Alastair Greig: How the Global Movement of Money and People Turns the World Upside Down

⬤ What is your background and how did you become interested in global inequality?

My earliest intellectual passion, throughout the 1980s, was development studies, in particular the efforts of various revolutionary regimes (from the 1917 Russian Revolution through to the 1979 Nicaraguan Sandinista Revolution) to achieve radical social change within the constraints of the world capitalist system. I was also politically active during this period in the Australia-wide solidarity movement that opposed US interference in Central American affairs, and through this movement I spent six months during 1985-6 helping construct a primary school in Masaya, Nicaragua.

I then became a postdoctoral fellow exploring technological change within the Australian clothing industry, a project which initially sounded depressingly parochial to me. Yet, ironically, this project became the catalyst that raised my awareness of the ‘global’ dimensions of inequality. Australian industry was experiencing a sharp reduction in tariff protection, and many clothing firms relocated their labour-intensive sewing operations to lower-cost countries, such as Fiji, China and Cambodia.

However, other clothing firms dependent on rapid market changes took advantage of the depressed labour market to establish complex local subcontracting chains that relied on exploiting  ‘outworkers’ under flexible irregular contracts. By 1990, these outworkers were typically  more recent migrant women from Vietnam who worked from home and were paid piecework for sewing bundles of clothing panels delivered to them by sub-contractors.[1] For this vulnerable section of the workforce, the globalisation of the clothing industry was a process in which they experienced higher levels of exploitation, poorer working conditions and loss of entitlements. Principal retailers and manufacturers often denied any responsibility for outworker exploitation, but my project showed that this denial could not be sustained in the light of the ‘quality assurance’ procedures powerful companies promoted along their lengthening local and global chains of production.

The experience of the restructuring of the Australian clothing industry alerted me to the multifaceted nature of contemporary global inequality, along lines of class, gender and ethnicity. I became aware of how the costs and benefits of this process were unevenly distributed, and how this exacerbated inequalities on a truly global scale.

⬤ What is global inequality?

Due to the dramatic social, economic and technological changes that have occurred over the past few decades, the operative word in this question is the adjective rather than the noun. When I began my academic career in Australia during the 1980s, this question would have provoked a discussion on the differences in wealth and income between different countries, especially between the ‘first world’ and the ‘third world’. These inequalities also manifested themselves in unequal power relations between nation-states. Indeed, during the 1980s, my political activism and my PhD in sociology dealt with the unequal power relations between the USA and Nicaragua.

Today, ‘global inequality’ evokes a more complex network of social, economic and technological relations. My example of the Australian clothing industry illustrates this transformation. It involved the dismantling of post-WW2 nationally-centred regulatory compromises between the state, organised labour and capital, and its replacement from the 1980s onwards with a more deregulated market environment, where the decisions of all actors within nation states are conditioned by multiple extra-territorial relations. These range from the differential costs of labour across the world, technological change, bilateral and multilateral trade agreements, including ‘competition policies’.[2]

This regulatory shift has strengthened the hand of capital and weakened that of organised labour. As a consequence, throughout the world, the conditions of labour have deteriorated, leading to growing levels of inequalities between the rich and poor within nation-states.  Everyone experiences this era as an ‘age of uncertainty’, but there are contrary impacts depending on a person’s social status. It increases the power and wealth of the richest while putting downward pressure on the wages, conditions and security of the rest of the population.[3]

I share with many Australians the experience of immigration, and both my place of birth and my destination in Australia have shaped my views on global inequality.

I was brought up in Glasgow, Scotland and in my youth lived for its football culture. However, my father saw a city in decline and he faced an uncertain future in the shrinking Clydeside shipbuilding industry. As my parents’ standard of living deteriorated, in 1976 they decided to move the family to Australia. So by the age of 15, I already sensed that social transformation was an ambivalent, apprehensive and somewhat foreboding process that could rip people from the comfort of their hearth, even if others spoke of this process as modernisation and a radiant future.

A decade later, settled in Australia, I read Julienne Schultz’s Steel City Blues, which described a similar experience among steel workers in Wollongong, Australia. Schultz argued that ‘restructuring’ was a euphemism that hid the intertwined phenomena of corporate growth and job loss.[4] As I mentioned earlier, it was while analysing the clothing industry in the early 1990s that I started to appreciate the global nature of these unequal outcomes, part of what the Austrian economist Josef Schumpeter called ‘creative destruction’.[5]

Even though evidence shows that the gap between the richest and poorest in Australia is wider now than it was thirty years ago, and despite the alarming rise in the number of people who eke out a precarious existence, Australia remains a country with a strong ethos of egalitarianism.[6] In the same way that the euphemism of restructuring can mask unequal outcomes, the rhetoric of egalitarianism can blunt the political reactions to widening inequalities. Living in Australia underlines the value of studying inequalities from multiple perspectives: from objective and statistical analyses of trends and processes (realism) to more subjective approaches that document individuals’ experiences of inequality and how they frame it (interpretivism).[7]

⬤ What are the main historical causes of global inequality?

I find it helpful to approach the historical causes of global inequality using a theoretical orientation that establishes a continuity between earlier stages of global inequality with our contemporary phase.

These origins of global inequality can be traced to the mercantile plunder associated with European colonial expansion from the end of the fifteenth century onwards. This underwrote the primitive capitalist accumulation that led to European banking and later industrial capitalism, along with the proletarianisation of the European workforce. Immanuel Wallerstein and Arghiri Emmanuel among others labelled this global form of inequality ‘unequal exchange’, whereby the economies of the colonised societies were subordinated to the needs of capital accumulation centred in the most powerful regions of the world economy.[8]

This unequal exchange survived the 20th century, despite the end of formal colonialism, as the USA assumed the prime position as global hegemon. The world capitalist system metamorphosed again during the last decades of the twentieth century as capital took advantage of more deregulated financial markets and the revolution in communication and distribution networks. In this new global phase of inequality, capital was afforded opportunities for greater mobility, while nationally-based labour forces competed with each other in a downward spiral of deteriorating wages and conditions. Labour and capital remain intertwined in a global web of compounding inequalities.

When I began studying the restructuring of the Australian clothing industry in the early 1990s, I found that the explanations associated with ‘the new international division of labour’, ‘post Fordism’, and ‘disorganised capitalism’, were consistent with the historical model outlined by Wallerstein, if we consider our epoch as the latest stage of the world capitalist system.[9] The most striking feature of this epoch has been that while the world has never been so interconnected the rich and the poor even within the same city experience different lifeworlds. To paraphrase Robert Reich, no longer do they rise and fall in the same national boat in the shifting tides of the global economy; it is now every person for themselves.[10] Global inequality has contributed to a fracturing of our sense of community and social solidarity.

⬤ What are the most pressing contemporary challenges concerning global inequality and how do we deal with them?

There are two types of challenges that need to be confronted when tackling global inequality; first tackling the trends outlined above; and secondly, challenging deeper existential threats.

With respect to the first set of challenges, reversing the trend towards global inequalities requires a multilevel (from the local to the global regulation) and a multidimensional approach (including class, gender, ethnicity, among other dimensions). The best means of effecting progressive change involves listening to those most affected by inequality. In Australia, an important starting point in this regard would involve supporting the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart which proposes giving greater voice in Federal Parliament to the nation’s most disadvantaged group, Indigenous Australians.[11] At a global level, reforms could include tighter regulation of international financial transactions, greater transparency with respect to corporate-state contracts, enforcing international labour standards, and a moratorium on - or cancelling of - the debt of poorer nations. At a national and sub-national level, reforms include more progressive taxation, guaranteed basic income, affordable housing, universal health care, democratic budgeting and democratic nationalisation. 

Approaches based on individuals (or nations) ‘catching up’ with the wealthy have proven to be illusory, and are now beyond the planet’s ecological threshold. In the future, a redistributive logic based on meeting social needs and ecological protection must override a growth logic based on individual consumption. Reforms have to involve enhancing our collective environmental security and working towards environmental justice. 

If current trends towards global inequality continue, I have no doubt that the wealthy will use their power to protect themselves from the global environmental catastrophe that they themselves have promoted, leaving the rest to the world’s population to face the consequences of an apocalyptic future. Fundamentally, challenging global inequality is the most effective means of challenging our current climate emergency.

References

To cite this source, kindly cite as follows:

Alastair Greig, “How the Global Movement of Money and People Turns the World Upside Down,” in Key Questions on Global Inequality, edited by Christian Olaf Christiansen, Mélanie Lindbjerg Guichon, Oliver Bugge Hunt & Priyanka Jha, online version November 13th 2020, http://global-inequality.com/interview-series-alastair-greig/

⬤ What is global inequality?

Due to the dramatic social, economic and technological changes that have occurred over the past few decades, the operative word in this question is the adjective rather than the noun. When I began my academic career in Australia during the 1980s, this question would have provoked a discussion on the differences in wealth and income between different countries, especially between the ‘first world’ and the ‘third world’. These inequalities also manifested themselves in unequal power relations between nation-states. Indeed, during the 1980s, my political activism and my PhD in sociology dealt with the unequal power relations between the USA and Nicaragua.

Today, ‘global inequality’ evokes a more complex network of social, economic and technological relations. My example of the Australian clothing industry illustrates this transformation. It involved the dismantling of post-WW2 nationally-centred regulatory compromises between the state, organised labour and capital, and its replacement from the 1980s onwards with a more deregulated market environment, where the decisions of all actors within nation states are conditioned by multiple extra-territorial relations. These range from the differential costs of labour across the world, technological change, bilateral and multilateral trade agreements, including ‘competition policies’.[2]

This regulatory shift has strengthened the hand of capital and weakened that of organised labour. As a consequence, throughout the world, the conditions of labour have deteriorated, leading to growing levels of inequalities between the rich and poor within nation-states.  Everyone experiences this era as an ‘age of uncertainty’, but there are contrary impacts depending on a person’s social status. It increases the power and wealth of the richest while putting downward pressure on the wages, conditions and security of the rest of the population.[3]

I share with many Australians the experience of immigration, and both my place of birth and my destination in Australia have shaped my views on global inequality.

I was brought up in Glasgow, Scotland and in my youth lived for its football culture. However, my father saw a city in decline and he faced an uncertain future in the shrinking Clydeside shipbuilding industry. As my parents’ standard of living deteriorated, in 1976 they decided to move the family to Australia. So by the age of 15, I already sensed that social transformation was an ambivalent, apprehensive and somewhat foreboding process that could rip people from the comfort of their hearth, even if others spoke of this process as modernisation and a radiant future.

A decade later, settled in Australia, I read Julienne Schultz’s Steel City Blues, which described a similar experience among steel workers in Wollongong, Australia. Schultz argued that ‘restructuring’ was a euphemism that hid the intertwined phenomena of corporate growth and job loss.[4] As I mentioned earlier, it was while analysing the clothing industry in the early 1990s that I started to appreciate the global nature of these unequal outcomes, part of what the Austrian economist Josef Schumpeter called ‘creative destruction’.[5]

Even though evidence shows that the gap between the richest and poorest in Australia is wider now than it was thirty years ago, and despite the alarming rise in the number of people who eke out a precarious existence, Australia remains a country with a strong ethos of egalitarianism.[6] In the same way that the euphemism of restructuring can mask unequal outcomes, the rhetoric of egalitarianism can blunt the political reactions to widening inequalities. Living in Australia underlines the value of studying inequalities from multiple perspectives: from objective and statistical analyses of trends and processes (realism) to more subjective approaches that document individuals’ experiences of inequality and how they frame it (interpretivism).[7]

⬤ What are the main historical causes of global inequality?

⬤ What are the most pressing contemporary challenges concerning global inequality and how do we deal with them?

There are two types of challenges that need to be confronted when tackling global inequality; first tackling the trends outlined above; and secondly, challenging deeper existential threats.

With respect to the first set of challenges, reversing the trend towards global inequalities requires a multilevel (from the local to the global regulation) and a multidimensional approach (including class, gender, ethnicity, among other dimensions). The best means of effecting progressive change involves listening to those most affected by inequality. In Australia, an important starting point in this regard would involve supporting the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart which proposes giving greater voice in Federal Parliament to the nation’s most disadvantaged group, Indigenous Australians.[11] At a global level, reforms could include tighter regulation of international financial transactions, greater transparency with respect to corporate-state contracts, enforcing international labour standards, and a moratorium on - or cancelling of - the debt of poorer nations. At a national and sub-national level, reforms include more progressive taxation, guaranteed basic income, affordable housing, universal health care, democratic budgeting and democratic nationalisation. 

Approaches based on individuals (or nations) ‘catching up’ with the wealthy have proven to be illusory, and are now beyond the planet’s ecological threshold. In the future, a redistributive logic based on meeting social needs and ecological protection must override a growth logic based on individual consumption. Reforms have to involve enhancing our collective environmental security and working towards environmental justice. 

If current trends towards global inequality continue, I have no doubt that the wealthy will use their power to protect themselves from the global environmental catastrophe that they themselves have promoted, leaving the rest to the world’s population to face the consequences of an apocalyptic future. Fundamentally, challenging global inequality is the most effective means of challenging our current climate emergency.