Grounding Globalization: Labour in the Age of Insecurity |
This book is published in the Antipode Book Series. Claims have been made on the emergence of a new labour internationalism in response to the growing insecurity created by globalization. However, when persons face conditions of insecurity they often turn inwards. The book contains a warning and a sign of hope. Some workers become fatalistic, even xenophobic. Others are attempting to globalize their own struggles. The book examines the claim that a new labour internationalism is emerging by grounding the book in evidence, rather than assertion. It analyzes three distinct places - Orange, Australia; Changwon, South Korea; and Ezakheni, South Africa - and how they dealt with manufacturing plants undergoing restructuring. It explores worker responses to rising levels of insecurity and examines preconditions for the emergence of counter-movements to such insecurity. It highlights the significance of 'place' and 'scale', and demonstrates how the restructuring of multi-national corporations, and worker responses to this, connect the two concepts.
Reviews:
"Grounding Globalization is a call for a new politics for the social force that labor as social movement represents in the era of global insecurity. Theoretically sophisticated, empirically grounded and politically visionary, it will be read with great interest by students and also by the organic intellectuals of the emerging global labor movement." - Ronaldo Munck, Dublin City University
"This is an important, insightful, and wide-ranging book that tackles one of the most important issues of our time. Grounding the theoretical and political narrative in empirical case studies, the book is an excellent account of the realities of economic restructuring and the political possibilities facing the global workforce. It makes a major contribution to academic debates whilst also providing important lessons for activists and policy makers." - Andrew Cumbers, University of Glasgow
Reference: Webster, E., Lambert, R. & Bezuidenhout, A. 2008. Grounding Globalization: Labour in the Age of Insecurity. London: Blackwell.