“You can’t have wage rises unless they are backed by improvements in productivity.” This is the bosses’ line on the growing number of pay disputes. On the rail it means replacing 1,950 maintenance workers and 1,000 ticket office staff with machines, cutting routine maintenance by 50%. On the post, automated parcel sorting machines are part of a “modernisation agenda” that is putting 10,000 jobs at risk. The government has even suggested there are productivity gains to be squeezed from NHS workers.
John Bellamy Foster takes readers back to Marx's understanding of the dialectics of nature and society. As Marx and Engels noted, humanity must not only…
The rapid financialization of nature is promoting a Great Expropriation of the global commons and the dispossession of humanity on an unprecedented scale.