Global Workers' Rights

Catalog description

This course analyzes struggles to promote workers' rights across a variety of economic, political, and geographic contexts. The stakes of such efforts are high at a time when worker movements face a barrage of new and old challenges. Political attacks, privatization, capital mobility, and automation have contributed to a decades-long decline in union membership in many of labor's traditional strongholds. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the world's workers-particularly women, immigrants, and informal workers-remain unorganized. In this course we will ask, what is the relationship between transformations in global political and economic processes, local labor control regimes and working conditions, and forms of worker resistance? What is the role of such movements in increasing the power of women, people of color, LGTBQ people, and immigrants? What catalyzes worker organizations to expand their focus from members' narrow economic interests to broader struggles for social justice, human rights, and democracy? The first unit of this course analyzes classical and contemporary theories of capitalist development, workplace control, and worker resistance. We will develop a sociological approach that understands workers not as free agents, but as actors embedded in economic, political, and cultural structures. In the second unit, we will analyze the history of the U.S. labor movement, paying careful attention to the way that work has been structured by class strata, gender, race, and region, and the implications for workers' self-organization. The third unit focuses on case studies of worker movements in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Cross-national comparisons will provide leverage for analyzing the complex interaction between movement contexts, ideologies, strategies, and outcomes. We will study how worker movements are shaped and constrained by the states within which they are embedded, but also, how they can sometimes transform the state--for example, by pushing for democratic transitions and workers' rights policies. The fourth unit addresses pressing challenges facing the contemporary global labor movement and potential pathways forward. We will analyze innovative strategies for organizing informal workers, building global labor solidarity, and forging alliances between the labor and climate justice movement.