Industrial Restructuring, Trade Union Strategy, and Social Transformation in Australia and Asia

The predicament confronting labour movements at the turn of a new century has been interpreted as a structural and an organizational-strategic challenge of such magnitude that unions, and more generally the power of organized labour, are thought likely to be superseded in a ’network’ society (Castells 1997: 354). This sense of pessimism as to the limited agency and declining bargaining power of workers, especially for those engaged in factory or ‘routine’ forms of work, is also evident in Bauman’s discussion of the implications of ‘liquid modernity’. Tied as they are to the ground, barred from moving, or arrested if they move at the first of the heavily guarded border posts, they are in a position a priori inferior to the capital which moves around freely. Capital is increasingly global; they, however, stay local. For that reason they are exposed, armless, to the inscrutable whims of mysterious ‘investors’ and ‘shareholders’, and even more bewildering ‘market forces’, ‘terms of trade’ and ‘demands of competition’. Whatever they gain today may be taken away tomorrow without warning. They cannot win. Neither — being the rational persons they are or struggle to be — are they willing to risk the fight (Bauman 2000: 166–167). Global capital mobility is intertwined with ceaseless corporate restruc-turing and occurs at multiple geographic scales.