1st Edition
Labour Conflicts in the Global South
Against the background of the global economic crisis since 2007/2008 and increasing inequality across the world, the Global South has experienced widespread, large-scale industrial action, including in countries such as China, Brazil, India and South Africa, which had been hailed as the new growth engines of the global political economy as part of the so-called BRICS.
This volume systematically evaluates how the new forms of labour mobilization witnessed in the past ten years responded to the predominance of the informality-precarity complex of industrial relations and what conclusions can be drawn for potentially successful strategies against exploitation in the future. Can we identify a convergence of new approaches across the Global South, or do we witness an ongoing fragmentation of actors, models and strategies? In addressing this question, consideration is given to issues of class as well as gender and race.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Globalizations.
Labour conflicts in the Global South: an introduction
Andreas Bieler and Jörg Nowak
1. From industrial relations research to Global Labour Studies: moving labour research beyond Eurocentrism
Jörg Nowak
2. Workers’ organizations and the fetishism of the trade union form: toward new pathways for research on the labour movement?
Maurizio Atzeni
3. Beyond traditional trade unionism: innovative worker responses in three African cities
Edward Webster, Carmen Ludwig, Fikile Masikane and Dave Spooner
4. Solidarity across boundaries: a new practice of collectivity among workers in the app-based transport sector in Indonesia
Fahmi Panimbang
5. Turning left: student-worker alliance in labour struggles in China
Ngai Pun
6. A gendered labour geography perspective on the Cambodian garment workers’ general strike of 2013/2014
Michaela Doutch
7. Becoming ‘active labour protestors’: women workers organizing in India’s garment export factories
Madhumita Dutta
8. Overcoming ‘small peasant mentality’: semi-proletarian struggles and working-class formation in China
Yu Huang and Kenneth Tsz Fung Ng
9. Revisiting the ‘boomerang effect’: the international relations of the trade unions in Turkey under the Justice and Development Party (AKP) rule
Isil Erdinç
10. Labour conflicts in the Global South: towards a new theory of resistance?
Andreas Bieler and Jörg Nowak
Biography
Andreas Bieler is Professor of Political Economy in the School of Politics and International Relations at Nottingham University, UK. His latest book is Fighting for Water: Resisting Privatization in Europe (2021).
Jörg Nowak is Visiting Professor at the Postgraduate Program of Environment and Rural Development at the University of Brasilia, Brazil. His latest book is Mass Strike and Social Movements in Brazil and India (2019).
