Labour and the Challenges of Globalization: What Prospects for Transnational Solidarity?

by Andreas Bieler, Ingemar Lindberg, Devan Pillay

Overview

This book examines the main challenges facing the world labor force and possible responses from trade unions.



The working classes across the world are feeling the effects of globalization and the race to the bottom that it encourages. Core jobs for workers in the developed world are being outsourced to countries where pay and conditions are terrible and union membership is often forbidden. Much of the work of the world economy is now taking place in a burgeoning informal sector, making worldwide organization of labor very difficult.



Case studies from 11 different countries, including China, Germany, Canada and South Africa, illustrate what is happening and show how workers and trade unions can successfully adapt to the neoliberal world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745327563
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	04/25/2008
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Andreas Bieler is Professor of Political Economy in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham. He is co-editor of Labour and the Challenges of Globalization (Pluto, 2008).

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The future of the global working class: an introduction

Andreas Bieler, Ingemar Lindberg and Devan Pillay

The current phase of economic globalization – expressed in the increasing transnational organization of production, the emergence of an integrated global financial market, the extensive informalization and deregulation of labour markets and the dominant ideology of neoliberal economics – has put the working class onto the defensive across the world. 'Working class' is here conceptualized in its broadest sense. It includes established, formal labour on secure contracts at the core of the labour market and non-established labour at the periphery of the labour market. The latter includes labour in the informal sector (for example street traders), 'semi-formal' workers within the formal sector on unstable temporary, part-time, casual or subcontracted types of contracts, as well as workers who occupy a grey area in between the informal and formal sectors, such as home workers who supply established firms.

The objective of this book is to analyse this situation and assess the possibilities for a revival of labour internationalism. In more detail, the aims of this volume are threefold. First, it is intended to provide a general overview of the situation of the working class around the world through a selection of countries in all the major regions. The division between formal and informal labour is of particular importance in this respect. Second, the responses of trade unions as well as other social movements, organizing the different fractions of labour in both the spheres of production and consumption, to the challenges of globalization are mapped out. This directly informs the third aim of this volume, the assessment of possible strategies forward for the various labour movements at different levels of policy making. Overall, the contributors to this book are driven by the normative purpose to study the possibilities of a revival of working-class internationalism based on transnational solidarity and its role in the resistance to neoliberal globalization.

This introductory chapter will:

• clarify our understanding of the main social phenomena we study and the concepts we use in doing so

• give some basic overall statistics to add to the picture from the country reports

• provide glimpses from the country reports of what our study is about.

THEORETICAL AND CONCEPTUAL STARTING POINTS

In the social sciences the global working class has been widely perceived to be on the retreat towards the end of the 20th century under the conditions of neoliberal restructuring of the global economy. Liberal international political economy (IPE) approaches have pointed to the structural changes related to globalization, and argued that the emergence of a globally integrated financial market and the increasingly transnational organization of production across borders have led to the emergence of new significant international actors. These include most importantly transnational corporations (TNCs), but also other actors such as international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), sometimes also called global social movements, and international trade union confederations. International organizations such as the IMF, World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Bank too are argued to have increased in importance (e.g. Higgott et al., 2000).

Nevertheless, this assessment of the structural changes since the early 1970s overlooks the underlying power structure in the global economy. TNCs, INGOs and international trade unions are all treated as equally important actors in a pluralist understanding of policy making, which has been transferred from the national to the international level. The problem is that liberal IPE conceptualizes 'transnational actors as autonomous entities rather than as embedded in, and indeed constituted by, transnational structures' (van Apeldoorn, 2004: 148). The privileged position of transnational capital within the asymmetrical international power structure is overlooked, as is the crucial importance of the capitalist social relations of production. It is not understood that capital can only realize itself in the form of TNCs on a global scale to the extent that real production processes are created on this scale. Hence, 'capital is more geographically mobile than it was in the past because it now has more proletariats on which to land' (Coates, 2000: 255).

Beverly Silver (2003) captures the international power structure well in her broad historical and geographical analysis of worker movements since 1870. Through a close focus on the social relations of production and the inherent dynamic of capital's relentless search for higher profits, she is able to unravel the links between different instances of labour unrest in diverse geographical locations as well as different industries. Capitalism is characterized by an ongoing tension between alternating crises of profitability and crises of legitimacy (Silver, 2003: 20). During crises of legitimacy, an increasingly strong labour movement challenges the prerogatives of capital over the production process. In order to avoid the collapse of the system, capital responds through a compromise with organized labour. For example, in the post-world war Keynesian compromise (mainly in Northern Europe), workers accepted capital's continuing right to make decisions over investment and production organization based on the principle of private property in exchange for full employment and rising wages, which allowed workers to participate in the generation of increasing wealth. Mass production was closely related to mass consumption, backed up by bipartite or tripartite institutional systems, within which employers, trade unions and sometimes the state discussed the macroeconomic way forward. Yet 'the rapid growth of world trade and production in the 1950s and 1960s eventually sparked an overaccumulation crisis characterized by intense intercapitalist competition and a general squeeze on profits. It was in the context of this crisis [of profitability] that the postwar social compacts accommodating labor exploded' (Silver, 2003: 161). One way capital can respond to this crisis is through a spatial fix: mass production is transferred to other parts of the world with lower labour costs and less organized working classes, leading to the global structural changes referred to by Coates above. Second, a technological fix can help capital to lower production costs through the innovation of the production process, with the help of new technology partly replacing labour. A combination of spatial and technological fix has yet again an impact on the international division of labour, leading to a bifurcation of industrial relations. In developed countries:

on the one hand, new innovations in organization and technology ... provide the basis for more consensual labor-capital-state social contracts, allowing legitimacy to be combined with profitability, albeit for a shrinking labour force. On the other hand, in poorer countries, where competitive advantage is based on a continuous drive to lower costs, profitability requirements lead to continuous crises of legitimacy.

(Silver, 2003: 81)

Third, capital can overcome crises of overaccumulation through a product fix, in which it shifts investment from declining industrial sectors to new industrial sectors. Silver identifies the shift from the textile to the automobile industry as the new leading sector in the 20th century, and indicates that another shift is currently taking place to various areas of the service sector as new leading industries of the 21st century. Finally, and very similar to the product fix, capital engages in a financial fix, in which financial instruments become the focus of intensified investment and points of accumulation in their own right (Silver, 2003: 132–3).

Nevertheless, while Silver captures well the underlying power structure of capital restructuring at the global level, she overlooks important aspects which shape the organization and strategies of individual labour movements. Capitalism emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries in different ways and at a different pace in individual countries, developing different national trajectories. In other words, the historically specific national social relations of production and the state and its institutional set-up are under-conceptualized in Silver's account. She therefore first underestimates the possible division between national labour, engendered by domestic production sectors, and transnational labour, engendered by transnational production sectors. Her focus on leading industrial sectors makes her overlook other sectors which are often equally important for the formation of labour movements, such as currently the public sector in many Western European countries. Second, she overlooks the importance of national institutional set-ups. Forms of state, as neo-Gramscians would argue (see below), differ drastically from country to country, and offer different levels of protection to national labour. Positions on labour internationalism by trade unions are strongly affected by the possibilities or lack of possibilities to influence policy making at the national level (e.g. Bieler, 2006). Hence, we cannot do without this focus on different national institutional set-ups or forms of state.

We also need to remember that historically labour movements have mainly been formed at the national level, strongly influenced by the different paths of industrialization leading to different production structures as well as the different institutional formation of states in this process. While the British labour movement was initially characterized by a multitude of craft unions with little centralization (Edwards et al., 1998), strong, unitary and highly centralized unions emerged in Germany from early on due to the different process through which capitalist social relations of production were developed (Jacobi et al., 1998). It is these different historical legacies which inform the structure of this book, with an emphasis on different national case studies. In short, for the purpose of this book, an approach needs to be developed which combines Silver's emphasis on the international dimension of trade union formation with a specific focus on the different domestic conditions within which national labour movements operate.

Historical institutionalist approaches and here especially the varieties of capitalism literature emphasize national institutional diversity. Kitschelt and colleagues, for example, understand globalization as external pressure on states. Then, they focus on how the various different national institutional set-ups mediate these pressures, ensuring a continuation of divergence of national models of capitalism (Kitschelt et al., 1999: 440–1). In short, the varieties of capitalism literature points out that there are different national institutional set-ups due to a historically specific development of capitalism, mediating globalization pressures in different ways.

Some argue that countries are likely to converge around two optimal solutions: either a coordinated market economy or a liberal market economy (e.g. Hall and Soskice, 2001); others speak of three models of capitalism: the market-led Anglo-American model, the negotiated/consensual model and the state-led model (e.g. Schmidt, 2002: 112–18). The main problem of this literature is, however, that it overlooks the social relations of production underpinning particular national models of capitalism (Coates, 2000: 176–7). Historical institutionalist approaches are therefore unable to explain why a particular set of institutions was established in the first place, as well as to assess change emanating from alterations in the production structure. Most importantly, the partial transnationalization of national production structures referred to above and its implications for states and national labour movements cannot be conceptualized.

In response, we offer here a neo-Gramscian perspective, which takes on board Silver's understanding of the geographical dimension of working class formation and combines it with a neo-Gramscian understanding of different national forms of state. In more detail, since Robert Cox's path-breaking work in the early 1980s (Cox, 1981 and 1983), a whole range of related yet different neo-Gramscian perspectives have been developed (Bieler and Morton, 2004a; Morton, 2007).

A neo-Gramscian perspective starts an analysis through an investigation of the social relations of production, where social forces are identified as core collective actors. The first division can be identified between capital, the owners of the means of production, and workers, who are 'free' to sell their labour power. Capital and labour, however, do not confront each other as two homogenous classes. Further divisions result from the transnationalization of production, as highlighted by Silver's point of capital's spatial fix, with national capital and labour being separate class fractions from transnational capital and labour (van Apeldoorn, 2002: 26–34; Bieler, 2006: 32–4). As far as the increasing marginalization of large parts of production are concerned, a further division can be identified between established labour with full-time employment and stable working conditions at the core of the labour market, often as employees of TNCs, on the one hand, and workers in the periphery of the labour market with unstable, temporary, part-time or casual working contracts on the other (Cox, 1981: 235). These potential divides between national and transnational, as well as formal and informal labour, already indicate some of the potential obstacles to transnational solidarity. They are discussed in the various chapters to this volume and will be engaged with in more detail in the conclusion.

In order to comprehend these potential divisions fully, a wider understanding of class struggle is important here. Van der Pijl argues that the crucial aspect of neoliberal capitalism as the latest stage of capitalist development is the extension of exploitation into the sphere of social reproduction through the (re-) introduction of the market into the public sector as well as an increasing exploitation of the environment. Resistance to this type of exploitation by social movements can be as much understood as class struggle as the resistance to exploitation in the workplace (van der Pijl, 1998: 46–8). This extended definition of class struggle allows us to conceptualize the possible cooperation of trade unions with new social movements, as well as the potential cooperation between formal and informal labour.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements List of Contributors List of Tables List of Figures List of Abbreviations Foreword: Samir Amin Rebuilding the unity of the 'labour front' 1. The Future of the Global Working Class: an introduction, by Andreas Bieler, Ingemar Lindberg and Devan Pillay 2. The Contested Politics of Gender and Irregular Employment: Revitalizing the South Korean Democratic Labour Movement, by Jennifer Jihye Chun 3. Globalisation and the informalisation of labour: the case of South Africa, by Devan Pillay 4. Globalization and Labour in India: Emerging Challenges and Responses, by Praveen Jha 5. How China's Migrant Labour is Becoming the New Proletariat by Wen Tiejun 6. The globalisation of capital and its impact on the world of formal and informal work: Challenges for and responses from Argentine unions, by Isabel Rauber 7. Neoliberal Policies, Labour Market Restructuring and Social Exclusion: Brazil's Working Class Response, by Kjeld Jakobsen and Alexandre de Freitas Barbosa 8. The Impact of Globalisation on Trade Unions: The Situation in Japan, by Wakana Shutô and Mac Urata 9. Challenges facing the Canadian Labour Movement in the context of globalisation, unemployment and the casualisation of labour, by Geoff Bickerton and Jane Stinson 10. German trade unions between neo-liberal restructuring, social partnership and internationalism, by Heiner Dribbusch and Thorsten Schulten 11. Swedish unions and Globalisation: labour strategies in a changing global order, by Andreas Bieler and Ingemar Lindberg 12. Building alliances between formal and informal workers: Experiences from Africa, by Ilda Lindell 13. European integration: a strategic level for trade union resistance to neo-liberal restructuring and for the promotion of political alternatives?, by Andreas Bieler and Thorsten Schulten 14. A Trade Union Internationalism for the 21st Century: Meeting the Challenges from Above, Below and Beyond, by Peter Waterman 15. What future strategy for the global working class? The need for a new historical subject, by Andreas Bieler, Ingemar Lindberg and Devan Pillay Bibliography Index

Editorial Reviews

'Breaks new ground by anchoring the response of labour to globalisation in the strategies of individual labour movements' Professor Eddie Webster, Sociology and Director of the Sociology of Work Unit, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa; 'In an era when capital strikes back globally, old tools are not enough. New counter forces must be formed. The book makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the situation of the working class today' Clas Linder, First Vice President, Swedish Transport Workers' Union.

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