| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 53

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Ronaldo Munck, Globalisation and Labour: the new 'Great Transformation' (London and New York: Zed Books 2002).

GLOBALIZATION sometimes conjures an image of footloose "vagabond" capitalism. Turning this image inside out, Ronaldo Munck suggests that rapid proletarianization is a fateful aspect of globalization. The world's total workforce has doubled in numbers in only three decades and Munck demonstrates that this massive expansion of the working class is geographically uneven and highly concentrated in the global South. Furthermore, this explosion is marked by profound changes in the nature of work and workers, particularly the "feminization" and "informalization" of work (highly correlated yet distinct trends). Meanwhile, labor unions, international confederations, and worker actions are honing creative strategies to face up to the new global realities of work. Drawing inspiration from Karl Polanyi and Antonio Gramsci among others, Munck explores this recent trajectory of labour internationalism and finds that effective transnational and international strategies are emerging. His central concern is to assess the positive potential of workers, worker institutions, and organizing efforts.

Munck's volume contributes to debates on globalization as well as labor studies and strategic (and counter-hegemonic) thought more generally. I found it to be highly readable, well organized, and original. Any serious scholar of labour studies or globalization will want to engage Munck's work. At the same time, the volume could provide a supplementary text in such courses as labour history, economic geography, globalization and society, or social movements. I believe undergraduates will enjoy the crisp writing style and I intend to assign the book in my course on globalization and geography. The book is organized in eight short chapters with the most provocative being two pairs of chapters: "Workers North" (Chapter 4)/"Workers South" (Chapter 5) and "The Old Internationalism"(Chapter 6)/"The New Internationalism" (Chapter 7). In these paired discussions, Munck outlines the key differences between a global "South" and global "North" perspective on labour. These contradictory viewpoints have come to a head recently over the idea of social regulation, specifically the incorporation of a "social clause" in international trade arrangements such as the World Trade Organization. Another contentious issue is the way in which trade-union corporatism during the Cold War metastasized into trade-union imperialism and undermined principles of worker democracy and solidarity, especially within the AFL-CIO.

There are a number of intriguing elements in Munck's argument that could be highlighted. I found the discussion of gender and women workers to be particularly insightful. Recognizing that women's rapid proletarianization may signal some new opportunities (and challenges) for labour activism, Munck does not simply "add women and stir." Instead he makes a concerted effort to think through how the feminization of global labour changes the dynamics and prospects of the contemporary situation. He develops the related issue of social movement unionism to signal the importance of wider creative worker strategies that seek to bridge community concerns, household and gender networks, and local and/or regional economic (and social) arrangements. These sorts of careful linkages to community — encouraging the "embeddedness" of trade-union institutions and social regulatory mechanisms at various geographical scales — will certainly be one effective way forward for labour activism. The "living wage" initiatives in a number of US cities are one example of a response to this sort of prescription.

It seems to me that it will be crucial to link Munck's insights on embeddedness to an analysis of the dismantling and devolution of many social programs (for example health and education programs associated with the welfare state) that have been propelled by globalization. In one sense, labour activists are trying to restore the linkages to community that existed — albeit unevenly — at the national scale during the "Golden Age" of various Fordist arrangements. The geography of globalization has shifted production logics to supranational geographical scales, while these parallel processes (of devolution and dismantling) have shifted social reproduction logics to subnational geographical scales and to the micro-spaces of households, individuals, and neighborhoods.

In the final chapter, Munck's findings again touch on the potential importance of theorizing social reproduction in relation to globalization. Here he discusses benchmarking as a potential strategy for worker internationalism and globalism. Benchmarking was developed by global management consultants to compare a particular enterprise with best practice anywhere in the world. As Munck shows, the Canadian Automobile Workers adapted this business-oriented technique by doing intensive research among their members to monitor and measure the quality of life. International labour standards could expand this method by setting workers' benchmarks "on key issues of wages and conditions to health and safety but also including an equality agenda and issues of social responsibility." (183) This would be a means of tracking production and social reproduction issues in a way that ensures overall improvement in worker conditions while avoiding the North/South controversies over protectionism. If quality of life information is shared widely, benchmarking might lead to techniques that could harmonize global inequities over time instead of exacerbating them.

This volume charts the rapidly shifting terrain of labour internationalism in pursuit of social justice goals. Munck chronicles and analyzes emerging internationalist strategies and suggests that these could give way to global strategies that agitate for global citizenship and global rights. Massive proletarianization is the force behind such a "great transformation." Munck honours Karl Polanyi in the subtitle to this volume and suggests that Polanyi's concern with the counter-hegemonic potential of workers to transform society during the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century is highly relevant to contemporary society. Polanyi's idea of a "double movement" in which the expansion of free-market principles is met with a counter-movement of self-regulation to protect society informs Munck's hopeful view of the future and his realistic assessment of the potential power of ordinary people. Let us prove him right.


Altha J. Cravey University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

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