Chapter 1
Introduction: Thinking Global Labour Studies

It’s a slightly chilly late September day and we are sitting in a café in downtown Montreal. While chatting and occasionally typing on our laptops, we each sip a cup of steaming black tea. This moment of consumption appears as an isolated act, something we might do on a daily basis without giving it a passing thought. For our part, we simply chose from an extensive list of excellent teas, paid the cashier and thanked the server when the hot mugs arrived at our table. Our actions, it seemed, were localized. After all, they took place in a small corner of a café in a backstreet of Montreal. And yet, through the simple activity of buying tea we are immediately yet unknowingly inserted as one nodal point within a dense web of productive activities that link thousands of people across continents. Although the leaves in our cups are predictably silent about their path from production to consumption, it turns out that they were grown in the Sri Lankan highlands half a world away. If you run a quick Google search, you’ll see that these tea plantations have a rather idyllic appearance, with lush green foliage flowing down across picturesque hillside terraces. Owing to humid subtropical temperatures and a fertile soil that is amply watered by seasonal monsoons, the region provides excellent conditions for cultivating Camellia sinensis, the bush from which all tea is produced. This was certainly the impression of the nineteenth-century British colonial authorities who imported tea plants from China and conscripted thousands of indentured labourers from India to start the first commercial tea operations in Ceylon, now the nation of Sri Lanka. Fastforwarding 150 years, these plantations have risen to become one of the biggest tea exporting sites in the world.

Putting the serene vistas of the Sri Lankan terraces to one side, we can start to map out the complex network of labouring relationships that collectively turn the leaves of a hillside shrub into a marketable commodity distributed to consumers via shops and restaurants many thousands of miles away. Tea, of course, is not an unduly complex commodity, yet the sheer variety of actors involved in this process is notable: from female tea pickers on the plantations, to various workers in the local companies where the tea is dried and processed into teabags, through to managers in international corporations that buy the bulk tea and market it to stores globally. Together, these agents – each with different roles, interests and degrees of power – have collectively shaped the journey of tea through its sequential stages of production, distribution and consumption. In so doing, they form part of a chain of lives and livelihoods that spills over a vast geographical terrain, stretching from the terraces of Sri Lanka to an unassuming café on another continent. Importantly, each actor has an unequal ability to shape the conditions under which they participate in the network. This affects not only the relative gains such as wages or profits that they accrue, but also the type and level of risks they face from their participation.

The tea leaves swilling in our cups, for example, are picked by a predominantly female workforce that is descended from Tamil indentured labourers imported by the British well over a century ago. These workers have spent generations assiduously labouring for poor pay and under arduous working conditions on the terraced hillsides. While tea picking is largely portrayed as women’s work, men from the local villages typically look for jobs in the processing companies that transform the raw leaves into finished teabags. Despite their long hours, jobs on the processing side tend to be slightly better paid and have less punishing working conditions in comparison to the pickers. These inequities indicate how the division of labour in the tea industry is highly gendered. Women disproportionately occupy lower paid, more arduous and less secure tasks and, as a result, experience a strong degree of marginalization with very little power to challenge their conditions of work or pay. Although they actively seek to improve conditions for themselves whenever possible, many women tea workers strive to ensure that their children gain sufficient educational achievements to pursue other paths of work, far away from the plantations on which they themselves often feel trapped.

The production of tea, of course, does not begin and end upon the terraces. It is filtered through the regulatory structures and political power of firms, states and other organizations, each of which exerts its own influence on how tea is made, including the conditions of workers at the foot of the industry. Although the lowly status of pickers is contested by the activities of workers and supportive nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that seek to improve conditions within the sector, both plantation owners and processers have often been resistant to such initiatives. Noting the strong international competition in the tea industry – with rival plantations in Assam, Fujian and other parts of Asia – they decry the potential adverse impacts on profitability that substantive wage rises would entail. The plantations themselves form the lowest link in a chain of companies headed by retailing corporations that market the tea internationally. The tea processors occupy a middle tier: buying leaves from the plantations before selling the processed product onwards to the retailers. At the top of the chain, these retailers actively seek to ensure that their suppliers provide low-priced yet high-quality goods so as to maintain their market share and profit line. Most consumers in distant markets, they note, are more interested in the price tag and flavour than in the social conditions of workers on plantations. At the same time, the Sri Lankan government has also provided an extremely facilitating environment for the plantations and processors owing to the status of tea as an important export crop.

Through this cursory glance at the journey of a simple teabag, we can lift the lid on an intricate web of labouring activities and livelihood struggles that link production in the hills of Sri Lanka to the consumption of a warm beverage in Montreal. We’ve noted diverse power relations at play – between workers with limited options and employers seeking cheap labour; between genders; between different tiers of firms – and we’ve taken note of the different connections and networks that cross space, to link producers and consumers across the globe. There are many more steps we could add to make this web more complete. Think about the activities of transportation, advertising, retailing and even the post-consumption question of who deals with the waste. All of a sudden, it becomes clear that a teabag is never just a bag of tea! It is a nexus point for a complex array of relations between thousands of people labouring in different corners of the world.

Why Global Labour Studies?

As an academic field, global labour studies seeks to map out precisely these kinds of relationships in order to analyse their contrasting implications for the actors involved at each node. By exploring the interconnections that link the production, circulation and consumption of goods and services, we seek to open up essential questions concerning who is producing what, for whom, under what conditions and with what long-term effects. This makes global labour studies an extremely useful way of engaging some of the most pressing concerns facing us in the present era. Several compelling issues stand out. First, the networks that link production, distribution and consumption have become increasingly intricate, creating a more unified global economy that is able to produce vast amounts of diverse commodities and distribute them across long distances. Looking out at any university food mall, for example, you can easily discern the globality of contemporary production and consumption. You’ll find a mix of foodstuffs for sale, with ingredients sourced from around the world: from fresh bananas to ramen noodles to cans of Pepsi. Electronic goods are also in clear display, such as cellphones and laptops designed in North America, Japan or Europe, but most likely assembled in East Asia. Even the standardized tables and seats we’re sitting on turn out to have been produced in locations ranging from Mexico to Indonesia.

That this zone of consumption is a meeting place for commodities from all over the world seems very natural and we likely don’t give it much thought. That said, when we reflect a little more deeply, the logistics involved in making all this happen on a daily basis suddenly appear breath-taking. Take, for example, that fresh-sliced mango in the package sitting next to the bananas. Less than forty-eight hours ago that fruit was hanging from a tree in central Brazil. After being picked, it was transferred by van to a refrigerated facility where a workforce of 184 Brazilians can process close to 200,000 mangoes per hour. There, the workers cut, skinned, sliced and diced the mango before sealing it away in its own personal plastic container. Once stacked in crates, those containers were loaded onto planes in São Paulo airport and then shipped outwards and onwards to retailers across Europe and North America. From tree to table across the length of a continent in just two days – now that’s fast food!¹

Despite this incredible productivity, however, the workforce that underpins the global economy is stratified by vast inequalities in income and working conditions both within and between countries. A quick glance at working conditions in the Brazilian fruit picking and processing sector, for example, shows how low paid and arduous such occupations are. Under conditions of intense competition for contracts with European and North American supermarkets, juice producers and other fruit retailers face strong downward cost pressures. These constraints are frequently transmitted onto those at the very bottom: i.e., the labourers who have little power to shape the terms of their employment. In the orange picking sector, workers are typically paid by volume so they must collect a huge amount of fruit per day in order to make a minimum wage. They do so by working long hours on temporary contracts in difficult conditions, wrapped in cloth despite the heat to protect themselves from the blazing sun, yet nonetheless exposed to a range of chemicals used in production.² In short, the social context of precarious labour in Brazil is intimately connected to the fresh fruit sitting in our university food mall.³ In this respect, we need not only to understand who has the opportunity to enter into relatively well-paid and secure work, but also how different forms of employment sustain uneven patterns of consumption at a global scale.

By exploring the tangible processes that create astonishing levels of wealth alongside persistent poverty, global labour studies offers crucial tools to better decipher the ways in which individuals and households work towards a more materially secure life, while also highlighting the many barriers and constraints to such outcomes. To do this, global labour studies provides a framework to better understand the structures and forces that shape lives and livelihoods across the globe. This is done explicitly in order to seek more equitable and sustainable forms of production, distribution and consumption in our increasingly interconnected and rapidly changing world. Examining these questions requires us to ask how goods are produced and exchanged through the daily activities of people who work, communicate, cooperate and conflict within diverse and contrasting circumstances. For this task, we use a series of concepts and approaches drawn from fields that include political economy, sociology, geography and development studies. Building upon these foundations allows us to understand what we might term ‘economic life’ outside the quantitative reductions of mainstream economic analysis.

This kind of quantitative economic analysis certainly has its place in our understanding of the world, but it must be kept in its place. It would no doubt be possible, for example, to transform the processes that underpin the production of Sri Lankan tea into a set of dollar values regarding gross domestic product (GDP), trade flows, per capita income and so forth. Yet to do so would be to produce a decisively weak brew. We would immediately rule out understanding the complex social and political dynamics that operate between plantations and their workers; between genders in production; between the international tea companies and their localized suppliers; and between those who consume goods and those who make them. In short, we would turn a blind eye to all the social, geographical and political processes through which the global economy functions on a day-to-day level. This book, in contrast, seeks to excavate precisely those processes and bring them to light. Before we can move on to that task, however, two definitional questions need to be addressed. What do we mean when we refer to ‘labour’ and why is it prefaced by the term ‘global’?

What is the ‘Labour’ in Global Labour Studies?

To grasp the significance of the term labour we can helpfully compare it to the related idea of work. In formal terms, work can be described as the conscious application of physical and mental energies necessary to produce something. The thing being produced might be a tangible item like a handcrafted guitar, an intangible good such as a piece of computer code that exists virtually, or a service such as sweeping a kitchen floor. In all cases, work is the deliberate expenditure of energy necessary for a productive activity. Now, whereas you might say that you worked really hard on designing a piece of art or writing an assignment, you are unlikely to term this as labour. The reason for this is that labour is a broader category that captures not only the purposeful expenditure of energy, but also the social context under which such work is performed.

The concept of labour therefore opens up a broader set of questions and issues than simply the physical and mental exertions involved in work. Consider, for example, how we talk about ‘slave labour’ rather than ‘slave work’. We do this to highlight the deeply uncomfortable proprietary relationships in which one individual has legal possession of others and compels them to toil on their behalf. Similarly, we term the work performed by children outside basic household tasks ‘child labour’ as a way to highlight the ethical questions inherent in putting children to work. Finally, the idea of ‘wage labour’ encapsulates how our ability to work has become a commodity that we sell to an employer in exchange for a wage. So when we talk about labour, we are deliberately engaging a set of questions around who is performing work for whom, under what conditions, and how such work fits within the wider production of goods and services at a society-wide level.

To talk about labour is therefore to put work as a productive activity in its social context. As the following chapters elaborate, we find a vast diversity of forms of labour at a global level. We often think of work in terms of waged labour in which workers sell their ability to work for a wage and – potentially – other benefits such as social security. However, there are many forms of labour, including self-employment through to forced or coerced labour. We follow up on these issues at length in further chapters, but it’s helpful to highlight a few key common issues that global labour studies must address.

Workforce

It seems obvious, but for work to happen there must be workers. Yet workforces do not simply exist. Rather, they must be produced and reproduced. This means that a key task of global labour studies is to understand how workforces with specific skills, attributes and characteristics are created and put to work, both on a daily and a generational basis. Without doubt, questions of education and training are key to making workforces, but we must also think of the relative rights that workforces enjoy regarding pay, conditions, security and so forth. For example, the presence of low-skilled workforces, composed primarily of rural migrant women, that were expected to do large amounts of forced overtime work at times of peak consumer demand was an important factor behind the growth of light manufacturing industries in southern China during the 1990s.⁴ So a key question concerns how these workforces are created, mobilized and put to work.

Workplace

Work always occurs somewhere – whether in a factory, an office, a marketplace or the back room of someone’s home. Different workplaces are structured by different kinds of technology, but also distinct relationships between workers and their employers. Bicycles, for example, can be made in a state-of-the-art factory in California or in an informal workshop in the backstreets of Bangkok. The end product might not be too different, but the process through which work occurs – including the activities, hours, conditions and compensation of work – will be worlds apart. We therefore need to consider how different workplaces shape, and are shaped by, the social contexts of work. This leads us directly to a third domain of study.

Regulating institutions

Productive work is essentially a collective activity involving the combined efforts and energies of a workforce. Whether in an office or a factory, these collective activities will be regulated by institutions. Institutions are conventions that govern behaviour, including formal rules, such as government stipulated laws enforced by courts, and informal rules, such as the shared norms about accepted behaviour in an office. When we think about key institutions that regulate the production and distribution of goods and services, government authority is evidently a key factor. States typically regulate the minimum level of wages, the details of contracts, worker rights and social benefits, and the conduct of workplace relations such as collective bargaining and dispute reconciliation. The state, however, is not the only regulatory institution. Firms themselves regulate relationships within the organization through various types of incentives and punishments, including under the rubric of ‘corporate social responsibility’. In other work contexts, particularly those characterized by an absence of effective state regulation, it can be informal networks that shape work relations, including in small family businesses or community associations of street vendors.

Cooperation and conflict

One of the paradoxes of global labour studies is that the production, distribution and consumption of goods requires intense cooperation and generates enduring conflicts. As we noted in the example above, the passage of tea from bushes in Sri Lanka to cups in Montreal requires the cooperation of multiple actors, from pickers to processors to marketers to retailers. Producing any commodity is a collective process that involves coordination and cooperation. At the same time, however, it is also a process riven with conflicts of interest: from gender inequalities over the division of jobs; conflicts between workers and management over wages and conditions in both fields and factories; tussles between large corporate wholesalers and small processing companies over the price of bulk tea; and, potentially, conflicts between activist consumers demanding socially responsible products and retailers seeking to keep prices down. This duality of cooperation and conflict is a key thematic of global labour studies and arises repeatedly across the following chapters.

What’s the ‘Global’ in Global Labour Studies?

When we attach the adjective ‘global’ to ‘labour’, we do so to explore how lives and livelihoods in any one part of the world are intimately connected to processes ongoing in others. In this sense, using the term global is not to suggest that there is some exterior global realm or level that exists ‘out there’ in a global space distinct from the local or national. On the contrary, as the example of the Sri Lankan teabag demonstrated, the global is very much present here and now in our localized, everyday relations and lived spaces. Each of the activities involved in producing, distributing and consuming that tea was local – in the sense that they happened somewhere specific – yet each was also global in that they were closely connected through processes occurring across continents. In short, the relationship between the global and the local is not one of opposition. Rather, we must seek to understand the conditions under which localized actions have impacts on a global scale.

As a result, the global in global labour studies is an invitation to analyse what forms of interconnection exist, how are they established and reproduced, what scale they operate on and to whose benefit they function. Although we sometimes think in terms of a heavily globalized world, we need to keep a close eye on the unevenness of such connections. As the historian Fred Cooper puts it, structures and networks may shape certain places and make things happen with great intensity, yet their impacts may tail off sharply elsewhere.⁵ As a result, within global labour studies there are some key modes of interconnection that we need to consider.

Markets

We often hear talk about how global markets create an important form of interconnection between peoples through trade. Yet to operate on a world scale, markets must first be made global. For this to happen, they need a dedicated set of institutions and technologies to underpin them and no shortage of political determination to maintain them. The market for wheat, for example, is currently heavily globalized with political agreements in place to allow the movement of grain between borders and an infrastructure of transportation and storage in place to facilitate its travel across vast distances. As a result, a fall in production owing to a localized drought in the American Midwest is quickly transmitted onto prices at a global scale, affecting the price of bread across continents. In contrast, the market for labour is strongly constrained. As we shall see in chapter 8, the movement of people is actively controlled and migrants are frequently unable to legally work in countries they may move to. The degree of globality of markets, therefore, is politically grounded, open to contestation, and is something that must constantly be reproduced over time.

Firms

Most firms in the world are extremely small: from tiny workshops to street-side food stalls and corner shops. In terms of numbers, these businesses make up the vast majority of the world’s enterprises and are for the most part localized in their operations. At the other end of the spectrum, transnational corporations are emblematic of globalization. Owing to their expansive scale, such firms shape the contexts of production, work and consumption therein, linking lives and livelihoods across space. Walmart, for example, is the world’s biggest multinational in terms of sales and has established extensive supply chains that source massive amounts of goods from across the world into its many thousands of stores. It was estimated that Walmart alone accounted for 10 per cent of Chinese exports, many of which are produced under typically austere working conditions.⁶ This has often led critics to assert that Walmart has played a lead role in facilitating a ‘race to the bottom’, depreciating labour standards on a global scale. From its perspective, Walmart would claim that it has fashioned an incredibly efficient division of labour, uniting producers and consumers through its state-of-the-art logistics in a way that provides jobs at one end and ever cheaper goods at the other. Either way, the role that the firm plays in coordinating a global production network that links quite simply millions of workers and consumers across national spaces is of extreme importance, and we examine this in detail in chapter 4.

International organizations

We argued above that regulating institutions are crucial to shaping the social contexts of work. In this respect, a number of key international organizations play a pivotal role in extending regulation at a global scale. Consider how the World Trade Organization (WTO) creates a system of rules and regulations governing trade and investment that applies to all 164 member states, providing a degree of conformity of such regulations on a global scale. To be clear, not all countries uniformly apply WTO regulations and there are vast differences in the ability of different countries to shape WTO agendas, to challenge its rules and regulations, and to make motions against other countries under its protocols. While the WTO provides trade regulations, the International Labour Organization (ILO) has a mandate precisely to promote decent working conditions at a global level. It does so by producing conventions on workplace rights that it invites its 187 member countries to sign up to. Unlike the WTO, however, the ILO has no direct power to enforce its conventions even though the vast majority of countries have ratified them. As this indicates, different international organizations have vastly uneven levels of influence to shape the world of work at a global level, with the protection of trade and investment rights much more closely guarded than worker rights despite formal recognition of both.

Social networks

As all users of Facebook know, building social networks across long distances has never been easier. And while it might be easy to dismiss such networks as simply a means to share the latest cute cat video, we should not underestimate how informal social networks can facilitate flows of money, information, goods and authority across contexts that strongly influence the world of work. For example, rural to urban migrants often use informal networks to gain information to help connect them to potential employers. Equally, such social networks within migrant communities can also be used to pass money back to families without recourse to the formal banking system. On a different scale, informal social networks are frequently key to international labour rights movements which seek to link the struggles of workers in a specific factory with consumer activist groups in the West. In short, social networks are an important way in which the challenge of distance is overcome.

Global Labour Studies

This brief discussion of the terms ‘labour’ and ‘global’ primes our discussion for the following chapters where we begin to unpack and analyse the changing world of work. On this basis, the next chapter turns to how we should go about doing global labour studies. It begins to put together a toolkit of concepts that can help us examine and explain the social contexts of work and the forms of interconnection that produce an increasingly unified division of labour on a global scale, while also reproducing stark differences and inequalities of opportunity and outcomes.

Work & Society Series

GLOBAL LABOUR STUDIES

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