FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
Take heed, America.ILO Reports, Wages Collapsing in the West, Rising in China, and Along Belt and Road
Dec. 12, 2018 (EIRNS)—The latest International Labor Organization (ILO) Global Wage Report has pointed out that while the average nominal minimum wage in China nearly doubled between 2011 and 2018, and wages for workers in state-owned enterprises rose even faster. In the advanced G20 economies, however, average real wages grew by a mere 0.4% in 2017, compared to 1.7% growth in 2015. While real wages were up by 0.7% in the United States (versus 2.2% in 2015), they stagnated in Europe, where small increases in some countries were offset by declines in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.
An op-ed by Jayati Ghosh highlighted these facts in the South China Morning Post today. Ghosh, an economics professor with the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, asked rhetorically: Given the global output recovery of recent years, why have conditions for workers in most parts of the world not improved commensurately?
“Neither of the usual suspects, trade and technology, is entirely to blame. The real reason workers are getting a raw deal is not so much economic as institutional and political. From country to country, legislation and court judgments are increasingly trampling on long-recognized labor rights,”
Ghosh wrote.
She said the
“obsession with fiscal consolidation and austerity has prevented the kind of social spending that could expand public employment and improve workers’ conditions. And the current regulatory environment increasingly allows for large corporations to wield power without accountability, resulting in higher monopoly rents and greater bargaining power. In short, neo-liberalism’s intellectual capture of economic policymaking across a wide range of countries is resulting in the exclusion of most wage earners from the gains of economic growth. But this was not inevitable. China, after all, has achieved rapid wage growth, and the share of national income accruing to labor is rising, despite the country’s pursuit of trade and rapid labor-displacing technologies,”
she concluded.
