Without doubt, for the world’s workers, the globalization project has brought about a weakening of employment protections and a growing trend towards precarious work. On the one hand, we see multinational companies and their local firm competitors increasingly looking to “externalize” or subcontract labor as a means of lowering their wage costs and reducing the capacity for worker organization. On the other hand, we see national states clamoring to create more “cost competitive” labor markets, as a means of enticing foreign investment; in the process, already inadequate national systems of labor legislation are further hollowed out as a way of avoiding supposed market rigidities. Workers and labor unions, in the process, are left to delineate new strategies and forms of organization that can offer more guarantees and protections in the face of the capital and state assault on worker rights.

Meanwhile, discrimination in low-wage job markets has pushed female, indigenous, and other racial minority heads-of-households and their families into a dangerous circle of poverty, which often implicitly leads to further socio-political exclusion. Furthermore, the mounting scope and span of the informal economy and other forms of precarious employment has left increasing numbers of families separated from formal systems of social protection. Unstable, casual employment may in fact be considered the new norm for millions of people around the globe who work daily outside the reach of labor law, the safeguards of labor unions, the programs of non-governmental monitors, and the purview of academics concerned with workers’ welfare.

This symposium sought to address the multiple problems that face workers as a result of their exclusion from formal, steady, and dignified work. The aim of the event was to discuss past, present, and future potentials and examples which push for more stable and better remunerated employment and for novel and practical ways in which workers can and have effectively fought for their own empowerment, both at work and within the broader spaces of the polity. Topics for discussion included: The impact of racial, cultural, gender, and sexual discrimination on informal job arrangements and wider life possibilities; particular vulnerabilities facing migrant or immigrant laborers, including dubious legal, social, and economic status; and the power deferential between workers in the Global North and South given continuing tensions associated with the opportunities or scope available to national development plans.

The symposium grappled with the growing degree of worker insecurity in the contemporary global political economy. Participants were asked to consider how best to confront and overcome worker-absorbed risks, along with the precarious future affected individuals and their families face around the globe, through worker organization and policy reforms.