Part III - New Challenges for Global Labour
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 August 2023
Summary
Global labour faces key challenges that could, paradoxically, present opportunities for the organization of labour and social change. Labour migration dominates political discourse across the North, as workers seek better conditions in a globalized economy and are willing to take big risks to move to jobs and new lives in foreign countries. Although they are traditionally opposed to the importation of workers, in terms of the making of a global working class trade unions may play a unifying and democratic role in integrating international migrants socially.
I also turn to the story of labour and its “others” – that is, those social movements that have sometimes been in competition with it, such as the environmental movement, but that would make up together a powerful force for sustainable democratic development. Too often opposed to the workers’ movements, the “new” social movements based on identity politics may well play an invigorating role in terms of reviving and reinventing trade unions. Finally, I examine the little-known story of workers and labour internationalism, which is, at one and the same time, an old story and part of the making of the working class but which, today, is a key issue if labour is to offer a global alternative to global capitalism. If we are moving towards a globalized setting for workers’ struggles, the need for a new internationalism is a pressing task, not only for trade unions but also for social movements more generally.
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- Information
- Rethinking Global LabourAfter Neoliberalism, pp. 157 - 158Publisher: Agenda PublishingPrint publication year: 2018