Open AccessWorkers Who Benefit from the Exploitation of Other Workers
Author(s) -
Marcel van der Linden
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
revista latinoamericana de trabajo y trabajadores
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2667-3231
DOI - 10.48038/revlatt.n1.8
Subject(s) - solidarity , inequality , rhetoric , wage , labour economics , working class , economics , business , sociology , political science , mathematical analysis , linguistics , philosophy , mathematics , politics , law
Often, all too often, global working-class solidarity remains fragile, conditional or fails to be realized in practice, whatever the lofty rhetoric may be. The present paper explores one possible explanation: workers in the North profit from the exploitation of workers in the South through cheap commodities and services, and additional job opportunities. For example, wage-earners in the North can buy T-shirts so advantageously because their real wages are much higher than the real wages of labourers in the Global South. This is what I would like to call a relational inequality within the world working class: some workers are better off because other workers are worse off. The paper presents a very tentative historical outline of global relational inequality since the 1830s.