs quite sharply at the end of the 19th century you can look at the percentage of the population which was urban and see that this was growing rapidly and then leveled off around 1900 so that the migration from the countryside to the town which is the essence of the latent reserve army ended and immediately after that you got an absolute soaring level of trade union membership this is the graph for trade union membership latent reserve army runs out here hush trade union membership shoots up this is when you got the shift from craft unions to general unions because prior to that point it was very difficult to create an artificial labor shortage in any area other than an area where there were specific craft skills which limited entry into the trade it was extraordinarily difficult to fire to that point to set up a general union which would organize non-craft workers once the latent art reserve army was exhausted general unions shot forward and you got the formation of the labour party as a significant influence and you had a total transformation of the political structure or the polarization of political forces in britain as a result of that oops now what what is the effect of migration well migration adds to the latent reserve army basically the latent reserve army of agricultural agricultural and undeveloped regions becomes part of the local latent reserve it's latent according to march because it lies in weight ready to be used by capital now uk data shows this very clearly if you plot the immigration into the uk in thousands of people per year and you plot the exploitation rate rate of surface value on the vertical axis [Music] you find there's a very strong positive correlation that those years or periods when immigration was high other periods when the rate of exploitation was also high and vice versa the periods when exploitation was was low coincided with builds on integration was low and the correlation coefficient is 75 statistically that means 75 of the variation in exploitation is statistically explainable by the variation in immigration the year with the maximum sorry the year with the lowest rate of exploitation was 53 pence in the pound and there were 200 000 immigrants that year the year with the highest rate of exploitation 89 pence in the pound had 589 000 immigrants very strong positive relationship if you look at the us you see the same thing in this case i'm giving a graph over a period of a hundred years from 1910 to 2010 the yellow graph shows immigrants as the percentage of the u.s population the red graph above that shows how much of us national income was going to the top one percent now that slightly underestimates the rate of exploitation because it doesn't include the exploitation by those capitalists who are not in the top 1 but again you see a strong positive relationship in the u.s case the correlation is higher a 78 correlation an 8.2 increase in the immigrant population produced an 8.4 increase in the top 1 income now is this just chance i think it's very unlikely to be a coincidence firstly because it's exactly what the marxian theory of the reserve army predicts i'm recording this outside and the plane's going by secondly because it's replicated into the leading catalyst destinations for immigration thirdly because the effect is long term are not just individual years we're looking at we're looking at a century in the u.s case we're looking in a half century in the british case and the u.s long-term data captures turning points of a cyclical process in the light of this should we support the demand for open borders should we support continued free movement of labor after brexit the reactions i've had when i raise these questions or when i publish these statistics is that it's reactionary that leftist open borders advocacy means at a practical level that there will be legal rights for migrant workers and i'm doing nothing but pandering to nativist racist stories and with a nationalist or a supposedly nationalist perspective like this you can never explain where inequality comes from well the problem is that what i'm relying on to explain this is marx's theory of the reserve army marx's theory of exploitation is it reactionary well yes there are certainly reactionaries who point out the effect of competition in the labour market but the issue is whether it's true that immigration depresses real wages or depresses the rate of increase in wages and if so what to do about it if it's true and if people's practical experience tells them it's true we discredit ourselves by denied nobody trusts liars we should be distinguishing ourselves in terms of the responses we advocate not not by denying facts now the common response i got was that if migrant workers have full legal rights they won't act as a serious competition for domestic labor but the problem with this is that european law does give full protection to foreign workers it allows employers to transfer low pay union contracts from one low-wage country to a high-wage country and it outlaws industrial action to prevent this the the in the next set of slides i'm going to be the ones marked with the hammer and star emblem i'm taking material from the commerce party of britain marxist lenders publications the eu's original treaty lay down the abolition as between member states of obstacles to freedom of movement of persons services and capital capital wants these freedoms to maximize its profits pure and simple and the european court has repeatedly upheld the right of employers to move labor from one country to another to lower wages and circumvent collective bargaining for example the eu court allowed a finnish ship owner called viking lines to re-flag its ships to estonia and employ workers at lower rates from estonia in the laval case a latvian company imported workers into sweden to build a school under cutting swedish rates in both cases workers tried to strike to protest they tried to take industrial action and in both cases the european court declared this industrial action to be illegal and that european court buying the ruling is binding on all nation states so all nation states at that point oblige to make any industrial action of that sort illegal the aim of the treaty of rome is to increase the labor the reserve army the free movement of labour encourages the modern slavery of workers moving at the order of cheapskate global employers gang masters and people traffickers it adds to the huge number of the reserve army of labour and it defines the laws of political economy to think you can massively expand the supply of labour power without depressing its price now marx said that capitalism depends on a double freedom an ironic freedom it demanded that people be free to move free to move to leave the land and sell their labor apart to urban capitalists but it also demanded that they be free of property free of the ownership of land free to move and property less hence in the british case the enclosures and the highland clearances freedom is made out to be a great thing but in the capitalist freedom is always paired with exploitation this possession impoverishedness and exploitation were inseparable from this freedom capitalism turns freedom into the means of exploitation the freedom to emigrate was already an ironic joke and this was well understood by 19th century artists basically open borders is a neoliberal slogan its free movement is freedom for employers to hire the cheapest labor and european experience since 1957 has shown that if free movement across borders is written into law the courts will protect the right of employers and outlaw any industrial action to prevent the undercutting of wages by the importation of foreign labor this was a big big political crisis in britain on the side of liberalism and the eu you had the majority of mps the majority of parties people like blair stammer cameron craig sturgeon the cbi and the majority of professional middle class voters against you had the majority of all voters and the majority you had a maverick and temporary estab uh not an establishment party ukip and you had a minority of the labour and conservative parties now what was the effect well once a referendum had taken place fewer recruits were available from the eu as you'd expect from the theory of the reserve army this caused real wages to start rising again at the time of referendum wages had fallen since 2007. real wages had been 472 in 2007 had fallen to 460 at the time of the referendum since then before the the keravid crisis they'd risen back up to 473 the left liberals claimed that working-class voters were misled by demagoguery when they voted for brexit it was a vote they said it was based on ignorance prejudice stupidity but it seems that working-class voters had a better idea of what was in their immediate class interests than those liberals who tried to educate them now in the next video i'll talk on what policy should trade unionists demand on migration now after the victory of brexit has been won and what what policy should we take towards what the bourgeois parties are offering now you

Channel: Paul Cockshott

Views: 1,981

Rating: 4.8865247 out of 5

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Id: T2zJjJJh_tU

Length: 22min 40sec (1360 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 24 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/RabidRab]

My internet is beng too fucky to watch the whole video right now (I've saved it for later though) but I love how he starts with "I hope I've fixed my audio issues" while making a video with even worse audio quality than he usually does. I love Cockshott but I genuinely think he's trolling us at this point.

[u/RANDYFLOSS]

Wait what’s his name