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Towards
Global Labour History: New Comparisons
An
International Workshop organized by Association of Indian
Labour Historians (India)
under
the SEPHIS Programme and the International Institute of
Social History, Amsterdam November 10-12, 2005 at
Delhi
(India)
THEME
PAPER
Towards
Global Labour History: New Comparisons
Download:Programme
Schedule
At
the beginning of the 1990s the discipline of labour
history was in serious crisis; some even predicted the end
of labour history. Since then however there has been a
slow but steady revival of interest in labour. This return
to labour is markedly different to the resurgence of
labour history in the 1960s. Fuelled by students and
workers movements of the sixties, this earlier revival had
its location in Western academia. The attempt then was to
revive the radical and revolutionary tradition of the
working class – which was seen to have been integrated
to welfare capitalism of the post-War era. The writings of
English historians notably EP Thompson and the history
from below approach were its main inspirations, though the
focus of these writings remained the traditional
industrial male working class. The long crisis since the
1970’s and the massive economic structuring following
the current phase of globalisation changed all that. The
rapid diminution of the industrial working class, the
retreat of the state and emergence of global
subcontracting and the demise of the Soviet system
coincided with emerging doubts about the foundational
basis for labour history.
The
recent revival is different both in its location as also
in its central concerns. It has emerged from the countries
of the South and its focus is no longer the traditional
working class. This reversal of location and the
broadening of the scope of labour history provides a basis
for a new global comparisons. The earlier Euro centric
labour history also had an implicit comparison: the West
was the basis of comparison for the rest of the world.
Flowing from this a set of binaries dominated the writing
of labour history. These can be conveniently grouped
around three axes: spatial, the temporal and the
relational.
1)
Around the spatial axis can be located the great
geographical divide of the West and the rest; workplace
and the home; the factory and the workshop, the urban and
rural. The classical drama is reserved for the former, the
West, the factory and the urban; while the rest is treated
as residual. Increasingly this spatial divide seems to be
a line drawn in sand, a convenient peg on which the story
of labour is hung. As manufacturing is increasingly
relocated in the third world and the divide between home
and workplace is blurred with the emergence of
subcontracting on a global scale, we can think of new
comparisons not just across the great divide but also of
forms which straddle the spatial divisions.
2)
The temporal divides of the pre modern/modern/
contemporary and the theme of transition across these
boundaries has been a major organising principle of labour
history. It is increasingly evident that these lines were
far too sharply drawn. Labour history has had to contend
with the uncomfortable fact of persistence of pre-modern
forms of labour relations and the coexistence of
industrialisation and deindustrialisation. A blurring of
temporalities is evident both in the industrial West as
also in the underdeveloped rest. As labour history
contends with the multiple temporal rhythms new issues of
comparison that cut across the temporal divides become
researchable.
3)
The key relation around which the field of labour history
has been organized is that of free wage labour, the
employer –employee relationship. At the heart of
classical labour history has been the figure of the free
male wage worker, located in the modern factory and member
of a trade union. However it is increasingly evident that
this figure if he ever existed was in a great minority
even in the industrialised West. With the expansion of
processes of informalisation and feminisation of the
workforce, the centrality of the male, unionized worker is
no longer tenable. The same processes have also thrown
into question the privileging of formal employer-employee
relationships. As the binaries of free-unfree; wage
work-non-wage work; formal-informal blur, labour
historians need to look for new nodes of comparison which
take into account the multiplicity of relationships,
locations and temporalities that under gird labour forms
and within which the individual worker is embedded.
If
the earlier modes of comparison based on fixed binaries
are no longer satisfactory, the answer to that is not to
relapse into the singularity of experience of labour. Nor
is the mere inversion of old binaries adequate. A more
meaningful way of comparison would be to focus on sites,
forms and relations of labour that habitually straddle the
classical divides of labour history. One way of
transcending these limitations would be to seek global
comparisons albeit on a new basis. Here we indicate
possible themes of comparison.
1)
Legalities: For a new global history we need to
rethink notions of law, legality and labour moving beyond
earlier distinctions between legal/illegal, crime/labour,
regulated/unregulated. Underlying these distinctions was
the assumption that labour relations were ordered by the
nation state. Variations in legal regimes coincided with
national distinctions. The colonial experience however is
proof of the way legal regimes moved across national
boundaries structuring labour relations. Without denying
the importance of the state we still need to look at ways
in which labour forms were similar or dissimilar across
the legal divides.
2)
Mobility: Labour mobility has always been seen as an
unstable or transitory aspect, belonging more to the
pre-history than to the history of labouring experiences.
With increasing attention now being paid to circular
mobility, cross border labour migration and the history of
mobile work sites, mobility is brought back to the centre
of labouring experience. Comparison of aspects of mobility
at the global scale may open up new areas of research.
3)
Solidarities: The breakdown of the axes around which
labour history was framed earlier has meant also a
questioning of the old oppositions between class and
community and assumptions which saw two as spatially and
temporally distinct. Frameworks which saw solidarities in
the industrialised West in terms of class categories and
collectivities in other regions in terms of categories of
community have been found inadequate. Once we go beyond
the organic models of community and associational forms of
class, comparisons of transient and temporary
solidarities, forms such as social networks forged at
workplaces and neighborhoods at both the global scale and
the local become possible.
4)
Relationality of Gender: One of the ways in which
older frameworks of labour history were criticised was
through feminist history writing. A focus on gender opened
up ways of transcending classic binaries. Feminist
writings reconceptualised distinctions between home and
work, workshop and factory, between family time and
industrial time. What seems important today is not just
the visibility of women and women’s work, but the
interrogation of received ideas such as male working class
formation, notions of masculinity, implicit in traditional
notions of solidarity, by making gender a relational
category. Comparisons along these lines need to be
deepened and explored.
5)
Impact of new technology on work: Concurrent with
globalization in the recent decades, there has been taking
place a transformation of the nature of work under the
impact of new technologies, particularly in the area of
information technology. This process has given rise to a
number of issues which demand studies in a global
comparative perspective. The decentralized
forms of electronic work, the dispersion of the work
force under the new regime of telework / teletravail /
telearbeit, extensive outsourcing by MNCs of
developed countries and its consequences for the
opportunity structure in work in the global
metropolises and elsewhere, the attenuation of the
links between workers under distance-working
conditions, the asymmetries inherent in the inequalities
of what is known as the digital divide -- these are some
of the issues which merit attention.
6)
Multiplicity of labouring identities: As attention has
shifted from the figure of the male industrial worker
other shadowy figures have emerged from the background.
The hyphenated entities such as home-worker,
peasant-worker, self-employed and those who straddle
across sectors of labouring activities are no longer
merely transitional. ‘Labouring poor’ a term usually
reserved for the pre-industrial worker has made a strong
come back in recent literature. These multiple identities
and locations of workers provide another important basis
for global comparison.
Postal
Address:
Association
of Indian Labour Historians
42
Deshbandhu Society
15
Patparganj, Delhi - 110092
India
Phone:
91-11 2272 1744, 91-11 2273 3443
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