We must stop the emergence of a global lumpenproletariat
Sir, Desmond King and David Rueda do a very good job at scratching the surface of the immense problem with “Cheap labour is creating an outsider class in Europe” (September 7), especially since the problem is not only Europe’s; it is happening all over the world; the problem is growing rapidly so much that non-standard jobs are already standard in many countries; and as they mention it leads to a tendency of equating cheap labour with second-class citizenship, although perhaps the term ignored citizens would be even more appropriate.
There is an urgent need for the world to find ways of truly assimilating within their societies all these new non-standard workers, informal sector workers, illegal immigrants and workers that work in the everyday growing illicit activities because if we are ever going to have a chance of putting the global house in order, for instance in terms of protecting the environment, the last thing we need is the emergence of a global lumpenproletariat.
One of the real challenges we face finding solutions to these problems is the fact that since there is so little data available about these sectors our PhD researchers have nothing to run their regressions on, which makes many of them stand at loss as to what to do, and has them instead going back to study, again and again, the plenty data available about the formal sector and its standard jobs.
By the way the problems that we confront here are not really related to the issue of labor being cheap since the other side of exactly the same coin, is just that labor is too expensive.
Desmond King David Rueda global lumpenproletatiat
There is an urgent need for the world to find ways of truly assimilating within their societies all these new non-standard workers, informal sector workers, illegal immigrants and workers that work in the everyday growing illicit activities because if we are ever going to have a chance of putting the global house in order, for instance in terms of protecting the environment, the last thing we need is the emergence of a global lumpenproletariat.
One of the real challenges we face finding solutions to these problems is the fact that since there is so little data available about these sectors our PhD researchers have nothing to run their regressions on, which makes many of them stand at loss as to what to do, and has them instead going back to study, again and again, the plenty data available about the formal sector and its standard jobs.
By the way the problems that we confront here are not really related to the issue of labor being cheap since the other side of exactly the same coin, is just that labor is too expensive.
Desmond King David Rueda global lumpenproletatiat
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