Kumar, Ashok (2015) Global workers’ rights through Capitalist institutions? Historical Materialism 23 (3), pp. 215-227. ISSN 1465-4466.
Abstract
In Workers, Unions, and Global Capitalism: Lessons from India, Rohini Hensman maintains that globalisation has afforded workers new opportunities for confronting capitalist exploitation. Using India as a point of departure, Hensman highlights globalisation as paradoxical, challenging anti-globalisers and the globalisation-as-imperialism thesis, to argue that capital’s toilers are now becoming its gravediggers. This analysis also explains why the World Trade Organization ( WTO) is so appealing to Hensman: a quintessence of capitalism’s contradictions. Hensman argues for both transnational solidarity and independent trade unions, embodied in the ‘employees’ unions’ of India, as well as in favour of the WTO’s ‘social clause’ amendment, in which the global exploiter is transformed into an arbiter of workers’ rights. The review maintains that the terms of Hensman’s twin position are impossible to reconcile. It evinces an underlying contradiction between opportunistic statism and a conception of revolutionary strategy predicated on action ‘from below’.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | World Trade Organization, globalisation, India, workers, social clause |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Business and Law > Birkbeck Business School |
| Research Centres and Institutes: | Innovation Management Research, Birkbeck Centre for |
| Depositing User: | Administrator |
| Date Deposited: | 26 Jan 2018 10:15 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 17:39 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/21033 |
Statistics
Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.
Archive Staff Only (login required)
