The globalisation of labour: counter-coordination and unionism on the internet

Citation

Grieco, M., Hogan, J. and Martinez Lucio, M. (2005), "The globalisation of labour: counter-coordination and unionism on the internet", Critical Perspectives on International Business, Vol. 1 No. 2/3. https://doi.org/10.1108/cpoib.2005.29001baf.001

The globalisation of labour: counter-coordination and unionism on the internet

The crises of labour demand imaginative strategic thinking. The consideration of the internet and associated information communication technologies (ICTs) is vital to this process. As Hyman (1999) has suggested, with tantalising aplomb, the virtual agora of the internet may well be a place where greater liberty and creativity might be released, perhaps freed from some of the many restraining and disciplinary mechanisms and procedures that stifle creativity and invite passivity. It has already been revealed that the coordinative capabilities of labour across the globe have been radically enhanced with the advent of the internet. The Liverpool Dockers and the Wharfies of Australia demonstrate through their internet-based campaigns the power of labour in counter-coordination in respect of global capital, while other labour-organised internet-based campaigns are found throughout the developing and developed world.

The debate about the potentialities of internet-based technologies for labour has now engendered considerable reflection. The earliest contributions came from organic intellectuals and practitioners on the margins of the labour movement (Bailey, 1996; Lee, 1997; Waterman, 1998; Shostak, 1999). Although perhaps slow to respond, centres of union power have begun to engage, through developments of union presence in cyber-space and promotion of further strategic thinking (Hogan and Grieco, 2000; Diamond and Freeman, 2002; Taylor, 2001). While the generation of discussion within trade union circles continues (Darlington, 2003), a community of academic researchers are pursuing the debate- generating new ways of understanding, exploring the nuances of the empirical and considering the implications for the actions of labour and the reproduction, transformation and even displacement of extant organisational forms, processes and politics.

It has been established that ICTs are an important set of tools for labour. There is now a widespread availability of communication technologies which can be utilized at relatively low and distributed cost and accessed in transit and from the home, with processing and storage capacities that are growing exponentially and which can be readily deployed for the receipt, storage, auditing, manipulation and broadcast of information globally. Visibility and transparency are sharpened, with consequences for the processes of auditing individual and institutional performance (Hogan and Greene, 2002), to effect forms of meta-governance (Grieco, 2002). The capacity to retain, reassemble and refer to collective memory presents the possibility to attenuate the costs of “forgetting”, while the contribution of the multitude of labour voices to such processes can be recorded in a disintermediated way in popular archives, free from institutionalised policing. Through the release of unheard voices a form of polyphonics may be brought to bear where the creativity of the “outsider” can inject flagging institutionalised labour collectives with the imagination necessary to innovate (Carter et al., 2003). Imaginative communicative strategy can also be developed by trade unions to service and organize members outside of the territories controlled by the opponents of labour and to resist the logic of residential dispersal (Freeman and Rogers, 2002). Through allowing for asynchronous communicative exchanges, the communication technologies can be used to alleviate time-space poverty and provide alternative points of entry into modes of deliberation and decision making, thus providing for the possibility of intervention and extended participation in collective organisation and action, along with new ways of collective identity and action formation (Greene et al., 2001). Finally, within the context of global business, the capacity of global reach is examined as a means to build more effective patterns of international solidarity (Bailey, 1996; Lee 1997; Waterman 1998).

This special issue set out to build on these extant understandings. It documented the emergence of new globalised labour communication strategies in the context of a globalising world of commerce, business and governance. The articles took a variety of forms and reflected the variations in communication intensities and activities which are a product of the unevenness in globalisation itself. Within the pages of the special issue we have seen the product of the researches of field leaders such as Freeman, Fiorito and Cockfield whose researches have focused primarily on connectivity within the wealthy West. As important, from the perspective of this special issue, we found the accounts provided by other contributors of changing communication practices within South Africa, Malaysia, Mexico and the Balkans. There is great variation in patterns and the reader will no doubt have had to work along with the authors to encompass the complexities of counter-coordination in both its more developed and its emerging forms, but the journey is worth the effort. The hyperlinks provided in the articles should be visited and weighed in the knowledge that sites are frequently changing and archiving practices which provide the stability of the printed world have yet to be widely adopted. Each article is a request to join a journey and its printed typeface is only one level of experience. We hope that, within this space of a special issue, we have provided sufficient stimulation to attract other scholars and activists to the recording, reviewing and relaying of counter-coordination.

Margaret Grieco, John Hogan, Miguel Martinez Lucio