Accueil
"Three billion individuals on this planet are wage labourers. They are employed by only 50 million business men and women worldwide. The wealthiest of these business people, like Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch, command assets equivalent to those of several small countries. By contrast, the people who work for them each command a
miniscule fraction of the world’s wealth. What’s more, they must labour for some 65–80 per cent of their lives if they are to satisfy their everyday needs and wants. Their salaries help to sustain not just themselves but entire families and communities [...] Meanwhile, a staggering 160 million people – a number almost equivalent to the population of Brazil – are currently seeking paid employment. Furthermore, if this vast reserve army of the unemployed is not to grow even larger, some 500 million new paid jobs will have to be created worldwide by 2010. Without these new jobs, population growth will produce unprecedented levels of global, national and local unemployment (ILO, 2001). Finally, as if this were not enough, tens of millions of people are today uprooting themselves from their homeplaces and criss-crossing the globe in search of employment. Labour migration on this scale has not been seen since the turn of the last century and is unlikely to slow down in the near future." (pp.XI-XII)
"So ‘normal’ has it become in the modern world for most people to offer themselves as wage-workers that it’s easy to forget what a relatively new norm this is. One can work for oneself; one can work for others but for non-monetary returns ; and one can work with others in order to produce things that are not exchangeable for coins and notes. In some parts of the world – especially in the South – these forms of non-waged work persist, albeit as islands within a vast sea of paid labour. But the overwhelming reality of work in the twenty-first century is that it entails, in effect, ‘selling oneself’ to an employer for certain daily, weekly, monthly and yearly periods. Most of this paid labour goes on in workplaces separate from the home, though in a minority of cases the latter remains the main site of commodity production.
Another way of saying this is that we live in a distinctively capitalist world. Though capitalism is by no means new, as a way of producing goods and services it is, today, globally dominant. In capitalist economies, businesses large, medium and small make things with the overriding aim of making money – and more particularly profit. The logic of capitalism is thus not about, say, social equality, human happiness or environmental justice. These laudable things may now and then be a means to the end of making money or even its outcome, but in capitalist systems they are rarely ends in themselves. In this context workers are, in essence, one ‘factor of production’: their services are purchased by employers along with other ‘inputs’ in order to make commodities that can be distributed and then sold to consumers.
According to Marxist and neo-Marxist theorists, this means that whatever their other differences wage labourers together comprise a ‘working class’. Globally, this working class is larger than at any point in human history. Certainly, it vastly outnumbers the ‘capitalist class’ that employs it in different workplaces worldwide. So why, it might be asked, do so many wage labourers worldwide work for a pittance in appalling conditions (be it immigrant female garment workers in New York or bonded child farm labourers in Pakistan) ?" (p.XII)
"Workers, and the businesses employing them in specific places, are more than ever connected to distant others within a national, international and global space economy." (p.XIII)
"Scale is, if you like, the middle term between place and space. It concerns whether and how local (or sublocal) scale events and actions reverberate across space (and vice versa). The capacity to ‘up-scale’ actions from a place or places to larger spatial scales can be an enormous source of power for particular businesses or workers. For instance, transnational companies have the capacity to search the globe for suitable locations for certain of their production facilities. Likewise, the capacity to ‘contain’ actions – like a workers’ strike – within a certain scale (such as the local) can be a powerful weapon for (or against) employers and labourers in pursuit of their respective objectives." (p.XIII)
-Noel Castree, Neil Coe, Kevin Ward & Mike Samers, Préface à Spaces of Work. Global Capitalism and Geographies of Labour, SAGE Publications, London, 2004, 303 pages.
"In New York, income inequalities grew more quickly than in the United States as a whole. As Sassen (2001: 270) describes:
New York has the worst income inequality in the US. The average annual income, adjusted for inflation, of the richest one-fifth of NY families rose to a level twenty times above the income of the bottom fifth of families in the 1996–1998 period, more than double this gap in the late 1970s. The city’s middle class also lost ground to the richer fifth, with the median income of the top quintile of families rising to a level four times that of the middle fifth of families." (p.14)
-Noel Castree, Neil Coe, Kevin Ward & Mike Samers, Spaces of Work. Global Capitalism and Geographies of Labour, SAGE Publications, London, 2004, 303 pages.
