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...