From industrial relations research to Global Labour Studies: moving labour research beyond Eurocentrism

ABSTRACT

The traditional industrial relations approach – focused on the state, employers and unions as main actors – faces severe limits in its capacity to analyse labour conflict in the face of the specific forms of labour regulation in the Global South. This contribution argues that a solid theoretical framework for Global Labour Studies requires a critique of its forerunner, the industrial relations approach. A globally relevant understanding of labour conflict in the twenty-first century requires to abandon the main assumptions of this forerunner. A new theoretical framework for the analysis of labour conflict can build on the debates around social movement unionism and the research agenda of labour geography that include other places and spaces of labour mobilization than the workplace and the trade union into their epistemological perspective. Such a conception allows to analyse labour conflict at the level of the social formation, and not just as something relegated to or emanating from the economic sphere.

KEYWORDS:

• Industrial relations
• Global South
• strikes
• social movements
• social formation

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to Andreas Bieler and two anonymous reviewers for extremely useful comments on the first draft of this text, and to Alexander Gallas who provided access to the text of Joachim Hirsch.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Brookes and McCallum (2017) restrict Global Labour Studies to the study of labour transnationalism which is at odds with most of the other writers in the field (see for example Taylor, 2009; Webster, 2010). I do not follow this definition and understand Global Labour Studies as the study of labour relations and labour movements with a global perspective.

2 Third World Quarterly, 2009, Vol. 30, No. 3, Putting Labour into the International Division of Labour.

3 Further contributions to the debate can be found in Vol. 1, No. 3 of the Global Labour Journal: https://mulpress.mcmaster.ca/globallabour/issue/view/124, and in Vol. 2, No 1: https://mulpress.mcmaster.ca/globallabour/issue/view/125.

4 I do not delve deeper into a critique of the power resources approach here which I have done elsewhere (Nowak, 2018). Instead the focus here is on the critique of the industrial relations approach as such.

5 ‘We cannot understand work and employment unless we also have a theoretical understanding of the economy, of law, of politics, of education, of the community, of gender relations’ (Hyman, 2004, p. 267); ‘To understand labour in the global economy, we argue, it is necessary to examine workers as a totality, workers in society and in their historical context’ (Webster, 2010, p. 385).

6 ‘The trade unions set up in those countries [in the southern hemisphere] recruited membership mainly from big industry and the public sector. Their fight for labour rights and social security benefits remained restricted to a tiny portion of the total workforce’ (Breman & van der Linden, 2014, p. 934).

7 The term apparatuses of proletarian hegemony is my own creation, and is aligned to Gramscís conception of the different stages of the development of popular organizations (Gramsci 1971, p. 365f).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jörg Nowak

Jörg Nowak is Visiting Professor at Universidade de Brasilia, Brazil. He has been a Visiting Professor at City University of Hong Kong and a Marie Curie Fellow at University of Nottingham, UK. His last book publication is Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India (2019, Palgrave).