The years since the onset of the global financial c risis saw a wave of protests all over the world, and among them were a series of mass strikes in the Global South that have not yet been investigated extensively, with th e exception of the mass strikes in China and the strikes in South African mining in 2012. My current research on mass strikes in Brazil and India has revealed that there are enormous similarities despite very different local, regional and national contexts and path dependencies. The strike waves in the construction sector between 2011 and 2013 in Brazil and the strikes in the Indian automobile sector are examples of strikes in centra l sectors of the national economies. These sectors have witnessed continual growth over the past 15 years, and at the same time workers experienced deteroriating working conditions, such as lower wages, an increase in contract work and/or a higher work spee d. The focus in the initial phase of the strikes was on wage demands and working conditions, but during the course of the struggles a political dimension emerged quite quick ly. In a number of cases, workers organized wildcat strikes or developed activities t hat could not be controlled by the trade unions, e.g. setting fire to workplace premis es, expelling union representatives with violent means or killing managers. And many of these strikes were met with repression, such as the repeated deployment of the national guard and military police to break strikes in Brazil or the arbitrary arrest and long-term imprisonment of workers in India.
This article delivers a critical analysis of the proposal to pay wages or royalties to data providers for any form of provision of digital data. It has been developed primarily by researchers of the Microsoft research department. The proposal to create mediators of individual data as trade unions of data providers aims at economic inclusion of everyday users of computers and smartphones. The article analyses the shortcomings of the proposal which does not consider the issue that many workers are obliged to provide data at their workplaces, and the problem of increasing digital tracking of workers’ productive activities. Furthermore, the proposal to pay wages for everyday activities lacks any strategy or vision to create more meaningful and satisfying work relations.
The traditional industrial relations approach – focused on the state, employers and unions as main actors – faces severe limits in its capacity to analyse labour conflict in the face of the specific forms of labour regulation in the Global South. This contribution argues that a solid theoretical framework for Global Labour Studies requires a critique of its forerunner, the industrial relations approach. A globally relevant understanding of labour conflict in the twenty-first century requires to abandon the main assumptions of this forerunner. A new theoretical framework for the analysis of labour conflict can build on the debates around social movement unionism and the research agenda of labour geography that include other places and spaces of labour mobilization than the workplace and the trade union into their epistemological perspective. Such a conception allows to analyse labour conflict at the level of the social formation, and not just as something relegated to or emanating from the economic sphere.
Despite of the centrality of the topic of labour in the 1983 book by Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism, global labour studies have devoted little attention to the concept of racial capitalism that became established with Robinson’s book. Robinson’s main claim is that the first proletariat formed in the plantations in colonized countries from about the 16th century, calling into question the crucial relevance of the industrial proletariat in England (and Europe) for the emergence of the labour movement. In taking up recent debates on racial capitalism that are inspired by Robinson´s work, but which also expand and criticize it, this text proposes a more integrated theorization of race and labour. It also takes up debates about the Plantationocene as a complex dispositive which connects ecological rupture, large scale production and racialised labour.
This article reflects on the insights generated by the contributions to the special issue on labour conflicts in the Global South. We emphasize first the need to go beyond Eurocentric industrial relations concepts forged in the historically specific circumstances of post-World War II industrialized countries. This also includes going beyond the fetishism of regarding trade unions as the privileged agents of workers’ interests. As the various empirical contributions to this special issue demonstrate, labour struggles against capitalist exploitation in the Global South go beyond the workplace and generally also include organizations different from the traditional trade union form.
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