Global Labour

This article examines the evolution of labour informality in Brazil between 2003 and 2019, a period marked by strong political, economic and social inflections. In the first section, we offer a brief reflection on the terms of the historical debate on informality and its relation to the transformations of the Brazilian economy. In section two we describe the remarkable process of labour formalisation that took place in the country between 2003 and 2014, pointing out its exceptionality and principal determinants. In section three, we note the reversal of this formalisation trend. With the recession of 2015–2016, informal and precarious work increased sharply, exacerbated by newly flexible labour laws and the emergence of new precarious labour relations. We conclude that the Brazilian experience in this new century shows that the formalisation of labour relations is strongly related to more general conditions of economic development and the solidity of public institutions. Furthermore...

The South of Ireland never experienced the full impact of the Industrial Revolution but in 2005 was defined as the ‘most globalised economy in the world’ (IDA Ireland). Global companies, primarily North American, outsourced operations to the Republic, attracted by a skilled and flexible workforce where direct cost of employment is among the lowest in Europe and, what continues to be, the lowest rate of corporation tax in Europe.

The title of the project is inspired by a widely utilised flexible economic management system responsive to the needs and demands of the global market which is intended to be implemented not only at the level of the factory floor but critically, to extend to the nation state itself.

The Breathing Factory (2002-2006) addresses the role and representation of labour and global labour practices in this newly industrialised landscape. Global industrial practices are characterised by fleeting alliances, transient spaces as capital moves when and as required. In such an ephemeral, precarious and globalised context, the project focused specifically upon the Hewlett-Packard Manufacturing and Technology Campus, part of a cluster formation of multinational complexes, in Leixlip in the east of Ireland.

Having begun onsite in 2003, following nine months of negotiation regarding access due to the sensitive nature of this highly secure environment and completed over a 20 month period, each visit was pre-scheduled and pre-cleared, being accompanied at all times and thus, the policing of the project is a central concern. The outcome of a practice-led doctoral research project framed by ethnographic understandings in its undertaking, the full installation includes photographs, text-based work, digital video and sound archival material as critical re-representation.


The Breathing Factory (ISBN No. 3-89904-216-6) is a hardback edition with 180 pages & 69 colour photographs/interview excerpts/artefacts.  Essays have been commissioned by Sean O Riain, Chair of the Sociology Department, National University of Ireland, Maynooth and author of The Politics of High Tech Growth: Developmental States in the Global Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Martin McCabe, lecturer and Programme Chair of the BA Photography, School of Media and researcher within the centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice in the Dublin Institute of Technology.

Volume 1 Issue 1 Special Issue on Globalization(s) and Labour in China and India, guest edited by Paul Bowles and John Harriss ... Greg Flynn McMaster University, flynngl@mcmaster.ca ... Robert O'Brien McMaster University, obrienr@mcmaster.ca ... This Article is brought to ...

Political and social change in South Africa has been crucially shaped by large-scale strikes that have often taken a violent form. In spite of South Africa establishing a constitutional democracy in 1994 – and a new vision of industrial relations – violence has become so entangled in institutional life that South Africa has been described as a “violent democracy”. The massacre of thirty-four striking workers by heavily-armed police at Marikana in August 2012 was a culmination of this trajectory. The article explores the possibility of a nonviolent resolution of industrial disputes. This would require the capability of unions to recognise and strategically use the four dimensions of union power: structural, institutional, associational and societal. Without such capabilities, power resources may go unutilised, or be strategically ineffective. The article argues that in post-apartheid South Africa, associational power has become disconnected from institutional power. Instead of a vita...

Jamie Morgan, Wendy Olsen: The International Labour Organisation (ILO) has developed a concept of decent work and set this as a standard in 1999. However, in many places in the world people labour under conditions that are far from ‘decent’. Many people are subject to forced labour and experience unfreedoms, which raises important theoretical and practical issues. In this contribution we set out some of the ways in which forced labour manifests and how it has been changing over recent years in India. India is of particular interest because, according to the ILO, Asia, and India within Asia, has more victims of forced labour than any other region. India illustrates that specific structures of social relations underpin one’s vulnerability to becoming a victim of forced labour. It illustrates also that forms of forced labour integrate into and develop within capitalism. Although neo-liberal policy prescriptions are formally opposed to forced labour, the neo-liberal capitalist system al...

The article examines the origins of the Global Labour Journal (GLJ) and its goal of broadening labour studies. It shows how, over the past decade, the GLJ has recorded and analysed the forms of action and organisation that fall outside the traditional focus of labour studies. Through a range of careful case studies, the Journal has made an important contribution to the growing field of global labour studies. The two topics that have been the focus of most attention across all types of submissions have been: 1) precarious work and new forms of labour struggles; and 2) international trade unionism or transnational/global labour. The Journal has been successful in giving a platform to content from the Global South, but it is uneven and limited. Another major limitation is the failure to bridge the divide between the big questions raised in the Marx/Polanyi debates during the early phase of the Journal with the more concrete accounts of labour rediscovering its power on the periphery of...

The renegotiated North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), now called the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA), contains two interesting innovations: the requirement of aminimum average wage in the manufacturing of motor vehicles (the Labour Value Content clause)and a detailed prescription for the reform of Mexican labour law. Both could serve as models forfuture labour chapters in trade agreements. The assessment contained in this article is based on theviews of those who demanded renegotiation of the labour-related provisions of NAFTA, expertson labour rights in free trade agreements (FTAs) and ethics criteria. The assessment results in asplit picture. The labour-related provisions came about under ethically problematic circumstancesand their complexity leaves much room for criticism. Yet, the idea of inserting a wage floor in anFTA, as well as monitoring and sanctioning mechanisms for ensuring internationally recognisedlabour rights, merits further consideration for f...

The article argues that the growth of worker protest suicide in the 2000s in South Korea is relatedto current neo-liberal political-economic conditions in Korea, including: 1) the growing crisis facingincreasingly irregular and part-time workers, and 2) the construction of an anti-labour legal regimegiving Korean workers few legal options for collective engagement in workplace actions. Legalobstacles facing labour activists include both business and state actors increasingly usingcompensation lawsuits and provisional seizure tactics to seize the assets of unions and strikingworkers. As the Korean labour movement finds itself increasingly marginalised by the cripplinganti-labour legal innovations of the last two decades, labour resistance has increasingly manifestedin extreme forms of individualistic protests, such as worker suicide. Though products of anomicdespair, these suicides retain the capacity to inspire collective labour action and to leverage change.KEYWORDS: labour movemen...

This article investigates the role of Brazilian legislation in the (re)production of subordinate forms of incorporation of peripheral countries in global value chains (GVCs) through new dynamics for the extraction of value intermediated by international systems of investment. The purpose is to show how financial deregulation contributes to “putting-out” research and development (R&D) labs of major brands, and serves as a way of exploring casual and flexible hiring schemes for skilled workers. To this end, the article explores the financing policies for the Brazilian innovation system, whose aim is to promote the inclusion of higher value-added activities in the GVCs through the connection of national innovative micro-enterprises to direct financial investments, a strategy considered fundamental to boost the country’s industrialisation. The analysis focuses on two Calls for Funds for technology-based start-ups, a category of micro-business where investments have been stimulated due t...

The past two decades have seen a dramatic upsurge in sustained, cross-border labour activism, or labour transnationalism. Scattered across multiple disciplines and subfields, a new field of inquiry – the new global labour studies (NGLS) – has emerged as scholars seek to comprehend the causes and consequences of twenty-first-century labour transnationalism. This multi-disciplinary approach has provided a platform from which to analyse an emerging phenomenon. We assess relevant strands of this emerging field that focus on: a) new theories of labour power and corporate vulnerability, and b) worker agency and organising strategy. While these areas have produced robust findings, we argue that developing a more complete understanding of labour transnationalism and its outcomes will require scholars to produce a more explicit critique of mainstream political economy, sociology, political science and labour studies.

This article investigates the relationship between German trade unions and refugees by focusing on union policies and practices aimed at integrating refugees into the labour market and wider society. Based on web research, newspaper articles, participant observation and internal documents, this article shows that unions follow a “logic of optimisation” in their support of the state’s migration and asylum policies. As employers aim to undermine existing labour standards, unions’ strategies of integration run up against limits. This article further finds that that unions’ positive stance toward refugees is based on Germany’s labour shortage, demographic trends and their commitment to anti-racism.

Technological innovation has had far-reaching implications for labour and for the world of work generally. It has led to job losses, the creation of new jobs, the loss of some skilled positions and the creation of new ones, and an increase in the quality of products like steel. Literature that addresses union responses to technological innovation in production has tended to classify them as either reactive or proactive, with reactive responses predominating. This article examines how South African trade unions in the steel, automotive and chemical industries have responded to technological changes. Based on interviews and documentary analysis, it argues that the unions have adopted a rearguard approach, responding to technological changes only after management has already implemented them. Unions have tended to prioritise “politics from above” and traditional union issues such as wage negotiations. In addition, the current division within unions has contributed to their inability to...

This article develops the concept of “precarious bodies” to theorise the lived experience of labour precariousness in the twenty-first century and its implications for workers’ health, well-being and household reproduction. Drawing on ethnographic research with Bolivian miners and Trinidadian garment workers, we explore the relationship between workers’ exposure to global market forces and their everyday experiences of work, health and risk in these industries. “Precarious bodies” is a heuristic that takes into a single frame the macro-level economic and regulatory processes that create risks for workers, and the various ways in which workers negotiate these risks through their work practices and livelihood choices. We show precarious bodies to be both vulnerable and strategic. Positioned in situations of exploitation and risk, their choices to protect their livelihoods can harm their health and reinforce – rather than counteract – the precarious circumstances of their households.

The article explores knowledge in global value chains (GVCs) and its correspondence with the nature of employment in different GVC segments. It starts with the role of knowledge that is protected through intellectual property rights in creating oligopolies in product markets, which are then re-created as oligopolies in the input markets. Knowledge requirements, transmitted through governance relations and the distribution of power within GVCs, lead to the inter-firm distribution of profits within GVCs, and result in differing qualities of employment corresponding to the level of knowledge required in different production segments.

Disputes over the meaning of human trafficking, forced labour and modern slavery have both provoked and coincided with a reinvigorated debate in academic and policy literatures about how to conceptualise unfree labour. This article traces the contours of the debate over free and unfree labour, identifying its key stakes as the debate has developed and paying particular attention to recent interventions. It begins by identifying a problem common to both canonical liberal and Marxian approaches to the free/unfree labour distinction, which is to fetishise the labour market. It then discusses the consensus that is emerging across disciplines and in leading international organisations that labour unfreedom in contemporary capitalism is best conceptualised as a continuum rather than a binary, highlighting recent disciplinary-specific contributions. It argues that the metaphor of a continuum of labour unfreedom obscures more than it illuminates. Drawing upon the growing body of literature ...