Political consciousness and political action of industrial workers in Ghana: a case study of Valco workers at Tema
What is the political consciousness of Ghanaian workers in large-scale foreign and state enterprises and what action have they engaged in? The present study, based on fieldwork in Ghana in 1975, attempts to answer these questions with regard to answer these questions with regard to industrial workers in a multi-national corporation at Tema, Valco (Volta Aluminium Company). Notes, ref., tab.
The Political Potential of African Urban Workers
RESUMELa classe ouvriere a, l'hisioire le demontre, joue un role important lorsqu'il s'est agi d'encourager a la fois les reformes sociales et la revolution dans les pays industrialises. Peut-on s'attendre a ce que les travailleurs urbains jouent un role analogue en Afrique tropicale etant donne les caracteristiques bien differentes du capitalisme peripherique? Les partisans de la theorie de l’ « aristocratie ouvriere » diraient que non. Mais cette theorie n'est pas seulement vague sur le plan abstrait et faible sur le plan pratique en ce qui concerne l'emploi pour l'ensemble des travailleurs en Afrique tropicale, elle est aussi simpliste de par son grossier materialisme. Alors que l’ « economisme » s'avere une tendance generale parmi les mouvements ouvriers des villes, certains segments en sont venus a une conception sinon revolutionnaire, du moins « populiste » qui transcende l'econo- misme. Certains des facteurs de politisation qui favorisent chez les travailleurs une mentalite populiste et partisane d...
Interpreting African Underdevelopment: Reflections on the ILO Report on Employment, Incomes and Equality in Kenya
IN 1971 THE KENYA GOVERNMENT requested the International Labour Organization to make a study of unemployment in Kenya and to recommend what to do about it. The report of the resulting mission of 26 experts ran to 600 pages and was published in November 1972.1 As was to be expected, it provided an immense quantity of invaluable information. More important, it placed public discussion of the problem, and indeed of the wider issue of the nature of the Kenyan economy and the pattern of public policy, on a new footing. Although what follows will be critical, it should be made clear at the outset that the report is a major achievement of its kind and should play an important part in the future analysis of African underdevelopment. At first glance the report's discussion of the general causes of unemployment seems to be broadly within the school of thought which sees it as arising from the 'development of underdevelopment' and the 'dependency' of peripheral countries on the metropolitan centres in the international capitalist economy. The report rejects the concept of 'unemployment' as its central concern. Instead, it sees the problem as consisting of a structural distortion of the economy, which provides highly rewarding employment for a small minority, and a very large amount of barely productive, poverty-line employment for the massesthe 'working poor'-in relation to whom the wholly unemployed are only another small minority; even if, when educated, a minority that is politically threatening. This analysis is worked out in great detail. The report points out that in the rural areas the main cause of unemployment and of unrewarding employment is that most people have little or no land, while a few hold large under-used acreages. Moreover, rural incomes, especially smallholders' incomes, are being further depressed by declining rural-urban terms of trade. Young people entering the labour force therefore seek work in the towns, especially Nairobi. But in the towns modern sector employment has grown very slowly, thanks to