In the seventy two years since India gained its independence from the British, a distinct precedent has been espoused throughout political discourses is that of religious difference. Established in the very partition of India, a dichotomy has formed, and grown, between India’s Hindu majority and it’s religious minorities. This is most often historically India’s Muslim majority (which is destined to become the largest single population of Muslims in the world) but has from time to time turned to Sikhs (notably in the 1980s), and other communities. This narrative of religious difference is not a impenetrable barrier to religious cohesion in India, in fact it can be argued that India displays a more sophisticated model of religion conscious democracy, though the ever growing populist narrative of India’s politics, this assessment grows weaker and weaker.
Rising
developments within labor challenge the conventional progressive wisdom that
neoliberal globalization has been an unprecedented disaster for workers, trade
unions, and the labor movement. The obstacles to labor organizing, of course, do
pose serious challenges. Increased mobility of capital has led to a sharp increase
in relocation, outsourcing, and offshoring. Multinational corporations can wield
the threat of plant closures against workers’ requests for better wages or states’
efforts to raise taxes. Executives at multinational corporations can even pit
their own plants against each other, going back and forth between them to get local
managers and workers to underbid each other in a race to the bottom. At the
same time, the increased mobility of labor has led to increased migration,
which can be seen as a threat to wages and working conditions if migrant
workers are introduced into a settled labor force. Corporations can then stoke
divisions among their workers across racial, ethnic, and linguistic lines to
undermine the foundation of solidarity necessary to organize.
Labor
faces these and myriad other obstacles in our rapidly changing, interconnected
world. However, fixating on obstacles creates a facile pessimism. Globalization
may have opened as many doors as it closed. At the most basic level, the
globalization of communication has countered one of the most formidable barriers
to global action. With email, social media, and other online platforms, workers
enjoy better tools to organize across countries—imagine trying to organize a
transnational strike a century ago. Moreover, globalized communication fosters
solidarity as workers are able to see, hear, and share each other’s stories.[1]
Looking ahead, improvements in translation software could help bridge the
language divide, thereby opening new paths to transcultural dialogue. Globalized
capitalism may have created the basis for a new global working class, not only
in material conditions but also in consciousness.
Transnational
unionism can take many forms. It can operate among union executives or on a grassroots
level, while organizing can be workplace-oriented or based on collaboration
with NGOs on issue campaigns. Successful transnational unionism has the
capacity to navigate complexity and operate on multiple levels. In particular,
transnationally oriented unions have used globalization to their benefit by
organizing transnational labor actions, forming new transnational structures,
and fostering solidarity with migrant workers at home.
When
a transnational corporation spreads production nodes across countries, thus distributing
the workforce, the geographic expansion also increases the possible leverage
points for organizing against the corporation. The workers of Irish budget
airline Ryanair understand this well. Since Ryanair’s foundation in 1984, CEO
Michael O’Leary had been a vocal opponent of union organizing, but workers
chose not to listen. In mid-2018, they went on strike—starting in Ireland
before spreading across the continent—for pay increases, direct employment, and
collective labor agreements that comply with national labor laws. Management,
which had used its transnational status to play workers against each other, was
confronted by a united cross-national organized labor force.
Labor
has also showed strength by partnering with allies at different points along
the globally dispersed production chain. A campaign against sweatshops in the
apparel industry showed how direct action by students in the US can support organizing
by workers in Honduras. Garment workers in global production chains are usually
considered weak compared to hypermobile, high-profit companies like Nike.[2]
But such corporations are vulnerable to boycotts. Transnational union resources
focused on a particular industry or country have considerable power to deny
market share and thereby bolster demands at the point of production.
Besides
enabling specific actions, the new economic landscape has given rise to new organizing
structures, as labor unions realize that old methods of operating can no longer
suffice. In the 1960s, the International Trade Secretariats (today known as Global
Union Federations, or GUFs) began to respond to the expansion of multinational
corporations (MNCs) through the formation of World Company Councils. First
established by the United Auto Workers and the International Metalworkers’
Foundation, the World Company Councils coordinated the activities of the
various national trade unions across a multinational corporation’s operations. However,
they proved unable to create the stability and continuity needed to achieve the
transnational collective bargaining power the unions hoped to develop.[3]
By
the 1990s, the international union strategy had shifted from the promotion of
voluntary “codes of conduct” with MNCs and the introduction of “social clauses”
(including labor rights) into trade agreements, to the more ambitious and
comprehensive Global Framework Agreements (GFAs). An expression of
transnational labor solidarity, GFAs bind a company’s global operations to the
labor standards of the headquarters, usually based in Europe. Thus, gains won where
labor is stronger can spread to where it is weaker. By 2015, 156 Global
Framework Agreements had been signed around the world, focused mainly on core workplace
conditions and the right to collective bargaining.[4]
Developments
like GFAs grew from the realization that relying on old national-level
collective bargaining had turned into a dead end. Labor needed new strategies,
tactics, and organizational modalities. With “business as usual” organizing
modes no longer adequate, many trade union leaders began calling for global
solidarity. They called into question labor’s “special status” alongside the
state and employers—the famous tripartite modality of the International Labor
Organization. If capital now organized itself predominantly as a transnational
player, so, too, would the international trade unions need to “go global.”
A
significant manifestation of this shift is the emergence of global unions. In
2008, the workers of the United Steelworkers in the US merged with Unite the
Union, the largest labor organization in Britain and Ireland. The new union,
Workers Uniting, represented almost 3 million workers at its founding in the
steel, paper, oil, health care, and transportation industries. Oil conglomerate
BP and steel behemoth ArcelorMittal are both transnational; now, their workers
are transnational too, refusing to be pitted against each other in
negotiations. Maritime workers, who have a built-in internationalism, have
taken similar steps. In 2006, in response to the globalization of the shipping
industry, the National Union of Marine, Aviation and Shipping Transport
Officers in the UK developed a formal partnership with the Dutch maritime
workers’ union Federatie van Werknemers in de
Zeevaart,
renaming themselves Nautilus UK and Nautilus NL respectively. Two years later,
workers took the partnership a step further, voting to create a single
transnational union: Nautilus International.
In 2015, the United Auto Workers in the US and IG Metall in Germany joined
forces to create the Transatlantic Labor Institute focusing on auto worker
representation issues at the US plants of German auto manufacturers.[5]
In a decade’s span, transnationalism has entered the trade union mainstream as
leadership catches up with the objective possibilities opened up by globalization.
Notably,
the smartest unions are treating migrant workers not as a threat but as an
opportunity. By making common cause with migrant workers, trade unions have
deepened their democratic role by integrating migrant workers into unions and
combatting divisive and racist political forces. In Singapore and Hong Kong,
state-sponsored unions have recruited migrant workers, to mutual benefit. In
Malaysia, Building and Woodworkers International, a GUF, recruits temporary
migrant workers to work alongside “regular” members of the union. Through such positive,
proactive outreach, unions can counter the divide-and-conquer strategy on which
anti-union management thrives.
Despite
such bright spots, many contradictions and pitfalls impede the forward march of
transnational labor organizing. The mismatch between the unlimited scale and
complexity of the challenge and the limited resources available remains a
chronic problem. Also, successfully organizing new layers of workers may reduce
the capacity of unions to take action due to the difficulties of mobilizing an
informal or precarious global labor force. These problems are not
insurmountable for a nimble and strategic labor movement, but they must be
addressed head on.
In the formative stages of the labor movement, unions engaged actively with the broader political issues of the day, in particular, the call for universal suffrage. There is no reason why such larger concerns cannot again move to the center of labor’s agenda, and a very good reason—the interpenetration of a host of economic, social, and environmental reasons—why they should form its backbone. In contrast to the later tradition of craft unionism, the early labor organizers did not recognize divisions based on skill or race. This tradition of labor organizing known variously as community unionism, “deep organizing,” or “social movement unionism” has been making a comeback.[6] Its spread could open a new chapter in labor’s ongoing struggle against capitalism.
This excerpt was originally published as part of the essay “Workers of the World Unite (At Last) on https://greattransition.org .
Further reading:
For Stuart Sim’s introduction to the journal edition, go here
Paul Bowman’s Open Access piece, The Limits of Post-Marxism: The (dis)Function of Political Theory in Film and Cultural Studies, is here
Read Ronaldo Munck’s Global Discourse journal article, Democracy Without Hegemony: A Reply to Mark Purcell, here
The whole of Global Discourse Volume 9, Number 2, May 2019 Reflections on post-Marxism: Laclau and Mouffe’s project of radical democracy in the 21st century, Guest Edited by Stuart Sim, is available here
[3] Reynald Bourque, “Transnational Trade Unionism and Social
Regulation of Globalization,” in Social
Innovation, the Social Economy and World Economic Development, eds. Dennis
Harrison, György Széll, and Reynald Bourque (New York: Peter
Lang, 2009), 123–138.
[4] Michelle Ford and Michael Gillan, “The Global Union Federations in
International Industrial Relations: A Critical Review,” Journal of Industrial Relations 57, no. 3 (2015): 456–475; Peter Evans, “National Labor Movements and Transnational
Connections: Global Labor’s Evolving Architecture under Neoliberalism,” working
paper, Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, Berkeley, CA, 2014, http://irle.berkeley.edu/files/2014/National-Labor-Movements-and-Transnational-Connections.pdf;
Mariangela Zito, Michela Cirioni, and Claudio Stanzani, Implementation of International Framework Agreements in Multinational
Companies (Rome: SindNova, 2015), http://www.1mayo.ccoo.es/24721dffea9bcf38971c14e6f5b83128000001.pdf.
When Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau published Hegemony and Socialist Strategy in 1985, a foundational text of post-Marxism was established. While Mouffe and Laclau were not the first scholars who we should consider “post-Marxists” and the essential elements can be identified in Baudrillard (1972) and Barthes (1957), their influence in navigating Marxist analysis away from the rigid orthodoxy of classes, unions, and exchange mechanisms and towards the discourses, subjects, and identities which are equally vital (but then-understudied) aspects of society, cannot be understated. In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s disintegration this trend gained even greater academic credibility and, the criticisms of Norman Geras notwithstanding, promised new approaches for a new millennium, offering the tools and mechanisms for understanding, and potentially reshaping, a society which exists as an imperfect combination of the sovereign, self-present subject and collective class agents.
Dr Lucia Ardovini, Swedish Institute of International Affairs
Just over 8 years after the outbreak of the so-called Arab uprisings, we seem to be unable to stop talking about it. The popular protests that led to the fall of authoritarian dictators and briefly reshuffled the status quo in several countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region are still being used as a reference point in most of the scholarship on states and peoples in the area, be it to argue in favour of democratic practices or condemn regime-sponsored violence and authoritarianism. The recent wave of popular protests in Sudan and Algeria suggests that the momentum might still be there, bubbling under the surface.
Alan Williams tweeted a few years ago that for having a book entitled Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (HSS) as magnum opus, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe had remarkably little to say about political strategy. Indeed, while the concept of strategy features regularly in HSS, it is not crucial to understanding the book’s central argument. It remains equally low-key in their later work, and is all but absent in most of the secondary literature in post-Marxist Discourse Theory published in the quarter-century post-HSS.
Yet recently, something resembling a strategic turn can be discerned within Discourse Theory (DT). In Germany, Martin Nonhoff started working on a rigorous theorization of strategy that fits within DT’s ontology. Eva Herschinger reappraised the notion for the first-time for an Anglophone audience. The hugely influential Inventing the Future by Srnicek and Williams placed strategic reflection about how progressives win at politics in the 21st century at the centre of its argument. And to make the circle full, Chantal Mouffe’s most recent work, For a Left-Wing Populism, wonders what kind of political strategy the Left needs to pursue in order to successfully implement its progressive projects.
Global Discourse Blog 