Class Formation: Transnational Relationships and Modes of Resistance in the Globalized Labor Process

• In Event: 345 - Section on Political Economy of the World-System Paper Session. Global Class Relations and the New "Precariate"

Abstract

Millions of workers worldwide are subject in their working lives to the logics that enable global commodity chains. While it is easy to lose the trees for the forest in terms of seeing the class relations that obtain in specific workplaces, it is precisely in those individual moments of production that general, global class relations emerge. This paper examines transnational class formation as observed in the context of warehouses and distribution centers, and extends the findings out (Burawoy 1998) to global capitalist social life in general. First, it analyzes evidence pertaining to relationships between workers and capital arising from management’s direction of transnational labor processes. Next, it assesses relationships between and among workers that form as result of activity associated with geographically dispersed labor processes, and material and cultural elements that present throughout work-life on the globally integrated shop floor. Finally, the paper concludes with an analysis of social outcomes related to work in these contexts: class formation, resistance, and organizational responses to transnational capital.

Author

• Jason Y. Struna, University of California-Riverside