Forces of Labor: Workers' Movements and Globalization Since 1870

By Beverly J. Silver

Book Overview

Recasting labor studies in a long-term and global framework, the book draws on a major new database on world labor unrest to show how local labor movements have been related to world-scale political, economic, and social processes since the late nineteenth century. Through an in-depth empirical analysis of select global industries, the book demonstrates how the main locations of labor unrest have shifted from country to country together with shifts in the geographical location of production. It shows how the main sites of labor unrest have shifted over time together with the rise or decline of new leading sectors of capitalist development and demonstrates that labor movements have been deeply embedded (as both cause and effect) in world political dynamics. Over the history of the modern labor movement, the book isolates what is truly novel about the contemporary global crisis of labor movements. Arguing against the view that this is a terminal crisis, the book concludes by exploring the likely forms that emergent labor movements will take in the twenty-first century.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521520770
• ISBN13: 9780521520775
• Release Date: April 2003
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 260 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

A World-Historical Hope for Labor

In response to various theorists and historians who claim that labor has very little role to play in creating a better world, Silver's book is an attempt to say that the labor movement is not dead. She by no means is looking to the US or various European labor movements to save the world but instead, by locating labor and capital in a world-historical perspective Silver is able to argue that auto workers in the global south are today strategically located in the same place auto workers in Detroit were located in the 1930s. Her basic argument is that wherever capital relocates, workers are then proletarianized, and organized working class resistance begins. She does an excellent job of illustrating that capital has always been mobile, and that through spatial fixes and product cycles, resistance follows capital's mobility.

Best Book on Contemporary Labor Studies

As a labor educator for 22 years, director of a labor education center, and adjunct professor of labor studies, this is simply the best book on labor studies I have ever read. I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in figuring out what is happening to the world labor movement today. I can't say enough or recommend it enough.