Who Works for Globalisation? The challenges and possibilities for international labour studies

Abstract

This introductory article to the special issue surveys the field of international labour studies and examines the key areas of growth over the past decade. It locates three core areas of the new literature: 1) the social construction of new labour forces across an expanding international division of labour; 2) the self-organising potential of workers, particularly within non-traditional sectors; and 3) the possibilities for transborder labour movements to help address the asymmetrical power relationships between globalised capital and localised labour. It argues that international labour studies as a field needs to make explicit its challenge to mainstream political economy by detailing how struggles over the construction, reproduction, utilisation and restructuring of labour forces are the contested social foundations upon which the global economy stands.

Notes

The author is indebted to Étienne Cantin, Ronaldo Munck and Susanne Soederberg for many useful suggestions.

1 T Branigan, ‘Reverberations of world recession rock a city built on exports’, Guardian, 1 November 2008, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/01/china-global-economy-dongguan.

2 For some analysts, a crisis has been brewing for a number of years in China's manufacturing sectors, with over-investment leading to overproduction beyond the limit of the market. See H Hung, ‘Rise of China and the global overaccumulation crisis’, Review of International Political Economy, 15 (2), 2008, pp 149–179.

3 Robin Cohen is often cited as formally recognising the NILS paradigm in a paper presented at a conference at the Centre of Developing Area Studies, Montreal, 1980. Major works that followed include R Munck, The New International Labour Studies, London: Zed Books, 1988; R Cohen, Contested Domains: Essays in the New International Labour Studies, London: Zed Books, 1991; P Waterman, The Old Internationalism and the New: A Reader on Labour, New Social Movements and Internationalism, The Hague: International Labour Education Foundation, 1988; R Boyd, R Cohen & P Gutkind (eds), International Labour and the Third World: The Making of a New Working Class, Aldershot: Avebury, 1987; and R Southall, Trade Unions and the New Industrialization of the Third World, London: Zed Books, 1988.

4 See E Webster, ‘Recasting labor studies in the twenty-first century’, Labor Studies Journal, 33 (3), 2008, pp 249–254.

5 F Fröbel, J Heinrichs & O Kreye, ‘The tendency towards a new international division of labour’, Review, 1, 1977, pp 73–88. See also the important critique by R Jenkins, ‘Divisions over the international division of labour’, Capital & Class, 22, 1984, pp 28–57.

6 See the retrospective account by R Munck, ‘Reconceptualizing labour in the era of globalization: from labour and “developing-area studies” to globalization and labour?’, Labour, Capital and Society, 37, 2004, pp 236–257.

7 See, for example, Robin Cohen's preface to Munck, The New International Labour Studies.

8 See P Waterman, The Newest International Labour Studies: Fit for New World Order?, Institute of Social Studies, Working Paper Series, 217, Amsterdam, 1996.

9 K Marx &F Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848.

10 See K Moody, Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy, London: Verso, 1997.

11 P Dickens, Global Shift, London: Sage, 2006, p 4.

12 World Bank, World Development Report 1995: Workers in an Integrating World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995; and International Monetary Fund, Globalization: Threat or Opportunity?, Washington: IMF, 1999.

13 For a critique, see M Taylor, ‘Displacing insecurity across a divided world: international security, global development and the endless accumulation of capital’, Third World Quarterly, 30 (1), 2009, pp 147–162.

14 H Zhang, China as the World Factory, London: Routledge, 2006.

15 E Cantin & M Taylor, ‘Making the “workshop of the world”: China and the transformation of the international division of labour’, in M Taylor (ed), Global Economy Contested: Power and Conflict Across the International Division of Labour, London: Routledge, 2008, pp 51–76.

16 See, for example, H-J Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective, London: Anthem, 2005; and E Reinert, Globalization, Economic Development and Inequality: An Alternative Perspective, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2004.

17 See, for example, G Gereffi, J Humphrey & T Sturgeon, ‘The governance of global value chains’, Review of International Political Economy, 12 (1), 2005, pp 78–104; and J Heintz, ‘Low-wage manufacturing and global commodity chains: a model in the unequal exchange tradition’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 30, 2005, pp 507–520.

18 See F Deyo, Beneath the Miracle: Labor Subordination in the New Asian Industrialism, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989; and P Burkett & M Hart-Landsberg, Development, Crisis and Class Struggle: Learning from Japan and East Asia, New York: St Martin's Press, 2000.

19 See the critiques by M Taylor, ‘Power, conflict and the production of the global economy’, in Taylor, Global Economy Contested, pp 11–31; and A Cumbers, C Nativel & P Routledge, ‘Labour agency and union positionalities in global production networks’, Journal of Economic Geography, 8 (3), 2008, pp 369–387.

20 For an overview, see R Munck, Globalization and Labour: The New Great Transformation, London: Zed Books, 2002.

21 Taylor, ‘Power, conflict and the production of the global economy’.

22 D Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism, New York: Verso, 2006.

23 See P McMichael, ‘Peasant prospects in the neoliberal age’, New Political Economy, 11 (3), 2006, pp 407–418.

24 United Nations, Report on the World Social Situation 2007: The Employment Imperative, Geneva: UN, 2007.

25 CK Lee, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007.

26 See, for example, L Salzinger, Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico's Global Factories, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003; J Elias, Fashioning Inequality: The Multinational Company and Gendered Employment in a Globalizing World, London: Ashgate, 2004; and T Caraway, Assembling Women: The Feminization of Global Manufacturing, Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 2007.

27 J Collins, Threads: Gender, Labor, and Power in the Global Apparel Industry, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003, p 169.

28 See J Medley & L Carroll, ‘The hungry ghost: IMF policy, global capitalist transformation, and laboring bodies in Southeast Asia’, in E Zein-Elabdin & S Charusheela (eds), Postcolonialism Meets Economics, London: Routledge, 2004, pp 145–165.

29 In particular, see CK Lee, Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998; and N Pun, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.

30 R Cohen, The New Helots: Migration in the International Division of Labour, Aldershot: Gower, 1988.

31 For example, see the important study of the Philippines electronics sector: S McKay, Satanic Mills or Silicon Islands? The Politics of High-Tech Production in the Philippines, Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 2006.

32 See, for example, J Hutchison & A Brown (eds), Organising Labour in Globalising Asia, London: Routledge, 2001; and K Broadbent & M Ford (eds), Women and Labour Organizing in Asia: Diversity, Autonomy and Activism, London: Routledge, 2008.

33 P Pangsapa, Textures of Struggle: The Emergence of Resistance among Garment Workers in Thailand, Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 2007.

34 MCK Louie, Sweatshop Warriors: Immigrant Women Workers take on the Global Factory, New York: South End Press, 2001.

35 S Hodkinson, ‘Is there a new trade union internationalism? The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions’ response to globalization, 1996–2002’, Labour, Capital and Society, 38 (1–2), 2005, pp 36–65.

36 See J Collins, ‘Redefining the boundaries of work: apparel workers and community unionism in the global economy’, Identities, 13, 2006, pp 9–131.

37 See also Lee's seminal Against the Law.

38 For example, J Harrod & R O'Brien (eds), Global Unions? Theory and Strategies of Organized Labour in the Global Political Economy, London: Routledge, 2002; and D Stevis & T Boswell, Globalization and Labor: Democratizing Global Governance, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.

39 J Chun, ‘The limits of labor exclusion: redefining the politics of split labor markets under globalization’, Critical Sociology, 34 (3), 2007, pp 433–452.

40 A Bieler, I Lindberg & D Pillay (eds), Labour and the Challenges of Globalization: What Prospects for Transnational Solidarity?, London: Pluto Press, 2008.

41 See, for example, K Bronfenbrenner (ed), Global Unions: Challenging Transnational Capital through Cross-Border Campaigns, Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 2007; and E Webster, R Lambert & A Bezuidenhout, Grounding Globalization: Labour in the Age of Insecurity, Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.

42 For example, R Armbruster-Sandoval, Globalization and Cross-Border Labor Solidarity in the Americas: The Anti-Sweatshop Movement and the Struggle for Social Justice, London: Routledge, 2005; and G Seidman, Beyond the Boycott: Labor Rights, Human Rights, and Transnational Activism, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007.

43 T Caraway, ‘Freedom of association: battering ram or Trojan horse?’, Review of International Political Economy, 13 (2), 2006, pp 210–232.

44 One attempt at such a campaign is the Asia Floor Wage campaign that is attempting to build support for a cross-border minimum wage for Asian textile workers. See www.asiafloorwage.org.

45 Webster et al, Grounding Globalization, p 15.

46 See also R Munck, Globalisation and Contestation: The New Great Counter-Movement, London: Routledge, 2007.

47 I have explored this line of analysis in greater depth in Taylor, ‘Power, conflict and the production of the global economy’. See also D Harvey, ‘The body as an accumulation strategy’, Environment and Planning D, 16, 1998, pp 401–421; and M De Angelis, The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital, London: Pluto, 2007.

48 See M Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.