a sharp fall in real wages . . . an average 30 percent decline between 1980 and 1 986 . . . In several countries the average rate has dropped 10 percent every year since 1980 . . . On average the minimum wage fell 20 percent over that period.46
In Latin America real industrial wages fell by more than 1 0 percent in the 1 980s, while they did so in the formal sector in India in the late 1 990s.47
The use of the informal sector to batter workers in the formal sector has led to the widespread assumption that informal sector workers are powerless. But capital faces a problem here too. The more it relies on them, the greater their potential capacity to resist its demands. In India those parts of the informal sector that have been taking on work from the formal sector-"intermediate goods producing activities in the unorganised sector, eg basic chemicals, non-metallic mineral products, metal products, and equipment sectors, have witnessed rises in wages as well as productivity"-indicating that "workers' bargaining power in these segments is not as bad as it is made out to be". 48
The phenomenon of casual employment is by no means new in the history of capitalism. Casual employment has often played an important role in certain industries. And forms of contract labour are very old-it was common in the textile factories of the industrial revolution. In the mines in both the US and Britain in the 1 9th century overseers or foremen ( "buttymen") would recruit workers and pay them out of a sum given to them by the mine owners. Such casual workers may not always have felt themselves to be part of the working class. They were often detached from the struggles of other sections of that class for years, even decades, at a time. Yet the potential for struggling within those sections was always there, and when it turned into reality the struggle could be very bitter, with an almost insurrectionary tinge.
Frederick Engels observed precisely this development in 1889 when London's dockers struck for the first time. He wrote:
Hitherto the East End had been in a state of poverty-stricken stagnation, its hallmark being the apathy of men whose spirit had been broken by hunger, and who had abandoned all hope ...
Who Can Overcome?
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