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Blackett, Adelle; Trebilcock, Anne --- "Conceptualizing transnational labour law" [2015] ELECD 1014; in Blackett, Adelle; Trebilcock, Anne (eds), "Research Handbook on Transnational Labour Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015) 3

Book Title: Research Handbook on Transnational Labour Law

Editor(s): Blackett, Adelle; Trebilcock, Anne

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781782549789

Section: Chapter 1

Section Title: Conceptualizing transnational labour law

Author(s): Blackett, Adelle; Trebilcock, Anne

Number of pages: 30

Abstract/Description:

The deliberately short and pithy chapters in this research handbook offer a unique and multifaceted lens through which to explore the texture of transnational labour law (TLL). For at least the past 30 years, TLL has emerged alongside struggles to understand and address the implications of a ‘polycentric’ globalization, for the implicit domestic labour law bargain. Some relevant changes include heightened global interdependency, technological innovation, labour migration, increasing informalization of work, and the persistence of poverty, discrimination and inequality along fault lines of historical marginalization. Today, thick webs of contractors structure global production chains, constructing yet obscuring links between workers in the global South who produce products they cannot afford to buy, and workers in the global North who both market and consume goods they no longer produce. The transnational enterprises through which markets operate are able to control the means of production, transform that control into power, and exercise it transnationally to compel workers to live and produce by their norms. Similarly complex networks of labour brokers recruit workers from an intricate range of regional peripheries, to provide a host of activities recharacterizedas services. They may work in actively informalized agricultural production, building construction or care reproduction servicing global cities, shaped in the light of – rather than in opposition to – a global and regional architecture structuring the provision of services transnationally. Such phenomena reflect and adapt a Westphalian notion of state sovereignty, and the highly differentiated rules governing the conditions of movement of products, services and capital.