Multinational corporations and jobs

Yeah, typically cali and northeast districts aren't so crazy. My teachers don't get too worked up if I go on an anarchist rant in government or history class. It also helps to know more than your teacher. Normally they're too embaressed to counterpoint and they just move on.

A good case study is the fruit industry. Del monte uses the mass-spraying of hugely powerful pesticides and herbicides to make sure the plants need attending by fewer people, and uses intensive monoculture farming practices which kill local plant/animal life, lead to diseases in newborns of all species (including humans) etc and eventually render the ladn unusable, atwhich point they fuck off somewhere else. They're also directly or indirectly responsible for the paramilitary killings of people trying to undo such harmful practices.

This results in Del Monte, a company which produces around 15% of the global output of bananas alone, oficially employing 17,600 people (9,800 seasonal) total for all its businesses, while the Australian Banana Growers’ council produces 1% (using more labour-intensive, but less environmentally damaging methods to farm) and has 2,000 members (ie. farmers, employing various numbers of people).

To increase its output to the same levels as Del monte would require a membership number of around 30,000, and a workforce of several times that, without taking into account the fact that bananas are only one string in Del Monte's bow. Of course the number or people not officially on payroll (and thus not given any rights, large numbers of which are children) for Del Monte is likely to be higher than the official numbr suggests, but I wonder, would your teacher condone child exploitation as 'much needed jobs'?

So no. Multinationals don't create jobs.

Freedom did a big expose of Del Monte which Libcom republished Hereif you want more info on that.

I'd still argue in that case that they are merely fulfilling a function demanded by (this) society. In the west multinationals are more regulated but fundamentally the tenet is the same, they take areas in which a product (be it services, manufacture, whatever) has been asked for and control it, but in terms of jobs inevitably their economies of scale will cut rather than raise the number of people employed in the pursuit of that function. In terms of straight job creation, the inefficiences of small businesses are numerically better employers than the consolidation of large ones.

Course that's also an argument against multinationals as an overall source of stability in an economy, should they come under threat for whatever reason. If one small company goes under the collateral damage is limited, and largely manageable for associates. If a large company closes a major operation, it will drag others down with it due to dependence (monopoly custom). While a multinational entity is undoubtedly more robust on its own terms, the vulnerability of the communities it bases in should the worst occur is made exponentially larger.

And they have figured that it's (generally) more cost-effective to obey labour laws than ignore them. They've realised it's easier to reverse/change labour laws for their benefit at its debating stage...

Multinationals don't create jobs, workers do. Workers create the means of production needed to work. If multinationals can buy them, it means that they must already exist. Even in a market economy, workplaces which make machinery could advance the MoP to a group of workers in return for future payment rather than getting money from capitalists. All capitalists do is appropriate the MoP and restrict access to it (because property gives them the right) thereby actually reducing the possible amounts of jobs.

The "you wouldn't have a job without them" argument is based on the misconception that the TNCs provide aything in a meaningful sense, when it is workers who create everything needed for jobs. It is also based on the idea that the shareholders etc have the right to stop people from using the factories if they themselves are not physically and completely using them themsleves. Providing jobs ie.e giving permission means nothing if you don't think they have the right not to give permission.

To play devils advocate for just a few seconds it is fair to say that capitalism is highly creative and creates new industries and therefore new jobs - this was a point even spelled out in the Communist Manifesto.

Yes, corporations provide a lot of employment and are innovative in business methods, driven as they are by profit. We are where we are now, and what with the advances made in science and technology it no longer need be true that capitalism alone need be the engine of job creation.

I go along with the line of the mutualists that finds that markets in themselves are not bad and that trade is a vital social mechanism - however the millions of third world workers at the bottome of the capitalist, corporatist food chain are not involved in trade, they are involved in wage slavery.

The problem to me rests on how to keep the drive of product innovation (not necessarily equal to making consumer crap) with a bottom up mutual economy that involves workers meaningfuly - the point has already been made that corporatism is utterly destructive of small enterprises - not just in the thrid world but in all major cities.

London and Britain are currently failing to counter the dominance of supermarkets and high street retailers and the incredibley negative effect this is have on small chop keepers, leading to shop closures and clone high streets ... you know the drill.