Al Jazeera: Manufacturing discontent: India's workers in crisis

The proposed reforms will make it easier for employers to fire labourers, make it harder to unionise, tougher to take industrial disputes to court and will exempt a large number of small and medium enterprises from existing labour regulations - including health and safety regulations.

They will also put an end to the regime of inspection meant to ensure implementation of laws and set up an alternative mechanism of self-certification in order to protect employers from harassment by corrupt inspectors. [...]

There is, however, strong evidence to indicate that states with labour laws that favour employees are not necessarily less productive.

More importantly, there is little evidence to show that pending reforms - of licensing, land acquisition and bankruptcy laws - and less regulation of the labour market will help the manufacturing sector. [...]

On September 2, a general strike of roughly 180 million workers - possibly the largest reported general strike in history - resulting in an estimated loss of $2.65bn, was a powerful indicator of the stress.

Unsurprisingly the state chose to respond by attempting to suppress the strike in some parts and downplay it in others.

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The Atlantic: Why So Few American Economists Are Studying Inequality

Those three are heavy hitters in the research on wealth inequality; other top scholars are also from Europe. There’s the British economist Anthony Atkinson at the London School of Economics, who has co-authored papers with Piketty and Saez; Nicholas Bloom, a British economist who writes about inequality at Stanford; Thomas Phillipon, a French economist at New York University who studies the financial industry and outsized compensation; Branko Milanovic, a Serbian economist at the City University of New York who published a book on the causes of inequality; and Stefanie Stantcheva, a French economist at Harvard who has co-authored papers on the top 1 percent and the effects of taxation with Saez and Piety. [...]

One reason is the deep influence of the so-called Chicago school. The economics department at the University of Chicago has long been a leader in the field; it has garnered the most Nobel Prizes of any university economics department and a significant number of John Bates Clark medals in economics. But inequality has never been a priority for the Chicago school, to say the least. It has a strong libertarian bent, focusing on how to promote competition and economic growth and the benefits of a free market. “In general, the [American] economics profession has avoided the subject of class conflict. All issues of distribution have been regarded as less pertinent than ideas of growth,” Arthur Goldhammer, a senior affiliate at Harvard’s Center for European Studies who studies French and American politics and history, told me. “Distributive questions in economics just raise hostility, and ultimately, growth is the important issue.” [...]

Why is class conflict more taboo in the United States, a nation dreamed up with at least a bit of rhetoric about throwing off the rigid class structure of Europe? Michael Zweig, an emeritus professor at SUNY Stony Brook, says that American economists haven’t always shied away from social problems like class and inequality. But during the second half of the 20th century, he says, class was “driven from the discipline,” Zweig says. This is largely because U.S. economists focused on the market, always the market.

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RSA: A Brief History of Tomorrow | Yuval Harari

A Brief History of Tomorrow with bestselling author Yuval Harari. What is the next stage of human evolution? How will we protect this fragile planet and humankind itself from our own destructive powers?We are delighted to be welcoming Yuval Noah Harari - bestselling author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind – for his second much-anticipated RSA appearance. Where Sapiens was a wide-ranging exploration of humankind’s history, in his new work Homo Deus he envisions our future: a not-too-distant world in which we face a new set of challenges and possibilities.

With his trademark blend of science, history, philosophy and every discipline in between, Harari will investigate the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century – from overcoming death to creating artificial life.

IFLScience: Costa Rica Has Been Running On 100% Renewable Electricity For 76 Days... And Counting

Ladies and gentlemen, a round of applause for Costa Rica – this Central American nation has been running on 100 percent renewable electricity for at least 76 consecutive days. This follows on from 150 other days already this year wherein it has only used geothermal and hydrothermal power generation. Last year, a whopping 300 days were fossil fuel-free in terms of electricity generation. [...]

Normally, about 7 percent of its electricity is generated by fossil fuels. Fortunately, particularly heavy rains recently have supercharged the nation’s four huge hydroelectric dams recently, rendering fossil fuel combustion unnecessary. (Weirdly, the surge in rainfall may be attributable to climate change itself.) [...]

Iceland – a far wealthier (GDP $47,500 per person) but far less populous (323,000) country, is comparable in terms of how it produces energy. Like Costa Rica, it has almost no need for other power sources, including wind, nuclear, biomass or fossil fuels.

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Jacobin Magazine: Lessons From the Arab Spring

a three-cornered struggle: not a binary confrontation between revolution and counter-revolution, as in most revolutionary upheavals in history, but a triangular conflict between one revolutionary pole and two rival counter-revolutionary camps — the regional ancien regime and its reactionary antagonists — both equally inimical to the emancipatory aspirations of the “Arab Spring.” [...]

The restrained nature of US intervention has been denied by some on the global left that see the country’s revolution as being tainted by complicity with US imperialism. Many have tacitly or openly supported Russia, Iran, and Assad on anti-imperialist grounds as a result.

Achcar chides them for their dehumanization of the Syrian people: “When disastrous failures of imperialism happen at the cost of terrible human tragedies, there can be no schadenfreude from a truly humanist anti-imperialist perspective.”

Achcar also subtly draws out how the regime has manipulated and tacitly supported jihadist groups to position them as its “preferred enemy,” allowing Assad to rally segments of both the domestic population and outside powers to his side. [...]

Achcar also credits Syrian Kurds for their gender politics, characterizing them as “the most progressive force to emerge to this day in any of the six countries that were scenes of the 2011 uprising.” He contrasts the Kurds’ strategically organized resistance to the participants in the early Syrian uprising, who failed to develop “an effective organization” and relied too heavily on “an improvised network facilitated by the use of social media.” [...]

Achcar also doesn’t seriously examine the relatively progressive elements of Islamism — like Egypt’s Abdel Mouneim Aboul-Fouteh, who together with Sabbahy garnered some 38 percent of the vote in the first round of the 2012 Egyptian elections. Finally, and perhaps most importantly for understanding the global effects of the Arab revolutions, Achcar’s critique of the limits of spontaneous organizing is only offered in passing.

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