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

Against the background of the global economic crisis since 2007/2008 and increasing inequality across the world, the Global South has experienced widespread, large-scale industrial action, 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 my recently published co-edited volume (together with Jörg Nowak) Labour Conflicts in the Global South (Routledge, 2022).

This volume systematically evaluates how the new forms of labour mobilization witnessed in the past ten years 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. Can we identify a convergence of new approaches across the Global South, or do we witness an ongoing fragmentation of actors, models and strategies?

While precarity has always been a predominant feature of labour markets in the Global South, informal working practices are increasingly also permeating labour markets in the Global North. Hence, this is the moment when labour organisers in the latter should start learning from the former, as organisers in the Global South have already successfully established forms of mobilisation in these rather difficult circumstances for many years. This volume, thus, also calls for a reversal of traditional North-South trade union relations. While in the past it was the North, which provided some kind of ‘development assistance’ to labour movements in the Global South, it is now organisers from the Global South, who provide valuable lessons for organising in the North.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Globalizations, Vol.18/8 (2021) and individual chapters can be accessed as follows:

Table of contents

1. Andreas Bieler and Jörg Nowak – Labour Conflicts in the Global South: An Introduction.

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

3. Maurizio Atzeni - Workers’ organizations 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 exportfactories.

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

10. Isil Erdinc – Revisitingthe ‘boomerang effect’: the international relations of the trade unions inTurkey 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?