Labor and Globalization

This collection provides the history and background necessary to understand authoritarianism in countries ranging from Russia to eSwatini and from Brazil to the Philippines, as well as conceptual lenses for understanding authoritarianism and resistance to it, specific practical experiences of establishing international solidarity and debates emerging from that imperative. Its chapters cover the convergence of politics with the organisation of labour under authoritarianism, the use of labour laws and institutions to suppress labour, alternatives to conventional trade unions where unions are co-opted or banned, and the treatment of refugees in unequal labour markets. This book will appeal to labour activists, scholars and workers everywhere.

With contributions by
Cecilia Brighi, Ramon Certeza, Claire Ceruti, Frank Hoffer, Elaine Sio-ieng Hui, Can Kaya, Başak Kocadost, Svetlana Kolganova, Kaye Liang, Lizaveta Merliak, Christopher Siu Tat Mung, Moreblessing Nyambara, Yury Ravavoi, Melisa Serrano, Fundizwi Sikhondze, Fundizwi Sikhondze, Jana K. Silverman, Verna Dinah Q. Viajar and Khaing Zar Aung.

This study argues that the spaces, limits and strategies in organising domestic workers are informed and shaped by a country’s political economy and labour regime. It is guided by the theoretical frameworks of Robert Cox’s Neo-Gramscian action framework and Social Reproduction Theory in its analysis. These frameworks of analysis illuminate the relations of social forces engendered through the particular relations of production and reproduction, and they provide the conceptual tools with which to explain the dimensions of precarity and organising strategies that shape and constrain the spaces involved in organising migrant domestic workers. This study proposes that the interlocking dimensions of precarity perpetuate and result in the cycle of disempowerment, disposability and exclusion of migrant domestic workers in Malaysia.