Social democratic parties and even conservative parties built robust welfare states, and across the North Atlantic, labor held a cherished and comfortable spot along with business and the state in setting economic policy. The three decades following World War II were known as a “golden era” for the upper strata of labor in the US and Europe, when workers secured more rights and social protections. The “labor” parties that once promised to empower the average worker now are often the agents of austerity and the allies of global capital.īy the mid-twentieth century, while international idealism had largely evaporated, labor did strengthen at the national level. The internationalist optimism of the fin-de-siècle Second International and the early twentieth-century Third International-the belief that victory was in reach for the worker-contrasts with the pessimism of labor today and the hollow shell that is the contemporary Socialist International. This retreat can make Marx’s call of “Workers of the world, unite!” seem quaint, and the international labor congress that launched the First International in 1864 a quixotic dream. Mention the labor movement today, and activists might ask, “What movement?” Indeed, the vibrant labor movement of yesteryear, when workers in industrializing countries organized their factories, has ebbed with the onslaught of neoliberal globalization. Emerging transnational unionism, if it perseveres, contains the seeds of a new global movement, a new international that extends beyond labor to embrace all forces working toward a Great Transition.įarewell to Labor? | A Globalizing Working Class | Harbingers of Transnational Solidarity | Reinventing Trade Unions | Towards a New International | Endnotes Most notably, globalization has forced unions to think and act outside the state to build transnational solidarity across countries and sectors. Rather than spelling the beginning of the end for organized labor, globalization has brought new opportunities for reinvention, and a sea change in both trade unions and the wider labor movement.
Once seen as the vanguard of a new social order, the contemporary labor movement has been written off by many progressive activists and scholars as a relic of the past.
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