CENTRAL CURRENTS IN GLOBALIZATION Globalization and Economy VOLUME 4 Globalizing Labour EDITED BY Paul James and Robert O’Brien Introduction and editorial arrangement © Paul James and Robert O’Brien 2006 First published 2006 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. Every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge all the copyright owners of the material reprinted herein. However, if any copyright owners have not been located and contacted at the time of publication, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B-42, Panchsheel Enclave Post Box 4109 New Delhi 110 017 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 10 1-4129-1952-5 ISBN: 13 978-1-4129-1952-4 (set of four volumes) Library of Congress Control Number: 2006901469 Typeset by Star Compugraphics Private Limited, Delhi Printed on paper from sustainable resources Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall Contents VOLUME 4 GLOBALIZING LABOUR SECTION 1 Historical Developments: The Rise of a Global Division of Labour 56. Wealth of Nations Adam Smith 57. World Scale Patterns of Labour-Capital Conflict: Labor Unrest, Long Waves and Cycles of Hegemony Beverly Silver 58. Globalization, Labor Markets and Policy Backlash in the Past Jeffrey G. Williamson 59. Rethinking the International Division of Labour in the Context of Globalisation James H. Mittleman 00 00 00 00 SECTION 2 Global Labour Divides: Class, Gender and Race 60. The Transnational Capitalist Class and Global Politics Leslie Sklair 61. Recasting our Understanding of Gender and Work during Global Restructuring Jean L. Pyle and Kathryn B. Ward 62. Racial Assumptions in Global Labor Recruitment and Supply Randolph B. Persaud 63. Rethinking Globalization: The Agrarian Question Revisited Philip McMichael 00 00 00 00 SECTION 3 Globalization and Labour Mobility 64. Neo-liberalism and the Regulation of Global Labor Mobility Henk Overbeek 65. Labor versus Globalization George Ross 66. Labour Migration: A Developmental Path or Low Level Trap? David Ellerman 67. Labor Internationalism and the Contradictions of Globalization: Or, Why the Local is Sometimes Still Important in a Global Economy Andrew Herod 00 00 00 00 vi Contents SECTION 4 Debating Global Governance and Labour 68. International Union Movement Robert O’Brien 69. Adventures of Emancipatory Labour Strategy as the New Global Movement Challenges International Unionism Peter Waterman 70. ‘Decent Work’: The Shifting Role of the ILO and the Struggle for Global Social Justice Leah F. Vosko 00 00 00 SECTION 5 Critical Projections 71. Power Repetoires and Globalization Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward 72. Responsibility and Global Labor Justice Iris Marion Young 73. Southern Unionism and the New Labour Internationalism Rob Lambert and Eddie Webster 74. Globalization, Labor, and the Polanyi Problem Ronaldo Munck 00 00 00 00 Globalizing Labour: A Critical Introduction ix Globalizing Labour Paul James and Robert O’Brien I nvestigations into the political economy of globalization usually concentrate upon three related developments – the expansion of international trade and the growth in transnational production, including the rise of transnational corporations;1 the creation of a world-wide market for finance and credit;2 and finally, the development of regimes and institutions of global economic governance.3 By comparison, the role and significance of labour and labourers tend to be neglected in most studies. Yet, from its very inception, the process of globalization has been marked by the different methods of organizing work and organizing the activity of workers themselves. This volume goes some way in restoring labour to a proper place in the globalization literature. The title Globalizing Labour has a dual meaning. On the one hand it refers to the increasing connectedness of workers and work as the globalization of integrated trade, financial and production systems merges economic activity from around the world. Labour is globalizing in the sense that it is connected to world-wide production and exchange structures. On the other hand, the title refers to the activities of workers themselves as their political and economic activities influence broader globalization structures. Labour is globalizing in the sense that workers are themselves building organizational links between different communities and are engaging global power structures whether they be globalizing corporations or international organizations. This essay introduces the subject of labour and globalization by examining four elements of the relationship. Firstly, the historical relationship between labour and globalization is briefly reviewed. Secondly, the condition of various forms of labour since the end of the Cold War is surveyed. Thirdly, the issue of labour, the state and regulation of globalizing corporations is highlighted. The chapter concludes with some thoughts on key issues facing global labour in the twenty-first century. Globalization, Labour and the Shaping of the Modern World Proposition 1. Labour has been central to the modern globalization process. From issues of the embodied movement of workers to the emergence of a global division of labour, x Globalizing Labour: A Critical Introduction and organized responses to capitalist relations of production, the relevance of labour to globalization is not new, and it is far more significant in shaping the world than is usually recognized. In relation to embodied globalization, going back to the eighteenth century, labourers were ‘sourced’ far from the centres of industrial power and drawn into the centre of things as part of the emergence of a world-spanning, capitalist global economy. This process took two main forms: forced labour movement and labour migration. Three hundred years ago, European settlers in the New World first enslaved Native Americans and then turned to importing large numbers of African slaves to work the mines and plantations of the Americas. Further afield, the British, French, Portuguese and Dutch empires used slaves and indentured labour to work in Africa and Asia. The wealth generated by this forced labour contributed to the European importation of Asian luxury goods, and was reinvested in European development. More controversially, it has been suggested that profits from the slavery in the Caribbean were a major source of the capital which financed the British industrial revolution.4 Most historians dispute the centrality of the slave trade to the industrial revolution,5 but Eric Williams (1944) in raising the issue succeeded in drawing attention to the important role that slavery played in the British Empire. Indeed, it is hard to imagine extensive economic relations crossing the Atlantic and extending to other parts of the world without the institution of slavery. Attempts to use indentured European labour in plantations and mines were largely unsuccessful, including the use of poor whites in the Caribbean in the seventeenth century. Without imported forced labour and slavery, Europeans would have been severely limited in exploiting the natural resources of the Caribbean, Latin America and southern United States. The global movement of slaves, indentured labourers, and, later, labour migrants, were all integral to the establishment of long-term racial hierarchies both within numerous countries and transnationally.6 In much of presentday Latin America the descendants of European settlers have secured privileged positions in local, externally-oriented economies, and people of mixed European and native origins occupy a middle category while indigenes and the descendents of slave populations remain firmly at the bottom of the labour force. In Canada and the United States, local inhabitants were excluded from economic society through banishment to reserves or extermination. In the United States, the system of plantation slavery established racial hierarchies whose legacy is present to this day. Racial divisions of labour were created in numerous African and Asian countries as British colonizers imported Indian labour. This has resulted in a long-term hierarchical division of labour between Europeans, Asians and Africans. Jeffrey Williamson in Globalizing Labour: A Critical Introduction xi his contribution to the present volume points out that the globalization of labour has historically created social conflict, even in relatively developed industrial states. Indeed, he suggests that the general systemic breakdown which spiralled into World War I has its roots in these problems.7 Another area where there has been considerable disagreement over the relationship between the process of globalizing labour relations and the shaping of the modern world concerns the emergence of a global division of labour. The positions range between classical liberal approaches which see market extensions as unproblematically part of the creation of capitalist efficiency; critical historical analyses which attribute tensions in the globalizing of labour relations to the lack of compensation for losers; worldsystems approaches which see the labour-capital conflict as ever-present and simply shifting location under more recent globalization processes; and global studies analyses which tend to argue that the contemporary intensification of the globalization of the division of labour necessitates a rethinking of classical liberal and orthodox Marxist approaches.8 Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, excerpted in the present volume, is perhaps the classic liberal statement of the significance of divisions of labour in the process of social extension. Writing in the late-eighteenth century, the moral philosopher and now adopted sage of neoclassical and neoliberal economists, attributed the productivity and prosperity of wealthy nations to an advanced division of labour.9 Breaking tasks down into different operations and distributing these operations to particular individuals, he argued, simply increased productivity. Though the writing in the Wealth of Nations is naïvely descriptive and he does not use the term ‘globalization’, there are three striking elements of his analysis that have profound implications for debates today over globalization and its effects. Firstly, Smith explains the relative backwardness of large parts of the world such as Africa and much of Asia as being a consequence of their inability to engage in an advanced division of labour. Secondly, Smith implicitly argues that increasing wealth requires the internationalization (globalization) of markets. This is because the division of labour is limited only by the size of the market. In this view, national markets are more productive than local markets, and international markets are even more productive. Thirdly, he suggests that the division of labour benefits everyone. In well-governed societies we find a ‘universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people’.10 These points later become an early intellectual point of reference and justification for policies advocating global free trade and the globalization of production that we find in contemporary writers such as Jagdish Bhagwati, Martin Wolf and Eric Weede.11 Not only were labour relations central to the early phases of modern globalization in relation to the changing modes of production and exchange, but workers themselves formed early transnational civic organizations as xii Globalizing Labour: A Critical Introduction part of a more general change in the dominant mode of economic and political organization. With the consolidation of industrialization and the rise of relatively new relations of modern organization such as abstracted bureaucracies and professional associations, labour movements were formed in the nineteenth century with ongoing even if often informal secretariats. At the time, state borders were relatively permeable, and it quickly became clear that an effective response to employers and industrialists would require workers to operate transnationally. European labour movements were often composed of broadly-based groupings of trade unions, leftist political parties – communist and social democratic – as well as a range of social groups such as co-operatives or friendly societies.12 Their common goal was to build a world where workers enjoyed a great share of the wealth that they produced. An early incarnation of this activity was the International Working Men’s Association (also known as the First International 1864–1872), which provided strike support, education, lobbying and campaigning initiatives across state boundaries.13 Karl Marx was a key intellectual leader of the First International. The slogan of the Communist Manifesto, ‘Workers of the World Unite’, captured the view that workers had common interests with other workers globally rather than with the capitalists of their own societies. It also reflected a view that capitalism was a global system which reached beyond state borders. An internationalist strategy which brought all workers together irrespective of nationality was thought to be required if capitalism was to be tamed and overthrown. Early labour activists were just as internationalist, if not more internationalist than labour activists today. The First International was supplanted by the Second International in 1889 with a call by socialist trade unionists for an international conference to address working conditions generally and, in particular, the question of the eight-hour day. From the late 1880s, the other force for globalizing the labour movement were the international trade secretariats bringing together workers in particular trades and crafts – though at this stage they were predominantly confined to transnational gatherings in Europe. Labour movements’ efforts at working internationally were qualified by the consolidation of the nation-state in the mid-nineteenth century and the rise of economic nationalism in the late-nineteenth century, but during this period nationalism and internationalism as concurrent ideologies were held in relationship. It was the outbreak of World War I which brought about the effective end of nineteenth-century economic globalization, and the demise of the first labour internationalist experiment. Although European labour leaders had pledged to oppose a conflict which would lead workers of different nationalities to kill each other, they were unable to stop the rush to a new globalizing war. Overcome by an intensifying jingoism, workers rushed to participate in the war. Leading socialist parties supported the war effort and dealt a devastating blow to working-class internationalism.14 Globalizing Labour: A Critical Introduction xiii As workers returned home following the carnage of the European War, they posed a challenge to governments that sought to re-establish an open, liberal international economy. Millions of people had been mobilized for the war effort and were unwilling to return to the old economic and political order. The economic turbulence generated by the war continued into the 1920s and 1930s and ignited massive transformation in numerous states. In Russia, the communists seized power as the war turned against the state. In Italy and Germany, fascist parties seized power while in the United States, a ‘New Deal’ was proposed to respond to worker discontent generated by economic depression.15 The victory of the communists in the Russian revolution provided an inspiration to many labour groups around the world and shaped one of the major geo-political globalizing struggles of the twentieth century. The Russian communists tried to spread the victory of the worker’s party around the world. An immediate international Western response to the rise of communist and socialist labour movements was the founding of the International Labour Organisation (ILO). The ILO was created to improve the plight of some workers in the hope that this would undermine the revolutionary message of the communism. Following World War II, labour groups once again backed political projects which reasserted national control over the economy and at least in one sense limited the spread of some of the economic pathways associated with contemporary globalization. In the North, workers were active in pressuring governments to redistribute income from the rich to the general population through the welfare state. In the South, many labour movements were involved in independence movements and anti-colonial struggles against Western states. Internationally, post-1945 labour movements were divided by the same ideological splits that characterized international relations. Most of organized labour came to be affiliated either to the communist World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) or the pro-Western International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). The communist and noncommunist unions competed for membership and state influence, splitting the trade union movement within and between countries. In an era of intensifying and globalizing Cold War rivalry many union members in both the East and the West paradoxically became enmeshed in the security apparatus of their states. The critical literature on the period suggests that the foreign policy held by unions often became a cover for nation-stateoriented foreign policy as workers became engulfed by a ‘labour-government’ nexus.16 In other words, on the one hand, the Cold War presented a globalizing pressure itself in the sense that it drew most of the world into a Manichean global standoff. This is a simple point; one too often overlooked – the Cold War was a globalizing phenomenon. However, on the other hand, a disjunction emerged between the globalizing organizational configuration of the two union networks, East and West, and the national orientation of their various affiliates.17 xiv Globalizing Labour: A Critical Introduction While the organizational form and political orientation of the labour movement turned back to the frame of the nation-state, the unintended consequences of much trade union activity served to accelerate economic globalization.18 For example, US trade unions supported the spread of capitalism into other countries because it created jobs for their members. In the early post-war reconstruction of Western Europe, US unions became heavily involved in undermining communist unions in France and Italy so that these countries would implement policies more friendly to US interests.19 In later years Western unions took a leading role in shifting the nature of social systems in the South. Companies and unions that were rivals at home joined forces to facilitate the reorientation of radical labour movements in developing countries. For example, British and US unions worked to provide a stable industrial relations climate in Jamaica which facilitated the exploitation of bauxite resources by Western multinationals.20 Such activity led to a critique that Western unions were in league with state elites, globalizing corporations and local authoritarians intent upon undermining unions which challenged widespread inequality or the policies of Western states.21 In deadly struggles for social justice in numerous developing countries, US unions often sided with the conservative ruling elite against those working for more equality.22 This is not to say that all Western international union activity was imperialistic or had the effect of dominating other societies. The attempt to assist South African trade unions in their struggle against apartheid is a complex, but significant example of positive solidarity activity.23 Similarly, the international campaign to protect Coca-Cola workers in Guatemala from 1975 to 1985 was central in combating the threats of violence from the state and forcing Coca-Cola to transfer its franchise to more unionfriendly operators.24 In both cases, solidarity was based upon listening to local demands and concerns rather than trying to export a particular model of union structure and development. The activity of some Western unions during this era left some groups in the developing world asking whether their Northern counterparts were partners or predators.25 North-South worker cooperation was complicated by the fact that positive intentions sometimes resulted in unintended consequences. It may be the intention of a Northern union strategy to support free and independent unions in other countries, but the consequences may be to undermine independent unions and bolster undemocratic unions. It may be a union confederation’s intent to protect its workers against mobile capital, but the effects of its actions could be to strengthen the system in which mobile capital works. This disagreement between intentions and outcomes was an interesting feature of a debate about the role of the AFLCIO and the International Labour Organization (ILO) in supporting US hegemony in the 1970s. Robert Cox has argued that the effect of AFL-CIO policy during the 1970s was to support US capital and undermine radical Globalizing Labour: A Critical Introduction xv unions in other parts of the world, whereas the AFL-CIO argued that their actions served the interests of American and non-American workers.26 The implication is that well-meaning people can have negative effects on others if they fail to be sufficiently self-critical of their actions. This is especially important in relationships characterized by an imbalance of power between the parties. The two decades from the beginning of the 1970s until the end of the 1990s saw a number of contradictory developments in the relationship between labour movements and globalization. In the more thoroughly industrialized economies this era was characterized by an undermining of labour movement power and an increasingly hostile view of globalization. In other parts of the world, some labour movements were able to contribute to a process of political liberalization and democratization, but they soon found themselves facing a menacing global economy. In other parts of the world, labour movements remained weak and the globalization of the economy created immense pressure on workers’ livelihoods. Globalization and Labour Mobility Globalization has always been associated with the movement of people, but the more specific question of labour mobility and its regulation is a relatively new phenomenon. Just as across the late twentieth century and into the present, Western nation-states have tightened the regulations on the movements of refugees, asylum seekers and most categories of migrants, so too the movement of workers has come to be increasingly regulated in terms of national-interest considerations. This is a dramatic shift from the massive labour migrations of the nineteenth century. Business migration has remained the most open category of labour movement, and, for a time in the mid- to late-twentieth century, guest-worker schemes brought large numbers of workers from peripheral economies to northern Europe, Japan and the oilrich Gulf states of the Middle East. Moreover, illegal labour migration continues, with a prominent example being the millions of Mexicans who have become integral to significant sectors of the US economy. However, more recently, some of those labour flows are being brought under increasingly tougher regimes of regulation. There is of course an irony here. At the same time as neoliberals, market-oriented policy-makers, and even Third Way politicians, have been arguing for an increasing openness to the global movement of commodities, they have argued for or instituted new regimes for disciplining the global movement of labour. The implication of this is that although production and exchange relations continue to be increasingly globalized – that is, for example through certain areas of the South and new production zones such as southern China becoming the focus of labour-intensive industrial production that once was centred on the xvi Globalizing Labour: A Critical Introduction West – cross-border labour movement is becoming increasingly regulated or restricted. In other words, contemporary processes of capitalist globalization are having uneven effects, including leading to strategic restrictions on global labour mobility. Financial remittances and personal communications from migrants and undocumented workers continue to flow across national borders – in these cases to those worker’s home-countries as part of the increasing globalization of the modes of exchange and communication. However, the same cannot be said for the unfettered movement of the worker’s themselves, except in some very specific cases. One counter-example is in the area of the service and caring industries where the Philippines government has been encouraging the labour migration particularly to the Middle East (in effect exporting temporary workers). One in ten Filipinos, or 7.8 million nationals, now works outside the Philippines.27 In this context, Henk Overbeek’s chapter in the present volume argues that modern globalization has been associated more with the movement of capital rather than labour, even as the global economy has become more integrated.28 Here ‘movement’ and ‘integration’ refer to two different phenomena. Labour across the world, including in regions relatively disconnected from the dominant global economy, has been increasingly integrated into globalizing capitalism. However, as the movement of people began to reassert itself in the second half of the twentieth century after a period of slowing down, states have instituted restrictions on the kinds of workers that they want and for how long those persons can stay. Top- and intermediate-level managers, and technical and commercial experts, have become increasingly globally mobile, while manual, industrial, and service workers are selectively granted access according to the changing needs of particular economies. These new modalities of organizing labour migration brought nation-states into a new coalition with informal and non-government bodies. For example, in Europe an informal system of consultation on the movement of migration emerged called the Budapest Group, concerned about movement from Central and Eastern Europe into the European Union. The organization of labour mobility in terms of perceived market needs has coincided with the relative decline of the power of organized labour institutions. This remains an unresolved issue in the literature. George Ross in his contribution to this volume suggests that the recent intensification of economic globalization has had significant consequences for weakening labour unions.29 In the mid-twentieth century, despite an ideology of internationalism and an organizational structure which included globalizing federations of union affiliates, the union movement was largely nationally oriented. Labour organizations and states in the West struck a Keynesian balance between sustainable wage and high employment levels on the one hand and productive efficiency and market growth on the other. Ross is overly idealistic in his description of this period in the decades after World War II Globalizing Labour: A Critical Introduction xvii as a ‘Golden Age’. For example, feminist analysis of the ‘Golden Age’ highlights how it rested upon a highly unequal gendered division of labour. Nevertheless, Ross is very clear that in the Eastern bloc countries and the South the ‘Golden Age’ was a long way from the reality of workers’ lives there. Western labour movements did not do enough to challenge the excesses of global capitalism beyond the borders of their own national orientations. This left labour organizations doubly weakened – weakened by the processes of globalization that have deregulated relations of production, and weakened by the way in which solidarity movements tend to rely on cultural and linguistic commonalities. Another unresolved issue in the literature is whether or not labour mobility – and in particular temporary labour migration from the South to capitalist industrialized countries – strengthens or weakens the countries from which the labour is drawn. Is labour migration a way of generating development in the South by skills training and repatriation of wages? David Ellerman, a researcher from the World Bank, for example, suggests that it tends not to have positive benefits.30 Temporary migration tends to become a permanent way of life, repatriated money alleviates poverty only while the money continues to be sent, often leading to new forms of dependency, and the skills training tends to be specific to the requirements of the place that the labour migrants have moved. Does all of this mean that under conditions of globalization and the increasing mobility of capital that labour has been completely subordinated to the power of the corporation? While attentive to the concerns expressed by George Ross on the weakening of the labour organizations, Andrew Herod, in his contribution to this volume, suggests on the contrary that globalization opens up new contradictions in the organization of capitalism that allows labour room for negotiation.31 We will come back to this point, but for the moment it is sufficient to note that the increased speed of communication has led to globalizing corporations having increased capacities for efficient integration at a distance, but it has also given corporations less time to respond to crises. Depending upon the corporation or dispute, this suggests that worker action at the global or international level, or some combination of both, can have an impact on corporations despite the mobility advantages of capital. The Effect of Globalization on Labour Movement in the Post-Cold War Period Since the end of the Cold War a fierce debate has been waged about the relationship between labour and globalization. There are two main questions here: the first about the decline or improvement of labour conditions; the xviii Globalizing Labour: A Critical Introduction second about the changing form of labour in the context of a shift from the dominance of industrial capitalism to the overlaying of a new dominant layer of techno-electronic capitalism, sometimes called the ‘knowledge economy’. In relation to the first question, liberal globalization enthusiasts such as Martin Wolf have argued that globalization is lifting millions of workers out of poverty.32 This has been countered by Robert Wade’s argument that the available evidence is so poor that it is impossible to say with any precision what the effect of globalization has been on workers around the world.33 Given the weakness of the data we proceed by providing only a rough overview of workers’ experience with globalization by examining the experience of protected and unprotected workers in the North and South. The second question will be handled in the process of handling the first. Protected Workers in the North: Autonomy Undermined Intensification of globalization since the early 1970s has coincided with, and contributed to, the almost universal undermining of the classical forms of protected workers’ autonomy in advanced industrialized countries. Workers, particularly manual and service workers, have lost ground both in the political arena and in the industrial relations field. Politically, trade unions have seen their influence decrease as former Left and social democratic parties have moved to the Right and loosened ties with their labour constituency. In the United States this was most vividly illustrated during the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). NAFTA was supported by the establishment of the Democratic Party despite the opposition of its labour constituency. During the crucial NAFTA vote in Congress, Democratic President Bill Clinton urged members of his party to join Republicans in passing the agreement. NAFTA was approved and organized labour was left reconsidering its traditional support for US foreign economic policy. Some interpreted this split as signifying a potential radical turning point in US labour’s relationship with the state.34 Organizationally, labour movements have been weakened by an attack upon trade union rights and steadily declining union density in many states. The attack has been most severe in the Anglo-American states with union density dramatically declining.35 For example, the percentage of workers belonging to unions in the United States declined from 35 per cent in 1954 to 20 per cent in 1983 to only 13.5 per cent in 2001. The figure for private (excluding public-sector) non-agricultural industry membership is less than 10 per cent.36 Despite an upsurge in resources dedicated to organizing workers,37 there is no sign yet of recovery. Although protected workers in the North have been undermined by globalization, they remain relatively more autonomous than unprotected northern workers or protected and unprotected workers in the South. They still have access to state, union and political party protection to assert their autonomy, Globalizing Labour: A Critical Introduction xix even if these institutions are significantly weaker or are less sympathetic than they were thirty years ago. The only groupings to benefit from globalizing economies have been a proportion of what might be called the ‘intellectually trained’, an emergent category of workers characterized by tertiary education and with an emphasis on the techno-scientific or administrative application of specialized skills in the information-oriented, computerized and hightechnology-based industries. At the higher levels, these workers have tended to trade once-protected conditions for higher salaries, but they have a significant flexibility and bargaining autonomy. It is this category of workers who now arguably constitutes the most powerful set of labour groupings within the emerging dominance of techno-scientific and information capitalism.38 The rise of these intellectually-trained groupings includes the ascendancy of what some have argued is a new class whose power transcends localized economies and is part of a remaking of the global class structure. In Leslie Sklair’s terms, this is a new ‘transnational capitalist class’.39 The literature here is undeveloped, but Sklair and others argue that networks of corporate executives, globalizing bureaucrats, professionals and media figures work together to expand the reach of global capitalism. Organizations such as the European Roundtable of Industrialists or the Transatlantic Business Dialogue allow representatives of transnational corporations to negotiate and articulate their positions. Corporate representatives sit on national delegations to rule-setting institutions (for example, Codex Alimentarius), and they work with interstate organizations to influence investment rules, as exemplified by the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI). Sklair in his contribution to the present volume documents how the global division of labour is being actively created by corporate interests that may benefit from it. The political failure of the MAI also illustrates how in some cases the exertions of global power can be successful resisted by publics putting pressure upon their national political leadership. Unprotected Workers in the North: One Step Back for Most While most workers in advanced industrialized economies enjoy some type of state protection in the form of minimum employment rights and social services, significant numbers of workers have seen their autonomy undermined by the growth of precarious employment. Increasingly, the norm of full-time employment with benefits and some degree of protection has been challenged by a temporary employment relationship characterized by casualization and insecurity.40 For example, in the United States in 2004 there were as many workers engaged in temporary contract work as there were members of unions.41 Some of these workers, such as privileged individuals within the intellectually-trained groupings, have chosen such ‘flexibility’, but many have it forced upon them. xx Globalizing Labour: A Critical Introduction The striking element about unprotected work in advanced industrialized states is the degree to which the rest of the economy relies upon this form of labour. Reliable statistics are difficult to marshal, but the extent and significance of unprotected work rises to the surface in a number of ways. One high-profile example occurred in 1993 when US President Bill Clinton attempted to appoint a woman to the post of Attorney-General. His first two candidates were forced to withdraw because they both had used ‘illegal’ workers for childcare. The eventual post holder was a childless woman. This incident demonstrated the degree to which professional women with children in the US rely upon unprotected, often migrant women, to perform household labour. Another example emerged in 2003 when it was revealed that an element of the retailer Walmart’s famous competitive advantage rested upon its employment of undocumented workers to clean its stores.42 The growth of precarious work conditions has combined with a transformation of the state that has left the lower echelons of the workforce with diminishing support. This transformation has variously been interpreted as the demise of the welfare state,43 the growth of the workfare state or the rise of the competition state.44 However it is conceptualized, the central element is the withdrawal of universal social services and the increased targeting and conditionality of social benefits. These changes have the effect of reducing the choices available to large sections of the paid and unpaid workforce. Protected Workers in the South: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back Protected workers in the South have had variety of experiences. One pattern has been increased political autonomy and decreased market autonomy. Another pattern has been stagnant political autonomy and marginally increased economic autonomy. Organized labour has been involved in dramatic democratization struggles around the world.45 In numerous nonWestern states, labour movements have played a key role in changing the political systems of their countries and opening up new regions to the full forces of globalization. One significant example is Poland where the Solidarity labour movement challenged the power of the Communist state. Its success in representing independent workers opened the first cracks in the Soviet regimes and eventually led to the elimination of communist states in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. These areas were then quickly and unevenly incorporated into the global economy and information society. In South Africa, labour movements played a central role in ousting the apartheid regime. Newly democratic South Africa quickly rebuilt links with the international community and other parts of the world. It has moved to integrate itself into the global economy at breakneck speed. A similar experience can be seen in Brazil where workers led the charge against authoritarian governments and were later rewarded with neoliberal economic programs. Globalizing Labour: A Critical Introduction xxi In these states, workers enjoyed and suffered the benefits of low-intensity democracy.46 The democratization of political institutions was accompanied by a move to neoliberal economic relations. This dual transformation offered workers new civil and political rights in liberal democratic states, but they also found their political influence and power in industrial relations undermined by the newly adopted liberal economic policies. Formal democratic institutions were created but the ability of workers to achieve their goals was undercut – hence the applicability of the term ‘low-intensity democracy’. For example, the newly democratic government of South Korea was forced into IMF structural adjustment programmes following the 1997 East Asian financial crisis. These policies ended employment security and prompted widespread labour unrest. The jailing of union leaders continued after regime-change to a more liberal democratic form of state. Post-apartheid South Africa rapidly liberalized its trade and investment regimes as it enshrined legal protection for its unions. The result has been increased union participation in tripartite bodies as its membership is eroded by unemployment. A different trend has been the continued authoritarian suppression of labour autonomy combined with some improvement in labour’s ability to engage in a restricted set of economic relations. Indeed, labour suppression was at the heart of the East Asian economic ‘miracle’ from the 1960s until the mid-1990s.47 The most prominent and significant case in the early twentyfirst century is China. China’s liberalization and integration into the global economy through trade and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has had immense implications for Chinese and non-Chinese workers alike. FDI in China’s special economic zones has created impressive economic growth and export-oriented development. Millions have fled the poverty of the rural economy and flocked to the cities in search of employment. However, Chinese workers lack autonomous organizations to represent their interests. They are represented by the All China Federation of Trade Unions which is controlled by the Chinese state. Attempts by workers to create autonomous organizations have been met by fierce state repression. While parts of the economy boom, many Chinese workers have few chances to advance their interests.48 Unprotected in the South: Two Steps Back Unprotected workers in the South have been seriously disadvantaged by the globalization process since the 1970s after initial gains in the early post-war period. Two key developments are structural adjustment programmes and the liberalization of agriculture. For many workers in the developing world, economic Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) were the dominant face of globalization, at least until they fell into disfavour in the early twentyfirst century. Following the debt crisis of 1982 many developing countries restructured their economies to follow a more liberal, export-oriented model. xxii Globalizing Labour: A Critical Introduction This model reflected the tenets of the ‘Washington Consensus’ which stressed balanced budgets, reduction in state subsidies, privatization, trade and financial liberalization. Both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank made financial assistance in times of economic crisis or for development conditional upon national acceptance of these principles. The attempt to manage the debt crisis through structural adjustment resulted in a lost decade of economic development in the 1980s followed by increasing inequality in the 1990s in many developing countries. Writing for one of the international trade union bodies, Harrod points out that SAPs attack living standards through liberalizing labour markets, increasing unemployment, reducing state social security, and either freezing, restraining or rolling back wages. 49 These ‘reforms’ resulted in growing inequality and a deterioration of labour market conditions in many developing countries.50 While many sectors of society suffer through these adjustments, the burden falls most heavily upon those already in unprotected work and those newly thrust into it. In particular, there is considerable evidence that the highest price is paid by women. As governments implement SAPs or other forms of liberalization of the economy, women are often forced to pay the price by taking up tasks performed by the state or giving up their existing sources of income.51 When food subsidies are cut, women often cut back on their own nutrition in order to feed their children. As health and education are cut back, women often take on the additional burden of nursing family members, or girls are kept at home to help in domestic tasks rather than be sent to school. Jean L. Pyle and Kathryn B. Ward show how globalizing trends in trade, production, finance and macroeconomic opportunities impact women’s lives.52 Developments in each of these areas are seen to make many women’s lives more difficult and insecure. The liberal globalization of the economy has led to an increase in the numbers of women employed in export production, and in the sex and domestics industries. It has led to existing gender stereotypes being drawn upon to further global corporate interests. For example, globalizing corporations in export processing zones opt for female labour because they can be paid less and are thought to be more docile. States following structural adjustment policies rely upon women’s traditional role as care givers to cushion the impact of cuts in social services. The gendered division of labour is highly exploitative, requiring women to bear a disproportionate cost of economic restructuring and assume greater burdens such as migration or dangerous work to ensure family survival. In desperation, some women export their labour in the healthcare and service industries. A second area of concern is the liberalization of agriculture. As countries attempt to find their niche in the global economy, they are increasingly faced with the ‘agrarian question’ that was prominent in Europe in the nineteenth Globalizing Labour: A Critical Introduction xxiii century.53 The agrarian question concerns the transformation of subsistence agriculture into commercially-based agriculture and the large-scale social and political adjustments required to manage the population transfer into new forms of economic activity and new spaces of living. This is a particularly important issue for countries with large rural populations such as China, Mexico, and India. Indeed, the situation in China is difficult as it is estimated that there are approximately 150 million rural dwellers who have migrated to Chinese cities in search of employment.54 With millions more on the move, this is the largest migration in human history. In terms of global regulation, the agricultural regime exacerbates these problems. Many developing states have reduced protection for their agricultural sectors and allowed markets to be penetrated by imports. Yet, at the same time developing countries have been unable to secure free access to the markets of developed states. This has challenged the viability of subsistence agriculture and lead to social upheaval in many countries where the agricultural sector is the dominant source of employment and livelihood. Trade liberalization has opened a large number of countries to global agricultural trade at the same time that agro-industrial corporations have increased their competitive advantage. Some developing countries have had their food security undermined as they produce for export rather than domestic consumption. Advanced industrialized states have secured the top position in the division of labour making it very difficult for most developing states to compete. Putting together the globalization-and-labour balance sheet, we can draw out the following generalization: Proposition 2. Contemporary globalization has seen that some labour groups in a few areas have made some progress in their working conditions, but the general trend has been negative. Some groups have increased their autonomy as the spread of liberal political arrangements has undermined previous authoritarian states. Others have been able to increase their economic options as they are swept up in the wave of the changing global economy. However, other workers have had their autonomy reduced as competition increases and the tasks of daily life become harder. Overall, the goal of critical autonomy55 – that is, being able to influence the environment through negotiation and political participation – has suffered numerous setbacks as labour organizations have in key areas been marginalized in political structures and discourses. xxiv Globalizing Labour: A Critical Introduction Transnational Openings While the globalization of capital, trade and production has increased competition between workers, the information technology revolution and reduction in transportation costs has increased the possibility of transnational contact and cooperation. Contrary to pessimistic evaluation of labour solidarity in the age of network society by some writers such as Manuel Castells,56 labour groups are forging new transnational communities. The neoliberal aspect of globalization undermines traditional organized labour autonomy, but the communications revolution has created transnational openings for increased co-operation. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward in their contribution to the present volume, respond directly to the question of the effect of globalization on the power of the union movement, particularly as sites of production are shifted across the globe and processes of economic exchange interpenetrate with local conditions to limit the efficacy of older nationally-bound forms of organizing workers. They argue that there are continuities in the relations between labour and global capital from the period of classical modern capitalism, but what has changed is the nature of the strategies that the labour movements can effectively use. For example, across the middle of the twentieth century, national strikes as a means of exerting power were developed in relation to state-administered regulations that both limited and made possible predictable repertoires of possibility. However, contemporary globalization has undermined the possibility of taking for granted that regularity. ‘The worker strategies constructed in the industrial age have been undermined’, Piven and Cloward suggest, ‘not because globalization has eviscerated labor power but because it weakened old labor strategies and spurred aggressive new elite strategies with which labor has yet to cope.’57 As they conclude, this does not mean that alternative responses are impossible. For unionized workers, the international organizations that represent them have undergone transformation and new entities have emerged. At the international level, the division between union confederations produced by the split between communist and non-communist unions during the Cold War abated in the early 1990s.58 Thus, the communist WFTU now exists only in name while the ICFTU has gradually absorbed affiliates from around the world to become the dominant international trade union organization. In November 2006 the ICFTU absorbed its one remaining challenger; the Catholic-based World Confederation of Labour into a new organization, the International Trade Union Confederation. Not only has the ICFTU taken a more prominent position, but its nature has changed in response to sustained challenges from within its membership and from outside.59 New activist affiliates from the South (Korea, South Africa and Brazil) have pushed for a more development-oriented agenda. Women unionists have advanced gender Globalizing Labour: A Critical Introduction xxv issues and the global social justice movement challenges the ICFTU to be more engaged with radical causes. While the ICFTU is still subject to withering criticism for its conservatism,60 recent changes suggest a broader understanding of community to include the role of women and persons from developing countries. Unprotected workers face more obstacles than their protected counterparts, but they are still generating transnational communities and responses. For example, small farmers and peasants from many parts of the world have coalesced around the group Via Campesina. Via Campesina describes itself as ‘an international movement which coordinates peasant organizations of small and middle-scale producers, agricultural workers, rural women, and indigenous communities from Asia, Africa, America, and Europe’ (www.viacampesina. org). It advances farmers’ autonomy by advocating for landless populations and small farmers while resisting the spread of free-trade agreements, genetically modified organisms, national and transnational agribusiness. Via Campesina has been active in the World Social Forums and engaging institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization and regional integration projects. The goal is to create space in the global political economy for small-scale farmers to pursue their livelihoods. In many developing countries the vast majority of the population works as unprotected workers in the informal sector. Transnational cooperation between such groups is very difficult since they often lack the resources to form local or national institutions. However, there are instances of informalsector workers whose organizations become stable enough that they can develop an international presence and serve as an example to workers in other countries. One of the most prominent is the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India (www.sewa.org). In addition to affiliating with established trade union international ICFTU, SEWA is building its own international networks. For example, in 2003 it hosted an international conference on organizing in the informal economy which drew participants from 47 organizations in 23 countries. This is the other side of the extended responsibility of those in the North. Those in South are also contributing to reforming social conditions ‘from below’. Rob Lambert and Eddie Webster’s article in the present volume takes up this issue in relation to a relatively new trend in the South towards the coming together of union movements in networks of solidarity – in some ways akin to the organization form of the ‘new social movements’.61 Writing in 2001, Lambert and Webster document the emergence of one organization called the Southern Initiative on Globalisation and Human Rights (SIGTUR) formed in 1999. In the few years since that article was written SIGTUR has continued to consolidate with large regional meetings in Korea in 2001 and Thailand in 2005. Participating xxvi Globalizing Labour: A Critical Introduction unions and NGOs have committed themselves to a series of joint actions which include anti-corporate campaigns, supporting organizing activities, exchanging information and attempting to shift state policies. However, even after these conferences, the organization still has a limited political presence on the global terrain, with for example only scattered references on the World Wide Web. One significant way that unprotected workers have been making transnational contacts and advances has been with the cooperation of consumer groups. The movement for ethical trade serves to link consumers in advanced industrialized countries with workers and farmers in developing countries. In its broadest sense ethical trade encompasses two elements.62 The first element is a concern with how companies make their product. This involves pressuring companies to ensure that the production process respects key human rights and environmental standards. Examples include companies that adopt codes of conduct guaranteeing respect for workers’ rights or banning child-labour. The second element is the fair-trade movement which seeks to increase the financial return to poor producers as a method of improving sustainable development. Major fair-trade initiatives have taken place in products such as coffee and chocolate. Both of these initiatives are designed to give workers in developing countries more autonomy in their working lives by supporting human rights or transferring wealth. This requires the formation of new transnational communities joining southern producers with northern consumers. One of the responses to the changing opportunities for labour autonomy has been an attempt to build transnational labour communities. These communities are assembled to act as platforms for political action designed to bolster labour autonomy. Labour, the State and Regulation of Globalizing Corporations Discussion about labour and globalization has the positive effect of causing us to think about the relationship between three key actors in the global political economy – labour, the state and transnational corporations (or what we have been calling throughout the present series of volumes ‘globalizing corporations’).63 Labour’s unease about globalization, to a great extent, can be attributed to a fear that corporations are shaping the process and rhetoric of globalization in a way that allows globalizing corporations to escape social regulation. A central question has been: How can corporate behaviour be regulated in relation to labour conditions and what role does the state play in this environment of intensifying economic globalization? Globalizing Labour: A Critical Introduction xxvii There are three possibilities for influencing the behaviour of globalizing corporations. The traditional method is for states to regulate behaviour in their own country. This poses several problems. Some states are so desperate to attract investment that they may feel unable to regulate corporate behaviour. This is particularly true for poorer countries. Benefiting from the structural power of capital,64 corporations may pre-empt labour-conditions enforcement simply by letting states know that they prefer not to have a ‘flexible’ labour force. An alternative would be for wealthy countries to hold their companies responsible through extra-territorial application of their own laws and standards. The difficulty with extra-territorial regulation is that it sets the preferences of a particular state as the benchmark for behaviour in other countries. In practice this means the desires of social forces in advanced industrialized states. Numerous states have objected to such activity in measures such as the US Helms–Burton legislation forbidding trade with Cuba. The problems of unilateral regulation have led states to discuss the issue of multilateral regulation of corporate behaviour. The problem with multilateral-level regulation is the lack of any enforcement mechanism. The ILO has been producing standards, recommendations and conventions for almost 100 years, but is not empowered to enforce its recommendations. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) established voluntary guidelines for multinational companies in 1976. These were modified and relaunched in 2000, but compliance is, once again, voluntary (www.oecd.org). Dissatisfaction with voluntary labour regulations has lead to an attempt to tie labour standards with trade agreements. At the global level a vigorous but unsuccessful attempt was made to apply the enforcement provisions of the WTO to labour issues.65 Many trade unions and some states argued that if the WTO could enforce intellectual property rights for globalizing corporations it could enforce basic labour rights such as freedom of association. Many states in the South argued that such an instrument would be used by developed states as a protectionist tool. Many South-based advocacy groups also opposed expanding the power of the WTO to cover labour issues. This echoed a general critique of multilateral negotiations – that they are biased to the interest of the strongest states. Pressure to defend labour standards has also emerged in regional economic agreements. Responses to labour demands for protection have ranged from states ignoring the issue to regional agreements which only require the enforcement of pre-existing legislation to the provision of some new rights such as maternity leave in the EU. The general thrust of such agreements is to liberalize capital and trade flows so that the defence or support of labour rights is a minor and often neglected consideration. On balance the agreements have done more to undermine than assist the securing of favourable working conditions.66 xxviii Globalizing Labour: A Critical Introduction The relative failure of state regulation has led to attempts to influence corporate behaviour through activity in the market. A wide array of civil society groups from labour unions to consumer advocates have tried to shame multinationals into providing better working and living conditions for the people that produce their goods. Although many corporations have responded to consumer concerns, there is a questions about the degree to which this is effective regulation.67 The initiative to handle labour issues in a bilateral (corporate-civil society) forum fits nicely with corporate desires for self-rather than state-regulation. Excluding the state from this area is likely to exclude the possibility of creating effective enforcement. Enforcement is the key because the power differential between globalizing corporations and their local workforces is so great that it invites abuse of power. Labour critics attack reliance on consumer activity as a privatization of regulation.68 Market activity is not seen as sufficient regulation in national societies because of the inefficiency of effort required to launch continuing citizen campaigns. There are problems with collecting and distributing information, mobilizing citizens and the need for constant vigilance. A legal process and institution is needed to regularize activity and enforce general rules. If market-based activity is seen as inadequate for domestic purposes, why would it prove sufficient on a global scale? Thus, labour issues bring us back to broad questions about the role of the state and public interest under conditions of intensive globalization. States appear less able or willing to regulate in a manner which would effectively support labour rights. Interstate agreements have been largely voluntary in nature. While such arrangements can improve conditions in some cases, they are limited in their coverage. Attempts at self-regulation or consumer-driven regulations also appear to be falling far short of the mark. Attempts at tripartite initiatives (state, corporate, civil society) such as the UN’s Global Compact (www.unglobalcompact.org) have created publicity, but once again rely upon the goodwill of corporations to achieve any degree of success. Many corporations have signed on to principles of good behaviour, but have working conditions actually changed? Overall, a series of struggles are taking place within, across and between states, as well as between groups of citizens and select corporations. The attempt to nurture safe and humane working conditions has become more complicated and intense as globalization deepens. Conclusion There are several significant issues surrounding the relationship between labour and globalization in the twenty-first century. One issue is whether labour movements can develop the tools required for an effective internationalism. Labour groups face immense challenges. They tend to be under-financed and under-resourced compared to the states and corporations Globalizing Labour: A Critical Introduction xxix they seek to influence. They usually lack the financial resources and time to respond to changes in state and corporate strategies. In some cases, states use violence to contain labour movements, while corporations often threaten to move economic activity to other locations. Labour movements also face the obstacle of overcoming nationalist impulses and communicating with colleagues in other languages. Whereas members of the business elite often use English as a common language, labourers are much less likely to share a common language. Transnational cooperation is particularly difficult when globalizing corporations are able to pit one group of workers against another by threatening to relocate investment from one country or state to another. Traditional trade unions also struggle to forge alliances with other social movements representing women, peasants or development groups. A second issue concerns the goals to which labour internationalism might be oriented. The diversity of forms and ideology of labour groups means that there is no single agreed-upon political, economic or social programme. Some groups favour a return to more nationally-oriented economies and strategies of socialist development within their particular countries. Other groups favour building a global order which redistributes wealth across national boundaries and takes responsibility for human welfare around the world. It is not clear what global governance would look like in a more labour-friendly globalization. A third issue is the activity and orientation of the labour force in the recent move into the centre of global capitalism of the world’s most populous countries – China and India. Intensifying industrialization linked to low wages has placed competitive pressures on the workforce of developed and developing states alike. China’s labour force is organized by a trade union dominated by the ruling Communist Party. The difficulty that this trade union has in representing the concerns of its members to the state and corporations suggests that labour unrest may undermine Chinese economic development. This would have significant implications for the stability of the Chinese state and the path of globalization. Labour movements have been, and continue to be, a key social force shaping globalization. They have the potential to push it in a more equitable direction or to undermine its key elements. The machinations of power and political organizations, together with concerns about the practice and ethics of neoliberal capitalism, are the arenas where most questions about the projections of the labour movement are centred. How does globalization affect the power of the labour movement? What are the consequences of broad social changes in the context of a new layer of the economy that threatens to sweep across local and national institutions and processes? What happens to labour when the flight of capital or the packing up and moving of local infrastructure is potentially possible; or when capital either cuts costs by using migrant labour or heads off to the South where labour costs are cheaper? xxx Globalizing Labour: A Critical Introduction In responding to these kinds of questions it is important to recognize the momentousness of the changes associated with contemporary forms of globalization, but to do so without suggesting that all that was solid has melted into air (to use an aphorism from Karl Marx). Global chains of production, just-in-time systems of organization, and new information technologies are all breaks in the lines of continuity with the past, but they are nevertheless built upon older forms of production, organization and communication. Corporations, for example, are globalizing in their orientation, but they are still based in local and national settings. Similarly, the solidarity movements associated with globalizing unionism have deep foundations in the past, even if they are reconsidering older modalities of organization in the face of intensifying globalization. Karl Polanyi69 describes a ‘double movement’ in the mid-twentieth century: on the one hand, the capitalist market commodifies and rationalizes social relations, thus disembedding ethics from its social origins, while on the other hand, socially conscious states act to embed ethics in institutional frameworks such as though welfare provision, labour and market regulation. What happens when that ‘double movement’ becomes a single movement – globalizing deregulation? What happens when, alongside the global market being deregulated in the name of neoliberal notions such as generating a ‘level playing field’, the state is central to deregulating the social conditions of reproduction? Ronaldo Munck’s contribution to the present volume 70 suggests that this ‘new transformation’ generates a counter-movement to neoliberal globalization. Globalization may be remaking the labour movement (and the class structure of contemporary capitalism), but labour is also remaking itself, alongside other social movements in the world today. One of the possibilities for remaking the capital-labour relationship is around instituting global labour rights. On this issue we could have chosen to conclude the volume with a range of material that documents the changes in rights discourses or critically assesses the political and economic consequences of such a projection. We have however given one of the spaces in this volume to a philosopher who sets out to provide the ethical underpinnings of such a claim for globalizing labour rights. Against those who might suggest that people in the North have no responsibilities to those workers across the globe in far-off relatively unconnected places that might be suffering hardship, Iris Marion Young argues that there is a structural and objective relationship drawn across such extended reaches of production and consumption.71 We may not be liable for the terrible conditions of sweatshops in distant lands, but given the structural relationship to those lands, if only through a commodity chain where we are the consumers, we do have a political responsibility to do something about ameliorating the conditions there through supporting global labour rights. The globalization of relationships makes us all responsible globally. Globalizing Labour: A Critical Introduction xxxi Notes 1. See the fifth volume of the present series ‘Central Currents in Globalization’ (viz., the first volume in the current set on ‘Globalization and Economy’): Paul James and Barry Gills, eds, Globalization and Economy: Vol. 1, Globalizing Markets and Capitalism, Sage Publications, London, 2007. 2. See the sixth volume of the ‘Central Currents in Globalization’ series and the second volume in the current set on ‘Globalization and Economy’: Paul James and Heikki Patomäki, eds, Globalization and Economy: Vol. 2, Globalizing Finance and the New Global Economy, Sage Publications, London, 2007. 3. See the seventh volume of the ‘Central Currents in Globalization’ series: Paul James and Ronen Palan, eds, Globalization and Economy: Vol. 3, Globalizing Economic Regimes and Institutions, Sage Publications, London, 2007. 4. Eric Eustace Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, A. Deutsch, London, 1944. 5. Seymour Dreshcer, ‘Eric Williams: British Capitalism and British Slavery’, History and Theory, vol. 26, no. 2, 1987, pp. 180–96. 6. See Randolph B. Persaud, ‘Racial Assumptions in Global Labor Recruitment and Supply’, Alternatives, vol. 26, no. 4, 2001, pp. 377–99, reproduced in the present volume; and Christopher Fyfe, ‘Race, Empire and the Historians’, Race & Class, vol. 33, no. 4, 1992, pp. 15–30, reproduced in an earlier volume in the present series ‘Central Currents in Globalization’: Paul James and Phillip Darby, eds, Globalization and Violence: Vol. 2, Colonial and Postcolonial Globalizations, Sage Publications, London 2006. 7. Jeffrey G. Williamson, ‘Globalization, Labor Markets and Policy Backlash in the Past’, The Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 12, no. 4, 1998, pp. 51–72, reproduced in the present volume. 8. See respectively the following essays reproduced in the present volume: Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, J.M. Dent and Sons, London (1776) 1950; Williamson, ‘Globalization, Labor Markets and Policy Backlash in the Past’, ibid.; Beverly Silver, ‘World Scale Patterns of Labour-Capital Conflict: Labor Unrest, Long Waves and Cycles of Hegemony’, Review, vol. 18, no. 1, 1995, pp. 155–92; and James H. Mittleman, ‘Rethinking the International Division of Labour in the Context of Globalisation’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 2, 1995, pp. 273–96. 9. Smith, Wealth of Nations. 10. Smith, Wealth of Nations, p. 10. 11. Jagdish Bhagwati, In Defense of Globalization, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004; Martin Wolf, Why Globalization Works, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2004. See also Martin Wolf’s contribution to an earlier volume in the present series: James and Palan, eds, Globalizing Economic Regimes and Institutions. Eric Weede’s work is also represented in the current series: see Eric Weede, ‘The Diffusion of Prosperity and Peace by Globalization’, The Independent Review, vol. 9, no. 2, 2004, pp. 165–86, reproduced in James and Gills, Global Markets and Capitalism. 12. John Price, The International Labour Movement, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1945. 13. August Nimtz, ‘Marx and Engels: The Prototypical Transnational Actors’, in Sanjeev Khagram, James V. Riker and Kathryn Sikkink, eds, Restructuring World Politics: Transnational Social Movements, Networks and Norms, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2002, pp. 245–68. 14. A lament concerning labour’s slide to war by leading internationalist, communist and anti-war activist, Rosa Luxemburg, can be found in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, Pathfinder, New York, 1978, pp. 353–453. 15. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Beacon Press, Boston, 1944, pp. 20–30, reproduced in an earlier volume in the present series: James and Patomäki, eds, Globalization and Economy: Vol. 2, Globalizing Finance and the New Global Economy. xxxii Globalizing Labour: A Critical Introduction 16. Gary K. Busch, The Political Role of International Trade Unions, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1983, pp. 31–41. 17. George Myconos, The Globalizations of Organized Labour: 1945–2005, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2005, Part 1. 18. Andrew Herod, ‘Labor as an Agent of Globalization and as a Global Agent’, in K.R. Cox, ed., Spaces of Globalization: Reasserting the Power of the Local, Guilford Press, New York, 1997, pp. 167–200. 19. Ronald Radosh, American Labor and United States Foreign Policy, Random House, New York, 1969, pp. 304–47. 20. Jeffrey Harrod, Trade Union Foreign Policy: A Study of British and American Trade Union Activities in Jamaica, Macmillan, London, 1972. 21. Don Thomson and Rodney Larson, Where Were You, Brother? An Account of Trade Union Imperialism, War on Want, London, 1978. 22. Beth Sims, Workers of the World Undermined: American Labor’s Role in US Foreign Policy, South End Press, Boston, 1992; and Cliff Welch, ‘Labor Internationalism: US Involvement in Brazilian Unions, 1945–1965’, Latin American Research Review, vol. 30, no. 2, 1995, pp. 61–89. 23. Roger Southall, ‘The Development and Delivery of “Northern” Worker Solidarity to South African Trade Unions in the 1970s and 1980s’, Journal of Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, vol. 32, no. 2, 1994, pp. 166–99. 24. Deborah Levenson-Estrada and Henry Frundt, ‘Towards a New Internationalism: Lessons from the Guatemalan Labor Movement’, NACLA Report on the Americas, vol. 28, no. 5, 1995, pp. 16–21. 25. Dave Spooner, Partners or Predators: International Trade Unionism and Asia, Asia Monitor Resource Center, Hong Kong, 1989. 26. Robert W. Cox. ‘Labor and Hegemony’, International Organization, vol. 31, no. 3, 1977, pp. 385–424; William Douglas, and Roy S. Godson, ‘Labour and Hegemony; A Critique’, International Organization, vol. 34, no. 1, 1980, pp. 149–58; Robert W. Cox, ‘Labour and Hegemony: A Reply’, International Organization, vol. 34, no. 1, 1980, pp. 159–76. 27. Mark Rupert and M. Scott Solomon, Globalization and International Political Economy, Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, 2006. 28. Henk Overbeek, ‘Neo-liberalism and the Regulation of Global Labor Mobility’, Annals of the American Academy, no. 581, 2002, pp. 74–90, reproduced in the present volume. 29. George Ross, ‘Labor versus Globalization’, Annals of the American Academy, no. 570, 2000, pp. 78–91, reproduced in the present volume. 30. David Ellerman, ‘Labour Migration: A Developmental Path or Low Level Trap?’ Development in Practice, vol. 15, no. 5, 2005, pp. 617–30. David Ellerman recently retired after ten years in the World Bank. For three years he was economic advisor to Joseph Stiglitz during Stiglitz’s controversial period as the Bank’s Chief Economist. 31. Andrew Herod, ‘Labor Internationalism and the Contradictions of Globalization: Or, Why the Local is Sometimes Still Important in a Global Economy’, Antipode, vol. 33, no. 3, 2001, pp. 407–26. Andrew Herod is editor with Luis L.M. Aguiar of The Dirty Work of Neoliberalism: Cleaners in the Global Economy, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 2006, and author of Labor Geographies: Workers and the Landscapes of Capitalism, Guilford Press, New York, 2001. 32. Martin Wolf, ‘The Big Lie of Global Inequality’, Financial Times, 8 February 2000. This article is worth reading in relation to a more considered essay of his, reproduced in an earlier volume of the present series: Martin Wolf, ‘Globalization and Global Economic Governance’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, vol. 20, no. 1, 2004, pp. 72–84, reproduced in James and Palan, eds, Global Economic Regimes and Institutions. 33. Robert Hunter Wade, ‘Globalization, Poverty and Inequality’ in John Ravenhill, ed., Global Political Economy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005, pp. 291–316. 34. Mark Rupert, ‘(Re)Politicizing the Global Economy: Liberal Common Sense and Ideological Struggle in the US NAFTA Debate’, Review of International Political Economy, vol. 2, 1995, pp. 658–92. Globalizing Labour: A Critical Introduction xxxiii 35. Peter Fairbrother and Charlotte Yates, Trade Unions in Renewal: A Comparative Study, Routledge, London, 2003. 36. Ian Graham, ‘It Pays to be Union, US Figures Show’, available at www.ilo.org/public/ english/dialogue/actrav/pub/128/3.pdf, last accessed 8 November 2006. 37. Kate Bronfenbrenner, Sheldon Friedman, Richard Hurd, Rudolph Oswald and Ronald Seeber, eds., Organizing to Win: New Research on Union Strategies, Cornell University Press, Cornell, 1998. 38. Geoff Sharp, ‘The Idea of the Intellectual and After’, Arena Journal, New Series no. 17/18, 2002, pp. 269–316. 39. Leslie Sklair, ‘The Transnational Capitalist Class and Global Politics’, International Political Science Review, vol. 23, no. 2, 2002, pp. 159–74, reproduced in the present volume. See also his ‘Social Movements for Global Capitalism: The Transnational Capitalist Class in Action’, Review of International Political Economy, vol. 4, no. 3, 1997, pp. 514–38, and Globalization: Capitalism and its Alternatives, 3rd Edn, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002. 40. Leah F. Vosko, Temporary Work: The Gendered Rise of a Precarious Employment Relationship, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2000. See also Leah F. Vosko ‘“Decent Work”: The Shifting Role of the ILO and the Struggle for Global Social Justice’, Global Social Policy, vol. 2, no. 1, 2002, pp. 19–46, reproduced in the present volume. 41. Griff Wittee, ‘As Income Gap Widens Uncertainty Spreads’, The Washington Post, 20 September 2004. 42. Doug Saunders, ‘Raids on Wal-Mart Expose Dark Side of US Economy’, The Globe and Mail, 24 October 2003. 43. Rames Mishra, Globalization and the Welfare State, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 1999. 44. Philip Cerney, ‘Political Globalization and the Competition State’, in Richard Stubbs and Geoffrey Underhill, eds., Political Economy and the Changing Global Order, Oxford University Press, Toronto, 2000, pp. 300–9. 45. Glen Adler and Eddie Webster, ‘Challenging Transition Theory: The Labour Movement, Radical Reform, and Transition to Democracy in South Africa’, Politics and Society, vol. 23, no. 1, 1995, pp. 75–106; Jack Bielasiak, and Barbara Hicks, ‘Solidarity’s SelfOrganization: The Crisis of Rationality and Legitimacy in Poland, 1980–81’, East European Politics and Societies, vol. 4, no. 3, 1990, pp. 489–512; Mine Eder, ‘Shop Floor Politics and Labor Movements: Democratization in Brazil and South Korea’, Critical Sociology, vol. 23, no. 2, 1997, pp. 3–31. 46. Barry K. Gills, ‘American Power, Neoliberal Globalization, and Low Intensity Democracy: An Unstable Trinity’, in Mick Cox, John Ikenberry and Takashi Inoguchi, eds, American Democracy Promotion: Impulses, Strategies, and Impacts, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000, pp. 326–44. 47. Fredric C. Deyo, Beneath the Miracle: Labor Subordination in the New Asian Industrialism, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1989. 48. Anita Chan, China’s Workers under Assault: The Exploitation of Labor in a Globalizing Economy, Asia Resource Monitor Centre, Hong Kong, 2001. 49. Jeffrey Harrod, Labour and Third World Debt, International Federation of Chemical, Energy and General Workers’ Unions, Brussels, 1992, pp. 74–9. 50. James Raymond Vreeland, ‘The Effect of IMF Programs on Labor’, World Development, vol. 30, no. 1, 2001, pp. 121–39. 51. Grace Chang, Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy, South End Press, Boston, 2000, pp. 124–9. 52. Jean L. Pyle and Kathryn B. Ward, ‘Recasting our Understanding of Gender and Work during Global Restructuring’, International Sociology, vol. 18, no. 3, 2003, pp. 461–89, reproduced in the present volume. 53. Philip McMichael, ‘Rethinking Globalization: the Agrarian Question Revisited’, Review of International Political Economy, vol. 4, 1997, pp. 630–62, reproduced in the present volume. xxxiv Globalizing Labour: A Critical Introduction 54. Jim Yardley, ‘In a Tidal Wave, China’s Masses Pour from Farm to City’, The New York Times, 12 September 2004. 55. Len Doyal and Ian Gough, A Theory of Human Need, Guilford Press, New York, 1991. 56. Manuel Castells, The Information Age, Vol. 2: The Power of Identity, Oxford: Blackwell Castells, 1997, p. 354. 57. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, ‘Power Repertoires and Globalization’, Politics and Society, vol. 28, no. 3, 2000, p. 414. Piven and Cloward are co-authors of a classic analysis of the role of welfare policy in the poor and working class, Regulating the Poor, first published in 1972 and with a second edition in 1993 (Vintage New York). 58. Myconos, Globalizations of Organized Labour. 59. Robert O’Brien, ‘Workers and World Order: The Tentative Transformation of the International Union Movement’, Review of International Studies, vol. 26, no. 4, 2000, pp. 533–55. 60. Gerard Greenfield, ‘The ICFTU and the Politics of Compromise’ in Ellen Meiksins Wood, Peter Meiksins and Michael Yates, eds, Rising from the Ashes? Labor in the Age of ‘Global’ Capitalism, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998, pp. 180–9; Stuart Hodkinson, ‘Is There a New Trade Union Internationalism? The ICFTU’s Response to Globalization, 1996–2002’ Labour, Capital and Society, vol. 28, no. 1/2, 2005, pp. 36–64. 61. Rob Lambert and Eddie Webster, ‘Southern Unionism and the New Labour Internationalism’, Antipode, vol. 33, no. 3, 2001, 337–62. Eddie Webster is Professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand and Rob Lambert is in the Department of Organisational and Labour Studies at the University of Western Australia. 62. Mick Blowfield, ‘Ethical Trade: A Review of Developments and Issues’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 4, 1999, pp. 753–70. 63. This term ‘globalizing corporations’ does not have the same problems as that of ‘multinational’ or ‘transnational corporations’ in implying that the corporations cannot at the same time be embedded in a national economy. It helps to counter books with overblown titles such as The Myth of the Global Corporation (Paul N. Doremus, William W. Keller, Louis W. Pauly and Simon Reich), Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1998. 64. Stephen Gill and David Law, ‘The Power of Capital’, in Stephen Gill, ed., Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 93–124. 65. Robert O’Brien, Anne Marie Goetz, Jan Aart Scholte, and Marc Williams, Contesting Global Governance: Multilateral Economic Institutions and Global Social Movements, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 67–108. 66. Robert O’Brien, ‘No Safe Havens: Labour, Regional Integration and Globalisation’ in Andrew Cooper, ed., Regionalisation and the Taming of Globalisation, Routledge, London, forthcoming. 67. Rhys Jenkins, Ruth Pearson and Gill Seyfand, eds, Corporate Responsibility and Labour Rights: Corporate Codes of Conduct in the Global Economy, Earthscan Publications, London, 2002. 68. Neil Kearney, ‘Corporate Codes of Conduct: The Privatized Application of Labour Standards’, in Ruth Mayne and Sol Picciotto, eds, Regulating International Business: Beyond Liberalization, Macmillan/Oxfam, Basingstoke, 1999, pp. 205–20. 69. Karl Polanyi’s ‘The International System’ taken from The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Beacon Press, Boston, 1944. Part I is reproduced in an earlier volume in this series: Paul James and Heikki Patomäki, eds, Globalizing Finance and the New Global Economy, Sage, London, 2007. 70. Ronaldo Munck ‘Globalization, Labor, and the Polanyi Problem’, Labor History, vol. 45, no. 3, 2004, pp. 251–69, reproduced in this volume. See also his Globalization and Labour: The New ‘Great Transformation’, Zed Books, London, 2002. 71. Iris Marion Young, ‘Responsibility and Global Labor Justice’, The Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 12, no. 4, 2004, pp. 365–88, reproduced in the present volume. See also her Inclusion and Democracy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000.