The evidence simply does not sustain the view that we are witnessing the emergence of a "new" kind of employment relations, seen in the "end of the career" and the "death of the permanent job for life" .24
One survey in 2000 showed only 5 percent of British employees on temporary contracts,25 while the number of people who had worked at the same workplace for more than ten years had risen from 29 to 3 1 percent. 26 Even in Spain, which has the highest level of "precariety" in Europe, 65 percent of workers have permanent jobs.
Capital cannot manage without workers who have certain skills and it prefers workers who have some sense of responsibility for the job. It takes employers time to train people and they are rarely keen to lose them if they can avoid it. They therefore do not always treat workers as "disposable", even when it comes to semiskilled and unskilled labour. They can benefit from a generalised insecurity making the majority of workers with relatively secure jobs fear that they may lose them. But that does not mean that capital can really dispense with such workers. And that means they have the potential to put up resistance to its demands, even if they are often not aware of it.
The new working classes of the "Third World"
Around 60 percent of the world's industrial workers are outside the "advanced" countries of the OECD, with perhaps 25 percent in China, about 7 percent in India and around 7 percent in Latin America.27 Such statistics do no more than provide a snapshot of the enormous change brought about by the sweep of capitalism's self-expansion across the world.
Sixty years ago 80 percent of the world's population lived in the countryside; and 30, 40, or even 50 percent worked on the land even in countries thought of as "advanced" like France, Italy or Japan. Today close to half the world's population live in towns and cities, and the urban population is a majority even in countries people often think of as rural-84 percent in Brazil, 76 percent in Mexico, 63 percent in Ecuador and 63 percent in Algeria. 28
Urbanisation and the spread of market relations are not necessarily the same as the growth of wage labour.29 People worldwide have been leaving the countryside at a much greater rate than the growth of stable livelihoods for them in modern sectors of the economy. This is especially true in countries where economic growth is slow or negative. Thus wage employment fell in absolute terms in several African countries during the 1980s,30 and half the non-agriculture workforce of Africa is self-employed.31 Even in China, with its rapid rate of accumulation, the employed working class has expanded more slowly than economic growth.32 But in general, the slowness of job growth should not be identified with "deindustrialisa ti on" . 33
Who Can Overcome?
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