ABSTRACT
Workers are often projected as structurally defenceless against highly mobile and globally organized capital. At first sight, the relative weakness of mobility of labour in the face of highly adaptive and rapidly restructuring capital appears to put significant limits on possible labour strategies. Faced with the threat of technological unemployment, the fear of total capital flight along with the increasing pressure for ‘flexible’ labour markets, unions and labour movements all around the world have found themselves increasingly compelled to cooperate and cave in to growing business demands. The increasingly vocal arguments on the declining role of the states in shaping the global economy, the visible restructuring of the welfare state (the shift from the Keynesian welfare state to Schumpeterian workfare state, to use Jessop’s terminology) and the emergence of what came to be called ‘post-Westphalian’ governance structures all suggest that the states will no longer be able to carry out their usual distributive social policies (Jessop 1993).
