Labour conflicts in the Global South: an introduction

ABSTRACT

This article provides an introduction to the special issue on labour conflicts in the Global South. We will first conceptualize the internal relations between structure and agency on the basis of a historical materialist approach in order to assess the strategies of workers within a rapidly changing global capitalism. Second, in order to avoid economic reductionism we will conceptualize the internal relations between class, gender and race to account for the gender-specific manifestations of class as well as how racialization continues to underpin today’s global political economy and is fragmenting the working class and, thereby, undermines its potential for resistance. Finally, we will discuss where appropriate how dualist, binary constructions from Northern Industrial Relations, which are frequently applied in the analysis of labour struggles in the Global South, can be overcome.

KEYWORDS:

• Class
• gender
• Global South
• labour conflict
• race

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andreas Bieler

Andreas Bieler is Professor of Political Economy in the School of Politics and International Relations and Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ) at University of Nottingham/UK. He is author of Global capitalism, global war, global crisis (with Adam D. Morton) (CUP, 2018) and Fighting for water: Resisting privatization in Europe (Zed Books, 2021).

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 (Palgrave, 2019).