Articles by Sharat G Lin

For the first time in 70 years, May Day in 2006 was marked in the US by two million people demanding legalisation for some 12 million undocumented immigrants. Sweeping the nation like a storm, the Latino protest mobilisation caught both the right and left off guard. The political struggle underlines the persistent economic gap between the US and its neighbours to the south, underlying racial stereotypes, fragmented ethnic consciousness, a divide between employers and right wing chauvinists, and the discontinuity between immigrant workers and the trade union establishment. Nevertheless, the May Day demonstrations could signal a new political awakening and rekindle the US labour movement.

World Order Sharat G Lin The global economic crisis has toppled governments and shattered nations in the east, given rise to a popular backlash for change in the west, and provided a new geopolitical context for international conflict in the 1990s and into the 21st century. The war in the Persian-Arabian Gulf was a case in point, for it was less the result of a failure of international diplomacy than a deliberate strategy of the US government to exacerbate a crisis as a pretext for intervention. At stake were not merely the price of oil, human rights, or military victory Of far more fundamental importance were, and still are, the sustained recycling of petrodollars into the western industrialised states, support for faltering US economic and financial dominance, and reassert ion of US military and political hegemony in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union as a countervailing superpower This retrogression to colonial-style armed force signals a new era in which the only regaining superpower will seek to enforce by any means necessary its economic centrality and political pre-eminence in the face of underlying economic weakness.

Implications of Linking Wages to Productivity Sharat G Lin Following the precedents in Bombay and Coimbatore, the Delhi textile strike has once again raised the issue of linking wages to productivity. In practice the major impact of such provisions is not to increase production through incentives to workers, but rather to enable management to rationalise reductions in workforce in order to reduce the man-machine ratio. Unlike in Tamil Nadu where labour productivity in the cotton textile industry is rising, in Delhi it is decisively declining. This means that if present trends continue and wages are linked to productivity, real wages may be expected to decline in Delhi. This is only a part of the broader dilemmas faced by a dying industry.