Beyond North and South: Migration, Informalization, and Trade Union Revitalization

Abstract

This article takes up both the challenges and opportunities that labor migration poses for the organized labor movement. Labor has been dramatically restructured over the last quarter of a century, but there are now signs of labor recomposition as trade unions seek different paths toward revitalization. Increasingly, the movement of workers across national boundaries might create divisions, and it will be deployed to undermine existing labor standards. But we pose all the possibility that it might be a source of trade union revitalization, bringing in new members with new ideas but also creating a dynamic for raising labor standards rather than lowering them. In brief, internationalism begins at home.

Global Crisis: Global Opportunity? Trade Unions, Migration and Social Transformation

“…This is the necessary framework for the subsequent analysis of Workers in the context of the processes of globalisation and precarisation. My hypothesis is that we are now moving beyond the categories of North and South in terms of the mutations of capitalism and their impact on the workers of the world (see Munck 2011). Finally, I turn to the sometimes under-rated Complexity of the way workers are responding to the mutations of capitalism and thus posing a very real challenge to the stable reproduction of capitalist rule.…”

Ruchy społeczne jako przestrzeń edukacji dorosłych: ruch kobiet w Polsce

“…Podział ten przez różnych autorów uznawany jest już za nieadekwatny, zwłaszcza w odniesieniu do nowych zjawisk i podmiotów społecznych pojawiających się od lat 2000., takich jak: prekariusze, ludzie poza systemem. W rekonstrukcji Johna Holsta grupy te zaczęły być najbardziej widoczne podczas protestów w Atlancie w 2007 roku oraz w Detroit w 2010 (informal sector, planet of slums, informal proletariat, global precariat, dispossessed) (Davis, 2007;Munck, 2011;Harvey, 2010). Ruchy społeczne po roku 2000, których nie można już badać poprzez strukturę klasową, interesy związkowe, ani też poprzez miejsce zajmowane w porządku ekonomicznym, tworzone są przez jednostki funkcjonujące poza systemem (służby zdrowia, systemu podatkowego, związków zawodowych, miejsc pracy, rynku nieruchomości, systemu edukacji) i działają nie tyle na rzecz reformy kapitalizmu, ile w imię jego zakwestionowania.…”

Migration, Precarization and the Democratic Deficit in Global Governance

“…They are credited by researchers who point towards a “community unionism” in the South, from the historical trajectory and political experience of which the supposedly conservative and bureaucratic unionism” of the North could learn. Otherwise they might lose precarious workers and, in particular, a multitude of new migrants and ethnic minorities, differentially inserted into fractured neoliberal labour markets and societies (Munck, ). That is a vision of a global countermovement driven by a reformed union internationalism, sensitive to a multitude of everyday livelihood strategies of migrants; a “networked international of labour's others” (Waterman, ); a vision of “grounding globalization” through “linking workplace issues to the community… a critical source of power [that] takes participation beyond representative democracy to new forms of participation that embrace an active civil society” (Webster, Lambert and Bezuidenhout, : 220).…”