Volume 2 No 1 of Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation is entitled 'Break or Weld? Trade Union Responses to Global Value Chain Restructuring' and focuses on trade union responses to globalisation. Most trade unions evolved to negotiate with single employers in an single country. Now, multiple sites around the world are linked to each other in complex value chains and global employers are more likely to answer to their shareholders than to national institutions. In this new context, what is the furutre for traditional forms of organisation and representation? Does the defence of local...

Call centres illustrate the consequences of globalisation for labour perhaps more clearly than any other form of employment. Call-centre workers sit at the interface between the global and the local, having to transcend the limitations of local time zones, cultures and speech patterns. They are also at the interface between companies and their customers, having to absorb the impact of anger, incomprehension, confusion and racist abuse whilst still meeting exacting productivity targets and staying calm and friendly. Finally, they take the brunt of the conflict at the contested interface...

When the irresistible force of globalisation meets the immovable object of specific national labour laws, industrial relations and working practices, as the song goes, 'something's gotta give'. This special issue of WorkOrganisation, Labour and Globalisation explores what 'gives' when work is reshaped in this encounter. Pummelled between the rock of global market forces on the one hand and national laws, traditions and cultures on the other, how is work being reshaped in different industries and countries and what price is being paid by workers in their daily lives? How are national policies...

Passing the buck is Volume 5 No 1 of the international interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal, Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation. Casual labour is often thought of as a hangover from the bad old days, when agricultural workers were hired by the day, homeworkers slaved hidden away in back rooms and street vendors eked out a living in urban slums. Modernisation, new technology, industrialisation and economic development, it might be thought, are doing away with such primitive conditions. Unfortunately, as this volume shows, this is far from being the case. In fact the logic of...

Volume 6 Number 1 of the international interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal 'Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation focuses on the gender in the international division of labour. The new global division of labour is bringing about huge changes in who does what work, how, when and where. But this dynamic new landscape is shaped by some very old forces. The gender division of labour in the home still, directly or indirectly, plays a dominant role in determining the very different experiences of women and men in this new global labour market, although it faces multiple new contradictions...

Can knowledge workers of the world unite? This question becomes ever more urgent as telecommunications technology shrinks the world and as more and more work is based on creating, processing and transporting information. Communications, information and cultural workers hold together the new global value chains that characterise more and more industries. But, with employers responding to global crisis by exerting ever-greater pressure on wages and working conditions, will these workers be able to overcome national and language differences and the divisions between occupational groups to unite...

It is often argued that 'digital labour' or 'virtual work' is fundamentally different from traditional forms of labour carried out offline, with 'work' and 'play' collapsed together to become 'playbour' and new forms of value creation that do not fit traditional economic models. But however 'immaterial' their labour processes, workers still have bodies that become exhausted and require feeding and housing in the 'real' economy. Drawing on both theoretical and empirical research, this collection takes a critical look at how online work can be theorised and categorised (including revisiting...

Supply chains are becoming ever more tightly integrated as corporations vie with each other to bring their products to global markets before they lose their value through replication or obsolescence. This restructuring of supply chains involves the interaction of a range of different public and private, local and global actors, including companies