Abstract
In most African countries, structural adjustment programs constituted the context of industrial relations conflicts during the 1980s because they had a negative effect on social and working conditions. This study discusses African labor’s responses to its deteriorating conditions, and to states’ attempts to limit labor’s demands. It concludes that structural adjustment programs were implemented in all African countries despite labor’s resistance. The degree of implementation depended on governments’ repressive capabilities, workers’ traditions of striving for independent organizations, and on unions’ perceptions of the issue and their responsibilities under prolonged economic crises.
Since the 1970s, African countries have experienced deep and prolonged economic crises. Indeed, economic and social performances in Sub-Saharan Africa have been worse than in Northern Africa. This explains why the Sub-Saharan region became a subject of particular interest in the studies and activities of international financial institutions. In almost all countries located in this region, the conditions for sustained economic growth and improvements in rural economies expected from the implementation of austerity policies and structural adjustment programs could not be created. Instead, these policies and programs have accentuated the deterioration of labor’s social and working conditions through layoffs, retrenchments, dislocations, different forms of workplace flexibility, rigidities in external labor markets, wage cuts, and declining purchasing power.
Introduction
Structural adjustment, as measured by the number of adjustment loans from the IMF and World Bank, reduces the effect of growth on poverty reduction. Growth does reduce poverty, but I find no evidence for a direct effect of structural adjustment on growth. Instead, the poor benefit less from output expansion in countries with many adjustment loans than in countries with few adjustment loans. By the same token, the poor suffer less from an output contraction in countries with many adjustment loans than in countries with few adjustment loans. Higher adjustment........
