A Fair Day's Wage for a Fair Day's Work? – By Sheila Blackburn
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2009.00745_2.x |
| Date | 01 September 2009 |
| Author | David Metcalf |
| Published date | 01 September 2009 |
BOOK REVIEWSbjir_745601..618
Labour and the Challenges of Globalization: What Prospects for Transnational Soli-
darity?, edited by Andreas Bieler, Ingemar Lindberg and Deval Pillay. Pluto
Press, London and Ann Arbor, MI, 2008, xxii +330 pp., ISBN 978 0 7453 2756
3, £19.99, paperback.
Exploring the impact of globalization on labour relations and examining the potential
for an effective trade union response has become a fashionable trend in the field of
labour relations. Much of this literature is divided between those who highlight
globalization’s impact on job creation and those who envision a pernicious race to the
bottom. Accounts of transnational solidarity face a similar divide. Optimists note the
range of creative and successful new forms of solidarity from global anti-sweatshop
activism to Euro strikes, while transnational pessimists highlight the obstacles to
transnational solidarity, including language barriers, the growing north/south income
divide, and the heterogeneous nature of today’s global workforce.
Bieler, Lindberg and Pilly’s edited volume provides a much-needed balanced and
nuanced account. They emphasize that while globalization is driven by a common
market-oriented logic, the impact on national labour movements is varied due to
variations in state structures. Yet in all countries, globalization has increased ‘pre-
carious labour’ (a term introduced by Samir Amin in the preface). At the same time,
transnational labour responses to globalization have been inadequate and need to be
modified in order to ‘transform global capitalism’ (p. 283), a goal that appears to
unify this group of authors.
Evidence for ‘precarious labour’ is everywhere, although the definition and degree
vary considerably across countries. For developing countries, precarious labour is
most often found in informal sectors — street vendors, black market activities,
hidden urban sweatshops — that lie outside the purview of major labour legislation.
In South Korea, Chun finds that even militant labour centres, such as the Korean
Confederation of Trade Unions, have had limited success in organizing these sectors
in part because the organization is dominated by male workers who have not effec-
tively reached out to the mostly female workers in irregular employment. A similar
problem faces the union movement in South Africa, as Pilly notes. In India, where
Praveen Jha finds only 10 per cent of the workforce is in the urban, formal sector,
an effective trade union response has been lacking due partly to union rivalry and
political splits.
China’s 180 million migrant workers, as Wen Tiejun explains, present a large
challenge for the union movement, which has focused on urban workers in state-
owned enterprises. Rauber highlights that in Argentina, a new movement, organized
in the Central de Trabajadores de la Argentina, has reached out to the growing number
of unemployed and informal workers while also building alliances with other social
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8543.2009.00745.x
47:3 September 2009 0007–1080 pp. 601–618
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2009. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
and political actors. Jakobsen and Barbosa find that in Brazil, the labour movement
has been able to block some flexibilizing reforms, such as pension reforms.
In developed countries, precarious labour is more often a reference to temporary,
part-time and other forms of ‘non-core’ labour. In Japan, Shutô and Urata show that
unions are just beginning to organize part-time and other non-core workers. Bickerton
and Stinson note that most Canadian trade union strategic responses to growing part-
time, temporary and insecure employment are limited, and political responses have
been weakened by the social democratic party’s shift away from its working class roots.
Dribbusch and Schulten’s chapter on Germany explores European Works Councils,
international social movement alliances and dockworkers’ protests, which the authors
see as offering limited responses at best. In the case of Sweden, Bieler and Lindberg
place union responses into two categories: one seeks to ‘defend and restore’, while the
other aims to ‘modernize and adapt’. A better strategy, they argue, would be ‘defend,
modernize and strike back’ (p. 211). Lindell’s chapter on the informal sector in Africa
notes that often, the informal sector is already organized; the problem is that these
organizations are not linked to trade union movements. Mozambique and Ghana are
exceptions. At the EU level, Bieler and Schulten also offer a sanguine picture: trade
unions, influenced by social partnership at the national level, have a tendency to be
‘coopted into neoliberal restructuring at the European level’ (p. 239). For Waterman,
unions would be better off pursuing ‘social movement internationalism’ such as that
illustrated by the World Social Forum, as opposed to ‘social partnership internation-
alism’ (p. 258). Bieler, Lindberg and Pilly conclude their volume by outlining three
fundamental tasks for labour: (i) increased transnational labour solidarity; (ii) organi-
zation of the informal sector; and (iii) co-operation with other social movements.
The chapters are informative and insightful, as they present a well-balanced, if not
sober, picture of labour movements today. The emphasis on precarious work is a
needed corrective for those labour activists and researchers who still exclusively focus
on formal sector employment. The treatment of the ideological aspect of globalization
illustrates that employers and governments often justify market-oriented reforms and
labour market flexibility on the need for greater competitiveness, while these reforms
are embedded in a larger neoliberal belief system and strategic agenda. Finally, while
offering a cautious tale of what labour unions have done to date to build transnational
solidarity, the conclusion takes the additional step to offer carefully considered pro-
posals for labour reactivation via new forms of global solidarity.
Most country chapters, however, had remarkably little to say about national
unions’ transnational strategies, an unfortunate gap. And perhaps the volume went
too far by insisting that labour’s future is largely linked to its ability to organize
informal workers. As Jakobsen and Barbosa find, this is a notoriously difficult sector
to organize; while one effort in Brazil brought together 2,000 workers, the next month
it was only possible to contact 20 of these workers due to their high level of mobility.
A truly transformative strategy, while attending to the current needs of these workers,
might also ask the question of what kind of economic and legislative policies would
create a greater number of formal sector jobs, which in turn would be easier to
unionize. At the same time, most formal sector workers in the world today still remain
unorganized, and more could be done here too. Yet overall this is a well-balanced
account of globalization, labour market restructuring, and the potential for more
effective labour internationalism. Readers will not be disappointed.
Mark Anner
The Pennsylvania State University
602 British Journal of Industrial Relations
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2009.
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