Eve Hall, a former consultant and expert with the UN's International Labour Organisation, took a hard look at a global virus that causes communities a great deal of harm.
It doesn't take much to start trashing a community. For a start, bring in people from hundreds of kilometres away to replace permanent workers. Don't offer the incoming workers anything but piecemeal and temporary jobs for the barest minimum wage (if they are lucky). What happens to them when they aren't employed is none of your business.
Advertise these wonderful opportunities on the local radio station to make sure you have got a surplus to choose from. Don't give them housing, let them squat, wherever, but let the proper houses that were occupied by the permanent workers, before they were retrenched, fall into the hands of thieves and squatters who take away the doors and the windows and finally, show incredulity when crime happens.
Subcontracting and sub-contracting ...
big fleas and little fleas...
This process is in danger of gaining momentum. Like it says in the jingle, big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em - and the little fleas and so on ad infinitum.
Most subcontractors don't have a permanent workforce but hire and fire according to the work that's passed on to them. Minimum Wages and Unemployment Insurance aren't words that are bandied about much.
In short these are phenomenon that the World bank are proud of promoting: Sub contraction is one of the ills that globalisation brings in its wake: Insecurity. What do temporary workers do on days when they are not working and they haven't got money in their pockets?
They have little to do, they just hang about and petty theft becomes more common. The crime rate goes up.
Yes it's true that not all the blame should fall on the subcontracting companies . Some, after all, are just providing work to people who would otherwise have no jobs at all.
The government thinks it is cleaver encouraging deregulation and subcontracting as a way of generating employment. But deregulation means ditching labour laws that used to give workers some security. If conditions of work lead to insecurity and crime, what does this say about the quality of that work?
The International Labour Organisation has launched the quaint notion into our world that work has to be decent if it is to address the problems of poverty and crime. It describes decent work as work that is productive and secure, provides an adequate income and offers social protection.
Until government and employers begin to take this seriously, the effects of globalisation will increasingly trickle down into our communities and they are just as destructive as a virus.
By Eve Hall
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