The workers of the world face numerous challenges. Many debates around the future of labour, such as the rise of the so called ‘gig economy’, tend to focus on experiences and trends within the Global North. The shortcomings of the present are often contrasted to a nostalgic view of the past, with an idealised ‘golden era’ defined by ‘standard employment contracts’ serving as the primary benchmark against which practices today are measured. Once work is defined in these terms, the primary focus becomes the ‘restoration’ of labour rights and protections that have been lost or eroded. The re-invention of a vibrant global labour movement will not occur through a vain attempt to put the clock back to a mythical ‘standard employment contract’. It is only through organising – recruiting, educating and mobilising – new members that labour can reinvent itself as a social movement.
We need to start from the experiences of the Global South, where no such standard employment contracts or labour rights have ever prevailed. There precarious and informal work has always been the norm rather than the exception, ranging today from two thirds to three quarters of the total labour force. As the contributions to this special feature demonstrate, there is now a move towards closer collaboration between the organised labour movement and informal and precarious workers. To ‘organise the unorganised’ has always been a challenge for the trade union movement, since these workers are less accessible and fall outside the industrial relations bargaining structures.
Yet trade unions across the South, even ones with strong corporatist traditions, now recognise that the working class reaches well beyond the factory and that their own future depends on engaging with these ‘non-traditional’ layers. Efforts to organise workers have increasingly brought together informal workers, street traders, the newly unemployed and, sometimes, migrant workers. When different kinds of workers are brought into the fold, trade unions may rediscover more militant approaches to collective organising and political impact. For example, the mobilisation of unemployed workers in Argentina after the 2001 crisis, the piquetero movement, helped revitalise a once strongly corporatist labour movement. It is now playing a big role in preventing the re-election of the neoliberal Mauricio Macri government that came to office in 2015.
