Renewing International Labour Studies

Marcus Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317986126
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume seeks to re-energise the paradigm of the New International Labour Studies by detailing how struggles over the construction, reproduction, utilisation and restructuring of labour forces are the contested social foundations upon which the global economy stands.

Through a combination of theoretical works and a series of case studies, the volume highlights the cutting edge of international labour studies. Its expands on three pivotal areas of study within the discipline: 1) the social construction of new labour forces across an expanding international division of labour; 2) the self-organising potential of workers, particularly within non-traditional sectors; and 3) the possibilities for transborder labour movements to help address the asymmetrical power relationships between globalised capital and localised labour.

In addressing these themes, the volume helps explain not only how the contemporary international division of labour is produced and reproduced, but also the strengths and limits to current attempts to overcome its unequal and divisive nature.

This book was published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

Who Works for Globalisation? The challenges and possibilities for international labour studies

MARCUS TAYLOR

ABSTRACT This introductory article to the special issue surveys the field of international labour studies and examines the key areas of growth over the past decade. It locates three core areas of the new literature: 1) the social construction of new labour forces across an expanding international division of labour; 2) the self-organising potential of workers, particularly within non-traditional sectors; and 3) the possibilities for transborder labour movements to help address the asymmetrical power relationships between globalised capital and localised labour. It argues that international labour studies as a field needs to make explicit its challenge to mainstream political economy by detailing how struggles over the construction, reproduction, utilisation and restructuring of labour forces are the contested social foundations upon which the global economy stands.

As the world currently stares into the abyss of a global recession, a new shake-up of the international division of labour is beginning to take place. Stung by a rapid shift in global demand, numerous light-manufacturing plants across China’s ‘sunbelt’ export zone—from toy factories to shoes and electronics—have been closing down in large numbers.¹ The immediate effect has been to throw tens of thousands of workers into unemployment, leaving them vainly searching for jobs in a region that, over the past two decades, was synonymous with the extraordinary expansion of export industries forged on the backs of a huge migrant labour force. At present, however, the dynamic forces of creative destruction are casting an altogether different light upon the region’s human landscape. Industrial capital has reacted to overproduction, falling demand, rising wages, mounting worker activism, a new labour code and shifts in currency values by liquidating, merging or moving.² Thousands of discarded migrant workers now clog up railway stations as they attempt to return to the countryside where they face the structural violence of a chronic shortage of jobs. In a region that has seen growing levels of worker protests over the past decade, the spectre of social unrest has arisen alongside mounting unemployment and unpaid wages. Recast as a reserve army of labour, the future of this workforce appears as murky as the polluted waters of the Pearl River Delta.

Through this dramatic ejection of workers from what was recently one of the dynamic growth poles of the world economy, we are reminded that global capitalism is interwoven with the accumulation, reshaping and sometimes annihilation of the labouring bodies on which it depends. The edifice of the global economy is built upon these social foundations and is constantly shaped and reshaped by the struggles unleashed by conflicts over the construction, reproduction and utilisation of labour. These unsettled relationships of domination and resistance, control and co-operation, division and collectivism are the ‘contested domains’ that international labour studies seeks to analyse.

From the initiation of the ‘new international labour studies’ (NILS) in the 1980s to the present, international labour studies has attempted to provide an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the production, reproduction and utilisation of labour and to use this as a basis on which to analyse broader trends within the global political economy. In this introductory article I outline the development of the field over the past two decades by highlighting the original goals of the NILS literature, the ways in which subsequent scholarship has evolved, and the major challenges in terms of methodological approach and empirical focus that continue to vex the discipline. Responding to the profound changes taking place within global capitalism, I suggest that three areas of research have become most prominent within the current literature: 1) the social construction of new labour forces across an expanding international division of labour; 2) the self-organising potential of workers, particularly within non-traditional sectors; and 3) the possibilities for transborder labour movements to curb the asymmetrical power relationships between globalised capital and localised labour. This necessarily includes a focus on the spread of social movement unionism at a global level in the forms of the ‘new labour internationalism’ and the anti-sweatshop movement.

What follows is not intended to be a comprehensive survey of new research in international labour studies, but rather to highlight some of the field’s important developments as a way to preface the articles in this book. Indeed, given the ongoing concerns over what—if anything—binds together international labour studies as an academic movement, the primary purpose of this introductory article is to illustrate the compelling features of the field. I argue that, while international labour studies faces a number of challenges regarding the coherence of its empirical foci and the adequacy of its underlying methodology, it nonetheless offers a potent critique of much mainstream political economy. The latter, I suggest, suffers from a profound ‘labour blindness’. From neoclassical economics to the global commodity chains approach, labour is conspicuous by its absence. Scant attention is placed on the conflicts over the creation and recomposition of labour forces, the ways that labour forces are both combined and divided for the purpose of production, and the forms in which workers act in an attempt to shape their individual and collective circumstances. One of the key challenges facing international labour studies, therefore, is not only to document these various struggles through qualitative and comparative case studies but more pertinently to show how such processes constitute the substratum of political economy. These factors are not simply sociological add-ons to political economy: their consideration is inseparable from the most fundamental economic and technological features of global capitalism.

Precedents and challenges: the ‘new international labour studies’

International labour studies began to cohere into a more formalised paradigm a little over 20 years ago when a series of important books heralded the consolidation of a ‘new international labour studies’ (NILS).³ For its proponents this scholarship represented a new interdisciplinary movement that could account for the complex challenges facing a rapidly changing global labour force. In contrast to the then prevalent industrial relations tradition, with its narrow focus on formal bargaining processes within tripartite structures, the NILS set out to analyse international labour as a product of diverse social relationships ranging from the level of the household, through the dialectics of control and resistance in the labour process, to the politics of organised labour on the shop floor and beyond. Rather than shy away from the contradictions and complications of labour politics at national and international levels, it dealt explicitly with the uneven nature of class stratification, identity formation and labour organisation across a divided and divisive international division of labour. In so doing, it sought to discuss the complexities of organised labour as a transformative subject shaped by a range of social struggles that transcended the sphere of collective bargaining in a way that is now commonplace within the ‘social movement unionism’ literature.⁴

Without doubt the steps taken within the NILS were important yet tentative. It established the ground for much of the ensuing progressive work on global labour issues that has arrived in the subsequent two decades. Moreover, many of themes broached by the NILS literature have become increasingly pertinent in the years that have followed, during which time the internationalisation of capital outlined in Franz Fröbel and collaborators’ provocative ‘New International Division of Labour’ thesis has become more pronounced.⁵ Notwithstanding, the NILS was also beset with problems. Despite the sophistication of specific contributions, the field was bound together as much by the rejection of existing paradigms as by a clear methodological and political focus. To some, international labour studies was little more than a flag of convenience under which could sail a disparate range of progressive scholarship committed to understanding the social dynamics of production and reproduction ‘from below’. Broad consensus over the importance of labour as a category of analysis and an agent of social change therefore obscured significant areas of disagreement.⁶

In particular, a number of ambiguities pervaded the NILS that, in many respects, remain pertinent issues facing the current literature. First, what was the particular nature of the ‘international’ in ‘international labour studies’? Was this simply shorthand for ‘Third World’ labour studies predicated upon a comparative case study methodology, or did it indicate a deeper commitment to engage with the dialectical relations between global forces and the localised dynamics of power, production and social reproduction? Second, what are the substantive implications of a methodological perspective that purports to analyse political economy ‘from below’? Did this simply express a normative commitment to the emancipatory struggles of the working class, or did it provide a substantive methodological basis for an alternative explanatory framework? Within the literature the question was often posed as an uncomfortable choice between a deterministic reading of labour from a structuralist political economy perspective versus a voluntaristic emphasis on agency and the power of the labour movement to shape working class history.⁷

While these questions began to be formally addressed within the literature during the 1980s, the genre did not build towards a unifying analytical framework. On the contrary, the momentum of the NILS literature became stalled as a consequence of the shifting political climate, both in academia and the labour movement. At a time when the primary theoretical tenets of NILS scholars—including Marxism, dependency theory and world systems theory—were being widely questioned on both theoretical and political grounds, the academic space for an assertive international labour studies built on these foundations began to constrict.⁸ Likewise notable defeats for organised labour movements in both the North and South led to a period of political retreat and introspection. In the context of profound socioeconomic crisis of the 1970s and their culmination in the debt crisis of the 1980s the guarded optimism of the NILS deflated parallel to the collapse of the national developmentalist project in which many labour movements were heavily invested. Across the developing world the battering ram of structural adjustment proved a powerful tool by which, in Marx’s terms, to ‘draw from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood’ and to impose a new cosmopolitan order of globalisation.⁹ Organised labour movements in both North and South suffered political defeats and faced daunting organisational challenges as their traditional bastions of support—often located within public sector and nationalised industries—faced up to the triple threat of restructuring, rationalisation and flexibilisation.¹⁰

While for some countries in the global South neoliberal restructuring resulted in deindustrialisation and a new reliance on primary commodity exports—an outcome that harks back to a colonial division of labour supposedly banished by 50 years of development—the more celebrated outcome has been the further expansion of the ‘global factory’. Although profoundly uneven in its geographical and social scope, the past 20 years have witnessed the incorporation of a growing range and magnitude of human labour into the global circuits of capital. This transformation has been predicated upon a notable growth of export-orientated manufacturing industry that is integrated into the sourcing networks and commodity chains headed by multinational companies: a trend that Peter Dickens has expressed in his notion of ‘global shift’. For Dickens the global shift entails that commodities ‘are derived more and more from an increasingly complex geography of production, distribution and consumption, whose scale has become, if not totally global, at least vastly more extensive, and whose choreography has become increasingly intricate’.¹¹ While the geographical expansion of capitalism’s social division of labour is far from unprecedented—indeed, it has been a staple point of analysis from Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto to the ‘new international division of labour’ thesis of the late 1970s—the particular character, causes and consequences of the current transformation is very much a source of contention.

For mainstream economics, perhaps voiced most fervently by international institutions such as the IMF and World Bank, the liberalisation of trade and financial flows has realised a Smithian fantasy in which a virtuous circle of expanding markets and an ever more complex underlying division of labour has reached global proportions.¹² The ‘era of globalisation’ is one in which liberalisation has allowed regions to become ever more specialised in tasks that suit their unique factor endowments. Allied to a logistics revolution that supports a flexible ordering of inter- and intra-firm supply chains, the liberalisation of trade and finance permits both static and dynamic efficiency gains that benefit producers and consumers alike through increased productivity, cheaper goods, technological advancement and an expansion of employment opportunities. The removal of restrictions on the extent of the market is therefore seen as the primary determinant of global development.¹³

Alongside other deficiencies this neoclassical formulation makes invisible the conflictive processes through which labour forces are produced, reproduced and utilised and therein disavows the importance of such struggles for shaping the dynamics of the global political economy. Within the analysis labour is conceptualised as a static factor of production, something that pre-exists in a raw homogenous form awaiting mobile capital to touch down and set it to work. The dynamics of change within the global economy can then be related simply to the natural outcome of liberated market forces operating at a global level according to the unbending logic of comparative advantage. For example, in a recent volume discussing how China has become ‘the workshop of the world’, the contributors spilled considerable ink discussing the degree of trade liberalisation, foreign direct investment regulations and capital account reforms.¹⁴ At no point did they consider how the profound restructuring of China’s working classes and labour institutions—including the breaking of the iron rice bowl, the creation of new migrant workforces and the contested imposition of new forms of discipline within the workplace—have underscored the wider socioeconomic transformation.¹⁵

Other political economy perspectives have questioned the neoclassical interpretation. For critical institutionalists, the shifting international division of labour represents first and foremost the accumulated effects of state capacity in promoting export-industry growth through a range of proactive policies in the vein of ‘infant industry’ strategies.¹⁶ Global commodity chain theorists, moreover, place emphasis on the agency of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Who Works for Globalisation? The challenges and possibilities for international labour studies
• 2. Modes of Production, Rules for Reproduction and Gender: the fabrication of China’s textile manufacturing workforce since the late Empire
• 3. Gendering Liberalisation and Labour Reform in Malaysia: fostering ‘competitiveness’ in the productive and reproductive economies
• 4. China’s New Labour Contract Law: is China moving towards increased power for workers?
• 5. From Fields of Power to Fields of Sweat: the dual process of constructing temporary migrant labour in Mexico and Canada
• 6. Disciplining Capital: export grape production, the state and class dynamics in northeast Brazil
• 7. Legal Liminality: the gender and labour politics of organising South Korea’s irregular workforce
• 8. The Radicalisation of the New Chinese Working Class: a case study of collective action in the gemstone industry
• 9. Local Worker Struggles in the Global South: reconsidering Northern impacts on international labour standards
• 10. Labouring under an Illusion? Lesotho’s ‘sweat-free’ label
• 11. Jumping Scale and Bridging Space in the Era of Corporate Social Responsibility: cross-border labour struggles in the global garment industry
• 12. Afterword: beyond the ‘new’ international labour studies
• 13. Power, Production and Solidarity: trends in contemporary international labour studies
• Index