Beyond the Factory: Globalisation, Informalisation of Production and the New Locations of Labour

Abstract

are two contradictory views on the impact of globalisation on labour activism. It is widely argued that globalisation has considerably weakened labour movements all over the world. With labour tied to specific geographical locations, increasingly footloose capital has made economies, especially the developing ones, vulnerable to capital strike the threat of capital moving out to places more attractive in terms of wages and standards, thus unleashing a race to the bottom. Labour, unlike in the second half of the 20th century, now has to passively adapt to the terms dictated by freely mobile global capital. This view, however, has not gone uncontested. There is a counter perspective in which it is asserted that while globalisation has undoubtedly undermined the conditions that made traditional trade unionism associated with Fordist mass production possible, the very forces of globalisation themselves have opened up new terrains where radically new forms of labour activism can be imagined. Globalisation may have created conditions that are debilitating for labour in the traditional sense of working class power but, at the same time, it has potentially empowered the working class in ways that the 20th century pre-globalised world did not allow. As Silver (2003) and Webster et al (2008) argue, the complex global network of production based on outsourcing and subcontracting that is emerging and consolidating is actually making global capital more vulnerable than before to disruptions in the global circuit of production and circulation, thus increasing the bargaining power of the working class. In this otherwise illuminating debate, labour, it must be noted, is characterised as wage-labour, and employment as wageemployment. In other words, it focuses exclusively on employment based on capitalist production relations that are rooted in the separation of capital and labour. The reality of developing countries today, however, does not answer such a monist characterisation of labour. It is now well known that developing economies are marked by the existence of an overwhelmingly large volume of economic activities that fall within what is described as the informal sector. It is an economic space in which workers engage in economic activities in ways that are very different from the capitalist organisation of production. In particular, the prevalent form of labour in the informal sector is self-employment, which is different from the usual wage-based employment resting on the alienation of labour from capital. Decades ago, Theodor Shanin, in introducing A V Chayanov's The Theory of Peasant Economy, wrote,