Labor in the Global: Challenges and Prospects Ronaldo Munck Source: Robin Cohen and Shirin M. Ray (eds) Global Social Movements (2000) 83-100 © 2000 Continuum Publishing. In one of his recent wide-ranging and ambitious three volumes on the new capitalism, Castells (1997:354) suggests that labour's prospects in the global arena are bleak indeed: 'Torn by internationalization of finance and production, unable to adapt to networking of firms and individualization of work, and challenged by the degendering of employment, the labour movement fades away as a major source of social cohesion and workers' representation'. This negative prognosis is a powerful and persuasive one but I would argue one that is already dated. Labour has been written off in the past as a social force and a political actor only to come back on the scene in some form. It is interesting in this regard to find the Danish General Workers' Union organizing a 'global labour summit' at the same time Castells' book appeared, which declared that: The time has come for the trade unions to use the positive sides of globalization to the advantage of workers and poor people all over the world' (Global Labour Summit, 1997). It is the apparent contradiction between these two statements that we need to explore. GLOBALIZATION: NEW TERRAIN? When the International Congress of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) met at its 16th World Congress in 1996, the key document before delegates was aptly entitled 'Globalization — the greatest challenge for unions in the 21st Century'. The ICFTU, as the major transnational representative of labour understands well that: The position of workers has changed as a result of the globalization of the economy and changes in the organization of production' (ICFTU, 1997: 4), The huge structural transformations of the labour market and labour process over the last 20 years have had a dramatic impact on labour worldwide. Globalization, a convoluted discursive terrain to be sure, now sets the parameters for labour activity across the globe. It would also appear to act as the spearhead of an ideological offensive against autonomous labour and, indeed, other social practices. Yet these are processes that are fluid, perhaps even contradictory and they certainly need to be deconstructed. We cannot work on the basis of a simple determinism whereby labour's role in the new global arena is always already determined. After all, even the remote ICFTU now declares that 'one of the main purposes of the international trade union movement is the international solidarity of workers ...' (ICFTU, 1997: 5). It is certainly possible to draw a direct unilinear correlation between the process of globalization and decreasing labour rights across the world. Thus, Tilly argues that globalization has undermined the nation state which in turn means that the state cannot now fulfil its historical role in guaranteeing workers' rights. For Tilly (1995:21): 'No individual state will have the power to enforce workers' rights in the fluid world that is emerging'. All rights embedded in nation states are necessarily under threat by economic globalization. Tilly (p 1) argues bluntly that: 'As states decline, so do workers' rights'. While not wishing to deny a certain reality to this scenario it does seem too deterministic and `necessitarian'. Tilly's (welcome) call for workers' organization to develop new strategies at international level then seems purely voluntaristic. The logic of his position is actually to call for a defence and strengthening of the nation state if that is seen as the only way for workers' across the globe to retain or gain social, economic and political rights. Indeed, we now find the 'Monthly Review school' arguing precisely this in a recent collection examining labour's 'Rising from the Ashes' (Monthly Review, 1997). The logic here is that globalization is but the latest of noxious ideologies, from 'Western Marxism', through post- Marxism to postmodernism designed to subvert the historical agency role of 'the working lass'. They reject any appeals to an 'abstract internationalism', in favour of focusing on the state 'as a target in an anti-capitalist struggle', 'the focus of local and national struggles' and 'a unifying force ... within the working class' (Monthly Review, 1977: 16). From this perspective, internationalism can only mean solidarity between different national struggles and no credence is given to such notions as international civil society. What is noticeable is the parallel with Tilly's determinism, even if on the assumption that globalization is basically a myth. To advocate an unreconstructed nation-statist workerism seems an inadequate riposte to the admitted excesses of the globalization discourse. As with Tilly we find globalization treated as a homogeneous, irreversible, all-encompassing process and labour seen simply as victim, 'done to' by the powerful, abstract, economic forces it unleashes. It now seems clear that globalization is a term which has undergone a conceptual inflation in recent years and has now been devalued. It can mean anything, everything or nothing. It has, as Louise Amoure and co-authors point out, become firmly established as the key to the 'brave new world' we are entering whether from a Panglossian or a demonization perspective but its guiding principles are being accepted across the board as the new common sense for the era. Globalization is seen as obvious, inexorable and, at the end of the day, simply 'out there'. Yet the concept can be understood as both amorphous and labile in the extreme. For example, as Kim Moody (1997: 37) puts it, it is `an all-encompassing analytical device that frequently concealed more than it explained'. The temptation to abandon the whole terrain of the globalization debate is there, but I think we should resist it. For the ICFTU (1997: 4) globalization is quite simply 'the biggest challenge to the free trade union movement in its long struggle on behalf of working women and men around the world'. That is because of the cumulative effects of neo-liberal economic policies, structural adjustment programmes and privatization, financial deregulation and the growing mobility of the transnational corporations. The end of the Cold War is seen to offer a unique opportunity for the once divided international trade union movement to develop common objectives and joint action faced with a hostile climate for labour worldwide. One of the largest ITSs (International Trade Secretariats), now working more closely with the ICFTU, the ICEM (International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions), has also launched a new global strategy, declaring that 'Action has to be planned on an international basis right from the start' (ICEM, 1996: 55). The dramatically increased level of internationalization over the last decade has created the conditions and the need for a new international labour strategy. As Doreen Massey (1995: 58) has suggested, a new 'global sense of place' has brought home the very real points of interconnection between people across the globe. This goes far beyond the communications revolution —e-mail making contact between labour leaders and activists easier for example — to create a new objective and subjective sense of commonality amongst workers worldwide and, at least, the possibility of a global strategy for labour. Exploring its current contours and possible prospects is the main purpose of this chapter. There has now been a backlash against the early globalization theories and now most talk is about its 'limits' (e.g. Boyer and Drache, 1995). In some cases this revisionist case has led to a 'business as usual' attitude prevailing. Hirst and Thompson (1996) have articulated this case most clearly and with the explicit political intent of countering the idea that 'there is no alternative' to globalization. Their attempt to relativize the dominating role of the transnational corporations (TNCs) is well taken but there is a danger of quantitative reasoning obscuring the qualitative changes which have undoubtedly occurred in the world economy over recent decades. David Held has quite rightly, to my mind, reminded us that there is a fundamental difference between ... the development of particular trade routes ... or even the global reach of nineteenth- century empires, and, ... an international order involving ... dense networks of regional and global economic relations which stretch beyond the control of any single state ... (Held, 1995:20). There is, furthermore, a view of globalization in Hirst and Thompson which is somewhat reductionist and economistic and, seemingly, with little awareness, for example, of the burgeoning literature on cultural globalization (e.g. Featherstone, 1995; Friedman, 1994). At times it seems that globalization acts as simple surrogate for neo-liberalism in relation to which many of their analytical points and political 'line' make more sense. Ultimately, however useful it may be to reject the Manichean view of globalization as a deus ex machina, the implicit political message of 'business as usual' in the nation state leaves social groups such as labour ill-prepared to consider how the local, the national and the global are today interrelated. While maintaining all the caution that is due, it is still possible to detect something different or distinct in this new phase of world history we are calling `globalization'. Jan Scholte (1997: 3-4) takes up the sensible (to me) stance that globalization can 'when developed with care, precision, consistency and suitable qualifications — be more than intellectual gimmick'. That is arguably now being done across a range of disciplines and applied to a host of specific topics in a more concrete manner than the first-generation literature on globalization. We do not need to become either propagandists for globalization or demonize it, a binary opposition if ever there was one. Nor is dismissing it as simply a new-fangled way of describing internationalization really adequate. One of the simplifications to overcome is the early idea of the global as dynamic and fluid as against the local as embedded, static and tradition bound.