IV527 - December 2018

IV527 December 2018 PDF available to download

The Kenyan government risks losing the lucrative Mombasa port to China should the country fail to repay huge loans advanced by Chinese lenders.

Albanian students are protesting en masse against a new hike in tuition fees in one of the poorest countries of the continent. While the medium wage in Albania is 350 euros per month, the tuition fees can go up to 2000 euros per year. Government wanted to make students pay for retake exams but it was forced to retreat to try to calm down the movement. But it seems not enough. We interviewed Redi Muçi, lecturer at the Faculty of Geology and Mining and member of Movement For University (Levizja Për Universitetin), one of the organizers of the protests.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev announced a drastic reform of Russia’s pension system this June, just as the World Cup began: the retirement age would be increased from 55 to 63 for women and from 60 to 65 for men. Although President Vladimir Putin tried to stay out of the debate, the announcement caused his approval rating to plummet from 80 per cent to 63 per cent. After hundreds of protests around the country, Putin went on television to tell the nation he would change the planned reform, revising the pensionable age for women to 60 and promising a significant increase in the value of pensions.

Protests against what is being called Viktor Orban’s “slave [labour] law” in Hungary are turning into a questioning of his entire regime. For nearly 2 weeks now, Hungarians have been taking to the streets in Budapest and in other cities across the country, protesting labour law reforms that will allow bosses to force workers to work up to 400 extra hours a year. For many observers, this movement is unlike others the country has experienced. We interviewed Gerg? Varga, editor of the web site Mérce.hu.

The shutdown in rural India coinciding with the trade union’s strike will unite the farmers and workers to challenge the pro-corporate and anti-people rule of far right BJP government.

In July this year, 89 workers at the Shenzhen Jasic Technology Co. Ltd demanded the right to set up a workplace union. In the past decade there has been an explosion of strikes in Shenzhen, and this dispute is one of the many where workers have demanded better working conditions, owed wages, unpaid social insurance, and severance pay. Yet, the Jasic case is unusual in that it was supported openly by a group of some 50 self-proclaimed Maoists and Marxist university students, along with a small group of older citizens. Coming from different parts of China, they organised themselves into a ‘Jasic Worker Support Group’ and descended on Jasic to stand in solidarity with the workers who were battling the police.

Militarist hawks and liberal pundits alike are up in arms (figuratively speaking, of course) over Donald Trump’s “victory” proclamation and announcement of U.S. troops’ withdrawal from Syria. Howls of Republican outrage may signal a further deterioration of the big twit’s shrinking political support on the home front. The Trump gang’s crisis of legitimacy deepens by the day. But what does it actually mean for the cascading disasters in the Middle East?

For years, the casual workers of the Port of Setúbal have had “regular” jobs. So “regular” that they are forced to pass a power of attorney to administrative employees of the companies who sign a contract of employment for them when needed.

Ten years after the bankruptcy of Lehmann Brothers, more and more analyses are being produced centring on two questions: how did it happen? Can it happen again? But they are almost all centred on the workings of finance, past or future. The point of view adopted here is a little different, since it seeks to identify the economic roots of global disorder. Its guiding principle is as follows: the exhaustion of the dynamism of capitalism and the crisis that opened ten years ago are leading to an increasingly chaotic globalization, bringing new crises, economic and social.