Disinterring the Report of the National Commission on Labour: A Marxist Perspective

The second National Commission on Labour submitted its report in September 2002. Its policy goal was pointed—change the labour laws. The importance of the National Commission on Labour (henceforth, NCL) must be judged in the proper perspective. 1 We claim that the NCL has a view of labour grounded on the logic of global capital harbouring the project of competitive capitalism. This in effect is the neoliberal platform based on neoclassical economic logic that explicates the place and role of labour from the perspective of capital. Not only is this approach troubling for its effort to reduce the multifaceted dimensions of labour to the logic of capital. It is equally disturbing to note that this approach is virtually forwarded as the only manner in which labour ought to be viewed, thereby evacuating the discursive terrain of any other way of viewing labour.