Trade unions and global restructuring: Labour Conflicts in the Global South

Wednesday, 24 February 2021

Labour Conflicts in the Global South

Against the background of the global economic crisis since 2007/2008 and increasing inequality across the world, we have experienced widespread, large-scale industrial action throughout the Global South, including in countries such as China, Brazil, India and South Africa, which had been hailed as the new growth engines of the global political economy as part of the so-called BRICS. In this blog post, I will introduce a new special issue of the journal Globalizations, dedicated to unravelling the underlying dynamics of these moments of contestation.

This special issue systematically evaluates how new forms of labour mobilisation witnessed in the past ten years in the Global South responded to the predominance of the informality-precarity complex of industrial relations and what conclusions can be drawn for potentially successful strategies against exploitation in the future.

In our Introduction to the special issue, Jörg Nowak and I first conceptualize the internal relations between structure and agency on the basis of a historical materialist approach in order to assess the strategies of workers within a rapidly changing global capitalism. Second, in order to avoid economic reductionism we conceptualize the internal relations between class, gender and race to account for the gender-specific manifestations of class as well as how racialization continues to underpin today’s global political economy and is fragmenting the working class and, thereby, undermines its potential for resistance. Finally, we discuss where appropriate how dualist, binary constructions from Northern Industrial Relations, which are frequently applied in the analysis of labour struggles in the Global South, can be overcome.

Further contributions to the special issue include:

2. Jörg Nowak – From industrial relations research to Global Labour Studies: moving labour research beyond Eurocentrism.

3. Maurizio Atzeni - Workers’organisations and the fetishism of the trade union form: toward new pathways for research on the labour movement?

4. Edward Webster, Carmen Ludwig, Fikile Masikane and Dave Spooner – Beyond traditional trade unionism: innovative worker responses in three African cities.

5. Fahmi Panimbang – Solidarity across boundaries: a new practice of collectivity among workers in the app-based transport sector in Indonesia.

6. Pun Ngai – Turning Left: student-worker alliance in labor struggles in China.

7. Michaela Doutch – A gendered labour geography perspective on the Cambodian garment workers’ general strike of 2013/2014.

8. Madhumita Dutta – Becoming ‘active labour protestors’: women workers organizing in India’s garment export factories.

9. Yu Huang and Tsz Fung Kenneth NG - Overcoming ‘small peasant mentality’: semi-proletarian struggles and working-class formation in China.

10. Isil Erdinc – Revisiting the « boomerangeffect »: The international relations of the trade unions in Turkey under the Justice and Development Party (AKP) rule.

11. Andreas Bieler and Jörg Nowak - Labour conflicts in the Global South: towards a new theory of resistance?

Andreas Bieler