World Bank’s Anti-Labor Analysis

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Nov 2, 2012, 11:28:21 AM11/2/12

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World Bank’s Anti-Labor Analysis Is a Dirty Business Oct 26, 2012, Michelle Chen

It’s a 2012 campaign mantra: On Day One, the new president will reboot the economy by spurring businesses to grow and thrive. Both mainstream candidates have vowed to achieve this, in part by eliminating onerous regulations to “unleash” the long-suppressed power of American industry.

The story is surprisingly similar across the pond. The financial giants of Europe’s troika pummel Greece and other struggling Eurozone countries with a blitzkrieg of kamikaze deregulation, conditioning financial “rescue” on giving markets free rein to work their magic, unencumbered by law. The flipside of this celebration of the Invisible Hand is, inevitably, a merciless beatdown on labor, stripping protections like unemployment aid and wage standards.

The World Bank has taken the extremely dubious science of deregulation one step further by creating a guide, known as the Doing Business report, that quantifies the regulatory “burden” that investors may face in various countries. The 2013 report was released this week.

Echoing the corporate “job creator” mythology of the Washington consensus, Doing Business encourages financiers and governments to erode public-interest protections, including safeguards for unions and workers. Labor groups say the publication's warped views on regulation and worker protections effectively gives a statistical justification for leveraging economic aid or investment to pressure countries to privatize, deregulate and undermine unions.

Labor advocates are particularly critical of the section of the report that crystallizes these views, the “Employing Workers Indicator” (EWI) which purports to measure labor policy "as it affects the hiring and redundancy of workers and the rigidity of working hours." Despite the World Bank’s past assurances that its analysis of labor regulations won't factor into the main rankings on business friendliness, critics fear that these data nonetheless filter into the report's evaluations, and in turn imply labor laws essentially impede development.

The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) criticizes the 2013 report’s implicit endorsement of policies that slash benefits for laid-off workers, which praises governments for “addressing one of the main factors deterring employers from creating jobs in the formal sector.” Similarly, the report chastises some countries in Africa for granting supposedly over-generous severance-pay requirements for displaced workers, while ignoring the fact that severance pay is especially vital for workers in weaker economies because, in contrast to wealthier regions, “state-provided unemployment benefits are practically non-existent.”

.....continue at http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/14092/world_banks_anti-labor_index_is_a_dirty_business/