Call for Papers - Trade unions and Free Trade in the post-pandemic environment: moving towards trade justice?

Free trade has been criticised for some time as being an obstacle to independent development of countries in the Global South supporting working people’s real needs. The assumed benefits of free trade for people in the Global North too have come increasingly under scrutiny. Does COVID-19, which has demonstrated the fragility of the global free trade regime, open up new space for labour movements in their struggles for an alternative regime organised around principles of trade justice?

 

In this one-day workshop to be held online on Friday, 7 May 2021, we intend to bring together short papers of between 3500 and 5000 words maximum about labour movements and their positions on trade to be presented within ten minutes each.

 

In particular, we are interested in contributions in the following areas:

• papers on specific labour movements from across the world and their positions on trade;

• papers on initiatives of transnational solidarity around alternative trade policies;

• papers on the colonial history of today’s global free trade regime;

• papers critical of the dominant free trade agenda from a historical materialist, a feminist, an ecological and/or post-colonial perspective;

• papers on what a labour-centred trade policy could look like;

• papers on what an alternative global institutional framework for trade would look like from a labour-centred perspective.

 

The objective is to establish the basis for a larger research network dedicated to exploring possibilities for an alternative global trade regime. Exploring the possibility of large research grant applications is part of this programme.

 

Importantly, labour movements are defined broadly incorporating trade unions but also other institutional expressions and organisations of the labour movement, such as social movements and NGOs. Trade will be understood as an issue reaching across the spheres of production and social reproduction facilitating a gender dimension, incorporating an understanding of the racialized nature of the global political economy as well as acknowledging the increasing expansion of capital into nature.

 

If you are interested, please send your proposal to Andreas Bieler at Andreas.Bieler@nottingham.ac.uk and Stephen Hurt at shurt@brookes.ac.uk by Friday, 26 March 2021.