Grounding Labour in the Age of Globalization Insecurity

* Book: Grounding Globalization: Labour in the Age of Insecurity. Bz Edward Webster, Rob Lambert et al. Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.

Description

"Claims have been made on the emergence of a new labour internationalism in response to the growing insecurity created by globalization. However, when persons face conditions of insecurity they often turn inwards. The book contains a warning and a sign of hope. Some workers become fatalistic, even xenophobic. Others are attempting to globalize their own struggles.

• Examines the claim that a new labour internationalism is emerging by grounding the book in evidence, rather than assertion

• Analyzes three distinct places – Orange, Australia; Changwon, South Korea; and Ezakheni, South Africa – and how they dealt with manufacturing plants undergoing restructuring

• Explores worker responses to rising levels of insecurity and examines preconditions for the emergence of counter-movements to such insecurities Highlights the significance of 'place' and 'scale', and demonstrates how the restructuring of multi-national corporations, and worker responses to this, connect the two concepts."

Review

Peter Waterman:

"This book (henceforth Grounding) is a highly original and ambitious work, which should provoke discussion and encourage further work amongst labour-oriented academics and research-minded activists in coming years (see full review Waterman 2011a). Grounding focuses on the tribulations and struggles of factory workers in the ‘white goods’ (refrigerators, washing machines, etc) industry in one locale each of Australia, South Korea and South Africa. The book could be considered as the major contribution (at least in English) from the ‘Global South’ to the widening Left efforts to reconceptualise and reinvent the labour movement worldwide in the age of globalisation.

Grounding depends on a critical reconsideration of the theory of 20th century Left sociologist and social historian, Karl Polanyi, with his currently much-cited and promoted work (e.g. Munck 2002, 2009, 2010) on ‘the great transformation’ brought about by the first industrial revolution, of the ‘double movement’ in which the capitalist economy came to dominate society and how this provoked a movement to ‘re-embed’ the economy in society. Grounding, however, marshals other theorists to supplement or correct Polanyi. They include, notably, Sidney Tarrow (2005) on transnational social movements, and Michael Burawoy (2000, 2004) on, respectively, movements against globalisation and the relationship of socially-committed academics to the people and movements they study (indeed, the title of their book does homage to Burawoy). The authors also make use of radical social geographers such as David Harvey, with arguments concerning capital’s spatial operations and the necessity for multi-spatial and multi-level counter-strategies.

Whilst they do not synthesise their theoretical sources, far less draw from them a set of initial propositions, the authors do deploy them throughout the work with elegance and effect. Curiously, Grounding does not conceptualise, in its theoretical introduction, two related notions from the old New International Labour Studies that nonetheless repeatedly reappear throughout the book, ‘social movement unionism’ and ‘the new labour internationalism’ (although the latter, as we will see, is at least defined in Chapter 9). Yet these two concepts actually seem to underlie or at least inspire their work. More limiting, however, is their failure to deal with computerisation/informatisation as a fundamental characteristic of capitalist globalisation and a crucial terrain of labour and other social movement struggle against this. Informatisation depends on and creates another space – cyberspace – which emancipatory social movements ignore at their peril.1 The implications of this void in the theoretical peregrinations of GG, become evident in the chapter on a new labour internationalism.

The internationalism chapter of Grounding (Chapter 9) depends on a schematic opposition between an old and a new labour (actually union) internationalism (Table 9.1), in which the characteristics are:

... (graphic here)

Whilst such Manichean oppositional schemes are a common rhetorical or polemical device (of a kind I may myself employ), and whilst this one does powerfully challenge the old union internationalism, the characterisation of the new is itself open to challenge. Where, for example, is the alternative to, the opposite, or surpassing of, the ‘male-dominated’? Not on the table, nor, actually, in the book’s index, any more than are ‘women’ or ‘feminism’.1 Nor, indeed, are there on this table any ‘new’ theories/ideologies/discourses. Such schematic presentations of internationalism need, I would argue, to be supplemented by wider and deeper features/aspects such as, for example, the following (Waterman 1998:57-63, 235-8).

These include:

• distinctions between different active bearers of internationalism (the union organisation? the broader labour movement? the new global social movements more generally? labour-movement or labour-oriented activists/researchers?),

• the axes, directionality, reach and depth of international solidarity actions or campaigns,

• the distinct possible yet problematic types of solidarity within either the old or the new (Identity? Substitution? Complementarity? Reciprocity? Affinity? Restitution?),

• the meaning to those workers involved at either end of the transaction (or any point of the network) of the solidarity they are involved in.

I am equally unconvinced by this chapter that a new union internationalism is or will be primarily carried by the Southern workers (Waterman 1998:Ch.5).

Indeed, it could be seen as a prerequisite of any new union or labour internationalism that it develop out of a global dialectic and dialogue

• between all world areas - including the here forgotten (ex-) Communist one and that humungous new Commu-Capitalist Workshop of the World, China (subsumed with difficulty into any homogenous North or South)!

• with the full range of radical-democratic worker movements

• with the complete range of radically-democratic social movements

• between labour organisations/movements and socially-committed academics.

The ‘new internationalist’ cases that this chapter of Groundings offers are all from the Geographic South, though Australia is, obviously (if embarrassingly) part of the Socio-Economic North, and South Korea is in the Geographic North (Seoul is almost as far North as Lisbon)! Even the most ‘socially southern’ of the three, South Africa, is a somewhat atypical member of the Global South (although what would be a ‘typically’ Southern state/society is today questionable). So any Manichean, or even a simple binary opposition, between North and South is here either fatally undermined or rendered seriously problematic.

The major case offered for the new union internationalism is the Southern Initiative on Globalisation and Trade Union Rights (Sigtur). It is no coincidence that this network links major unions in the three case countries in this book. Nor that one of the Grounding authors, Rob Lambert, is a founder and keystone of this network. Nor that he and Eddie Webster have been its major academic promoters. So one has to decide whether authorial over-identification does not seriously exaggerate its importance.

Sigtur has no presence within the World Social Forum (unlike the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) and the South African Confederation of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), it has attended only one WSF). And after almost two decades of existence it has a weak and non-dialogical web presence.1 Yet a dialogical web presence is today surely another requirement for any new labour internationalism. Nor are we offered, in the presentation of Sigtur, here or elsewhere, any serious discussion of the ‘North/South’ relationship between the three countries that the authors consider ‘the fundamental challenge to a new labour internationalism’ (209). Yet Australia, home base of Sigtur, is clearly a Northern wolf in Southern sheep’s clothing. Sigtur has, finally, been so far trapped in an unrecognised or unadmitted contradiction - or at least a foundational tension - between trying to build a new networked labour movement internationalism on the basis of leadership relations between trade union organisations that themselves reproduce the state-national base of their Old Labour Internationalism.

Grounding is, therefore, a work still imprisoned within earlier stages of capitalism and the incrementalist discourses of the Westeurocentred Left; its proposed strategies reproduce the 20th century social-democratic tradition. I say ‘20th century’ because there was an emancipatory 19th century one, and there is also developing a 21st century social-democratic tradition – one that is opening itself to the dramatically-transformed nature of global capitalism and to the newest global social movements contesting this (consider, for example, Bieler, Lindberg and Pillay 2008, Bieler and Lindberg 2011, New Unionism, UnionBook and the personal but pluralistic and multi-lingual, Global Labour Institute website of Dan Gallin). Striking, also, is that despite the Southern drumbeating,1 our co-authors are entirely dependent on Northern theories and theorists.

The most Grounding can hope for is that, in its three somewhat untypical Southern cases, industrial unions and Left political parties will bring about radical reforms within (presumably repentant) national-capitalist polities. In 2012 evidence of such such movements and such repentance is lacking. Even those Left Latin American states in which so much labour and social movement hope has been placed over the last 5-10 years are now being critically questioned and challenged (e.g. Heinz Dietrich 2011). The utopia which the authors are promoting (in Chapter 10) must be seen as one of the past: Sweden of the 1970s? On a world scale? And this despite the surely reasonable argument that it is union identification with this Swedish utopia that continues to disarm, firstly, the unions of the North in the face of the new capitalism but also many if not most of the unions of the South, for which this shrinking (if not yet melting) Northotopia has become the only imaginable one. Consider here the almost literally universal union endorsement of the Decent Work project2 of the Euro-centred International Labour Organisation (critiqued Waterman 2005)."

Source

• Peter Waterman article on proposed Emancipatory Global Labour Studies for the journal Interface.