Advanced Introduction to Global Labour

Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences, business and law, expertly written by the world’s leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive academic and policy issues associated with discrete subject areas.

This Advanced Introduction examines globalization and its challenges through the perspective of workers and the labour movement. Driven by workers’ struggles, Ronaldo Munck highlights how capitalism has ‘gone global’ since 1990 and, in doing so, has become a powerful new agent for social transformation. Drawing on historical frameworks, Munck explores current debates around precarity, migration and emerging technologies, as well as the widening disparity between a doubling global working class and decreasing unionization rates.

Key Features:

• Presents an international perspective, moving beyond Eurocentrism to focus on the lasting impact of colonialism and imperialism
• Integrates multi-disciplinary insights from comparative sociology, labour geography, anthropology, labour history and industrial relations
• Introduces a new global social movement unionism, which seeks to unite the labor movement with other groups to find an alternative to neoliberal globalization
• Demonstrates how working class unity must be constructed by dismantling overarching social divisions organised around gender, race and location in the world system

Breaking new ground by linking globalization with the postcolonial paradigm, the Advanced Introduction to Global Labour is an essential resource for scholars and students of labour, trade union, globalization and postcolonial studies, as well as contemporary politics.