Forces of Labor: Workers' Movements and Globalization Since 1870 (review)

There has been no lack of commentary and analysis over the past decade on the course of the relentless globalization of world markets and the capability of international capital, waving the banner of free trade, to move with agility from country to country and skip from continent to continent. For organized labor, whether in the industrialized or underdeveloped world, the general prognosis is universally grim. Transnational investors invariably seek out areas where labor is cheap and unions weak or non-existent. So far as wages and working conditions are concerned, it appears to be a headlong race to the bottom.

Beverly Silver's new book provides a more measured and considered view of globalization and its various discontents. She relates how the post-World War II social contracts between capital, labor, and government in North America and Western Europe eroded and finally were abandoned by economic elites in the 1970s, as profit margins began to decline. Free trade, privatization, and unregulated markets became the new mantras of economic analysis and public policy.

Based on extensive research, Silver identifies two major initiatives, or "fixes," of the capitalist system—one geographical, the other technological—that were used throughout the twentieth century to lower labor costs and bolster profits. To illustrate the geographical fix, the author presents the automotive industry as a model, demonstrating how the mass production of cars moved from the Detroit area to other sites within the United States, to Western Europe, and finally to Brazil, South Africa, and South Korea. Each successive relocation of production has had the effect of engendering a militant and class-conscious proletariat provoked to mass mobilizations and direct action in demanding higher wages and better working conditions. In the second case, Silver notes that technological fixes that spawn the manufacture of new products and services often enhance the bargaining power of various sectors of the labor force at the same time. So-called "just in time" systems, for example, remain quite vulnerable to disaffected employees located at strategic points in the productive chain, for example, transport workers.

If globalization has been an inevitable step given the logic of the free enterprise system, economic elites must still maintain at least a modicum of social legitimacy to avoid serious challenges to their rule. Silver ponders this question in the light of the periods of reform and repression flthat have waxed and waned across the globe over the last century. She emphasizes the point that the effects of globalization must be regarded as contradictory processes that both foster and retard labor's strength and bargaining power, locally and internationally. Prospects are therefore not nearly as dim as they have been painted, neither for the "old" working classes of the developed world, or for the "new" industrial workers of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

The author has been able to present this somewhat complex topic in a clear, precise, and accessible style. This book can be highly recommended as a text for graduate students in the social sciences, as well as a guide for labor educators developing courses on globalization. Silver's well-founded conclusions supply a much-needed corrective to the notion that the new transnational economic order has foreclosed on the future of the organized working class. Globalization may yet be the unwitting and involuntary source of a new labor internationalism.