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Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy
KIM MOODY, 1997
London: Verso Books
pp. vii + 310, $40.00
Illusions, of Opportunity: Employee Expectations and Workplace Inequality
SONIA OSPINA, 1996
Ithaca: ILR Press
pp. xiii + 214, $45.00
The two books under review are wildly different. Workers in a Lean World is a wide-ranging analysis of the global economy and the role of unions within it by an engaged, theoretically sophisticated labor journalist/activist. Illusions of Opportunity is a narrowly focused academic monograph that examines how employees in a single organization respond to the reality of workplace inequality. I cannot claim to have discovered a good reason for reviewing them together. Still, these two very different books do converge on the single, disturbing reality of inequality and growing uncertainty in the contemporary workplace.
In Workers in a Lean World, Kim Moody, director of Labor Notes, presents an iconoclastic view of the global economy. In a well-documented and largely persuasive analysis, Moody challenges the dominant view that globalization has created a single, unified world economy with a completely new set of dynamics. Rather than simple globalization, he sees the spread of capitalism to all comers of the globe, a process which has had both old and new consequences, all of which are uneven and contradictory. The spread of global capitalism has stimulated the emergence of three economic "regions" centering on the United States, Europe and Japan. Within these regions, traditional North/South inequalities have been preserved or even intensified; the North remains the site of most economic activity and remains firmly in charge of the production chains that reach into the impoverished South. Rejecting labor strategies based on the assumption that economic power has shifted away from the North, Moody urges labor to understand the dynamics of this new capitalist world economy. Capitalist competition has not been eliminated; on the contrary, it has been reshaped on a regional basis and intensified by the accelerating pace of technological change. The economy has become more, not less, centralized as mergers and acquisitions increase the control over production of major Northern employers. The stagnant or declining wages of workers in the North are not the simple result of capital mobility and the export of jobs; in fact, Moody shows...