Strong Governments, Precarious Workers: Labor Market Policy in the Era of Liberalization by Philip Rathgeb. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2018, xviii + 215 pp., ISBN: 978‐1‐5017‐3058‐0, Price £45.00 hardback
| Date | 01 December 2019 |
| Published date | 01 December 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12487 |
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12492
57:4 December 2019 0007–1080 pp. 947–959
BOOK REVIEWS
Rethinking Global Labour by Ronaldo Munck. Agenda Publishing, Newcastle-upon-
Tyne, 2018, 280 pp., ISBN: 9781788211055, £19.99, paperback
In Labour Studies, Ronaldo Munck holds an esteemed position, as one of the people
who has co-founded InternationalLabour Studies. This book summarizes the author’s
decades long experience and oers an extensive historical perspective.
The purpose of the book is to ‘proclaim a new era of renewal and reinvention for
the labour movement’;globalization, it is claimed, has produced a truly global working
class for the first time that is busyputting in place a multifaceted and flexible response.
International Labour Studies has long encountered globalizationas a force that along
its destructive path also opens new possibilities forthe practice of international labour
solidarity and action. Nowadays, in the period ‘after neoliberalism’ and within the
discontent that the Global Depression has brought about since 2008, globalization
from below is finally coming of age. Across the world, an uneven process of recovery,
decomposition and reorientation is taking place but one that is combined: workers of
the world — the book claims — are establishing a unified social presence;unions and
labour are still vital and vibrant forcesand are here to stay!
Part I presents a historical evolution of the capital/wage(d) labour relationship.
However, ‘labour’ here is equated to people at waged employment; non-waged forms
of labour are side-lined. Chapter 2 details the golden era of post-war capitalist
expansion and chapter 3 the era of globalization(1990s). Both chapters oer a detailed
description of the economic forces that propelled capitalismin the past and highlight
some of current developments. Written from a ‘labour perspective’, these chapters
aim to overcome typical portrayals of labour as ‘a passive victim’. Social movement
unionism and global unions are given as evidence of the impetus thatorganized labour
has acquired.
Part II describes the rise of a global labour force united by precarity. Chapter
4 contains a historical analysis of labour in the North post-WWII, when Fordism
hold supreme. It oers a description of regional models of capitalism in the United
States, Europe, Japan, and the former East Bloc in the 20th century. It concludes
with a discussion on the spread of flexibility in the 1990s. Chapter 5 takes up the
story of labour in the South from the (post) colonial 1950s to the globalization 1990s.
The ‘new international division of labour’ in the 1970s broke old colonial ties and
established export processing zones — wherelarge numbers of mostly female workers
were employed — marking the beginning of contemporary global supply chains.
Informalization is set as a distinctive feature of labour in the South that goes ‘hand
in hand with the feminization of the labour force, increased poverty and diminishing
regulation’ (p. 121).
C
2019 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
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