April 2011 - Centre for Civil Society - University of KwaZulu-Natal

undertaken with little or no training. The death in 1998 of 24-year old
Simon Jones in a shipyard only hours after starting work (with several
minutes “training”) was the first well publicised example to bring this to
peoples’ attention. The trend continued of course, with current rates of
more than 1000 workers killed at work each year (with over 2 million being
killed worldwide). The recent case of the Chinese cockle-pickers
illustrated how use of illegal migrant labour, leaves such workers in a
hyper-exploited position existing outside any regulatory framework at all.
Little is known of the true extent of this but sectors known to be heavily
reliant are garment manufacture, restaurants (and associated food
industries like the meat-packing plants in Norfolk), construction and sexwork.
Contract
This amounts to a ratcheting up of the discipline applied to labour,
something that applies equally to those in longer-term work. There has
been a long-term change in hiring strategies, with the widespread
introduction of fixed contracts in place of the “job for life”, reducing job
security and forcing workers into having to periodically renegotiate their
positions. The teaching profession experienced this in the mid-80s, and it
later spread throughout the public sector, often as a prelude to
privatisation. Agencies are integral to the process of privatisation and are
being extensively used in the NHS, especially in care-roles, administration
and support positions. Self-employed subcontracting has long been used as
a way of undermining workers organising abilities (for example in
construction), and this has now spread to many other sectors. This
uncertainty has lead to the longest working hours and highest levels of
work-related stress in Europe as workers compete with each other to
retain their jobs. The benefits of this to the bosses are obvious: higher
intensity of work at lower costs, with the added gift of regular unpaid
overtime (according to the TUC, to the tune of £23bn last year alone) and
a disincentive to “be difficult”.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the productivity per worker
has more than doubled in the last 30 years. There has also been a massive
rise in the number of workers as women (by choice or necessity) rejected
their traditional roles and entered the job market, and the heightened
disciplining of the unemployed marshalled many into low-wage service
sector jobs.
Deregulation of labour markets (e.g. through weakening legislation that
once protected job security) makes it easier for employers to eliminate
jobs or replace workers with others on less secure contracts. It becomes
easier to pit workers against each other, extracting more labour at times
and places more convenient to the process of production. Casualisation
and “labour flexibility” have the overall effect of making it more difficult
for workers to improve or extend their conditions.
Casualisation As Process: There To Here
The phenomenon being described must be understood as a product of the
class struggle. It is very difficult to disentangle the complex
interdependencies of cause-and-effect, as every economic development is
a result of the manoeuvrings of both sides. It seems that the process of
casualisation is largely a result of three factors:
・ the shift from a manufacturing to a service based economy
・ decomposition of the working class as a political actor
・ increase in investment capital flows
The shift away from manufacturing (with its traditional high levels of
unionisation and strong collective bargaining) and towards services (small