A preview of the unpublished book A CIVILIZATION WITHOUT A VISION WILL PERISH: AN INDEPENDENT SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH by David Willis. CHAPTER 1: INDIFFERENCE (Part 20). This blog is a continuation of review of The Creation of World Poverty by Teresa Hayter, published in 1990.
Chapter 12: Workers and wages
The problem of finding workers for mines and plantations was a continuous one. As long as workers have access to their own means of production they will not work for someone else. Where the Europeans did not themselves take over the ownership of the land, they needed to persuade local people to produce for the market, rather than for their own consumption. There were some cases in which local farmers quite eagerly grew cash crops in order to gain access to imports. In some places, in particular in the Caribbean and in South America, they were simply not available in sufficient numbers, and African slaves were imported. Even after slavery was abolished in the 19th century these continued to provide a more or less captive labor force.
The British used the practice up to the second world war
Elsewhere the problem was more complicated. In Africa there are examples of Africans being forced to work for Europeans, or to grow cash crops, by gun and whip. The best known of these examples were in Tanganyika under German rule, in Portuguese colonies right up to the period of the liberation struggle, and in French Equatorial Africa and the French Sudan in the 1930s. The use of more-or-less open forms of forced labor was widespread; the British made use of the practice up to the second world war.
The time and land devoted to producing food was reduced
But possibly the most usual way of getting Africans and others to produce cash crops was to extract tribute or taxes; these had to be paid either in the cash crop desired or in money for Europeans for a wage. This meant that the time and land that could be devoted to producing food was reduced and that subsistence farming was deprived of many able-bodied men and women. Migration became a massive phenomenon in Africa in particular.
Hunger drove them to work for a pittance
The inducement to work in European mines or farms was also sometimes reinforced by deliberate attempts to depress living standards in subsistence areas. Europeans were concerned not only with obtaining raw materials and agricultural commodities, but obtaining them at very low cost. Therefore the wages paid to workers and the prices paid to peasant producers had to be as low as possible. Slaves were of course not paid at all, although they had to be fed and sheltered, more or less. After the formal abolition of slavery (which was not everywhere effective), hunger drove them to work for a pittance.
Wages are a fraction of those paid in rich countries
One method of keeping down wages was to make sure that, although wages might provide for the bare subsistence of the workers themselves, the cost of providing for children who would supply the next generation of workers, was borne not by their employers or by the state, but by others. Multinational companies, especially those currently manufacturing consumer goods in ‘low wage areas’ for consumption in the rich countries, pay wages that are a fraction of those paid to workers in rich countries; pick and choose among workers; use women, children and apprentices; take them at their fittest; sack them when they are worn out. Thus they are freed of many of the charges that employers and state are expected to take on in the developed countries. Underdeveloped countries produce and train doctors and other skilled personnel, who are then used in the developed countries without the cost of training them or of supporting them when they are not working.