Post-war Consensus Research Articles

“For whom the bell tolls”? A ‘vulnerability-responsibility’ model based on democratic and ‘dignified’ transactions”

The welfare state, once seen as the best institutional response to people in need, has steadily come under pressure, as much from shrinking state capacities as from neo-liberal advocates of individual responsibility. Still, despite decline of the post-war consensus on the efficacy of the welfare state, social ‘vulnerability’ still remains the key focus of public policy. However, though much in use in contemporary political discourse, the logical and practical implications of social vulnerability remain unclear. Its essential subjectivity – it is the ‘feeling of vulnerability’ which makes one vulnerable – turns the concept into a catch-all variable, impeding rigorous theoretical and empirical analysis. I respond to this problem with a ‘vulnerability-responsibility’, model. Its parameters include a ‘responsive’ state, an active civil society and a participatory political environment, bolstered by the assertion of agency of the vulnerable. With India as an empirical exemplar, the essay shows how ‘nested’ vulnerability – a community of pro-active citizens in need of urgent and vital assistance - in the backdrop of a responsive state and competitive, robust and resilient political participation, can generate a sustainable, context-relevant process to cope with the problem of social vulnerability. The model, currently aimed at vulnerable citizens in a democratic state, has the potential of being extended to non-democracies as well as vulnerable non-citizens into its domain.

An Assessment of the Significance of the 1947 Industrial Charter in Shaping One Nation Conservatism

Following the Conservatives’ heavy defeat in the 1945 election, The Industrial Charter (1947) arguably demonstrated the Conservative Party had reconciled itself with a shift to the left in British politics. The Charter provided the basis for what would become the Postwar consensus, accepting the mixed economy, the advocacy of industrial partnership, social reform and achieving full employment in a free enterprise system. Although the degree of consensus is disputed within the existing literature, the Conservative governments of 1951-64 would utilize these concepts in their approach to economic, industrial relations and trade union policy, satirically labelled as “Butskellism” after Labour and Conservative Chancellors, Hugh Gaitskell and Richard “Rab” Butler respectively. This approach was later defended by those in the Conservative Party who would identify themselves as One Nation Conservatives opposing the Party’s adoption of Thatcherism in 1979. Contemporary depictions of One Nation Conservatism invoke notions of a more moderate, paternalistic and pragmatic Conservative Party when contrasted with the currently hegemonic and arguably ideologically led Thatcherite doctrine. This article explores the conceptional analysis of One Nation Conservatism, determining that One Nation Conservatism should be considered a product of its time, confined within the Conservative governments of 1951-64. This article will then examine the significance of The Industrial Charter on One Nation Conservatism as a political doctrine and demonstrate that The Industrial Charter asserted the Conservative Party’s compulsion to transform as a means of preventing an existential crisis and set the course for a decisive change of approach. In addition, those Conservatives who opposed Thatcherism, would coalesce around the ideas expressed in the Charter and subsequent writings published by the Party. This article then seeks to conclude that The Industrial Charter provided the platform for the Conservative’s approach to policy in the postwar period and remains a crucial milestone in the development of One Nation Conservatism.

Revisiting the Role of Profits in the Collapse of Britain's Post-War Consensus

Revisiting the Role of Profits in the Collapse of Britain's Post-War Consensus

Macroeconomics under pressure: the feedback effects of economic expertise

The influence of macroeconomists’ on policymakers through economic expertise is usually taken for granted. Yet, the reverse proposal appears far less elusive and as significant. From the analysis of Malinvaud’s writings, I set forth three significant feedback effects of economic expertise on macroeconomics, which has (i) become oversensitive to the results of economic policies, (ii) behaved as a tool for decision-making, and (iii) been impelled to search for internal consensus in order to guide policymaking. Taken together, these feedback effects of economic expertise draw how macroeconomics has been structurally intertwined with policymakers’ needs and issues since World War II, thus providing new insights on the “Keynesian consensus” in France and the broader history of macroeconomics.

Urbanism of zines: the potential of environmentalist zines as sources for planning history

ABSTRACT The explosion of youth revolts in the long 1970s, including the emergence of environmental activism in western Europe, coincided with the democratization of printing technologies, and led to radical transformation in the production and distribution of knowledge. Publishing became cheap and easy due to the appearance of portable versions of formerly costly and heavy printing machinery and a myriad of self-published zines with an environmentalist tone flourished, disseminating a firm rejection to the post-war consensus of consumerism and growth, denouncing the overarching planning organizations, policies, and strategies. Besides criticism, they also present ways of thinking, living, cooperating, and building that follow different rules and values than consumer capitalism. This contribution identifies a gap in European planning history related to the agency of 1970s’ environmental activism and explores the potential of environmentalist zines as sources to sustain historical inquiry and help to fill that gap. It proposes conceptualizing zines as ‘minor’ sources, arguing that the Deleuzian-Guattarian category is a useful concept for reframing previously marginalized voices in planning history. Through the analysis of seven transnationally published zines, the paper demonstrates their validity as sources that document contributions of voices that have been neglected so far.

Temporal comparisons, historical semantics of interaction and ‘post-war consensus’ in British Parliament: Studying time references in a deliberative environment

This article aims to demonstrate that the transition from the mainstream narrative to the interactional history of concepts promises tangible benefits for scholars of social time in general and temporal comparisons in particular. It is shown that the traditionally close alignment of narration with the production of historical consciousness at various levels hinders the study of time as a semantic variable perpetually contested, amended and upheld across society. Alternatively, the references to time made in public settings, allowing for more or less instant reactions (turn-taking) as well as expression of dissenting opinions (stance-taking), offer a much more representative palette of temporal semantics and pragmatics in a given sociopolitical environment. In a particularly intriguing case, the essentially deliberative venue where contestation is supported by both institutional arrangements and political reasons (British House of Commons) is put to test under circumstances commonly known as ‘the post-war consensus’ – the unspoken convention directing opposing political parties to suspend stance-taking regarding the past actions of the government during WWII, its immediate aftermath and its future prospects. As a reliable indicator of this arrangement, the contestation of temporal comparisons between relevant pasts and futures is tested in oppositions reflecting party allegiances (Conservatives vs. Labour vs. Liberals) and executive functions (government vs. opposition) between 1946 and 1952. It is shown that, notwithstanding the prevalence of non-contested statements aimed at preserving interactional coherence and pragmatic functionality of the setting, the moderately active contestation of the adversary’s temporal comparisons in the House of Commons at that time helped all parties, albeit to a different degree, to shape their own political and institutional roles as well as to delegitimize their respective adversaries.

‘Well grubbed, old mole!’: The press, the Institute of Economic Affairs and the propagation of neo-liberalism in the UK

This article considers how before and after the Tories came to power in 1979, The Times and the Daily and Sunday Telegraph consistently propagated ideas emanating from the free-market think-tank the Institute of Economic Affairs. It argues that this was part of a wider process in which the post-war Keynesian consensus came under fire from sections of both the media and the political class, and heralded an era in which neo-liberal ideas would come to constitute a new form of economic ‘common sense’. Given the dominance of this perspective, most of the mainstream media failed to anticipate the 2008 financial crisis and have repeatedly endorsed austerity as the only means of reducing the ensuing deficit.

Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956) as a Transgressive White-Life Novel

"James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956) as a Transgressive White-Life Novel. In the wake of the Second World War, American literature saw the rise of a type of novel that is little known today: the white-life novel. This type of novel is written by black writers but describes white characters acting in a mostly white milieu. While at the time African-American critics praised this new way of writing as a sign of maturity, many have since criticized it for being regressive by pandering to white tastes. This paper sets out to analyze the most famous of these novels, namely James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956). It is my contention that Giovanni’s Room connects blackness and queerness through the use of visual metaphors in the novel, disrupting thus the post-war consensus on ideals of white masculinity. The novel, while seemingly abandoning black protagonists, enacts a subtle critique of white heteronormativity akin to Baldwin’s own positioning within American thought of the post-war era. Keywords: blackness, James Baldwin, post-war fiction, queer, white-life novel "

Comprehensive education for mutual recognition: A sacred gift to the nation

The post-war consensus has been dismantled in favour of a culture that rewards and empowers a small acquisitive elite at the expense of the great majority. This culture actively prevents the creation of a society of mutual recognition and respect. But without just such a society there can be no true comprehensive education. Where it exists, progressive comprehensive education develops pedagogies of recognition in learning communities that mediate worlds of difference, and, in some areas, has fostered the introduction of tiered deliberative forums to enable at local level democratic discussion of major decisions. This framework offers a model for informing and sustaining inclusive democratic participation of the kind required to establish the new cohesive national-political settlement we need.

Politics against individualism?

Politics against individualism?

“Temporary Kings”: The Metropolitan Novel Series and the Postwar Consensus

Focusing on Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time and C. P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers, this essay discusses the representation of parliamentary politics in the long English novel series of the postwar settlement. It demonstrates how, through the openness to contingency built into its extended historical span, the then-popular novel sequence presented a formally distinctive opportunity to imagine political consensus and continuity in an age of marked national transformation.

A quantity theory framework for thinking about monetary policy

Abstract. In August 2020, FOMC chair Jerome Powell announced a strategy for achieving an inclusive value of the FOMC’s goal of maximum employment. The strategy rests on discovering the minimal value of sustainable unemployment by running the economy above potential until the unemployment rate declines to a level that initiates an inflation overshoot from the FOMC’s longer-run 2 percent target. There is presumably no contradiction with an FOMC target for inflation of 2 percent. As indicated by the appellation “flexible-average-inflation targeting” (FAIT), the inflation overshoot would compensate for prior undershoots of the 2 percent target. The FOMC’s current framework is reminiscent of the 1970s. With a country fractured over the Vietnam War and a militant civil rights movement, a socially desirable low unemployment rate became a political imperative. FOMC chairman Arthur Burns accepted the challenge (Hetzel 1998, 2008, Ch. 8). The Keynesian consensus of the time promised to deliver a socially desirable rate of unemployment at least as low as 4 percent at the cost of only moderate inflation. This desirable Phillips curve trade-off between unemployment and inflation became the centerpiece of monetary policy. Modigliani & Papademos (1975 and 1976) provided the organizing principle for monetary policy. Namely, there is a predictable and “exploitable” trade-off in which changes in inflation depend upon the difference between the unemployment rate and a full-employment rate termed the nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU). At least in 2021, however, the FOMC assumption is that there is no trade-off because the Phillips curve is assumed flat at least down to its prepandemic low of 3.5%. When persistent inflation above 2% emerges, the adjective “flexible” in FAIT becomes relevant. The FOMC will then trade off between two competing goals – 2% inflation and inclusive maximum employment. Keywords. Quantity theory, Monetary policy. JEL. E50, E53, E63.

The Un-Ideal Home: Fire Safety, Visual Culture and the LCC (1958–63)

Mounted annually at the Ideal Home Exhibition, a series of fire safety displays produced by the London County Council (LCC) in 1958–63 crystallized some of the key contradictions of the postwar consensus. The paper explores how the displays negotiate, in aesthetic and affective terms, two dissonant sets of concerns: on the one hand, the Ideal Home Exhibition’s celebration of homeownership and home-centred consumption; and, on the other, the LCC’s ‘high fire risk’ inspection programme, which focused on areas of multiple occupancy housing during a period when house fires were growing at an alarming rate. A visual-cultural history of the LCC displays demonstrates their contradictory testimony to a neglected history of housing inequalities. That history, it will be argued, was inseparable from the Conservative government’s so-called ‘property owning democracy’. At the same time, the LCC displays reveal the frictions and resistances inherent in this same moment.

Challenges for Social Work Education in a Changing Europe

There can be little doubt that neoliberalism has replaced social democracy as the political consensus across Europe and globally. This has led to levels of inequality and relative poverty unprecedented since the post-war social democratic consensus. It has also led to a common sense, neoliberal narrative essential in garnering support for policies that weaken workers’ rights, deregulate corporations and businesses, and cut budgets for welfare and public services. Essentially, the narrative is that people should be completely self-sufficient and that to depend on welfare or the state in any way is a sign of poor character, laziness and of membership of the ‘underclass.’ It is a ‘moralising self-sufficiency’ narrative (Marston, 2013). Much of social work activity is concentrated in areas of unemployment, poverty and deprivation and what will happen to our values of respect, compassion and care if social workers unquestioningly internalise the above narrative? Maybe a form of authoritarian social work that treats people as ‘less than human’ (Smithson and Gibson, 2016)? Grasso et al (2018) undertook a study using British Attitudes Study data and found that the generation known as ‘Millennials’ were more right-wing authoritarian than all previous generations. What might happen if that trajectory continues? The authoritarian attitudes of our current generation of post-Millennial students, labelled as iGen by Twenge (2018), were studied in one Scottish university and the results will be shared in my talk today. What might the implications be for social work education and are we up to the challenge?

Appropriate technology's prompt to ‘architectural thinking’, c. 1976

This article argues that the UK’s vanguard magazine Architectural Design (AD) promoted appropriate technology (AT) to prompt ‘architectural thinking’ about the late-modern crisis following the collapse of post-War consensus in the welfare state and its architecture. This was to be a crisis settled by the decade’s end in postmodernism and neoliberalism, a new consensus so overwhelming that it was heralded even in AT, especially those variants drawn from the Californian libertarianism of the Whole Earth Catalog. But British AT was also drawing from the UK’s eco-socialist Radical Technology group and its publication, whose chief artist, anarchist Clifford Harper, and editor Peter Harper, contributed to AD. At the beginning of the decade, the magazine’s sub-editor Martin Pawley insisted on the role of a lateral ‘architectural thinking’ of the sort inherent to AT, which pointed to futures by turn libertarian, socialist, and social democratic (its first advocate, Ernst Schumacher, had been a stalwart Keynesian and manager of nationalisation). Beyond politics per se, paradox and analogy were keynote to the decade’s epistemological uncertainty, from the ‘wickedness’ besetting design as a ‘problem-solving’ activity, to a post-structuralism eroding the long Enlightenment project, to a post-colonialism challenging Eurocentric technologies of exploitation. Indeed, AD could position design and AT as ‘non-aligned third way’ much as the so-called Third World indicated a ‘third way’ between the capitalism and communism of the so-called First and Second Worlds.

Knowledge as a fictitious commodity: a Polanyian reading of the 'digital economy'

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the attempts to use Karl Polanyi's framework to make sense of current developments have multiplied, producing a noticeable and lively debate. This debate centres on the notion of double movement put forward by the Hungarian thinker in his masterpiece – The Great Transformation. The paper is a contribution to this debate. The first part addresses a series of questions that make the interpretations of the double movement advanced so far not very compelling. To this end, a close reading of Polanyi's text, with the aim of dismantling and rearticulating its analytical structure, is carried out. The upshot is a dynamic and multistage picture of the double process as a recurrent and vortex-like attempt to progressively commodify natural and social resources against growing opposition. The second part employs this revised reading of the double movement to explain the collapse of the postwar consensus politics, the success of the neoliberal counterrevolution and the development of the knowledge economy. The claim put forward here is that, in addition to sustained efforts to deepen previous forms of commodification (land, labour and money), we are witnessing a fullblown attempt to turn knowledge into a new fictitious commodity. Building on the idea of digital Taylorism, the paper tries to show that information and computer technologies are being used to standardise and routinise a growing number of intellectual, professional and managerial activities which were able to escape previous attempts in this direction. Once again, at the forefront of this process there are powerful state actors, who are using New Public Management policies strategically to: support the enclosure of intangible cultural resources through the creation of intellectual property rights regimes, and undermine the counter-reaction of negatively affected societal actors by rising the collective action problems they face.

Inequality, Recognition, Irrationalism and Populism. From liberal Democracy and the democratic Rule of Law to post-Democracy. Two crucial historical moments and their consequences: 1945 and 1989/91

After the inequality turn of the late 1970s and mainly after the collapse of the Soviet Union deregulation, globalization, hyperconcentration of wealth and private power, oligopolies, monopolies and the dominant position of the financial capital are the consequences of paradigm change from the post 1945 Keynesian consensus to the neoliberal dismantling of the social contract. The end of the heavy industry era, the relocation of production to China and the digital revolution and industrialization 4.0 undermine the classical negotiation between capital and labor leading again to marginalization of social recognition and to oligarchy and transforms the classes dangereuses of the industrial era to classes irrelevantes. The erosion of Democracy and the rise of irrationalism as the systemic rationalization of inequality are the consequences in the declining Western world parallel to the aggressive authoritarian capitalism in China. It seems that the era of the social state between 1945 and the end of the 1970s and mainly after 1989/91 was only a historical intermezzo and that exorbitant inequality reappears as the constituent element of capitalism.

Responding to the Failures of Labour Law Exposed by Covid-19

The Covid-19 crisis has demonstrated that labour law in the UK has dismally failed in its ostensible primary purpose of protecting and empowering workers. It has not protected workers’ jobs, incomes and their health and safety. In particular, it has failed to ensure that workers have the right to participate in the decisions about their jobs, incomes or safety. Workers in the UK now face the worst recession in Europe with the likelihood of the highest rate of job losses. Well before the pandemic, the delicate and unsteady ‘post war consensus’ of most of the twentieth century was destroyed by the advent of neo-liberalism that was given free reign by the Thatcher government. Rights were diminished, enforcement authorities defunded, managerial prerogative reinforced, trade unions excluded from any role in the State, and the collective power to bargain collectively and to strike subjected to systematic destruction. The process was not reversed in the 13 years of Labour government and, in the decade since 2010, the attack, under the flag of austerity, has been ruthlessly pursued. Collective bargaining coverage steadily declined from 82 percent in 1976 to less than 25 percent before the pandemic. Union membership numbers followed. The consequence of the removal of legal and collective protections for the vast majority of workers was that, before the crisis, their job security, pay, hours, terms and conditions of work were almost exclusively were in the hands of the employer on a take it or leave it basis. The pandemic illuminated the point. It revealed the remarkable and hidden irony that some 7 million ‘key’ workers, essential to maintain the fabric of society, are (doctors excepted) amongst the worst paid and least legally protected of the entire workforce. The contrast between their critical role and the terms and conditions under which they work reveals the irrational and unjustifiable nature of fixing terms and conditions of work through an artificial ‘labour market’ in which working people are no more than disposable commodities, mere ‘human resources’. The economic crisis now unfolding shows the extent of workers’ powerlessness. Workers are dumped and wages slashed even in workplaces such as British Airways with a strong trade union presence. The failure of labour law has never been so starkly visible. II A striking feature of UK labour law is the almost lack of industrial democracy. The law since 1980 has been stripped of the supports for collective bargaining as Conservative governments reversed what had been the policy of the State from (at least) 1909 to 1979. The many restrictions on the right to strike successively imposed since 1979 also undermined collective bargaining. A statutory recognition procedure has been singularly ineffective in reversing the slide. Even where collective bargaining continues, it has been widely undermined. In the public sector, where collective bargaining has most coverage, government has refused to bargain over pay, instead imposing pay caps or Pay Review Bodies to determine wages. In the private sector, firms that would follow national sectoral agreements now set their own terms and conditions; collective bargaining coverage in nonpublicly owned business is around 13 percent. As a result, collective bargaining has largely collapsed and young people have lost even the folk memory of it. There is no industrial democracy outside the few remaining islands of collective bargaining. There is no legislation requiring workers on boards. There are few co-operatives. The request of the TUC for the formation of a National Recovery Council with unions, employers and government working together has been ignored1. III The abject failure of the law to protect the health, safety and lives of workers in the pandemic is evident to all. Scores of essential workers have lost their lives to Covid-19 and thousands of others have become infected. Yet it remains the statutory duty of employers to ensure adequate protection for the life and health of workers in all occupations, and the duty of the State to ensure that this obligation is met. The obligations to provide adequate personal protective equipment, a safe place of work, risk assessments and to report illness and injury caused by work are not merely statutory duties but are backed by criminal liability. The problem is that, through the...

Editorial: Impacts of Covid-19 on Work and the Challenge for Union Rights

2 | International Union Rights | 27/3 EDITORIAL Editorial: Impacts of Covid-19 on Work and the Challenge for Union Rights In the course of just a few months, the global health crisis has had profound impacts around the globe, causing devastating job losses, instability, poverty, and social and economic turmoil. Sharan Burrow sets out a stark assessment of the condition we are in: not only are people suffering the direct impacts of poverty, instability and health, but also anxiety about work and ‘a lack of trust in government’; many of them ‘are feeling powerless’, and we are witnessing ‘the widespread breakdown of the social contract’. Burrow acknowledges the tremendous challenge: ‘hundreds of millions of jobs have been destroyed by the pandemic, and hundreds of millions of new jobs are required to ensure recovery’ and that this ‘requires investment on a scale which is unprecedented’. It is, however, she asserts ‘achievable’, but will require ‘a transformative agenda’ and the constructive, on a global scale, of a new social contract, to build a world able not only to recover from this crisis, but to resist what she calls the ‘inevitable’ challenges of the future. Prof. Keith Ewing and Lord Hendy QC observe that the British ‘post war consensus’ was destroyed by the advent of neo-liberalism, under which labour law has ‘failed’, and collective bargaining and industrial democracy are almost completely absent. The situation in Sweden is, according to ClaesMikael Ståhl, completely different: there ‘social capital, trust and responsibility’ remain intact, and this framework of mutual trust explains why a different path was possible in Sweden. And at the opposite end of this scale, in a situation in which trust and social cooperation has broken even further than in the UK, Fabio Tibiriça Bon tells us that Brazil is ‘an international pariah, insensitive to minorities, a persistent violator of human rights, constantly flirting with neo-fascist movements’. In a context so radically different to the ‘mountain plateau’ of Sweden, Bolsonaro’s ‘irresponsible, unscientific, denialist’ approach to the virus is, Bon argues, literally criminal. Liz Blackshaw expands on and continues ideas discussed in IUR 271/272- concerning global transport and distribution workers, asking how these workers rights can be protected under the pandemic, and also how can their unions continue to function – even globally – with lockdowns and social distancing measures restricting union meetings; Prof. Phil Taylor looks at how unions are seeking to protect call centre workers, not only those who return to workplaces but also looking at ways to protect, organise and represent unprecedented number of homeworkers in the industry; and a team of researchers with the Fair.Work group discuss how couriers in Latin America have been asserting their labour rights, and Prof. Anthony Forsyth discusses the ‘legal barriers’ between gig economy workers and labour rights. While some ‘gig’ companies have been willing to negotiate with unions, and some couriers have formed their own unique models of organisation, Forsyth argues that the ‘legal fantasy’ that gig workers are independent contractors has had ‘brutal effects’ under the pandemic. Finally, we turn our attention to a concept that has been mooted around social protection, labour rights and trade union circles for some time, that was already gaining considerable traction in the years leading up to the pandemic, and which has found renewed appeal under the pandemic as a possible solution to racing global unemployment trends: Universal Basic Income. Ralf Krämer acknowledges the superficial charm of the idea which ‘sounds intriguing’, but which many unions believe is not well understood, may drive-up inflation, and is actually not as widely supported as it sometimes appears to be: even among UBI advocates a majority agree on an asset limit and an off-set against other income (which positions Krämer suggests rather undermine the central concept). More intriguing is his concern that UBI might even ‘put into question the existing system of monetary economy and capitalist production’. IUR might have to return to that suggestion in a future edition. Daniel Blackburn, Editor Next issue of IUR Articles between 850 and 1800 words should be sent by email (mail@ictur.org) and accompanied by a photograph and short biographical note of the author...

Editorial: Impacts of Covid-19 on Work and the Challenge for Union Rights

2 | International Union Rights | 27/3 EDITORIAL Editorial: Impacts of Covid-19 on Work and the Challenge for Union Rights In the course of just a few months, the global health crisis has had profound impacts around the globe, causing devastating job losses, instability, poverty, and social and economic turmoil. Sharan Burrow sets out a stark assessment of the condition we are in: not only are people suffering the direct impacts of poverty, instability and health, but also anxiety about work and ‘a lack of trust in government’; many of them ‘are feeling powerless’, and we are witnessing ‘the widespread breakdown of the social contract’. Burrow acknowledges the tremendous challenge: ‘hundreds of millions of jobs have been destroyed by the pandemic, and hundreds of millions of new jobs are required to ensure recovery’ and that this ‘requires investment on a scale which is unprecedented’. It is, however, she asserts ‘achievable’, but will require ‘a transformative agenda’ and the constructive, on a global scale, of a new social contract, to build a world able not only to recover from this crisis, but to resist what she calls the ‘inevitable’ challenges of the future. Prof. Keith Ewing and Lord Hendy QC observe that the British ‘post war consensus’ was destroyed by the advent of neo-liberalism, under which labour law has ‘failed’, and collective bargaining and industrial democracy are almost completely absent. The situation in Sweden is, according to ClaesMikael Ståhl, completely different: there ‘social capital, trust and responsibility’ remain intact, and this framework of mutual trust explains why a different path was possible in Sweden. And at the opposite end of this scale, in a situation in which trust and social cooperation has broken even further than in the UK, Fabio Tibiriça Bon tells us that Brazil is ‘an international pariah, insensitive to minorities, a persistent violator of human rights, constantly flirting with neo-fascist movements’. In a context so radically different to the ‘mountain plateau’ of Sweden, Bolsonaro’s ‘irresponsible, unscientific, denialist’ approach to the virus is, Bon argues, literally criminal. Liz Blackshaw expands on and continues ideas discussed in IUR 271/272- concerning global transport and distribution workers, asking how these workers rights can be protected under the pandemic, and also how can their unions continue to function – even globally – with lockdowns and social distancing measures restricting union meetings; Prof. Phil Taylor looks at how unions are seeking to protect call centre workers, not only those who return to workplaces but also looking at ways to protect, organise and represent unprecedented number of homeworkers in the industry; and a team of researchers with the Fair.Work group discuss how couriers in Latin America have been asserting their labour rights, and Prof. Anthony Forsyth discusses the ‘legal barriers’ between gig economy workers and labour rights. While some ‘gig’ companies have been willing to negotiate with unions, and some couriers have formed their own unique models of organisation, Forsyth argues that the ‘legal fantasy’ that gig workers are independent contractors has had ‘brutal effects’ under the pandemic. Finally, we turn our attention to a concept that has been mooted around social protection, labour rights and trade union circles for some time, that was already gaining considerable traction in the years leading up to the pandemic, and which has found renewed appeal under the pandemic as a possible solution to racing global unemployment trends: Universal Basic Income. Ralf Krämer acknowledges the superficial charm of the idea which ‘sounds intriguing’, but which many unions believe is not well understood, may drive-up inflation, and is actually not as widely supported as it sometimes appears to be: even among UBI advocates a majority agree on an asset limit and an off-set against other income (which positions Krämer suggests rather undermine the central concept). More intriguing is his concern that UBI might even ‘put into question the existing system of monetary economy and capitalist production’. IUR might have to return to that suggestion in a future edition. Daniel Blackburn, Editor Next issue of IUR Articles between 850 and 1800 words should be sent by email (mail@ictur.org) and accompanied by a photograph and short biographical note of the author...