Workers, Unions, and Global Capitalism - lessons from India

This book started life as a rather unorthodox thesis presented to the University of Amsterdam in 2006: unorthodox because it was based not on one or two years of fieldwork but on more than three decades of research conducted as a participant in the labor movement, mainly but not exclusively in Bombay, India. I then rewrote it as a book for Columbia University Press, but while the manuscript was waiting for approval, there were many new developments, including the global crisis of 2008. Fortunately, my main argument—that deglobalization was neither possible nor desirable but that the dominant neoliberal model of globalization was both unjust and unsustainable—was vindicated by the crisis and its aftermath. Hence there was no need to rewrite the main body of the book or to change my conclusions. However, a major update was necessary, and I waited until a year had passed and the situation had settled down somewhat before completing it.