After 30 Years of Deadlock: Labour's Possible Strategies in the New Global Order

This article is based on the understanding that in order to analyse labour's current inability to defend social standards and to shape the discussion of how to overcome the financial crisis, it is necessary to examine labour's wider role in the global economy during the last 30 years. It will be argued that because globalisation has severely weakened labour, new strategies and power resources have to be recovered in its struggle against neo-liberal restructuring. Importantly, this requires a generally new perspective which needs to be operationalised depending on the particular industrial sector and geographical location. The experience and challenges of Northern trade unions in transnational manufacturing must not be generalised.