Sitting in front of a large machine that spools denim at a high speed, a Chinese factory worker examines the fabric as it spins by. (Photo: Bobby Brill / Getty Images)
The World Bank decided last year to devote the 2019 edition of its flagship annual policy review publication, the World Development Report, to the theme of the future of work. Preparation of the WDR 2019 encountered some delay after the ouster in late January of the report’s first director, the Bank’s chief economist Paul Romer.
Romer lost his job after severely criticizing another major annual World Bank report, Doing Business, for ideologically driven data manipulation. However, he was promptly replaced by Simeon Djankov, who was the founding director of Doing Business while working at the World Bank from 1995-2009 and subsequently became Bulgaria’s finance minister (2009-2013).
The Bank moved forward quickly with its new WDR director to produce a working draft that, in its latest form (it changes from week to week), almost completely ignores workers’ rights, asymmetric power in the labor market, and phenomena such as the declining labor share in national income. It puts forward a policy program of extensive labor market deregulation, including lower minimum wages, flexible dismissal procedures, and UK-style “zero-hours” contracts, which allow employers to hire staff with no guarantee of work. The resulting decline of workers’ incomes would be compensated in part by a “basic level of social insurance” to be financed largely by regressive consumption taxes. The WDR 2019: The Changing Nature of Work calls this an “upgraded” social contract.
Perhaps to avoid having to expose this disturbing vision of the future of work to an open discussion with workers’ representatives, the WDR 2019 team refused to meet with a 38-strong international delegation of trade union economists and policy officers that traveled to Washington in March for two days of meetings with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. …