; often in the same year, same territory, same market economy (say, the Saxon lands, c. 1500). Premodern currency relationships were hybrid, fuzzy and principally negotiable, with coin values fluctuating wildly around target exchange rates set by the state. This gave rise to complaints, grievances, even social unrest and sometimes revolt. 19 In terms of forms, shape and meaning, money in late Antiquity was not fundamentally different from money in the Middle Ages, or from money around 1870. Only when governments finally retreated from metallism , that is, the
decreased and with the decreasing number of members, the membership fees have run out and thereby the funds to finance services. The employers’ associations are also struggling with a decreasing membership retention and heterogeneous interests (Behrens and Helfen, 2009, p 6). In altered Table 14.1: Press releases and referred policy areas (%) IG Metall DGB BDA Gesamtmetall Total Labour market/training 23.1 (61) 31.7 (226) 32.5 (114) 28.5 (20) 30.1 (421) Collective bargaining policy 44.0 (116) 7.4 (53) 10.3 (36) 50.0 (35) 17.2 (240) Tax, financial and economic policy 8
significantly to growth, employment and prosperity’ (BDA, nd). Unions and the politics of non-partisanship On the side of labour, the labour regime is institutionalized through the existence of large union federations, whose member organizations are heavily involved in the process of collective bargaining. The dominant force is the DGB, which has 6 million members and represents 77 per cent of all unionized workers in the country. It has eight member unions, among them the two biggest unions in the country. These are the industrial workers’ union IG Metall and the
solution which reflects previous securing of monetary value in gold – what Maurer et al call a ‘digital mentalism’ ( 2013 ) – reflects a decidedly modern faith in the solidity of currency as money, even while it draws analogies between money and language which also typify postmodern sensibilities. Following the earlier analysis of money and speech, these attempts at digital metallism seem to respond to a supposed vulnerability: an undermining of (promised) power by those who hold control over central units. This resistance to the interference of the state in money
socioeconomic positions of workers but had also created more favourable conditions of struggle for labour. The union leaderships, on the whole, did not respond to this attack with industrial action ( Brinkmann and Nachtwey, 2023 : 41). In fact, the so-called Hartz commission, which produced a report that served as the foundation for restructuring the labour market and reducing the social wage, had 15 members, two of whom were officials from the two largest German unions IG Metall and ver.di ( Tagesspiegel , 2002 ; see Heinrich, 2004 ). Inherent in the mutation model is a
law for the leading blue-collar union, IG Metall, referred to the "misuse of the social state"; and the official respon- sible for social policy in the white-collar union, OAG, argued that "we must place more emphasis on the basic principle of equivalence between contribution and benefit". Stability is a key concept. As the chair of the COU-CSU Social Policy Committee put it, "we should stick to the insurance-based system"; similarly, the SPO chair of the Parliamentary Com- mittee for Labour and Social Affairs stated: "I favour the status quo" and another SPO
property money was made of, and to circumvent the indivisibility of other money-commodities – oxen is a preferred example of Mr Smith – merchants eventually gave ‘preference … to metals above every other commodity’; 8 hence the name given to this school of thought, ‘Metallism’. ‘Rude’ ‘unstamped bars’ of iron among Spartans and of copper in ancient Rome, the story goes, were used ‘to purchase whatever they had occasion for. These bars, therefore, performed at this time the function of money’. Generalised acceptance of this form of money – whether made of iron, copper
Metall. In many ways, Löfven’s election signified an important break from the past for the party. The new leader was a newcomer to electoral politics, untarnished by political games and corruption. While his leadership, compared to that of Sahlin and Juholt, has been less crisis-prone, it has not been easy for him to convince swing voters. In fact, the results from the two elections held in 2014, the European Parliament election in June and the general election in September, would suggest that Löfven had failed to succeed in what the party had been hoping to
.di and IG Metall’ (Jørgensen, 2016: 10; see also Oliveri, 2018). Restrictions on migrants’ rights are portrayed in the documentaries we analysed as a question of ‘common sense’, hiding their active role in constructing sections of super-exploited labour. Montali et al (2013: 245) identify a similar process in Italian media, whereby migration is presented DECONSTRUCTING MIGRANT/WORKER CATEGORIES IN BRITAIN 182 BORDERS, MIGRATION AND CLASS IN AN AGE OF CRISIS as fundamentally problematic in order to justify the exclusion of migrants as ‘reasonable, natural or
-vs-reality-a-study-of-bridge-international-academies-for-profit-schooling-in-kenya [Accessed 17 June 2022 ]. Fichter , M. ( 2018 ) ‘ Building union power across borders: the transnational partnership initiative of IG Metall and the UAW ’, Global Labour Journal , 9 ( 2 ): 182 – 98 . Fichter , M. , Ludwig , C. , Schmalz , S. and Steinfeldt , H. ( 2018 ) The Transformation of Organised Labour: Mobilising Power Resources to Confront 21 st Century Capitalism , Berlin : Friedrich Ebert Stiftung . Fischer , K. ( 2021 ) ‘ Global labour and labour studies ’, in A. Komlosy and G. Musić (eds) Global Commodity Chains and Labour
