The title of this book, In Search of the Global Labor Market, implies both a question and a process. The question of what constitutes a global labour market is the starting point of a collective process in which various aspects of the subject are examined more closely. The volume presents the outcome of the discussions and exchange between an international and interdisciplinary group of researchers who met in residence at the Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung (Centre for Interdisciplinary Research, ZiF) at the University of Bielefeld, Germany, from October 2017 to July 2018. The theme of the project was “In Search of the Global Labour Market: Actors, Structures and Policies”, and it was organized around three core questions: What is labour? What are markets? What is global? It comes as no surprise that the book does not claim to deliver final and definitive answers, but rather illuminates the complexities of the questions and intends to stimulate further research. The book is dedicated to a co-editor of the volume, Thomas Welskopp, a distinguished German historian in the field of labour and social history and a driving force behind the project to set up the ZiF research group on border-crossing labour markets. Sadly, he passed away before publication.

The editors warn the reader in their introduction that: “The title of this book […] may be read as a provocation. Even the staunchest adherents to the pure neoliberal creed would probably concede that the plural ‘markets’ would be more accurate” (p. 2). The starting point of the project was the observation that global labour markets play a prominent role in historical and social science research, but that the underlying concept of what constitutes a global labour market had received little explicit attention to date. By putting global labour markets (plural!) centre stage, the volume wants to contribute to closing this research gap.

The book is organized in four parts, comprising fourteen studies of differing scope and interest. Each chapter is characterized by an extensive knowledge of the relevant academic literature and sources. All sixteen contributors are linked to academic institutions in Western Europe, including nine from Germany, three each from Switzerland and the UK, and one from the Netherlands. All these countries are on the receiving end of global labour migration. The participants in the project were aware of the limitations this entailed.

Part One follows the question: What is meant by labour exchanged in labour markets? It deals with the issue of what exactly is traded on global labour markets. Marcel van der Linden takes a global look at labour markets in history. He argues that the changing features of labour markets must be studied against the background of specific historical contexts. Both the emergence and demise of colonialism shaped the development of global labour markets, as did the more recent transnationalization of labour processes. From a historical perspective, labour markets are “constantly ‘messy’” and must be seen as “[…] power structures determining barriers for entry, accessibility of information, transactions, and outcomes” (p. 42). Thomas Welskopp focuses on wage labour as gainful employment and regards “free wage labour” not only as the prerequisite, but also as the key element of capitalism. Welskopp acknowledges that capitalism is opportunistic enough to assimilate slavery and prepared to profit from unfree labour along the value chain, but he insists that these forms of labour are not what drive capitalist productivity. In his “Reflections on Violence”, Richard Hyman looks at labour from a quite different angle. He argues that there was no binary divide between voluntary and involuntary, or free and unfree, labour. “Correspondingly, there are many varieties of violence and coercion” (p. 67). Among those varieties, he identifies not only prison labour, but also situations when cuts in social welfare or specific migration regimes force people to take up occupations they would have otherwise avoided. He worries whether forced labour might become the new normal if financialized global capitalism is not regulated. Alexandra Scheele discusses the role of gender in the making of global labour markets. She points to the interrelation between productive and reproductive labour in capitalist economies and the gendered division between both spheres (p. 96). Scheele argues that an analysis of global labour markets needs to include often unpaid or low-paid care work in private households and commodified public or private care services.

Part Two focuses on the market concept and its heuristic potential. Patrik Aspers argues that, although there are some clear differences between labour and other objects of trade in markets, there is no need to have a specific market theory for labour. Karen Shire discusses the contributions of market theory for the study of labour markets and concludes that labour is not a commodity like others: employment contracts differ from sales contracts, and the exchange of labour is not completed in the market. A theory of labour markets could also be instrumental to identify pathways to improving the standards of global labour (p. 128). Peter-Paul Bänziger looks at the coproduction of labour markets and nation states between 1850 and 2000. He is convinced that, “[…] even if the global level is gaining momentum, there is no doubt that labour markets are still mostly based on national institutions” (p. 142). Ursula Mense-Petermann and Helen Schwenken examine the analytical potential as well as the “blind spots” of different market concepts for the study of cross-border labour migration. For them, “[…] it becomes clear that the relationship between migration and labor markets is a recursive one, not an either- or, as has been dominant thinking in migration studies […]” (p. 157).

Part Three looks at the actors and practices that enable labour to cross borders. The first two contributions are built on empirical evidence from Germany. Anna Zaharieva analyses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) to explore the role of social networks for job search in Germany. She finds that referrals via social networks are more often used by less-educated workers, by males, and by workers in part-time jobs and small companies, and that the incidence of referral hiring is higher for immigrant workers compared to natives (p. 178). Mense-Petermann assumes in her contribution that truly global labour markets hardly exist and prefers the term transnational “[…] because most cross-border labor markets embrace workers competing for a job from only a very limited number of countries” (p. 184). She explores the making and reordering of a transnational labour market and the power relations between the different actors involved in a study of service contract work in the German meat industry. After the completion of her manuscript, high rates of infection among eastern European contract workers led the German government to prohibit both national and cross-border contract labour in the industry from 2021. Sigrid Quack considers, like Aspers and Van der Linden, that labour markets are politically and socially embedded. Instead of searching for a pre-given global labour market, she recommends studying the fluid transnational institutional assemblages emerging from the dynamics of institutionalization and deinstitutionalization across multiple territorial and regulatory scales (pp. 199–200). Arguing for a broadening of perspective in terms of actors and scales of regulation, she finally proposes “[…] to conceptually distinguish between transnational regulation of labor and transnational labor markets” (p. 211).

Part Four explores from different angles what is “global” in the labour market. Eleonore Kofman takes the example of the UK to illustrate how states continue to play a major role in the construction of labour markets through immigration policies. Kofman argues that these policies are developed not only in response to economic demands, but increasingly due to pressure for greater control, and even sometimes closure, from anti-immigrant populist and nationalist movements. After withdrawing from the European Union, the UK has tried, since 2021, to combine two parallel migrant labour markets, one based on the global scale and the other on the regional scale of the EU within a new single system. “Hence, the global is a potential field that may or may not be utilized” (p. 235). Rebecca Gumbrell-McCormick focuses on global institutions and governance, thereby pointing to the differences between “international” and “global”, whereby institutions are rarely truly global but mostly international, i.e. still referring to states. As the book is about labour markets and Gumbrell-McCormick is an industrial relations specialist, particular attention is given to the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the international and European employer associations and trade union confederations (unfortunately she misses the special case of the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF)). She summarizes that, “[…] the major international actors form a network of relationships, norms, rules, and regulations that provide the basis for the international industrial relations system” (p. 253). None of these international actors, however, enjoys a power or sense of legitimacy similar to that enjoyed by national actors. The section is closed by Martin Bühler and Tobias Werron, who examine what is global about global markets. They deal with global markets in general, taking the example of the global wheat trade in the late nineteenth century. They argue that the “globality” of markets is not “a matter of networks of local market actors but of a particular kind of global imagination created in public discourse” (p. 261). They propose to view “[…] global labor markets not just as global chains of production, transnational migration flows, outsourcing of labor or headhunting of specialists, but as triadic structures created in public discourse” (p. 276).

In their concluding remarks, the editors point out that the ZiF research group has sought to put global labour markets as a phenomenon sui generis centre stage while acknowledging that all members of the ZiF research group agreed that truly global labour markets, in the sense that workers compete for jobs and employers compete for workers, rarely exist on a planetary basis (p. 281). Or, as Kesselring and Shire in their introduction to Part Three put it: “One of the important insights of this collaborative volume is that global labor markets per se barely exist” (p. 166).

Not surprisingly, given the breadth of the topic and the regional composition of the research group, there are gaps and desiderata. The transcontinental labour markets of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, for example, are largely left out of the picture, as are the waves of migration connected to them. Nevertheless, the book offers a diverse bouquet of contributions that address the guiding questions of the research group – What is labour? What are markets? What is global? – from different angles and perspectives. Interested readers will not expect to agree with all the theses and conclusions offered, but they will be rewarded with a lot of material for further thought and research.