Globalisation has been accompanied by a global offensive by
Capital against the labour of workers and small producers
(Chapter 1).
Globalisation has accelerated the process of centralisation of
capital in the hands of a few hundred companies. The power of
multinationals has grown and usually led to the emergence of
oligopolies (see glossary) (Chapters 2 and 3). Nevertheless, care
should be taken not to exaggerate this process. There is intense
competition between multinationals, they are not able to
establish global monopolies. One indication of the limits of glo
balisation is that multinationals have not broken ties with
national states. As a general rule, they continue to rely on the
backing of the state of their country of origin.
Unemployment in the North is not the result of massive transfers
of production from the North to the South or to Eastern Europe
(Chapter 3). Interesting in this regard are the unequivocal
results of two comprehensive working papers published in 19 9 7
by the highly respected National Bureau of Economic Research
(NBER). The NBER based its findings on the study of a large
sample of US multinationals and their subsidiairies, over a ten-
year period from 1983 to 1992. In only a marginal number of
cases have jobs from the headquarters of companies in industri
alised countries been replaced by jobs in their Third World
subsidiairies. At the same time, there is a lot of movement
between the Third World subsidiaries themselves. The authors
of the study note that 'the rise of investment in countries like
Brazil poses a much smaller threat to employment at company
headquarters in the USA than it does to employment in the sub
sidiaries of developing countries in Asia'. Further on, the
meticulous econometricians at the NBER compare the different
subsidiaries and conclude that 'the activities of subsidiaries in
developing countries are complementary to, and do not
substitute for, the activities of subsidiaries in the developed
countries.' Therefore, even between subsidiaries, we come
across the same phenomenon; workers are placed in a situation
of competition with one another, but only when the subsidiaries
are in countries where skill and productivity levels are
comparable. Nike provides a concrete illustration of these
academic findings. Before the Asian crisis, one of its main
contractors in Indonesia awarded its workers a 10.7 per cent
