Global Restructuring and the Power of Labour (Electronic book text)

One of the commonly assumed consequences of globalization - that workers are worse off and no longer have the power they once had to fight effectively on their own behalf - is still often taken for granted. Labour, suggest mainstream theories of restructuring, has been dispersed across space as capital flits to wherever it can pay the lowest wages. Meanwhile old collectivities are destroyed and labour is also socially dispersed - divided by skills, gender and nationality in increasingly isolated workplaces within diffuse subcontracting networks. Bill Dunn challenges these assumptions. He argues that changes in the structure of capitalism are overstated, cannot account for workers' experiences and do not preclude effective organisation by labour.