Presentation on Transnational Corportations in referance to the Contemporary basic needs. The position of the WFTU. The role of the international trade union movement

1. World Federation of Trade Unions

2. ILO, June 7th, 2012
 WFTU’s position on
Transnational Corporations
(TNC’s)

3. TNC’s a product of imperialism
 The transnationals’ stabilized
their presence in the imperialist
state of capitalism.

4. What is imperialism?
For Lenin, imperialism has the following characteristics:
 Accumulation of capital and production in such high
level of growth that monopolies are created which play
decisive role in the economic life.
 The merging of the bank capital with the industrial
capital and creation of a financial oligarchy based on
the “financial capital”.
 The export of capital has great significance in
comparison to the export of goods.
 International imperialist mechanisms are being founded
that divide the world.
 Monopoly capital, with the aid of its imperialist
governments completes the division of the earth’s
territories amongst themselves.

5. What are the monopolies?
One of the basic characteristics of capital
is the huge industrial growth and the
extremely fast process of
accumulation of production in larger
enterprises.
This means the concentration of
capital, i.e. increasingly fewer producers
remain in the market as monopolies grow,
accompanied increasing rate of
productivity and decreasing number of
workers.

6. What are the monopolies?
We use the term “monopoly” because a few
dozens of dominant enterprises world-wide can
directly come to agreements when it is necessary
in order to dominate the market. This gives
them power to impose prices and therefore create
the monopoly tendency.
These enterprises combine different sectors of the
economy or successive levels of the production or
secondary procedures around the production (e.g.
recycling)

7. Professor Hermann Levi, 1909 (!):
“In Great Britain it is the size of the enterprise and its
high technical level which harbour a monopolist
tendency. This, for one thing, is due to the great
investment of capital per enterprise, which gives rise to
increasing demands for new capital for the new
enterprises and thereby renders their launching more
difficult. Moreover (and this seems to us to be the more
important point), every new enterprise that wants to
keep pace with the gigantic enterprises that have been
formed by concentration would here produce such an
enormous quantity of surplus goods that it could
dispose of them only by being able to sell them
profitably as a result of an enormous increase in
demand; otherwise, this surplus would force prices
down to a level that would be unprofitable both for the
new enterprise and for the monopoly combines.”

8. Emerge of monopolies
 1860-1880 : Upper level of the development of
free competitiveness. The monopolies in this
period are embryos that are just making their
appearance.
 After the 1873 crisis we see the long period of the
development of cartels which are not yet stable,
as they are still an exception.
 The growth in the end of the 19th century and the
crisis of 1900-1903 bring the cartels to the fore,
they increasingly become the main feature of
capitalism in the 20th century. Capitalism enters
its imperialist state.

9. What are the cartels?
The cartels are agreements between rival
enterprises usually in homogenous
productions (e.g. dairy products).
The cartels close deals for the terms of
sale, the payment deadlines, etc. They
divide the sale territories or markets
amongst themselves. They define the
quantity of products that must be
produced in order to keep the prices high.
They define the prices. They distribute the
profits amongst the affiliated enterprises.

10. Cartels define the prices
Several economic studies and legal decisions of
antitrust authorities have found that the median
price increase achieved by cartels in the last 200
years is around 25%. Private international cartels
(those with participants from two or more
nations) had an average price increase of
28%, whereas domestic cartels averaged
18%.
A 2005 research has shown that in 1991-2004
there were 49 national and 137 international
cartels. 17 of which were legally operating
according to the regulations for the “free
competition”.

11. The role of the Banks
 The role of the banks is highly important
in this procedure. The banks don’t have
the role of the mediator anymore as they
have themselves now become
monopolists. The banks possess the
whole financial capital of the capitalists
and the households as well as most of the
means of production and the resources of
raw materials in a country.
 According to the 2012 data the top 50
banks hold assets of about 60 trillion
dollars.

12. The production is being socialized
 To a great extent the accumulation
makes the calculation and
estimation of all the raw materials,
in a country and the world, possible.
There can be an estimation of the
size of the market and the demand.

13. The production is being socialized
 Another feature of monopoly capital
is the increased socialization of
production whilst there is increased
concentration of ownership. In other
words, for a product to be
produced, thousands of workers in
different parts of the planet work on
different levels of the production.
This includes the division of the
value chain across countries.

14. The production is being socialized
 However the product and the profit
is owned by a few individuals
around the world who keep on
holding the prices high. Despite the
great scientific and technological
development and the produced
wealth, the working class and the
poor popular strata cannot fulfill
their basic needs.

15. WFTU International Action Day
3rd October 2012
 We are targeting the core of
capitalism: in other words the action and
operations of the transnational
corporations and touching the heart of
the problems faced by of the working
class and the poor popular strata. This
includes demands focused on the
satisfaction of the basic needs of the
working class and the poor in general;

16. WFTU International Action Day
3rd October 2012
In this International Action Day we
focus on the following basic needs:
Food – Water – Medicine
– Education – Housing.

17. Our demands are realistic and
necessary:
 The wealth-producing resources of each
country (miners, water etc.) are being
looted by the transnationals’ causing only
poverty, hunger and suffering for the
people. How is it possible to privately own
water resources, especially as an
international monopoly. This vital
resource for human survival is allowed by
the governments to be privatized and
become a means for profiting and in
many occasions with deterrent price.

18. Our demands are realistic and
necessary:
884 million people have no
access to safe clean water
39% of the global population –
mainly in Africa and in Asia –
have no access to basic
sanitation facilities

19. Our demands are realistic and
necessary:
 Without the working class nothing
could be produced. From the
collection of the raw materials to
their treatment, until the final
product, the transport and the
trade, the working class is and
irreplaceable force that produces
surplus value.

20. Our demands are realistic and
necessary:
 The contemporary scientific and
technological progress as well as the high
productivity is such that all the needs of
the people can be satisfied.
 It is the action of the transnationals’ that
keeps the prices high, that blocks the
evolution of the productive forces
(destroys products, crops, stops the
production etc.)

21. Our demands are realistic and
necessary:
 FAO: With the “conventional” agriculture and the
existing climate and weather conditions, the
production of agricultural products could be
sufficient enough to satisfy the nutritional
needs of a population twice as big as the
existing one.
 At the same period when the “market” is
supposed to be saturated and large amounts are
being destroyed or subsidies are being provided
for the reduction of production (i.e. given to
farmers for them to stop the production) in order
to keep the prices high more than 850 million
people are undernourished or starving because
their income prevents them from obtaining
proper sustenance.

22. Our demands are realistic and
necessary:
 The action of the transnationals’ is dangerous for
the public health and the environment whilst
obeying the ultimate law of profiting.
 The drug companies who owned the patent
for Aids drugs went to court to stop the
post-Apartheid government of South Africa
producing generic copies of it – which are
just as effective – for $100 a year to save
their dying citizens. They wanted them to
pay the full $10,000 a year to buy the
branded version – or nothing. In the poor
world, the patenting system every day puts
medicines beyond the reach of sick people.

23. Our demands are realistic and
necessary:
 The huge amounts of profits of the transnationals’
are such that the suffering of the Third World
people can be prevented, that the private
ownership is the stumbling block that stops the
social progress and welfare.
 In the current condition of the capitalist crisis
most companies keep on being profitable more or
less in comparison to the pre-crisis levels. The
competition amongst them and the logic “the
larger fish eats the smaller fish” destroys some
productive forces.
 In 2010 amidst the capitalist crisis, the 50
more profitable companies in USA only,
earned profits more than 715 billion dollars.

24. Our demands are realistic and
necessary:
 On the contrary. 16% of the total population is
undernourished.
 1 out of 6 people worldwide do not have access to adequate
clean water.
 More than 100 million people are homeless. Millions live in
slums. Hundreds of millions of people live on rent or have to
pay unbearable house loans in order to get their own home.
 920 million people remain illiterate.
 8,1 million children died in 2009 before reaching five years of
age.
 Each year about 2,1 million people around the world die from
vaccine-preventable diseases.
 The workers’ rights in decent basic salary, social security, free
and qualitative public services (education, healthcare,
transport, electricity) are being undermined and attacked.
 The freedom of association and the trade union freedoms in
general are being attacked.

25. Our demands are realistic and
necessary:
 Because in the current conditions of
global capitalism in various countries
there should be such a movement that
will block the anti-labour policies, it can
make the capitalist maneuvers and right-
wing measures more difficult to
implement, it can gain temporary gains in
favor of the working people if only it has a
strategy of direct conflict with the
monopolies.

26. WFTU International Action Day
3rd October 2012
FOOD
WATER
MEDICINES
EDUCATION
HOUSING
Against the plundering of the natural
resources by the transnationals

27. World Federation of Trade Unions