Make sure you check out Mostafa Bassiouny’s article in the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar, on the fight of the Egyptian civil servants for free unions. A booklet on the Egyptian labor movement, coauthored by Mostafa and Omar Said, is available in English here.
John Reed describing the transformation of Russian society with the outbreak of the 1917 revolution:
As in all such times, the petty conventional life of the city went on, ignoring the Revolution as much as possible. The poets made verses–but not about the Revolution. The realistic painters painted scenes from medieval Russian history–anything but the Revolution. Young ladies from the provinces came up to the capital to learn French and cultivate their voices, and the gay young beautiful officers wore their gold-trimmed crimson bashliki and their elaborate Caucasian swords around the hotel lobbies. The ladies of the minor bureaucratic set took tea with each other in the afternoon, carrying each her little gold or silver or jewelled sugar-box, and half a loaf of bread in her muff, and wished that the Tsar were back, or that the Germans would come, or anything that would solve the servant problem–. The daughter of a friend of mine came home one afternoon in hysterics because the woman street-car conductor had called her “Comrade!”
All around them great Russia was in travail, bearing a new world. The servants one used to treat like animals and pay next to nothing, were getting independent. A pair of shoes cost more than a hundred rubles, and as wages averaged about thirty-five rubles a month the servants refused to stand in queue and wear out their shoes. But more than that. In the new Russia every man and woman could vote; there were working-class newspapers, saying new and startling things; there were the Soviets; and there were the Unions. The izvoshtchiki (cab-drivers) had a Union; they were also represented in the Petrograd Soviet. The waiters and hotel servants were organized, and refused tips. On the walls of restaurants they put up signs which read, “No tips taken here–” or, “Just because a man has to make his living waiting on table is no reason to insult him by offering him a tip!”
Chris Harman, Revolution in the 21st Century, London: Bookmarks, 2007. Pages 57-59:
It is often argued workers cannot fight back as they once did because globalization of the world economy allows firms to shit down operations and re-open somewhere else. Globalization certainly means finance houses and speculators can move massive amounts of money from one country to another at the click of a computer.
There is a also a trend for firms in one country to buy into those in other countries. But it is harder to move production from country to country than it is to move money. Productive capital is made up of factories and machinery, mines, docks and offices. These take years to build and cannot simply be carted away. Sometimes a firm can move machinery and equipment. But this is usually an arduous process and, before equipment can be operated elsewhere, the firm has to recruit and possibly train a sufficiently skilled workforce. In the interim, not only does investment in the old buildings have to be written off, there is no return on investment in machinery.
What is more, few productive processes are ever completely self-contained. They depend on inputs from outside and links to distribution networks. So before a firm sets up a car plant it has to ensure there are supplies of quality steel available, secure sources of nuts and bolts, a labor force with the right level of training, reliable power and water supplies, a trustworthy financial system and a rod and rail network capable of shifting finished products. It has to persuade other firms or governments to provide these things, and the process of assembling them can take months or years of bargaining. Multinational companies do not simply throw these assets away and hope to find them thousands of miles away because labor is slightly cheaper or governments slightly more co-operative. Such moves take time and effort and involve writing off costs. Productive capital simply cannot be as footloose as people often suggest.
The claim that firms find it easy to move production overseas is widespread in the US. But economist Tim Koechlin reports that less than 8 per cent of the US productive investment goes abroad. Job losses are mainly the results of firms cutting the number of workers they employ in existing plants, or closing some plants so as to concentrate production in those that remain.
In Britain, the pattern is much the same. The manufacturing workforce has been cut in half over the last 30 years, but total output has not fallen and each worker is producing twice as much as 30 years ago. In other words, each worker is more important to the system now than in the past. There are many important jobs that cannot be moved abroad – for example, in construction, newspaper printing, the docks, the civil service, post and telecommunications, local government, education, refuse disposal, food distribution and supermarkets. Even in the case of call centers, where some work has moved to India, the employment sector in Britain continues to expand.