To be able to understand the workers of the world today, we need an understanding of how the current state of affairs developed. This section of the book sets out the evolution of the capital/wage labour relationship and how the Industrial Revolution spawned a transformation in societal structures from which the working class sought to protect itself through resistance and collaborative organization, namely through trade unions, co-operatives and social movements. The postwar boom that dominated the Western industrialized economies until the mid-1970s was bolstered by the Cold War and underpinned by the social settlement wrought from Fordism and welfarism. Workers in the developed world enjoyed a brief period of stability and prosperity, albeit based on the exploitation of colonial or dominated territories and workers of the developing world. The collapse of that settlement ushered in a period of transition from which emerged the neoliberal dogma of the market that has held sway ever since. The strong unions of the North were defanged and declawed throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and their decline contributed to the ascendance of a new model of capitalism that reached beyond national borders. The age of globalization drew most of the world into its market for goods, workers and production as communism collapsed in eastern Europe in the 1990s. Since then a global working class has emerged that is characterized by increasing numbers of women joining the workforce and the insecurity of that work, brought about by capital’s push for flexible labour. Organized labour’s response has lagged these developments, but there are signs of a resurgence of grass-roots labour movements worldwide that aim to counter the dominance of the market and fight for workers’ rights and welfare on a global scale.