Industrial Restructuring, Trade Union Strategy, and Social Transformation in Australia and Asia

Michael Gillan and Rob Lambert

Chapter 6 in Trade, Labour and Transformation of Community in Asia, 2009, pp 129-157 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract The predicament confronting labour movements at the turn of a new century has been interpreted as a structural and an organizational-strategic challenge of such magnitude that unions, and more generally the power of organized labour, are thought likely to be superseded in a ’network’ society (Castells 1997: 354). This sense of pessimism as to the limited agency and declining bargaining power of workers, especially for those engaged in factory or ‘routine’ forms of work, is also evident in Bauman’s discussion of the implications of ‘liquid modernity’. Tied as they are to the ground, barred from moving, or arrested if they move at the first of the heavily guarded border posts, they are in a position a priori inferior to the capital which moves around freely. Capital is increasingly global; they, however, stay local. For that reason they are exposed, armless, to the inscrutable whims of mysterious ‘investors’ and ‘shareholders’, and even more bewildering ‘market forces’, ‘terms of trade’ and ‘demands of competition’. Whatever they gain today may be taken away tomorrow without warning. They cannot win. Neither — being the rational persons they are or struggle to be — are they willing to risk the fight (Bauman 2000: 166–167). Global capital mobility is intertwined with ceaseless corporate restruc-turing and occurs at multiple geographic scales.

Keywords: Trade Union; Bargaining Power; Collective Bargaining; Labour Movement; Global Civil Society (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-27410-5_6

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9780230274105

DOI: 10.1057/9780230274105_6

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().