The challenges of globalization

Tim Sandle, St. Albans CLP

Book review: ‘Globalization And Precarious Forms Of Production And Employment:

Challenges for Workers and Unions’. Edited by Carole Thornley, Steve Jefferys and Beatrice
Appay. Published by Edward Elgar, 2010.

There have been many books in recent years on globalization: how increasing global
interconnectedness locks the developing word into a more rigid relationship of dependency
with the West or how the greed of bankers, in re-packaging debt, triggered the economic
recession of 2008. Where there has been little published critical inquiry is with the direct
changes to the form of work, in shifting away from full-time stable employment to part-time
work made increasingly ‘precarious’ for workers by being subject to flexible employment
practices, minimal rights and diminished security. Precarious work is coupled with the very
real threat of unemployment, as the introduction to the book makes clear: the financial
collapse of 2008 alone led to 20 million job losses worldwide. This analysis alone would
make ‘Globalization And Precarious Forms Of Production And Employment’ a timely book
to help navigate through the various employment strategies of employers and governments.

Where the book, written by three leading academics of industrial relations and the economy
of work, adds additional insight is in analysing the implications of changes to work for
workers and their trade unions. This is somewhat in keeping with the tradition of Marx for
those engaged in critical social science should not simply describe the world, for there is also
a responsibility to provide a pathway for how the world can be changed. Here the thoughts
centre on how unions can engage in a power struggle: trying to shift the balance back towards
workers and to create a society where economic outcomes are more equitable.

The book consists of a fifteen chapters by international authors. Some of the chapters analyse
what has changed with the world of work, charting the decline of mass production, the norms
of collective bargaining and ‘full employment’ (the relative stability of the 1950s and 1960s)
to the era of flexible labour markets and secondary employment. Other chapters describe
what is actually going on in workplaces like Wal-Mart, the car industry, rail and the public
sector where the rapid changes to employment, as experienced by workers based in different
countries, are drawn out.

By adopting a global perspective the book is able to provide a useful insight into the
trajectory that capitalism is taking, in both mature states and to the less developed regions of
the world and the fallacy of the neo-liberal economic arguments of most political parties over
the past twenty years. Most interestingly, the most vulnerable group of workers are women
not least because they are over-represented in jobs most vulnerable to economic
globalization, with those who work part-time or on a temporary basis most vulnerable of all.
The most pressing lesson drawn, for me, is the need for unions to adapt to what is going on
and to consider how workers in the most precarious forms of employment can be represented.
The answer would seem to start with forming strong global connections with other unions
and restructuring union organization to math the adaptation of capital. To weight up these
complex questions and to help to understand the ‘new economy’, this book provides an
invaluable starting point.