Globalisation and Labour: The New "Great Transformation" (review)

Ronaldo Munck surveys the post-Seattle literature on organized labor and globalization in order to make the case that working people are in the process of becoming a global social movement that is challenging the global development of capitalism. Adopting the framework developed by Karl Polanyi more than fifty years ago, Munck argues that global capital's effort to create markets free of regulation by nation states is provoking a counter movement by working people to construct new rules, ethics, institutions, laws and processes that transcend previous national limits.

Munck brings together a wide literature, mostly European in origin, on a variety of issues salient to the theory of the Great Transformation, including feminization of labor, informalization of labor markets, regional economic integration, and the inclusion of a social clause in trade agreements. Newcomers to the study of globalization will find Munck's book useful for its breadth and extensive bibliography; those who have followed globalization more closely will find Munck's reasoned comments and herculean efforts to conceptualize so many issues valuable as well.

Munck's use of Polanyi's conception of The Great Transformation is helpful because it reminds us that when the growth of industrial capitalism disrupted established political, economic and social patterns in the nineteenth century, working people were able to channel capitalist energy and challenge the dominance of capitalist values. Looked at in this light, the globalization of the past thirty years looks more historical, more susceptible to analysis and challenge, more open to redirection than it appeared in the triumphalist and necessitarian literature of the 1990s.

Nevertheless, Globalisation and Labour has important drawbacks. Maddeningly, its subject seems to be the literature about how the world has changed, rather than the world itself. Munck does not tell stories, write narratives, or give examples. Instead, he cites texts, often with only a phrase or two indicating what the text actually said, and almost never demonstrating why we should accept that text's conclusion, or at least, Munck's characterization of that conclusion. With hundreds of studies barely mentioned, the effect is dizzying and alienating. To my own taste, David Bacon's study of the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement on efforts to promote cross-border solidarity, The Children of NAFTA, is far easier to read and absorb, and more convincing, because each of its chapters examines the effort of identifiable human beings to create cross-border links in depth. Munck's book, by contrast, urges us to see people and events in their historical, social context, but it doesn't focus on any of those people or events.

Another problem is that despite his own warnings about necessitarianism, Munck focuses on those aspects of workers' responses to the global growth of capital which support his analysis that a social movement unionism is in the process of becoming, without focusing on other phenomena that point in other directions. Thus, he focuses on developments in the International Confederation of Trade Unions, the International Trade Secretariats (now Global Unions), and the AFL-CIO far more than he does on national union bodies, which represent specific industry sectors.

It is in these latter institutions where resistance to global labor solidarity is often greatest, and where the traditional focus on collective bargaining institutions and processes remains strongest.

Once one begins looking at the national unions of plumbers, longshoremen, truck drivers and autoworkers, it is hard to ignore the fact that workers in one country often have some important interests separate from, and even in conflict with those of workers in another country. Surely, this helps explain why, despite Munck's persuasive analysis, unions around the world are so hesitant to commit themselves and their resources to the project of transforming their organizations to become part of a global social movement.

This brings me to my final reservation about Munck's analysis: in his quest to establish the legitimacy of the concept of "social movement unionism," he largely ignores collective bargaining...