The Effects of Financialization on Labour in Georgia
1. Introduction
The post-Soviet space, particularly the Caucasus region has become a field of drastic political and economic changes in recent decades (Jones, Georgia: A Political History Since Independence., 2015). From wars to civil wars, through deindustrialisation and massive privatisation, to revolutions and the inception of a purely neoliberal political agenda, Georgia has become one of the most curious cases in the region to research since the collapse of the USSR. The political economy perspective in the country is peculiar regarding the political push to financialization. The logic behind the deregulation is the idea of attracting investments, however, the price to pay turned out to be the deprivation of the socioeconomic conditions of the Georgian citizens (Jones, Kakha Bendukidze and Georgia’s failed experiment., 2015). Particularly, the Georgian labour force was affected by the neoliberal instalment.
This paper will attempt to give a perspective about the Georgian case. It is worth to underline that there is an absence of any research in this specific direction. Although comprehending the academic limitations and requirements for this paper, it will be tried to examine the process of how the economic reforms in 2003–2018 by successive Georgian governments led to strong financialization of the economy, affecting the local labour. Considering also the format and the restricted timeframe the paper will use the secondary quantitative data and also focus on the qualitative analysis of the cohesive reasoning of the related various scientific texts.
The paper will be divided into four parts. With the second and the third parts being central. In the second part, the theoretical framework of the financialization will be discussed. Through a more Marxist leaning approach, the second section will incorporate the deconstruction of the concept and retroductively find the central pillars. Additionally, a historical framework will be given, in order to analyse the policies correlation between financialization and neoliberalism.
The third part of the paper will mainly focus on observing the development of economic reforms in Georgia since the early 1990s. In this part, there will be reasoning made about political implications of the neoliberal establishment and its connection to the financialization. Moreover, after finding the linkages the effects of financialization on labour will also be inspected.
2. The Paradigm of Financialization
Financialization, as the process whereby financial institutions and markets rise in power and influence, is a relatively new phenomenon. The financialization itself refers to the rise of the financial capital as a dominant mode of capital accumulation in a country or a specific economic regime. Through decision-making and the policies actively promoting the deregulation and massive privatisations, giving more power to the speculative market actions the profit from the real economy has transformed into the profit from the speculative market actions of finance (Graeber, 2011).
Financialisation is the mode of capital circulation where money (surplus value) is made by the money, and the profit is not aggregated from production. “Money that is thrown into circulation as capital without any material basis in commodities or productive activity” (Harvey, The Limits to Capital, 1982, p. 95). Henceforth, this logic builds a paradigm implying the fictitious nature of the finance — finance as fictitious capital. According to Marx (1959) finance can be characterised as “money capital”, credit derived profit that is dissimilar from “real capital” requiring material means of production and labour power of workers. Consequently, this reasoning leads to the induction of financialisation to be the hegemonic mode of accumulation through finance in capitalism, abandoning classical production based modelled by “real” capital.
As it was mentioned above, although financial capital did exist since the capitalist relations commenced, and it was congruent with “real capital”, it took time and the political will for it to become loose and present itself as the locomotive of the modern capitalism. Without the existence of political barriers, rapid financialization has been occurring that is even prone to crisis. It has been affecting global economic relations and also the social conditions of labour (Durand, 2017).
According to Sweezy (1994) “the normal condition of the mature capitalist system is stagnation.” Every time stagnation occurs the system of capital is reconstructed for stabilising the probability. In 1929 with the Great Depression, this is the first time in which the world would see a mature capitalist economy stagnate, however, due to the WWII and the ensuing war economy this situation was ameliorated. Through the historical examination, it can be stated that after WWII there was a seen a relative balance between capital and labour in what was then referred to as the leading economies of the West. This relative stability and balance between labour and capital came under the policies of the states revamping its economic, political and industrial recourses for reconstructing the industrial capacity of the state economy. During this era, trade unions became strong and labour could organise and create enjoy some level bargaining power under the regulated free-market regimes. This can be considered as the golden age of regulated capitalism. According to the ILO data in the 16 leading economies of the West 75% of national revenue was held by labour. Nevertheless, this proclivity has been halved by the beginning of the 1980s (Onaran & Galanis, 2012).
The Oil Price shocks of the 1970s, the Stock Market Crash, as well as the Latin American Debt Crisis, give way to a global recession as well as burgeoning neoliberal dominance. Championed by the political figure Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. According to David Harvey Neoliberalism is “a theory of political economic practices proposing that human well-being can best be advanced by the maximization of entrepreneurial freedoms within an institutional framework characterized by private property rights, individual liberty, unencumbered markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices” (Harvey, Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction, 2007). And it was this neoliberal environment which gave rise to financialization. Deregulation and more specifically financial deregulation gave way to the dismantling of laws such as the Garn-St. Germain and enacted the Gramm-Leach- Bliley Act which repealed part of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. The 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act gave too much freedom to the banks by repealing the barriers for a bank to engage in both commercial and deposit activities (Langley, 2015). The 2007–2008 US mortgage crisis soon became contagious for the US financial speculator markets that plunged the Wall Street into a global financial crisis. The blame was redirected from capital to labour, though bail-out politics and ordoliberalism austerity policies.
In accordance with the framework elaborated by Costas Lapavistas and Ivan Mendieta-Muñoz (2016), the financial institutions (including the least regulated hedge funds) can now be considered as new capitalist class profiting from positioning oneself in the financial speculation. Moreover, unlike the real economy, the profit is made through financial monopolisation of financial transactions, loans to business and other banks, hollowing out the state power of universal insurance and the indebtedness of the educational system, and the privatisation of retirement funds. The commercial and industrial business or the big business, in general, became independent from the traditional banking systems by constructing their own financial funds and gaining the control over the financial transactions and the banking system as well, thus creating a system prone to crisis. “Financial capital, once cut loose from its original role as a modest helper of a real economy of production to meet human needs, inevitably becomes speculative capital geared solely to its own self-expansion. In earlier times, no one ever dreamed that speculative capital, a phenomenon as old as capitalism itself, could grow to dominate a national economy, let alone the whole world. But it has” (Sweezy, 1994).
The financialization and neoliberalism are intertwined, but yet not congruent. Through the ideological mindset of neoliberal approaches to economics, financial capital has become unregulated and overtook the real economy (industrial production). The rise of the financial capitalism and the hegemony of the international finance saw its apotheosis through the domination of the neoliberal economic policies pursued the by the financial centres of the Global North with a political spillover effect in the Global South during the previous decades. The financialization of capital and the deregulated profit-based economic operations in the transnational trade have taken their toll on labour throughout the world. Evidently, the mode of neoliberal international competition affected macroeconomic growth, foreign and domestic indebtedness of the state, wages, employment and industrial relations (Shaikh, 2016). Furthermore, it is worth underlying that the unregulated laissez-faire, as the basis of the financial capital with the concentration of the wealth among the transnational corporations diluted the political power of the state managing macroeconomic activities. The hegemony of the neoliberal policies has massively contributed to the impediment of the economic growth and to the discouragement of ameliorating the social conditions of the developing world (Stiglitz, 2012). Ergo, through emphasising the internal dimension of the capital, it can be depicted that the upsurge on the profitability in the financial capital resulted in the overexploitation of the labour force. The neoliberal model with finance at its core has become a go-to policy alternative for developing the economies in some post-Soviet countries. As a political choice for the previous decade, the financial reforms have given the way to the unregulated banking system and unchecked credit organisations in Georgia.
3. The Political Economy of Labour in Georgia
The dismantling of the Soviet Union sent shock waves that bequeathed deteriorating political and economic system to the former Soviet space1. This resulted in a social catastrophe of a large scale for the population of the region. The population of Georgia has dropped from 5.1 million in 1990 to 4.5 million in 2002 and has plummeted to 3.7 million by 2016 due to massive labour immigration and poverty (GEOSTAT: National Statistics Office of Georgia). The economic shock therapy and introduction of the market-oriented policies were massively implemented in these countries. Moreover, the accelerated structural privatisation and the accumulation of capital have incorporated these markets into the hegemony of global neoliberalism.
Additionally, it is worth to consider the internationalisation of the state in the current time of the Neoliberalism and the depleting role of the state (Brand, 2007, pp. 20–21). After the Soviet collapse in 1991 and gaining the independence the political history of the country was filled with turmoil until the late ’90s. In the 90s the informal sector flourished as the family-run small-scale businesses ranging from farming to retail and metal trade. The lack of regulations on informal sector created a corruption as the country had an alternative GDP in the informal economy.
However, in general, it is worth mentioning that even during the Soviet times there have been the instances of kinship informal sector existing either in the rural areas or in the forms of “speculants” selling the luxury items. But compared to the situations in the ’90s was almost all-inclusive and not as rare any longer extracting human capital by incorporating the new logistics of cheap labour reproduction. Hitherto, the “market speculations” or the Soviet shadow market was less accessible to women, however, the introduction of the capitalist paradigm and the social catastrophe that followed created a threshold for the women to engage with the market relations by offering their labour power mainly to the informal sector that governed the market for the given period of time (Alyiev, 2015). The informal sector and the migration dominated the social economy as the core incomes for the Georgian households, that in some extent can be detected not to be fully derailed (Rekhviashvili, 2016).
Consequently, the deskilling of the Georgian labour and the failure of the market policy adjustments to respond to the development of Georgian financial market fostered the large exodus of the population from the formal economy during the 1990s. The 2000s were marked with the UNM’s attempt to introduce market-oriented sharp reform policies contributing to the formation of marginally organised labour representation in the country and also, attacking the unskilled labour force of the informal sector (Baumann, 2010).
The introduction to the stability and reconstruction programmes of the IMF and the World Bank contributed to the accelerate establishment of the neoliberal policy-makers. Considering the absence of the local organic intellectual class and the infiltration of western-educated market-oriented “reformists” (e.g., the former Russian Oligarch, Minister of Economics and an adviser to President Mikheil Saakashvili — Kahkha Bendukidze) the establishment of the market culture on some extent and constructing a social structure with no other alternatives to the neoliberal ideas was successful (Jones, Kakha Bendukidze and Georgia’s failed experiment., 2015).
“The failure of Georgia’s economic transformation illustrated the degree of symbolism in Bendukidze’s programme of economic liberty. In underdeveloped Georgia, with its long tradition of popular resistance to ignorant state administrators, it was more of an aesthetic vision than a realistic one. This is a common pattern in the post-colonial world where Western countries push universal economic blueprints with little calculation of the ability of locals to undo them” (Jones, 2015).
The 2003 Rose Revolution promised radical market liberalisation and the defeat of the corruption remnants of the post-1990s Civil war rampaged country that was led by the former prominent Soviet Politician Eduard Shevardnadze. The massively organised youth movements (e.g., “Kmara — meaning “Enough”), along with the ideological centre of the Georgian Liberty Institute with the close ties to the IMF, WB and the indirectly US endorsed INGOs (e.g., IRI, NDI, NED, TIG etc.), the successfulness of the revolution and the regime change was guaranteed (Welt, 2006). Henceforth, this event was the marking for the neoliberal ideas to become dominant in the country.
As the new government came into power in 2012, the struggle against the informal economy grew, however, as the people were forced to transfer from informal sector to formal sector, the formal sector proved to be harsh especially, in the sphere of service economy and retail. This a result of non-existing regulations in the industrial relations giving the employer asymmetric power to exploit the employee. The conflicts have been escalating ever since in the formal sector as the government negates the execution of the labour standards for ameliorating the situation, because of their staunch belief in neoliberal FDI oriented political economy. This has guaranteed to strip the citizenry off the prospects of decent work, universal healthcare, free education, universal social support programmes and thus, defining the country’s economy making it hostile to social market and relying upon only the FDIs and cutting most of the regulations (Japaridze, 2017).
The tertiary sector of the economy has been ever-dominant since the mid-2000s. The previous openly-neoliberal and authoritarian and the current neoliberal under the social-democrat coat governments have been promoting the tourist industry to be the locomotive in the Georgian economics to improve the macroeconomic data of the GDP. Nevertheless, at the beginning of August 2017, the Georgian Prime Minister celebrated the 1 billion GEL spent by the tourists in the country, where on the import-dependent country like Georgia approximately more than 0.5 billion GEL was spent of the import products and around 0.4 billion GEL will be spent to purchase the imported goods. As the deindustrialisation has taken its toll the country has become extremely dependent on the import and the export is simply non-existent, thus leaving the country with the negative external trade balance encouraging for the further indebtedness along with the upsurge of the power of the financial.
Meanwhile, the government along with the dominant economic scholars push for economic logic that frees the finance from almost all the social responsibilities. Withal, the state constitution of the country limits the budget with 30% (28%) of the national GDP. This happened after the 2010 constitutional amendments of the so-called “Liberty Act” that also limits the state’s sovereignty to manage the fiscal politics and for parliament to have the power to determine the taxation (Parliament of Georgia, 2010). However, the new government yielded to the pressure of the business association and their lobbyist organisation (e.g., Transparency International representation in Georgia had been vehemently campaigning to endorse this bill and portray the amendment of the taxation as a referendum issue to be a democratic matter).
Moreover, the complete deindustrialization and focus on the FDIs, relieving the barriers for the financial institution (banks) and the service economy investments are not delivering stable jobs. On the contrary, the jobs are few, low-skilled and low-paid. Ergo, employees work over 60 hours and get paid, for example, ₾400 or €132.4 per month, which was supposed to be for 40-hour work week per month. According to the labour code of conduct in Georgia, the employer must pay overtime for work over 40 hours at a higher wage than the regular compensation (Parliament of Georgia, 2010). For a salary of ₾400 a month, a 60 to 80-hour work week schedule should have the respective salary of no less than additional ₾200 which would be equivalent of no less than ₾600 a month. Thus, the formal sector produces what can be certainly called an unpaid overtime work as “Wage Theft”. In the case of the nurses, their monthly salary fluctuates between ₾300 and ₾500 (In addition to this, around 95% of the healthcare is privatised and 1/3 of the private hospitals are owned by the Bank of Georgia at the end of 2018) (Karanadze, Charkviani, Japaridze & Omsarashvili, 2018). Thereby, the low wages invoke low consumption. This is an underpinning for the diminished production that itself would guarantee the dormancy of the overall state economy.
The deceleration of wages is a huge problem in the country. The official statistics do not recognise either the concept of median wage income and or mode wage income, unfortunately, calculations are made by emphasising average wage income. The government does not regulate the “dollarization” in the country, hence the idea of inflation wages are uncommon. The deflating economy ensures the high priced imported products to get expensive every day as the Georgian Lari is persistently losing its value (e.g. food prices rise almost each month, hence the rent become almost unaffordable as the average rent in the capital Tbilisi fluctuates between $250 and $900, whereas the real median income is around ₾350≈ $129.19).
Therefore, this methodology, applied by the government for measuring the wage and income equality does pose a problem for reflecting the real gap between the ever-growing numbers of indebted poor employed or unemployed and the very rich monopolists. Furthermore, the definition of the very notion employed is also controversy regarding the fact that government does recognise employed the people who own small piece of rural land, have several farming animals or work in a bazaar-retail, also those who work as taxi drivers. All of these people are categorised as “self-employed”.
The deficiencies of this logic can be depicted in the upsurge of the free trade agreements and unregulated finance that limit the social market, thereby stipulating the plummet of the welfare and the curbing of the bargaining power for the working class. Consequently, these value-loaded policies result in the greater inequality with GINI coefficient as high as 40.09 by 2014 (Word Bank, 2017).
It is considerable to argue in favour of intertwining the 1990s’ waves of the uncertainty politics with the upsurge of 2000s neoliberalism in Georgia through comprehending the social and economic perspective by adjusting them to the economic discrepancies invoked by the political turmoil of the 90s. Accordingly, the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia was the beginning of the official instalment of Neoliberalism in the country that has been still vehemently pursued by the current Georgian Dream governing team. This was an instance that showed how the market-oriented policies hollowed out the social dimension of the local labour market (It is without mentioning the neoliberal policies directly influenced the rise of social inequality and labour safety. For example, the abandonment of the safety regulations in the labour code of Georgia, along with violating all the ILO standards, the number of dead and has dramatically exacerbated since 2006. According to the Georgian police statistics (Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia, 2018), the accidents (some with fatalities) have increased by 22.56% in 2017 in comparison with 2016. Henceforth the total number of dead and injured amounts to 1210 people between the years of 2011 and 2017.
These politics of the neoliberal non-real economics based on finance-driven greed and the total abandonment of the notion of “social market” has led the Georgian labour politics to advocate the overexploitation of the local labour power through service sector economics in the recent years. Although the industrial relations of the industry sector can be seen as abysmal with extremely dangerous working conditions, the idea of regulating and monitoring the labour relations is being downgraded only to the safety conditions recommendatory inspection of the “willing” enterprises in the industrial sector. This complete neglect of the full acknowledgement for the necessity of the labour relations to be inspected in all sectors of the economy has created promotion of the “sweatshop service economy”, where the already weak labour code execution is violated almost every working hour. Comprehending the fact that service (tertiary) sector has been looming large the labour market for the last decade or so, this sector comprises the approximately 65% of the total number of the employed in the country (National Statistics Office of Georgia, 2017).
In addition to these all, the adhered neoliberal policies gave rise to financial institutions including microfinance organisations in the country offering cheap credits to the citizens. According to the 2016 IMF data, outstanding loans with the commercial banks consist of 59.01% of the total GDP. Whereas, 717, 48 people per 1000 adults are the borrowers of the commercial banks (National Statistics Office of Georgia, 2017). Furthermore, the unaccounted data comes for the microfinance companies in Georgia that are the locomotive force for the indebtedness of the Georgian population. The deceleration of wages, skyrocketing number of unemployment, lack of jobs and the constant plummet in purchasing power per capita are the main reasons for the people to undertake the risky endeavour of taking loans. As there is a lack of regulation of the financial market in the country, the asymmetric relationship between the financial institutions and the citizens can be accounted for the economic deprivation of the middle and working classes. Withal, the number of suicides committed because of the indebtedness is growing every year. And these unfortunate events are just the glimpse into the gruesome Georgian social economy determined by the vehement pursuit of the neoliberal politics. Moreover, it should also, be stated that only 25% of the Georgian economy consists with the real sector, and with most of the economy is tertiary sector dependent (National Statistics Office of Georgia, 2017).
This situation in the country has caused a dichotomy between indebtedness with cheap and easy credits and low-paid irregular safety and monitoring lacking unstable service economy jobs in the country. Although the clear data is unavailable for this moment, but there is a common knowledge that the two large banks, Bank of Georgia and TBC Bank are slowly oligopolising both financial and real economy sectors through massive purchasing of company shares (e.g. Bank of Georgia, has acquired 100% equity of JSC Evex Medical Corporation (“Evex”), the Bank’s healthcare subsidiary, hence Evex falling under direct control of the bank (Bank of Georgia Holdings PLC, 2014)). Furthermore, the ration of the indebtedness of the Georgian household has been constantly increasing during recent years (A Euromoney Institutional Investor Company, 2017).
It is worth noting that the financial sector in Georgia has found a rapid increase since 2007. Ergo, the financial institutions, specifically the international and the local private financial lenders have become the kingmakers in the local economy, thus dictating the policy-design and the policy-relevance in the country.
4. Conclusion
The financialization is a political mindset of an economic process endorsing the finance-led economy to become dominant in a country. The finance itself is a fictitious capital that is created without labour force or with a lack of the means of production. It is rather presented to be a speculative money capital that is created from money itself (Marx, 1959). The financial capital overtook the real capital since the 1980s. This period has been marked as inception of a neoliberal hegemony paving the way to the dominance of financial capital.
Neoliberalism as a political project became quite prominent in some post-Soviet bloc countries. The deindustrialisation and the instalment of the neoliberal government ushered the perseverance of the neoliberal paradigm. Therefore, the logic pursued by the government avoided the public investment for the rejuvenation and the restoration of the pre-independence industrial capacity of the country. This was supplemented with the concentration on the massive deregulation in every sector. The financial sector, especially the banks proved to be the dealmakers in Georgian economics by already in the mid-2000s. The occurrence of the rapid financialization in Georgia took a toll on labour.
The neoliberal framework gave the rise to the tertiary sector in the country, incorporated approximately 65% of the local labour force (GEOSTAT — National Statistics Office of Georgia, 2017). The unstable irregular low-paid and low-skilled jobs in this sector are the largest portions of the jobs available at the local labour market. Moreover, all the preconditions have been laid for the establishment of the dichotomy between the indebtedness from cheap credit loans and service sector economics. Along with the lack of labour inspection oversight and condensed salaries, most of the workers to resort to the unregulated cheap credit offered by the financial institutions. Hence, the financialization has become the driving force for the indebtedness of the Georgian labour. Without a strong labour movement and politicised trade unions that create the space for the resistance from below, the political elites are to continuously coerce the undemocratic neoliberal policies to deprive the Georgian people of the prospect of just and sustainable development.
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