Globalización, sindicatos y migración laboral: Viejos dilemas, nuevas oportunidades

Abstract

This essay addresses the complex and sometimes conflicted relations between trade unions and migrant workers. We ponder the challenges which migration represents for trade unions in the context of globalization and the changing panorama of the global system since the 1990s on the basis of Gramsci's dictum that «the old has died but the new has not yet been born». This sets the scene for an analysis of workers in the context of the processes of globalization and precarization, arguing that we are now moving beyond the categories of North and South in terms of the mutations of capitalism and their impact on the workers of the world. Finally, we examine the complexities of the ways in which workers are responding to those mutations and are therefore posing a very real challenge to the stable reproduction of capitalist dominance and the opportunities arising for a new multi-scalar global social unionism.