Although the golden era of capitalism was primarily national, the last decade of the twentieth century saw a greatly increased transnationalization of economic, political, social and cultural relations. This led to a new era of globalization, which has had a decisive impact on workers worldwide, although much of the flourishing globalization literature seems to ignore the role of workers on the whole. This chapter seeks not only to introduce some of the major parameters of this new great transformation but also to explore its limits and contradictions from a labour perspective. A fundamental thesis is that workers and the workers’ movement are, and will become, increasingly central to the new globalizing capitalist order. Capitalism is being reconstructed but so too are the world of work and the organizations of workers, as I show in the section on the new global labour force. I examine in particular the increased flexibility and feminization of this new global labour force. The final section on the global social movements explores the extent to which globalization has created the conditions for a new social movement for workers worldwide.

A new great transformation

Globalization, whether viewed as a panacea for the new century or demonized as the source of all our evils, had become the new “common sense” for our era from around 2000. In a relatively short period of time the term “globalization” spread across academic disciplines, spawned multiple research centres and generated a vigorous counter-movement. It is a most labile term, fluid and slippery in its meaning and its political implications. As a starting point we could do worse than Paul Drache’s (only slightly tongue-in-cheek) conclusion that “[t]he simple truth is that one-third of the globalization narrative is over-sold, one-third we do not understand because it is a process unfolding and one-third is radically new” (Drache 1999: 7). Globalization appeared as a new grand meta-narrative, just as we were being told that the meta-narratives of labour and socialism were dead. It is presented in much of the academic literature – not to mention more popular outlets – as a homogeneous, irreversible and all-encompassing process.