1 - Being on the Side of Workers: On the Normative Foundations of Global Labour Studies

Summary

The normative gap in global labour studies

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously ended the Manifesto of the Communist Party with a call to arms – ‘Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch!’ [Proletarians of all countries, unite!] (1959: 493; emphasis in the original). Ever since, the issue of transnational solidarity and labour internationalism has formed part of the debates on the strategies and aims of labour movements. And through the ages, these debates have been of concern to scholars, who have not just discussed the prospects for solidarity that cuts across national boundaries, but also – and relatedly – the specificities of labour relations in different parts of the world, the issue of labour migration and the geographical scales of labour struggles (see van der Linden, 2008; Gallas, 2016a). In response to the emergence of global production networks from the 1970s onwards, ‘global labour studies’ has emerged as an academic project and a demarcated research field. Sociologists and other social scientists have committed to moving beyond the ‘methodological nationalism’ of industrial relations research and examining labour relations and movements from a global perspective (see Nowak, 2021a). This endeavour has become institutionalized in various ways – for example through the establishment of the Research Committee on Labour Struggles (RC44) of the International Sociological Association in 1990, the Global Labour University (GLU) in 2002 and the Global Labour Journal in 2010.

In recent years, several authors have made programmatic statements in which they seek to explain the aims and challenges of global labour studies. Marissa Brookes and Jamie McCallum, for example, suggest that there is a community of scholars from a variety of social science disciplines committed to a ‘new labour transnationalism’ that attempts ‘to steer economic globalisation towards more equitable ends’ (2017: 202). Similarly, Maria Lorena Cook and others (among them the author of this book) call for focusing global labour studies on ‘who is being pushed to, or has continuously remained on, the side- lines’ (2020: 75). It is clear from the context that they refer to people performing productive and reproductive labour who are at bottom of work-related hierarchies and to the distribution of wealth created through global divisions of labour.