Thread by @jasonhickel

In this new paper we calculate the unequal exchange of labour between the global North and global South. The results are quite staggering. You'll want to look at this... 🧵

nature.com/articles/s4146…

First, a crucial point. Workers in the global South contribute 90% of the labour that powers the world economy, and 91% of labour for international trade.

The South provides the majority of the world's labour in all sectors (including 93% of global manufacturing labour).

And a lot of this is high-skill labour.

The South now contributes more high-skilled labour to the world economy than all the high-, medium- and low-skilled labour contributions of the global North combined.

But... global wage inequalities are truly massive. Southern wages are 87–95% lower than Northern wages for work of equal skill.

And the wage gaps are getting worse.

Is this because the South performs labour in primary sectors while the North performs labour in secondary sectors?

No. Southern wages are 83–98% lower than Northern wages for work of equal skill within the same sector.

There is nothing normal about this. These wage inequalities are a result of imperialist dynamics in the world economy that act to suppress wages and consumption in the global South. Why? Because it massively benefits Northern capital.

Systematic price inequalities mean that for every hour of embodied labour the South imports from the North, they have to export 11 hours to "pay" for it. This results in large net flows of value from South to North.

In 2021, the North net-appropriated 826 billion hours of labour from the global South. This occurs across all skill levels and sectors (sectors visible in the red graph at top of thread).

That's more labour than what is rendered by all workers in the US and Europe combined.

Roughly 50% of all labour that is consumed in the North is net-appropriated from the South.

This means that without unequal exchange, Northern economies would have to reduce their consumption by half, or double their working hours.

If the net-appropriated labour were valued in terms of Northern wages by skill level, it would total €16.9 trillion in in 2021. Or €310 trillion over the whole period from 1995-2021.

This is labour that could be mobilized to meet human needs and achieve national development objectives in the South (if Southern states and workers had greater control over production), but instead is siphoned away to support consumption and accumulation in the imperial core.

The paper is published in Nature Communications. A big congratulations to my brilliant co-authors, @morenahanbury and Felix Barbour. Stay tuned for more from each of them soon!

You can read it open-access here: nature.com/articles/s4146…

An important implication of this: the global North model of a "service economy" is not universalizable. It exists because the North can appropriate labour in agriculture and manufacturing from the global South. This is a reality that development pundits need to grapple with.