Weight: 25% of your final grade Length: 1500 words Due: Upon completion of Unit 1 Instructions This assignment lays the analytical groundwork for the rest of the course. Reviewing Unit 1 of the Study

After completing this unit, you should understand:

1. What Global Labour History is about, and how it is relevant to thinking about labour and labour movements today.

2. That global labour is anything but new and that it existed in various forms ever since capitalist development began.

3. Global divisions of labour and their historical transformations.

4. Why labour always existed in diverse forms and how these forms impacted labour movements in different places and at different times.

What is this course about?

Often, when people hear the term “labour” they think of workers in mines, fields, factories, waterfronts, and railroads, sometimes shaking their fists from picket lines—many of whom are muscled, gruff-looking men covered in coal dust or oil. Labour usually evokes images of hard work, tough lives, and sometimes bitter struggles with bosses, hired goons, cops, and corrupt politicians. These images are black and white, images of the past, the stuff labour history is made of. However, that history has reached its end, and it does not reflect the present—and it certainly has no future.

“Globalization,” on the other hand, conjures in the mind a world full of colours, different cultures, and ideas, inhabited by highly-educated knowledge workers—or symbol analysts. Constantly reinventing themselves and assuming various identities, they deconstruct industrial capitalism and nation-states. In their place, they construct a global knowledge society. There are also globalization critics, pointing at increasing inequalities and the fact that a significant share of the world’s population, if not a majority, toils long hours for low pay but often under unhealthy conditions. Without this endless toil, the minority of knowledge workers, not to mention stockbrokers and bankers, could not lead cosmopolitan lives. However, even far-reaching claims to represent the 99% against the rich and powerful 1% did not allow globalization critics to overcome the imaginative power of globalization as a new age of human development in which toiling masses have no place, no voice, and nowhere to go. Unlike earlier generations, those who toil today have no trade unions, no workers’ parties, no co-operatives, no radical imagination, not even welfare states protecting them unfettered market competition.

Associating labour with a bygone past of manual work, factories, and unions, and globalization with a borderless world, cultural diversity, and post-industrialism might be common—but empirically, it is wrong. Or perhaps more precisely, these associations highlight only a small part of empirical realities—past and present—whereby they offer a grossly distorted picture. Without claiming to capture all of reality, this course will show that, in the past:

• Labour that was done under direct or indirect control of capitalist firms and state apparatuses has always been part of a global system. The connected developments of capitalism, colonialism, world markets, and nation-states, have been creating global labour ever since these developments began.

• Global labour was always diverse in regard to the tasks that labourers performed, the tools and technologies they used, the things they produced, and the skills they had. It was also diverse in terms of skin colour, gender, language, religious creed, culture, and the legal conditions under which labourers did their work. These conditions included wage labour, slave labour, indentured labour, sharecropping, and independent contracting. These forms of work only existed in relation to an employer, a slaveholder or, in the case of sharecropping and contracting, a client. All of them also relied on work done to feed, clothe, and house old labourers, current labourers, and the next generation.

• Labour movements mobilized all kinds of different labourers and achieved more than just union organizing. Struggles for democratic rights and the access to land—and the fight against slavery, colonialism, and discrimination—were as much part of labour’s arsenal as were unions.

Contrary to images of a post-industrial world or knowledge society, manual labour has by no means disappeared. Today, more workers toil in factories than ever before, as industrial centres have shifted from the Global North to the Global South. Moreover, manual labour comprises more than factory work; it also includes subsistence farming (though this kind of work has been in decline since the beginnings of capitalism), and many kinds of service work—from stocking shelves in grocery stores, to waiting restaurant tables, to giving care to the young, the sick, and the old. In the past, only a relatively small share of all labourers were blue-collar factory workers; today, an even smaller share consists of knowledge workers. Despite the widespread representation of all labour as being blue-collar back in the day and nothing but knowledge-work today, labour has been highly diverse at all times in terms of demographics, occupations, and economic and political conditions under which diverse labours have been carried out.

Labour: More Diverse Than You Might Think

Recognizing the diversity of labour and labourers is not only a matter of saving empirical reality from mythology, but it also contains lessons with regards to labour organizing. One implication of the “blue-collar past, knowledge-work present” image is that labour organizing might have been necessary and possible in the past but is unnecessary and impossible today. The reason: By cramping workers into mines and factories, employers cleared the way for union organizers. As countless images of destitute blue-collar workers suggest, employers created equally bad conditions for large numbers of workers who worked in the same place. These workers would recognize their commonalities, organize unions, let the employer know their demands, and go on strike if necessary. The knowledge workers of today, on the other hand, are individualistic and move freely between working from home, from coffee shops, and sometimes from company offices. The last thing they want is to conform to union rules. And they do not need to: If they have issues with their employer, they either have it fixed or move on to another job.

However, blue-collar work was, and still is, much more diverse. And blue-collar workers have stronger individual characters than these images imply. Conversely, knowledge work is more uniform and not every knowledge worker is the outspoken, go-my-own-way type, no matter how corporate media portrayals often suggest otherwise. Many knowledge workers, if not most, toiling away in today’s gig economy would actually be better off if they had a union contract.

To be sure, the blue-collar past, knowledge-work present image that underlies almost everything corporate media has to say about labour—if labour makes it into those kinds of media outlets in the first place—is not the only image available. There are also pro-labour images that contrast the good old unions days with today’s cut-throat competition. These images either point at globalization triggering a race to the bottom that leaves workers everywhere in dire straits, or they point to the automation that leaves workers jobless. In the case of globalization, unions would be desirable, but building them seems unrealistic. There are just too many workers chasing too few jobs. In the case of automation, workers are simply added to the list of endangered species. Although these images express empathy for labour, they do not imply any conceivable way forward for labour. In this regard, they are no different from the otherwise more positive labour images that corporate media distributes.

Of course, there are kernels of truth in the blue-collar past, knowledge-work present images and in the contrasting of the good old union days with today’s cut-throat competition. This is most apparent when putting both images together. At one time, in some mostly Western countries, blue-collar workers were the best organized factions of the world’s working classes. Before that, however, they were seen as unorganizable, like today’s knowledge workers. From the late-19th to the mid-20th centuries, craft unions had nothing but disdain for the apparently unskilled and undisciplined blue-collar riff raff cramped together in ever bigger factories. At that point, just before their share in total employment in Western countries started to decline, these blue-collar workers had become the backbone of organized labour and the welfare state expansion that spread gains made by unions beyond factory gates. However, taken out of context, kernels of truth often create massively distorted understandings of reality. For example, hints at knowledge workers and automation as key markers of today’s world ignore the fact that the decline of blue-collar work in Western countries started decades before anybody had ever heard about knowledge workers. No matter the relative decline of blue-collar work in Western countries, on a global scale more blue-collar workers than ever before are toiling on factory floors. Just most of them work in countries of the Global South instead of the old industrial centres of the Global North or West. Contrary to blue-collar experiences in the Global North (and West), most of the blue-collar workers in the Global South are not unionized, which shows that there is nothing automatic about certain kinds of workers organizing and others being condemned to work-lives without protections by unions or other kinds of labour movements.

Global labour history cannot present all there is to say about labour history on a global scale. There is simply too much. However, by carefully crafting theoretical frameworks that highlight links between different labours across the globe and drawing on a wide range of sources from workers’ oral histories to news reports, business histories, and statistical data-sets, global labour history can set popular images of labour straight and point at the limitations of histories of labour in individual countries as if these countries existed in isolation. More specifically, global labour history shows, as already mentioned, that labour has been diverse from the earliest days of capitalism and colonialism. Too be sure, labour, whether it was called that or not, was also highly diverse before the birth of the capitalist-colonialist hybrid. But individuals lived and laboured in local economies that had little to nothing to do with one another. This changed with the dual developments of capitalism and colonialism, which created a global system that established ever more connections between local economies.

The practical point here is that our inquiries into global labour history begin with the early days of capitalism and colonialism. From that point on, global labour history shows that a global system did emerge which, precisely by establishing connections between different parts of the world, affected local economies in different ways. Instead of creating economic and social conditions that looked the same everywhere on earth, global capitalism created a highly uneven world with hierarchies between imperial centres and peripheries or, in more casual current language, the Global North and the Global South. This North-South division was clearly created by colonialism and contrary to much globalist ideology has neither disappeared after former colonies gained political independence, nor after the dismantling of Northern welfare states and Southern developmentalist states. Uneven development in terms of political power and economic capacities is still very much part of the diversity of labour, although in radically different forms than was the case during the early days of colonial conquest in the 16th century or the heyday of imperialist rivalries in the late 19th century. Building labour movements under conditions of unevenness has always been and continues to be a challenge—yet, as history shows, not completely insurmountable. So, the short answer to why global labour history matters is: It serves as a corrective to widespread images of labour and invites us to take a fresh look at thinking about the future of labour and labour movements.

What is global labour history anyways?

As a subject of scholarly inquiry, labour history developed as a patchwork of various national histories rather than as a discipline that covers the overarching trend toward understanding labour history in a global sense. Most labour histories focus on Western countries and the stories of Western governments, business tycoons, and notable historical figures. Until recently, labour in the non-Western, i.e., colonial and post-colonial world, received very little attention. While you will find much scholarly information on the labour landscape in such Western countries as the US, Canada, the UK, and those of most European countries, you may be hard pressed to find like information on labour in, say, Brazil, India, or South Africa—and relatively hardly anything on labour in Guyana, Mongolia, or Sierra Leone. Also important to the study of labour history is learning about the former communist countries in Eastern Europe, and contemporary communist holdouts like China, Cuba, and Vietnam, whose governments continue to claim that they represent workers. Many histories, often ideologically burdened by support of or opposition to communist rule, have been written about those countries, but those histories are mostly top-down histories, looking at the rulers, not the ruled, as labour history usually does. However, with the collapse of Soviet communism, interest in those countries has largely disappeared. There are a lot of histories of Soviet Russia but hardly anything about Russian labour since the end of communism.

China, of course, still figures prominently, but less so among historians of Sino communism than among business leaders seeking to expose lucrative markets and cheap labour—and among labour movements in the West fearing Chinese competition. Race-to-the-bottom scenarios regularly point at China, not Guyana, Mongolia, or Sierra Leone. But, as already explained, it is scenarios like these that make thinking about a future for labour movements tenuous and perhaps doomed to fail. In many ways, these scenarios are an outcome of national labour histories that had little interest in the outside world, as long as this outside world seemingly did not interfere with labour issues in the West, and had nothing to say about future strategies for labour as soon as the non-Western world appeared as a threat. Global labour history tries to get out of that dead-end by exploring the possibilities that link the global history of labour with the building of global labour movements.

Labour historians have not been the only ones taking a global turn in further exploring the discipline. Historians working in different subfields have responded to globalization becoming a buzzword in the 1990s—which captured everything and nothing—and included individualistic knowledge workers replacing unionized blue-collar workers, and Northern workers being forced into a race-to-the-bottom with their Southern counterparts. The global turn in labour was very much about showing that capitalism and colonialism had created a global economic system from the 16th century onwards, and that this system had gone through a number of incarnations. In this long-term perspective, it was easy to see that such changes in the global system occurring after the fall of Soviet communism and China’s turn to world markets were something new and something old at the same time. New, as a post-communist expansion of global capitalism never happened before; and old, as other forms of capitalist expansion had occurred multiple times before. These expansions created and transformed the ways that labour was performed in specific places and connected the expansions through global divisions of labour. Each of these divisions of labour was tied to changes in technology and the use of nature implied in these technologies, the relations between the global capitalist economy, and local non-capitalist economies.

This course is on global labour history, but a complete understanding of labour requires an understanding that labour and its history—or histories—is embedded in the global histories of gender, nature, and social movements. At various points in this course, therefore, you will learn about changes in gender relations, the environmental impact of various kinds of economic activity, and movements addressing a whole set of issues beyond wages, hours, and the terms and conditions of union-negotiated collective agreements.

How Do We Study Global Labour History in this Course?

The scope of global labour history being so wide poses difficulties even for the historians who devote their entire lives to the study of global labour. There is far too much stuff that is interesting and relevant, and way beyond what can ever be looked at closely. To handle this challenge, global labour historians usually combine theoretical arguments with case studies. Theoretical arguments themselves draw on a wealth of empirical work and, if consistently developed, offer a framework to locate concrete facets and understand the relations between them. However, an undergraduate course like this does not have enough space to look at as many case studies as are needed to back up theoretical arguments, and thus offer a picture of global labour history that does not look arbitrary or incomplete.

Instead, what this course offers are (a) a few theoretical concepts (in this Unit) for making sense of global labour history, (b) studies of the global cotton and rubber industries (Units 2 and 3) that illustrate changes of the conditions of labour, and some thoughts (partly in Units 2 and 3, but mostly in Unit 4) on global labour movements. The rationale behind these approaches is:

• Historians are better at applying theoretical concepts and frameworks than they are at laying them out explicitly; theories are very much hidden behind the empirical materials that they carry. This makes for easier reading but poses a challenge when it comes to interpreting and comparing developments described by these empirical materials. The introduction of some key theoretical concepts in this first unit of the course should facilitate interpretations and comparisons in the units that follow.

• Units 2 and 3 offer histories of cotton and rubber, respectively, and look at the work of different groups of labourers along the supply or commodity chains, from the cotton plant and rubber tree to the final products that these commodities created. These connections offer empirical support to the above claim about the diversity of labour, and that different kinds of labour and different kinds of labourers really were part of an integrated labour process. That is an empirical fact, not an arbitrary theoretical construction.

While many commodities could have been chosen to explore the labour process, cotton and rubber represent complete microcosms of 19th- and 20th-century industry, and indeed capitalism. It is true that nineteenth-century capitalism often invokes images of steam engines and railways. However, these technologies were initially developed to move massive amounts of raw materials, especially those materials that powered the textile industry. And no other industry had as many, to use economists’ parlance, “backward and forward linkages” as did textiles; and no material was as important in textiles as cotton. In other words, the history of cotton, and the labour required to produce and process it, to some degree, is representative of labour in other industries. As for rubber, while it was certainly not the most crucial industry driving 20th-century capitalism, it delivered indispensable parts to it—especially to the automobile industry. But because exploring the history of the automobile industry required (and still requires) so many different parts, delving into its history in one unit—one book even—would be next to impossible.

• The histories of cotton and rubber are more focused on labour—individuals doing different kinds of work—rather than on labour movements. Such movements do show up in both histories, more in the history of rubber than in the history of cotton, but not in a very systematic way. To make up for this partial omission, Unit 4 of this course is fully devoted to historical labour movements. Considering how diverse that labour has been throughout its history, labour movements have also been highly diverse. This is not only true in terms of the kinds of labourers who were involved in movements, but also in terms of the choice of allies, strategies, and goals. The inquiry of the history of such movements should offer lessons to think about future strategies for global labour.

Theoretical Concepts

Division of Labour

The key to understanding labour, whether under the direct or indirect control of capitalist firms, is through examining the division of labour within these firms. The purpose of such firms is profit making, profit being defined as sales minus cost. Sales are dependent on total market size and each firm’s market share. These are important factors in understanding profits, investments, and capitalist development—but not the factors that are key to understanding labour and determining costs. For that, we need to look at cost, which is made up of payments for labour, buildings and machinery, and natural resources. Nearly every worker or union negotiator who has ever asked for a raise has heard from the employer that labour costs need to be minimized. One way of doing this is paying as little as possible for every hour of work. The other way is getting as much actual work done per hour as possible, which can be accomplished by making workers work faster. However, there is a limit to that. At some point, even if workers are willing to work faster, they do not get more done; once exhaustion kicks in, work slows down and/or quality and safety are compromised. This leaves one other option to getting more work done per hour: organizing the labour process and implementing technologies that make work more productive. Each concrete way a labour process is organized establishes certain divisions of labour within a firm. This in-house division of labour is embedded into other divisions of labour: between firms, regions, and countries; and between firms and households.

The term “division of labour” refers to labourers specializing on certain tasks needed to produce a certain good or service. Specialization on individual tasks requires coordination so that all tasks needed to produce a good or service are realized. As far as the division of labour within firms is concerned, this kind of coordination—along with control over the labour process and the workers involved in it—is done by management. Between firms, no matter whether located nearby or on distant shores, coordination takes places through markets. Between firms and households, coordination is a matter of laws and customs.

Whether different divisions of labour and the coordination between specialized tasks that they require are efficient or whether efficiency is increased through changing divisions of labour, is not a question we need to discuss in this course. Economists and sociologists have been debating this for a long time. What matters for a theoretically guided understanding of global labour history is that the different divisions of labour—within firms, between firms, regions or countries and between firms and households—offers a framework in which labourers doing one kind of work and their relations to labourers doing other kinds of work can be located and understood. Despite all being part of one and the same commodity chain, or labour process, not only are the tasks performed by various groups of labourers different, but also the conditions under which they work.

Later in the course, we will encounter slaves and sharecroppers who produced cotton and rubber that was transported and processed by waged workers whose products were sold by waged sales staff or independent shopkeepers. Different as these labourers may have been, all of them depended on one degree or another on unpaid household work that provided for food, cleaning, and care. This work was, again to one degree or another, done by the labourers who also worked under direct control of capitalist firms or by members of their households who did not work under direct capitalist control.

Control of Labour

The term “direct capitalist control” rather than “employer” is used here, as employer refers to one side of a contract, the other being the employee or worker, in which one side agrees to do a certain job and the other side agrees to pay for it. However, this course will show that significant share of labour done at various points in time has been under legal conditions different from the employment relationship. Slaves were traded by others; they had no rights whatsoever, which also meant they could not sign an employment contract. Sharecroppers and contractors operated legally like independent businesses who did not sign employment contracts either. Yet, lack of alternatives often meant that they had to engage in business contracts with large firms that controlled access to materials, finance, and markets and were therefore in a position to dictate conditions of such contracts. Indentured labourers and coolies did have employment contracts, but they were completely devoid of bargaining power.

“Indirect capitalist control” refers to power over those people who are neither in a contractual relationship with an employer (i.e., waged or salaried workers, contractors, sharecroppers), nor those who are physically coerced to work for capitalist firms (i.e., slaves) but whose lives are very much conditioned by the activities of those firms. All forms of indirect control have occurred in the borderlands between capitalist and non-capitalist economies, and these forms have differed greatly. They have included disruptions caused by colonization of indigenous peoples either pushed off their lands or taken elsewhere to work as slaves, enclosures that forced peasants off their lands in the imperial centres of capitalism, and artisans serving local markets destroyed by the influx of cheaper goods made by capitalist firms.

These disruptions have two effects: First, they create pools of labour for workers that have no other way of sustaining their lives other than working under direct capitalist control. Second, new relations between capitalist and non-capitalist economies need to be established. Capitalist economies do not disappear entirely but are subjected to indirect capitalist control. This was quite obvious throughout the early history of labour, especially in the case of household work that used food, textiles, and tools bought by spending wages earned through capitalist employment or through work as an independent contractor or sharecropper. It might be less apparent in the case of slaves who were claimed as property by slaveholders and work under their direct control. Yet, even as slaves were left to themselves when it came to fixing meals and clothes, nurturing children, or looking after the sick, they were stilled barred from leaving the slaveholders’ compound. Even groups of people who are not absorbed one way or another into the capitalist economy, but had their pre-capitalist economies destroyed by colonial conquest or capitalist expansion, have spent their lives under indirect capitalist control as marginalized groups who lost the means to an independent subsistence. Marginalized does not mean small or tough. In terms of numbers, today’s slum dwellers—with only sporadic economic relations to the capitalist economy—make up a large part of the world’s population, but their social position in global capitalism is marginal.

All forms of direct and indirect capitalist control rely on reinforcement of various state apparatuses. Colonial conquest was very much state-driven. Military violence and the imposition of taxes were as much part of disrupting pre-capitalist economies—and thereby opening them for capitalist penetration—as providing credit and forcing the opening of markets for cheap imports produced by capitalist firms. Later on in this course, we will see that state apparatuses were not the only institutions displaying physical violence to colonize non-capitalist economies. On many occasions, notably when state apparatuses in the colonies were still weak, private firms took the law into their own hands or were tasked by the colonial empire to do so.

Discontent

So far in this section on theoretical concepts, we have looked at labour performed under direct of indirect control of capitalist firms and state apparatuses. Now, we will turn to labour movements, such as efforts made by labourers to collectively improve their working and living conditions. Such movements occur because labourers see their sense of justice and dignity being betrayed, or because they find their working and living conditions unbearable. Theoretically, we can distinguish between these different causes of discontent and their articulation through labour or other social movements. Empirically, there is always a mix between them. What is important to understand is that discontent develops when individuals find a discrepancy between the actual situation they find themselves in, with a situation they think they ought to be in.

Even seemingly material bread-and-butter issues are measured against some moral standard that tells individuals how things should be. A discrepancy between actual conditions, as perceived by individuals, and conditions, as dictated by the moral standards of the same individuals, causes cognitive dissonance. This can lead to active engagement towards improving conditions if individuals also think that things could be better than they are. Without a vision for a better future, cognitive dissonance is reduced by adapting to current conditions. Often such adaptations come at the price of alienation from others and from oneself. Alienation can be mobilized for different kinds of movements, especially movements that do not work towards the improvement of the conditions of labourers but lay the blame for conditions they do not like at the door of social groups even weaker than themselves. Such scapegoating inflicts harm on the group and affirms the conditions that produced the scapegoaters in the first place. In this course, racism, a by-product of the complementary development of capitalism and colonialism, is the main scapegoating movement that you will encounter.

Even though some labour movements have thought they could make headway by discriminating against labourers identified as belonging to an inferior race, by pitting one group of labourers against another, racism has inevitably hurt labour movements. In fact, to some degree, racism in labour movements has paid the expected “wages of whiteness.” But this has been done at the price of creating rifts among different groups of labourers who have allowed capitalist firms and state apparatuses to roll these wages of whiteness back by employing more of the labourers deemed inferior by the racists. While to some degree, this happened within countries of the Global North and the Global South, to a much larger degree, it occurred chiefly between these global regions. Colonial and neocolonial exploitation of the South—conceptualized theoretically as super-exploitation or unequal exchange—and the monopoly of industrial production with its massive gains in productivity, allowed capitalist firms in the North to pay increasingly real wages without cutting into their profits—particularly during the long boom after WWII. At the same time, industrialization in the South was severely hampered, even though many post-colonial regimes focussed their attention on this region and resources were exported at prices that decreased relative to the prices of imported industrial products from the North.

North-South Divisions

During the 1970s, in the face of unexpected labour militancy across the Western world and a radicalization of anti-colonial revolutions in the South, the same capitalists felt it was time to roll back unions and the welfare state in the West and developmentalist regimes in the South. This is the time that, along with the first generation of industrial robots and office-computers being installed, the relocation of jobs from the West to lower-paid workers in the South began. Wage-differentials between the West and the South had become so large that such relocations, despite leading to higher transportation costs, helped to boost profits. This, in a nutshell, is the logic behind neoliberal globalization—it is just about making more money, the bread-and-butter issue of the rich, so to speak. However, racism does play a role in this economic story, as racism has been the ideological wrapping for colonialism right from the start, with some Western labour movements embracing colonialism from the late 19th century onwards. Individuals belonging to those currents often felt uneasy about racist ideology; rather than saying that non-white people were inferior to white, they would say that colonialism had a civilizing mission, without always noticing that references to “The White Man’s Burden  ” (a late 19th-century poem by Rudyard Kipling about the costs and benefits of imperialism) were just another form of racism. The colonizers’ main concern was, of course, the idea that profits extracted from the colonial world would make it easier to negotiate higher wages and social reforms in the imperial centres. As already mentioned, this was the case after these centres—chiefly in Europe—had gone to war with each other twice between 1914 and 1945. The period that followed WWII, lasting until the 1970s, very much shapes the collective memory, such as the good old union, blue-collar days, while (neo)colonial exploitation of the South and the exclusion of racialized groups and women from many social reforms are easily forgotten. This forgetfulness might be one of the reasons that a new wave of sexism and racism gained traction once the social compromise that underpinned welfare capitalism began to falter and then gave way to neoliberal globalization; another reason is that the aims for a better future that were tied to welfare capitalism in the West and developmentalism in the post-colonial South were only partially fulfilled. Labour and other social movements’ efforts to bring reality closer to such aims met massive opposition from the owners and managers of capitalist firms. This opposition gained advantage over insurgent movements from below and led to neoliberal globalization. The defeat of insurgent movements casts a long shadow over many discontents as it makes envisioning a better future extremely difficult.

Structural and Associational Power

A key reason neoliberal globalization succeeded was that capitalist firms and governments could bypass or weaken the social power that labour movements had developed in earlier times and had been partially institutionalized in Western welfare states. This power had two sources: structural power and associational power.

Structural power relies on the position labourers occupy in the labour process. Labourers who can bring the entire process to a halt when they go on strike have a lot of structural power. Wielding that power does not always require strike action, and managers always factor that possibility into their calculations at the bargaining table. On the other hand, labourers who can easily be replaced have little to no structural power. For example, as long as manufacturing is concentrated in a relatively small number of companies in each industry, assembly line workers in those companies have considerable structural power. If only a few would go on strike, the entire production process would stop. This was exactly what happened when labour militancy increased in the Western world from the late 1960s to early 1970s. To curb the structural power wielded by striking workers in those days, managers sought to replace some of them permanently through automation, and then make the remaining workers more replaceable by creating production networks that would allow the shift of production from one place to another in case of a strike threat. However, it should be noted that such shifts require spare capacities, which also come at a cost. Also, extended production networks rely on more transportation of parts from one location to another, and this transportation requires logistics hubs, ports, rail-yards, and airports that are vulnerable to disruption. Logistics workers in these hubs wield, at least potentially, significant structural power.

Associational power rests on labourers pooling their abilities to disrupt the labour process, even if the structural power of each individual labourer to do so is limited. Associational power can include articulation of common concerns beyond individual workplaces through rallies, petitioning, supporting pro-labour political parties or, in a more radical fashion, by organizing boycotts or blockades. For example, in case of a strike at one worksite, workers organizing across different worksites could stop managers from shifting production from one area to another if all of the workers decided to strike. As just mentioned, the building of associational power includes mobilizations beyond workplaces and the raising of political demands, including abolishing slavery and colonial rule, and championing the rights to unionize and vote.

To avoid key concepts getting lost in the text, here’s a list of the most important concepts introduced in this section:

• divisions of labour between firms, regions, and countries and between firms and households

• direct and indirect control by capitalist firms and state apparatuses

• causes of discontent

• structural power and associational power

Keep these concepts in mind as you work your way through the units that follow, as they will help you gain a fuller picture of global labour history.

Perceptions and Reflections

This unit has examined what global labour history is, why its study might be of interest, and how it can be studied. Many references were made to widespread images, or perceptions, of labour and globalization. If accepted as proper representations of reality past and present, such perceptions shape the study of global labour history in a way that confirms perceptions without raising the question whether they match or distort reality. To allow new insights, students and scholars have to be wary of perceptions turned into prejudices. Not an easy thing to do, as some perceptions are so deeply engrained in collective memories and consciousness that the very thought of challenging them seems absurd. Yet, this is exactly what scholarly inquiry is about: Challenge everything. Be critical of everything somebody says, even if it is your teacher; but also be critical of yourself.

Study Questions

To avoid being mired in pre-conceived views, you should evaluate your own perceptions about labour and globalization—there is a good chance that they are similar to the ones described earlier in this unit. Ask yourself the following questions and write down your answers:

1. What comes to mind when you hear the terms “labour” and “globalization”? Do you know where those perceptions come from? Radio, television, social media? Readings? Conversations with family, friends, fellow workers, students?

1. As a labour activist, do you think your personal experiences at school, work, or in your neighbourhood shape your perceptions of labour and globalization?

2. Do you think your perceptions reflect empirical reality? What is the basis of your judgement? Which empirical information do you draw on? Which theories do you use to interpret such information?

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