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Abstract. Post-apartheid South Africa's turbulent industrial relations and experience of wider social protest movements mirror the challenges confronting industrial relations systems globally, suggesting how workers' representation could be reconfigured in the future. Traditional trade unions have so far failed to address the agenda of marginalization, inequality and poverty which might have enabled them to organize workers currently excluded from union membership. Meanwhile, globalization has been opening up opportunities for new forms of organization and institutional innovation. The outcome, the author argues, will be determined by how key actors in the world of work respond to the marginalized workers of the world.
In 1971, Robert W. Cox directed a project in the ILO's International Institute for Labour Studies (IILS) on "the Future of Industrial Relations", focusing on the neglect of the marginalized workers of the developing world. He argued that tripartite industrial relations was only one of many types of social relations in production. He identified 11 broad types, including also self-employment and subsistence farming (Cox, 1971; Cox and Harrod, 1972, pp. 5-10). His colleague Jeff Harrod made a similar point: the labour force of these developing countries bore no resemblance to the foundational concepts of the ILO, which was based on workers in industry and employed in agriculture (Harrod, 2008, p. 9).1
But, while the IILS was identifying the limits of tripartism, Ela Bhatt was making tentative steps to empower marginalized workers by forming Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) in India in 1972. It was what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called a "classification struggle", a struggle over how and who is to define what a worker is. Bhatt eventually won this battle when first the Indian trade union movement in 2007, and then the international trade union movement, accepted SEWA as a legitimate voice of labour. A crucial insight of Bhatt's was that the household was not simply the locus of reproduction; it was increasingly becoming a place of production, of income generation, as home work spread in the age of globalization.
I will look at the future of industrial relations through the eyes of the global South, beginning with the changing work order in post-apartheid South Africa. I suggest that the challenges South Africa faces are part of a global challenge to find...