Rethinking Global Labour: After Neoliberalism
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| Author | Ronaldo Munck |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject | Labor and globalization |
| Publisher | Agenda Publishing |
Publication date | September 2018 |
| Pages | 280 |
| ISBN | 9781788211055 |
Rethinking Global Labour: After Neoliberalism is a 2018 book by Irish-Argentine sociologist Ronaldo Munck, published by Agenda Publishing.[1] Munck documents transformations in the global workforce after the 2008 financial crisis. The author argues that neoliberal capitalism has inadvertently created conditions for new forms of worker resistance.[2]
New Global Labour Studies (NGLS)
In a 2015 interview, Munck cited feminism, postcolonialism, and political geography as major influences on his work, alongside the ideas of Karl Marx and Karl Polanyi. He has linked his intellectual development to political events he witnessed firsthand, including the Pinochet coup in Chile and his time in Belfast and South Africa.[3]
In ‘The New Global Labour Studies: A Critical Review’,[4] Marissa Brookes and Jamie K. McCallum, note that Ronaldo Munck probably more than anyone is responsible for the move toward Polanyian themes in the NGLS (New Global Labour Studies). Drawing parallels between the labour movements that successfully re-embedded the market in Polanyi’s time and the transnational labour movement of sixty years later, Munck argues that these movements signal a turning point in the development of modern anti-capitalism. "It may, indeed, simply be the case that the hour of von Hayek is gone, and the hour of Polanyi has arrived" (Munck, 2002: 177–178). Part of the allure of Polanyi’s framework is that it allows for uncoordinated and disaggregated labour movements to reflexively retaliate against the market, much as the body reacts to fight disease. "For each victory of the transnational capitalist class", writes Munck, "there is a new blow struck from below through a strike, a consumer boycott, or a legal challenge to their hegemonic role" (Munck, 2002: 178–179). This perspective gained momentum after the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle, where unionists from different countries shared the stage and streets with students, environmentalists, feminists and community groups. The protest helped solidify, if only for a moment, the idea that labour had "moved beyond a conception of transnational collective bargaining" and towards "a more ‘social movement’ unionism’" (Munck, 2002: 154).
This perspective emerged out of the New International Labour Studies (NILS) perspective of the 1980s The fatalism of the Thatcher–Reagan decade saw unions in the industrialised North in decline and social movement unionism gathering momentum in the South. In this milieu, the New International Labour Studies (NILS) movement emerged with a formidable critique of mainstream political economy and global commodity chain approaches, injecting labour into the analysis of globalisation, an area where it had been conspicuously absent (Munck, 1988). NILS proponents assembled a body of literature advancing a theoretical paradigm that expanded the traditional industrial relations outlook to include insights into the uneven geographic division of labour, the social reproduction of inequality, class stratification, informalisation and new identity formation, anticipating some concerns that would later be raised by theorists of union renewal and social movement unionism.
