Intervening in debates around universal health care in South Africa, this article draws on class-based analytical tools from social medicine, political economy, and historical sociology. It is argued there are 3 keys to achieving sustainable universal health care in South Africa: addressing the socioeconomic roots of ill health; establishing a fully public, nonprofit health care system; and adequate investment in undervalued female workers who are the backbone of public health care. Each key is discussed with accompanying recommendations, using evidence from South Africa and other countries. Principal constraints are also identified through an analysis demonstrating the links between inequality, health care financing, and the monopoly structure of the South African health care industry.
Temporary labor migration is the phenomenon of workers migrating on the basis of temporary work authorizations, which attach the legal status of workers to particular employers and/or particular positions of employment. Temporary labor migration schemes take on various forms: from bilateral and regional agreements for the exchange of labor between states, to changes in national legislation allowing employers easy and accelerated access to temporary migrant workers for varying time periods, to provisions in multilateral trade agreements such as Mode IV of the World Trade Organization's General Agreement on Trade in Services. While labor migration has been a recurring phenomenon in human history (Potts 1990; King 1996), what is new in the post‐1970 period of restructuring in the world capitalist economy is the increased use of temporary migrant labor by employers around the world and state facilitation of this shift.
Using David Harvey's notion of “accumulation by dispossession,” this article brings systematic understanding to the connections between two widely observed contemporary phenomena: growing inequality on a world scale, and the rapidly increasing shortages of nursing and other health labor in the global South. Through an exploration of the dynamics of late 20th-and early 21st-century nurse migration, it is demonstrated that the increasing flow of temporary migrant skilled labor from African and other countries of the global South, to the global North, is a new form of accumulation by dispossession. Socialist feminist notions of caring labor and the Marxian concept of unequal exchange are used to articulate how the disproportionate accumulation of global nursing labor in the global North represents a dispossession of yet greater proportions in the global South.
This article is adapted from a presentation made at a meeting of policyexperts of the Organization of EconomicCooperation and Development, and theTrade Union Advisory Council. The presentation provided the "trade unionexpert perspective" at the seminar heldin Paris, October 17, 2007, entitled "FairLabour Migration – from vision to reality." Tracing an alternative approach tounderstanding ‘global labour supply’,the article makes links between joblessgrowth, trade and investment liberalization, and the increased use of temporarymigrant workers around the world. Thearticle concludes with proposals for abroad framework of change leading to decent work and sustainable development– in both the global North and the global South.
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