neutrality non-alignment as laid down by the Ard Fheis'. Behal argued that this policy had His argument that the Eritrean struggle had not received adequate support and that soviet submarines off the Irish coast were as dangerous as NATO ones narrowly carried the day: The motion had been opposed by Dannv Morrisor Chomarie who behalf the Ard defended the record of Sinn Fein's Foreign Affairs Bureau.
The main internationa guest speaker was from the Basque country in the area of the Spanish state. Contrary press statements that sections of the US organisation Irish Northern Aid, or Noraid, were supporting O'Bradaigh's bicakaway group, the organisation reSinn Fein's paper Republican News carries a statement issued jointly by Noraid's national publicity director, Martin Galvin and vicine Flannery, the organisation's founder and trustee.
'any possibility of a • split between outselves or within the ranks of Irish Northern Aid following Sunday's vote on abstentionism Trish Northern Aid is, and Will continue to be, fully united the Republican Movement and fully united in opposition to DrisI colonial rule 11 LIc by 199 votes to 153.
throughout this year, of the North.
•Towards tier soc Socialist Action DINED 1E8 Nuclear power workers lobby Labour Party conference.
THE LONG phase of economic depression in which the capitalist economy finds itself offers no sign of recovery. Before coming to conclusions about the overall employment and unemployment trends, let' us look at the trends industry by industry. They fall into categories: those where there has been a clear, absolute decline in employment, those where there is an intermediary situation, those where there has been an increase in employment.
first category, dustries hardest hit by unemployment, there is a combination of declining demand and the impact of introducing new technologies. Here there is a considerable drop in employment. Such industries include ship building, mining, steel, textiles, shoes and — to a certain petrochemicals and oil extent fineries.
AEU president, Bill Jordan -"aggressively right-wing.
tion.
industrial employment three trical applances.
public works.
no decline in demand.
those infrom country to country.
high-tech industries, goods industry, ceutical products.
Europe and term it is about the same. lest at The drop in felt to be in some circles Nonetheless have to he made The second category is where demand, and therefore production, continue to increase, but at a siower tempo than in the past. and where there 1s a strong thrust of technological innovaThese are key industries, accounting for almost half the total volume of Paulo, cice construction Here, in the medium term, there is Demand continues to increase. But it is being accompanied by increased productivity, hence by the application of new technologies. Therefore, there is a combined ettect on employment that is hard to measure exactly, because competition plays a big role. The trends, therefore, are different Finally, there is the third category -that of industries that are enjoying a greater than average growth in demand and production. Paradoxically, in these the technologies are having far less impact employment than in the others. The most important are the engineering industry, the entire machine and producer electronics, scientific medical pharmaIf we put these data together, the first thing that emerges is that there is an increase in the numbers of unemployed and the rate of unemployment. But here there is a myth to be refuted -the idea that we are seeing fully fledged 'dewaging in North America The figures on the trends in the volume of employment in capitalist Europe are the following: a drop of 0.5 per cent in 1983, stabilisation in 1984, a slight rise of 0.2 per cent in 1985. Over the longer quite minimal fluctuations. If you compare them with those in the period 1930-38, the difference is striking. Then, there were nose dives in employment of the order of 30 per cent. The present drops are marginal ones. This does not mean that they are not grave or without social consequences employment in industry speaking has been sharper. But the shift is not so extensive as it is particular remarks about youth and female unemployment. Since the onset of the crisis, female employment has been rising, marked. Male employment has been declining.
In Denmark, the level of employment for women rose from 63 per cent in 1975 to 72 pe cent in 1983. In Sweden the rate rose from 67 per cent to In Belgium the rate of employment for women rose from 44 per cent to 50 per cent, in France from 49 percent to 51 percent, and in Italy from 35 per cent to 40 per cent. Only in West Germany is the rise siow 49 per cent to 50 per cent.
This rising rate of female employment has to be qualified immediately by taking into consideration the scope of unsteady jobs. Most of the increase in female employment is accounted for by the increase in part time work.
This increase in part time work is different from one country to another. Between 1973 and 1983 part time jobs rose to 25 Sweden, 25m 21 percent to 24 percent cent of in Denmark, and from 16 per cent to 19 per cent in Britain.
In Europe women hold more than 80 per cent of part time jobs. In West Germany the rate is 92 per cent. In the other European countries, it is around In Britain the proportion is lower, 70 per cent women as against 30 per cent tor men.
Unemployment among young people between 16 and 25 is rising sharpty.
term unemployment, Belgium holds the disreputable record. is also increasing sharply. The rate of youth joblessness went from 4 per cent of total unemployment to 10 per cent at the beginning of the 1980s in West Germany, from 15 per cent to 2o per cent in France, from 14 per cent to 22 per cent 'We are still largely in what is called the phase of "semi-automation" ' in Britain, from 25 per cent to 34 per cent in Italy, and so on.
ing number of young people who have never worked, who have never held any phenomenon has obvious political implications, which represent grave threats for still in an initial stage automation what is called the - Iron automation'. There is no question of manual • jobs or radically eliminated from industry. In these conditions, the recomposition of the working class, the relations between labourers and skilled workers, and new skills, fluctuate greatly according to industries and from plant to plant, depending on whether the new technologies are applied to a large extent, partially, or only marginally. total in ing from high-tech industries, LOUL often something that has not been proven that is that in the coming ten years all of industry is going to be reorganised on this model. No because no one knows that, and, for the moment, seems probable.
introduced, that brings on a reorganication of the whole labour in which there are a whole series of burdens that go along with this changeover, and it cannot be long they will have to be borne Learn. ing and trying out the new technology, and reorganising the work process, requires a lot of labour power. Likewise, plants have to be re-equipped as subse.
widening.
at the same people In all these countries there is a growleft social and WU KCID If we turn to another issue, we are of complete most of we are still largely in number phase OI "semiwage being plied solely of old criteria of count Any conclusion drawn by generaliswhere profitably used, assumes ductivity can say that, extremely 1m- of capacity.
When a radically new technology is But process.
predicted in advance how cal IN BRITAIN today every division and differential in society is grow ing. The political gap between the Labour north and the Tory south is An increasingly open and aggressive right wing in the - Hammond in the EET PU, Jordan in the AEU, Golding in the NCU — is strengthening itself time as powerful movements of women and black have developed in Labour Party and the impacr of the miners strike continues to be felt Every pay differential — between skilled and unskilled, men and women, white and black, private sector and public sector, among teachers and white collar workers — is widening.
The gap between the employed and unemployed is becoming more quent stages of the production proces have to be brought into line with th new technologyy.
This requires building new plant and new machines, with correspondin effects on employment - effects tha are very different than they would be i the technology was already in place The bourgeoisie, th trade union bureaucracy, the bourgeo state and governments are deliberatel using all this talk about robotisation t frighten the workers.
So where is the real problem ssessment of this process? It is that the projections about th of robots and the trend robotisation, the question of market that is, the volume of production an sales, is left entirely out of the pictur The argument is built up as if the ne technologies were with in accordance with technical efficiency reducing wage costs, without taking a of the fact that these technologies involve an enormous i crease in the volume of productio They therefore require a big expansi of the market in order to be employ In the production of the motor f the Fiat Uno car for example, the pr of labour has more doubled as a result of the use of cor puters and robots. But the producti apparatus is utilised only to 30 per ce Why? Because in order run it at 100 per cent of capacity t Company would have to sell two or thr times more cabs that it does today. Ai where is it going to sell two or thr times more cars? Today, auto sales a increasing in the order of 2-3 per cen Obviously, there is competitic within the industry. Fiat can hope to i crease its share of the market at the c pense of other automobile manufa turers, but only by a little. This is wh
permanent. Hysterical campaigns against gays and lesbians, on issues such as AIDS, accompany the adoption by the labour movement of its first ever progressive policy on gay and lesbian rights. Racist chauvinist campaigns growing at the same time as Black Sections have developed and there more support for withdrawal from Ireland than for many years. The political situation has moved to the right but with the continued development radicalised minorities.
All these developments have an economic basis. Capitalism today is driving to create a two tier society': an economy with a stable core of skilled, overwhelmingly white, male, and older workers — the base of the Hammonds, Jordans and places limits on the introduction of the new technologies.
Overall economic growth, outlets, markets, . buying powel, figures have to be taken into account. The industrialists own projections and perspectives are pinned on that. At an international conference of robotics industrialists a vear ago. the figures advanced were quiet modest. predicted that from now to 1990, only 1-2 per cent of industrial labour would be robotised. This is an overall figure It does not mean the figure may not be much higher. But in general robotisation remains quite marginal.
In the famous high tech workshop at Fiat mentioned, in which there are 103 computers and 56 robots, the total number of workers employed dropped from 3,100 to 2,670 — that is a drop of 13 percent in employment. the introduction of new technologies, is far from having been totally automated.
we now turn to look distribution of employment between sectors of the economy then generally over the last ten years a decline has been registered — - altough it is much less pronounced than usually thought employment in industry, and a new increase in employment in the so-called service sector. However it is only in the public sector that we are seeing a net expansion of non-industrial employment, one that is continuing.
But here also we have to avoid extrapolation. bounced crisis of public finances the cutbacks this is countries rapidly These sectoral shifts in employment bringing about a recomposition of working class. Do they inevitably 1 a weakening is movement? Here we have to sharp in British regular employment of rising numbers social spending.
general trend throughout powerful HEALTH S overall sales was 111the trend to Even with at the unemployed is becoming more in public sector by comparison traditional sectors. But this automatically leading to in all Today, reverse this Consalco of the organised Goldings - and a growing number of insecurely employed, mainly female, black, and young workers.
These trends are particularly where the economic effects of the oil revenues have permitted increases in real to be felt. wages of over 15 per cent under Thatcher for many of those in - coupled with drastic falls in income for those on low pay, unemployment benefit, pensions and with rapidly DUvel Ly savage attacks on many fields of If Britain is an extreme case the has developed Western Europe, Japan, and North America. In a survey ERNEST MANDEL looks at the strength of these trends throughout Europe.
against "The gap between the employed and beware of extrapolations. The only constant that seems to emerge is that there relative increase in the weight of wage earners, and therefore of unions, in the with the does not mean weakening working-class militancy or of the trade union movement's striking power.
paralysing the telecommunications centres, the big transporthe electricity generators, or even the banks can hit a capitalist economy just as hard as shutting down the mines, steel or even the auto industry could have in the past. In more than a few countries, some public Impact of the miners strike continues workers unions are today the spearhead of working-class combativity. no reason beforehand to exclude the possibility that this trend may grow.
It is another question whether what have been traditional bastions of the workers movement, owing to the concentrations of workers and the traditions of militancy they represent, can be replaced by new bastions. Let me note only that the concentrations of wage earners in rall, the post office and telecommunications centres, the air ports and the electronics industry is considerable. New bastions of the union movement may well develop in such places.
What have been the long term effects of the crisis on the level of direct real wages, social benefits, and on the problem of pauperisation? The bourgeoisie has calculated rightly that frontal attacks against social security would provoke sharper reactions than attacks wages. For example, touched sick benfits, the response could be a general one rather than from a limited group. The bourgeoisie wants to fragment the working class. So, it has an interest in moving more slowly to attack social security. It is in fact thanks to the protective net of social security that the socio-political effects of the crisis have been more limited up till now than they were in the 1930s.
This does not mean that there will not be attacks against the social security system, quite the contrary. As the crisis drags on, the defecits in the social security system are growing. In these conditions, the system of social protection is going to be strongly challenged.
The result of this is that even if overall social security spending is on the rise, the number of persons and households below the poverty line is marked ly on lue rise. in Wes number of persons benefits has practically doubled, rising from 1.9 to 2.5 million persons. In Britain the number of people who can be considered between 1975 and 1984 - rising from 4.5 million to 8.5 million.
By taking economic weakening of the workers movement — which is gentlal although uneven from country to counthe bourgeoisie is achieve a lasting change in the relationship of forces among the classes and to institutionalise it.
dismantling the gains of the workers movement over the preceding quarter of a century, if not There is over the past 50 years.
If we want to sum up these gains in a single formula, workers movement managed to achieve a quantitive rise in the level of objective class solidarity through a combination of trade union power, control over the work process and politcal weight. The weight of the workers been a force in society for better protection of all the underprivileged strata That is the most general meaning of everything that has taken place since the crisis of the 1930s.
Moreover the bourgeoisie is not trying to hide what it wants. Its project is to deal a lasting blow not just to the incomes but to the status of a third or 40 per cent of the working class. This is term justified as a characterisation of the bourgeois project, achieved, if a third or 40 per cent of the if they working class is deprived of minimum protection countries such as Belgium, we will go back to a pre-1914 situation.
All the bourgeoisie's projects aim at 'Since the onset of the crisis, female employment has been rising, and this has been rather marked.' increasing On Germany the living public OCTICS poor had almost doubled advantage of the by the depression and the relative phenomenon, trying to cases, general objectives.
AS This means essentialimportant tests, LIOSE hand we could say that the movement has of society.
them up society strong. because if it then, sondarily, that Socialist Action 21 Nov 1986 and institutionalising the divisions within the working class -divisions between native and foreign workers, between men and women, between young people and adults, between adults and retirees, between skilled and unskilled workers, betwen declining industries and high-tech ones, between public and private sectors and betweer the workers of different countries.
all levels, the bourgeoisie's policy aims at provoking, broadening and institutionalising these divisions. It proposes different measures, suited to each case, to freeze such divisions and increase their weight in the relations between canita and labour as a whole Some success have already been achievwrong to UCHY Despite the very positive reactions by young people against racism, in a whole of European countries chauvinism and racism have had real effects on the adult working class We can see three kinds of reaction working in capitalist Europe to this overall situation. There is a minority that is resigned to it. There is a minority that has radicalised. The majority may fight back in specific but it is hard to mobilise for for the anti-war anti-imperialist mobilisations, youth proall the autonomous movements thev are a result of a dou ble desynchronisation On the there objective desynchronisation, resulting from the fact that the various social layers are being hit in different ways by • the crisis of bourgeois society. On the other hand. there is a subjective desynchronisatior between the reactions of the organised workers movement and various strata The workers organisations were backward on these questions. It was inevitable that others would take Now the question arises of reuniting all these components of a potential challenge to capitalism in a crisis into a fighting bloc against bourgeois society It is easy to make such a reunification on paper, but in practice the revolu tionary currents are still weak, while the bureacratic apparatuses are still vers In these circumstances the reunification in deeds will be long and ardous. This requires, moveover, that the socialist project, the socialist programme, again gain credibility in the eyes of the broad masses.
Marxists must fight systematically for
Socialist Action 21 Nov 1986
----- pull-quotes -----
JU CANT PLAY CuMiCS WITH "HER PEOPLES
21 Nov 1986 JES TO NUCLE?'
i a two ¡ety?
SOCIAL SECURITY