Recognition of unions | Economy | EUROtoday

An glorious report on the 100 days of strike by Acerinox staff in Cádiz, by this newspaper's correspondent, Jesús A. Cañas, illustrates the profound adjustments that the world of labor is experiencing. He specifies that along with wage will increase to get well buying energy, “the real workhorse of workers are the conciliation problems generated by rotating shifts, made up of six days of work and four days of rest, of which two come from their vacation days.” “With these shifts we have already missed too many birthdays in our families,” says the president of the unbiased union Steel Workers Association (ATA).

In political and tutorial debates about the way forward for Europe there are few references to the social dimension of the brand new single market that’s being constructed. There is an absence of specific recognition that social advances have mainly been produced by stress from these under. It has been the work of the unions that has caused social progress.

The president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors (1925 -2023), with a unionist background, had the honesty to acknowledge that he had not managed to present the social content material he meant to his single market mannequin. Delors lucidly warned that “no one can fall in love with a common market.”

In the seek for the Europe that fits us, the latest reflections of Angus Deaton, Nobel Prize winner in Economics, in Rethink my Economyrevealed by the IMF, collected by the British Marxist economist Michael Roberts in Without permission.

Deaton, an economist involved with poverty, well being and well-being, confesses: “The profession knows and understands many things. However, today we are in some disarray. We did not collectively predict the financial crisis and, worse still, we may have contributed to it through an overzealous belief in the efficacy of markets, especially financial markets whose structure and implications we understood less than we thought.”

And extra related is his courageous self-criticism about what he considered unions: “Like most people of my generation, I always thought of unions as a nuisance that interfered with economic (and often personal) efficiency and I was glad of their slow decline. But today big business has too much power over working conditions, wages and decisions in Washington, where unions barely wield power compared to corporate lobbyists. In the past, unions served to achieve wage increases for workers, whether they were unionized or not. In many places they constituted an important part of social capital, bringing political power closer to workers in the workplace and in local, state, and federal governments. Its decline is contributing to falling wages, the growing gap between executives and workers, the destruction of community and the rise of populism.” The self-criticism of a clever man that offers lots to consider.

Follow all the knowledge Economy y Business in Facebook y Xor in our e-newsletter semanal

_