Who is working within the corporate food regime?

Over the last few months I have heard several people that I respect -- both activists and academics -- claim that the sum total of employment in the food system, as an aggregated sector of economic activity, is very significant. Of course, this employment is not in farming -- the capital intensity of industrial agriculture under the corporate food regime in countries such as Canada means that the employment linkages from farming are low. Thus, in 2006, of an employed labour force of almost 17 million in Canada, only 2.2 per cent were directly working in agriculture. Rather, work in the corporate food regime is primarily in service-sector jobs: restaurants, bars and caterers; corner stores and supermarkets; and wholesale food trade. This has a very interesting implication for those that are involved in the food movement: we will never know with any deal of accuracy how many people are employed in jobs related to the plethora of activities that are part and parcel of the corporate food regime. This is because the common categories used to assign individuals to labour market activities in both industrial and occupational censuses in the developed capitalist countries do not have the level of detail needed to construct such information.

For example, if Statistics Canada wanted to construct an aggregate measure of all those employed or having an occupation in Canada's food system, it is obvious that someone who has the occupation of 'chef' (occupational category G411 in Canada's 2006 census) would be assigned as working within the food system. However, someone working in the Human Resources department at Monsanto (occupational category B021 in Canada's 2006 census) works in human resources, and not the food system, according to Statistics Canada, and at the level of aggregation used by Statistics Canada could not be separated from someone working in the Human Resources department of a financial institution. The same would apply in other developed capitalist countries. Similarly, employment in specialty food stores (industrial category 4452 in Canada's 2006 census) could be captured as work within the food system, but someone who is employed within a university (industrial category 6113 in Canada's 2006 census) and teaches food studies could not be separated from someone teaching astrophysics and thus could not be counted as working in the food system.

This is not simply an arcane matter of definition. For local, regional, national and international food movements to unite, it is important that the food system be seen as a livelihood issue, rather than simply an issue for 'consumers' or 'producers'. In order to be seen as a livelihood issue, it would certainly be helpful to know how many people's livelihoods depended upon the food system. Citizens and farmers are connected because both need to be able to construct viable (and meaningful) livelihoods in order to take part in the food system -- and yet the food movement will not be in a position to conclusively demonstrate the extent to which livelihoods in global, national and local economies depend upon the food system.

What can be said, however, is that the extremely ambiguous statistics that we do have substantiate the proposition that the food system is a significant source of livelihoods. For example, aggregating industrial classifications in the 2006 Canadian census that can be directly linked to the food system demonstrates that 13.8 per cent of all Canadians were employed in a food system-related activity. It can also be unambiguously stated that this is a dramatic understatement of the actual numbers of those whose livelihoods depend upon the food system in Canada: it does not include educators, researchers, government civil servants, financiers or hauliers, among others, who might be employed in a food system-related activity. It is also significant that many of those that can be counted as working within the food system are not unionized, while many of those that cannot be counted but are in fact working within the food system are unionized. The implication is very clear: as a livelihood issue, the character of the corporate food regime must become a central concern for the labour movement.

the curious case of the missing recovery

Join Jim Stanford in this excellent search for Canada's economic recovery.



My thanks to Brian Robinson for showing me this.

the York University strike

As a resident of Toronto, with friends who work and study at York University, I have, like many Torontonians, followed the strike by contract faculty represented by CUPE local 3903 with great interest. The voices that seem to be aired in this labour dispute seem to be of those who do undoubtedly lose out: the students. Nonetheless, while I have a great deal of empathy for the difficulty that the 50000 undergraduates at York have faced, I sometimes wonder if they 'get it'.

CUPE 3903 has 3412 members, and, like many universities in Canada and the US, does more than 50 per cent of all undergraduate teaching at York. The union wants a wage settlement that is above the rate of inflation, a 2 year contract to harmonize the York contract with those of other CUPE university locals, job security, better working conditions, an end to the student code of conduct at York, and post-residency fees. Utlimately, though, this strike is about improving job security.

It is, in my view, important to remember just who are striking. Within the membership 871 are 'contract faculty' who sign a contract to work a certain number of months a year. The remainder--teaching assistants and graduate assistants--work part-time. So the York strike is above all else a strike by part-time workers for improved terms and conditions of employment, including some job security. It is the sort of thing that sensible people take for granted.

In this light, that the provincial government feels that it is necessary to pass back-to-work legislation to force the local back to work should be seen as an affront to sensible people. Back-to-work legislation, which I disagree with in principle, is usually passed to get essential services back up and running. This is what happened last year, for example, when the Toronto Transit Commission, which runs public transport in the city, went on strike. However: how can part-time workers be deemed an essential public service? If their work is essential, why don't they have a properly paid and secure job? These are the key questions that are missing in discussions about the strike.

The reliance of North American universities on part-time and insecure faculty demonstrates the extent to which neoliberalism has reconfigured tertiary education. Neoliberalism in the public sector relies on insecurity and fear to get the job done. However, casualization and flexibilization are not the basis by which to create a worldclass tertiary education sector where students actually learn. The strike demonstrates that some people are not prepared to kow-tow to such a regime. CUPE 3903 continue to deserve the full support of the people of this city.

slavery's ground zero

I have been spending the holiday season in Richmond, Virginia, my first trip to the former capital of the Confederate States of America and my first trip to the U.S. South in almost 30 years. Before I came to Richmond, I had not thought much about the significance of the trip from an international development perspective, but for the past week I have not been able to avoid it. The reason is simple: in one of my early first year lectures I focus my attention on the role of slavery in facilitating the rise of industrial capitalism in Europe and the United States, and Richmond is the ‘ground zero’ of the American slave trade.

The U.S. stopped the international trade in slaves in 1808. It was Virginia’s slaveholders that stepped in to replace international trade by transforming Richmond into one of the biggest, if not the biggest, slave markets in the U.S., particularly in the neighbourhood known as Shockoe Bottom. What Île de Gorée in Dakar, Senegal, is to the slave trade from Africa, Shockoe Bottom is to the slave trade in the U.S. Owners of slaves from Virginia plantations brought them into Richmond to sell to owners developing new plantations in the Deep South. As a result, between 1808 and 1865 anywhere between 300000 and 3500000 slaves were sold out of Richmond’s slave markets. Considering that in 1865 the African-American population of the U.S. stood at around 4 million, this means that today hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of African-Americans can today trace their ancestry back to the slave markets of Richmond.

However, slavery in Richmond was not only about securing unfree labour for agricultural export production from the South. It was also about ‘developing’ the economy of a Virginia witnessing declining soil fertility and a decaying agrarian economy. Granted, a large proportion of Richmond’s slave population worked as ‘domestics’. Nonetheless, the development of industrial capital in Richmond—a legacy that can still be witnessed today—was predicated upon unfree slave labour. Hired slave labour was an important part of the work force at the Tredegar Iron Works, and the other iron foundries, that provided the industrial basis of the Confederacy’s attempt to sustain the class power of agrarian elites. Hired slaves also dominated the labour force in Richmond’s tobacco industry, performing the hard, back-breaking work needed to process tobacco. Finally, slave labour was necessary to create and maintain Richmond’s transportation networks. Unfree labour worked on the construction of the James River and Kanawha Canal, the first canal in the U.S., while crews of slaves, alongside free African-Americans, made up the bateau crews that navigated cargoes into Richmond.

The truth is thus that the history and development of Richmond, like the United States as a whole, and indeed the North, was, to a large extent, built by slave labour. As I try to argue in my lecture on colonialism and slavery, a convincing case can be made that industrial capitalism in its infancy required slavery in order to gain economic ascendency in the North. Capital was built, initially, on slavery.

This reality demands two final comments. The first is that slaves incessantly resisted their unfree status. Richmond paradigmatically illustrates this. Following the Haitian Revolution of 1792, the first major slave revolt in the south was led by a 24 year old slave named Gabriel (often, incorrectly, named Gabriel Prosser), a deeply Christian blacksmith. In 1800, disgusted by the slavery that bound him, Gabriel made plans to take the city of Richmond by force. By August of 1800 Gabriel had thousands of slave supporters and had secured a cache of weapons, including guns. Gabriel’s plans came to naught: he was betrayed by two of his ‘followers’ and, moreover, on the day of the planned revolt, the bridges into Richmond were destroyed in a flood. The Virginia militia attacked Gabriel and his thousand followers the next day; they were captured, and he and his followers were hanged. Gabriel’s revolt, little acknowledged outside African-American historiography, was the closest the U.S. came to a home-grown slave-led revolution.

The second comment follows from the fact that Gabriel’s revolt is little acknowledged. The history of capitalism’s development, and our globally-privileged life, is predicated upon slavery; yet this is not discussed, freely and openly. Our lives are built on a hidden history of power and privilege, a transcript that needs to be revealed and confronted if the poverty that stalks the world is to be eliminated.

Postscript: It should be acknowledged that Richmond was, in 2007, the first city in the U.S. to formally apologize for slavery. In mid-2008 Gabriel was informally pardoned by the Governor of Virginia. In late 2008, in the Shockoe Bottom area, a Slavery Reconciliation Statue was unveiled. These acts, which are about revealing a hidden transcript, do not come about autonomously, but as the result of citizens seeking to reclaim history. Such acts are a precondition of further, deeper social change.

globalization and labour

The International Monetary Fund has, in its most recent edition of the semi-annual World Economic Outlook, made an astonishing, if not, for them, heretical, discovery: that globalization, that great force for worldwide economic prosperity and social justice, has reduced the share of national income going to labour, and, as a consequence, increased the share of national income going to capital, in the form of profits. Has the IMF discovered that globalization is bad for global labour?

Not quite. The IMF argues that while labour's share of income has gone down, the total size of national income has gone up: in other words, the elasticity of income with respect share is both positive and greater than one. This means that labour's income has still gone up, because of the increase in national income, even though the fraction of national income accruing to labour relative to capital has gone down. In a sense, then, the IMF is proposing that globalization is producing an economic valhalla--more money for workers, more profits for capital. Talk about a virtuous circle that global capitalism creates!

The IMF also evaluates what is driving changes in the labour share of income: technological change, an expansion of the global labour force, or labour market policies. The Fund finds, consistent with the dominant economic orthodoxy, that technological change benefits capital and that the expansion of the global labour force benefits capital, but that liberal labour market policies benefit labour. So technological innovation and technical change benefits firms, the expansion of the global labour force as a result of the 'entry' of China and India onto the world stage benefits capital, by driving down global wages, but political economies where it is easy to 'hire and fire' benefit labour.

The IMF has, for the most part, apparently re-discovered elements of classical and Marxist political economy! Marx was, along with some of the classical adherents of the labour theory of value, extremely clear that technological change was biased in favour of capital. Marx's revenge on this point, however, was that as the share of labour in commodities declined, and the organic composition of capital rose, this would lead to a fall in the extraction of surplus value, and hence a fall in the rate of profit. This, according to Marx and others, could, to an extent, be partially offset by tapping into new labour forces had the benefit of increasing the reserve army of labour, fostering competition amongst the labour force that could generate relative, if not absolute, cuts in wages. This could counter, temporarily, the decline in the rate of profit. As for liberal labour market policies, this had a similar effect: disciplining labour so as to offset declines in the rate of profit. Thus, from a Marxist point of view, the Fund has discovered long-standing cyclical and counter-cyclical tendencies within capitalism which were already known by some but which were not accepted by the global economic orthodoxy.

Of course, it is important to stress that Marxist and Marx-inspired measures of the rate of profit are not the same as the profits reported by companies in the Standard and Poors 500. Thus, although Marx believed in a falling rate of profit, this is perfectly compatible with an increasing rate of profit amongst global firms. The two are measuring quite different things; and estimates of Marxian-based profits drawn from conventionally-based measures demonstrate that the increasing profitability of the corporate sector is perfectly compatible with Marx's theory of crisis.

Of course, the IMF does not see its findings as heralding a crisis. Far from it. What is interesting is the extent to which the Fund, the Bank and other global institutions feel the need to justify policies in the face of widespread discontent with the downside of globalization. In an era when resistance is widening, there is a need to shore up the defenses. The IMF offers a fresh pillar for the defense. However, the redoubt is extremely weak. Moreover, it is unlikely to convince global labour, excluded as they are from the prosperity that is accruing to the few during the latest bout of neoconservative globalization.