Silver forces of labor pdf

Approximately 9, of these children in hazardous child labor are engaged in the production of baked goods. Spanish Translation. There are reports that children as young as age 10 are forced to work in the production of bamboo in Burma. According to the ILO and NGOs, forced child labor is pervasive, particularly in Karen, Shan, and Arakan States near military camps, with children constituting up to 40 percent of forced laborers being used for a variety of activities, including the production of bamboo.

Some of these children are sent by their families to fulfill a mandate imposed by the military that requires each household in a village to undertake specified forced labor activities. Villagers, including children, are forced by local officials and the military to work cutting bamboo for the military camps. The forced child laborers are not paid for their work, and face physical violence or other punishment if they refuse to work.

Burmese Translation. There is evidence that children ages 5 to 13 cultivate bananas in Brazil. Based on an analysis of the survey, an estimated 2, child laborers cultivate bananas. The ILO has found that generally children who work in agriculture may be at risk of exposure to hazards including, working long hours, carrying heavy loads, using dangerous tools, and exposure to the elements, physical injuries, and chemicals, such as pesticides.

Portuguese Translation. Submissions will continue to be taken into account as ILAB works to release periodic updates to the List. View the list of submissions. Breadcrumb ILAB. List of Goods Excel. List of Goods Bibliography. Open Filters. Print Version. Items per page 10 25 50 - All -. Artificial Flowers. Baked Goods. Want this report plus over a thousand pages of research in the palm of your hand? Download for iPhone Download for Android. Are you a company looking to fight child labor and forced labor in supply chains?

The List in Numbers. What You Can Do. Alcoholic Beverages. Child Labor. The most concrete discussion of an actual workers struggle in this section involves the Justice for Janitors campaign. It is striking that one of the most militant union campaigns in recent American history was carried out by a work force heavily composed of non-citizen immigrants. However, to be effective, the Janitors campaign had to develop associational strength through alliances with other unions, church groups, community groups, etc.

This is the financial fix, in which capital withdraws money from production, and invests it in financial channels. As a result of this earlier financial fix, workers engaged in Polanyian struggles to resist being treated as disposable commodities. The rising tide of these struggles provided the context for two world wars, and here there is an effort to illuminate the relationship between workers struggles and war.

Silver considers three contradictory theories-that war is used to distract workers, that war suppresses struggle by encouraging national unity, and that wars create the context for intensified struggles and revolutions-and resolves them by arguing that each theory identifies a different phase in the cycle.

Before each world war, states engaged in efforts to distract the population through mobilizing for war-classically, through colonial expansion although this strategy also sounds strangely contemporary.

This expansion itself helped lead toward full-blown world wars, which temporarily enhanced national unity -for example, the famous abandonment of international socialism by the parties of the second international—particularly because states were willing to enter into deals with workers to insure labor both for producing military goods and as cannon fodder. Finally, the denoument of the wars led to periods of intensified strike activity and revolution. Eventually the crisis generated by the financial fix of the late nineteenth century and the world wars was resolved through the deal produced by American hegemony, which promised mass consumption and rising living standards for all.

In the post-colonial world, much smaller groups of workers were promised the same, although these promises were more difficult to carry out. These in turn led to explosions of militancy in the new centers of accumulation Poland, Brazil, South Africa, South Korea, etc , which in turn led to the financial fix that has emerged over the last twenty five years.

Finally, this financial fix has produced a new bout of Polanyian struggles, epitomized by food riots over IMF austerity programs designed to recomodify labor, land, and the state sector. In the conclusion, Silver attempts to assess the present situation in light of the past. Although there is confidence that labor struggles will constitute a recurrent feature of capitalism, she is not unduly optimistic. The grounds for a new internationalism are undercut by the tremendous gap in incomes between workers in the wealthier and poorer countries.

None of the new leading industries seem to deliver as much bargaining power to workers as did the auto industry. The above oversimplifies a complex narrative worth reading closely.

But it gives some sense of the themes. As noted above, it forces a reexamination of many of the prevailing notions dominant among left thinking about the world economy. Similarly, the crisis of poorer states inability to meet any demands these days looks different when located in both the cycle of the financial fixes, and their ongoing difficulties from colonialism to hard-pressed developmental states to neo-liberal states.

Still, there are ways this narrative can be enriched and broadened. This happened in the Soviets of Petersburg in , among the anarchists of Barcelona in , in the cordones industriales of Chile in , and, to a varying degrees in many other places not least of which, Seattle There is even a moderate echo of it in the factory seizures in contemporary Argentina.

Everywhere in the twentieth century, Luxemburgian struggles were crushed-either by a counterrevolution or by a bureaucratic, revolutionary state. States and parties had a powerful appeal, and typically there was willingness to abandon workers power for the promise of a state that would mobilize the resources of society for the well being of all.

Nevertheless, Luxemborgian struggles raise different issues than the Polanyian types, which seek security typically through the state or Marxian types which seek higher wages and more control within a factory. The Luxemburgian struggles represent the prospect of workers shaping the social division of labor. This seems particularly resonant in a time when the dream of simply higher living standards through enhanced productivity-the promise made by states of the right and left in the twentieth century-is running aground on environmental reality.

Can workers play a role in directly shaping what is produced, how it is produced, rather than only who gets what? Perhaps in the less state-friendly climate that seems to be emerging in the twentieth century, these struggles will play a more prominent role, particularly in the vexing problem of defining what should be struggled for. I am not altogether convinced that automated warfare will resolve decisively struggles between wealthy and poor states, or render the societies of the states waging the warfare redundant.

Judging by the situation in Iraq, to produce a lasting victory, troops sooner or later need to be deployed on the terrain of defeated countries, at which point they become much more vulnerable. Already, there are signs of discontent among military families in the US. Additionally, the era of automated warfare in some ways initiated by the bombing campaigns of world war II has seen a counter-trend: the rising ability of actors from poor territories to bring the war to the terrain of the wealthy countries.

But of course, September 11 brought this to a different level. Not unprecedented as a crime against humanity-one can identify dozens of armies and governments that have done worse even in the very recent past, the Rwanda genocide, and the UN sanctions against Iraq were vastly more destructive in terms of human lives -September 11 was unprecedented in its scale as an attack by peripheral actors on the terrain of a wealthy country.

Broadly speaking, it does not seem obvious that wealthy countries can secure themselves against such attacks other than by costly measures to dampen down the anger directed toward them , any more than poor countries can secure themselves against bombardment other than risking attack and accelerating arms races by developing nuclear weapons programs.

In the short and probably medium term, September 11 inflamed racist and nationalist tendencies in the US. In the longer term, efforts to create a dense security environment may require the active cooperation of the working class, and thus concessions.

Finally, the prospects for international solidarity are perhaps underrated. As Silver does note, the spatial fix of transferring office work from the core to the Carribean or India requires that workers in those locales be brought on line.

She fails to note, however, that their online status may be employed to produce transnational communities of struggle. The more general process of the creation of transnational communities of struggle has already begun to happen of course, with the heavy middle class bias one would anticipate given who is on line at this point.

On the other hand, much as middle class nationalists eventually had to forge alliances with working classes to achieve their goal of national independence, so transnational networks may have to turn to the working class to achieve goals like environmental sustainability and human rights. Check out his Three Hegemons blog. He can be reached at threehegemons aol.

New from CounterPunch. Weekend Edition January 14, Friday - Sunday. Kim C. Dan Bacher Federal government forecasts that U. Dedrick Asante-Muhammad Dr. John P. Sebastian Santos Sports and Politics. David Swanson Read Glenn Ford.