Angela
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"Globalization of Labour and the Continuing Force of the Nation-State: Asian Nationalism, Citizenship and State-Orchestrated Labour Market Segmentation"
Stuart Rosewarne (Dept. of Economics, U. of Sydney, NSW, Australia)
The global orientation of the East Asian and Southeast Asian economies and particularly the increasing internationalisation of capital is generally held to have underpinned the sustained and rapid economic development of these economies. One school of economic thought, best exemplified by the World Bank, has contended that it has been the liberalisation of capital, initially commodity capital and subsequently industrial and money capital, that has provided the momentum for maintaining the pace of development, and this thesis has served to justify the push for further liberalisation of commodity and capital markets across Asia. This is an argument that has not gone unchallenged for many institutionalist and leftists scholars have stressed the continuing force of state intervention or direction, both in terms of securing a particular national accumulation programme as well as shaping the globalisation of the national economy. However, this more critical intervention is largely missing from the recent efforts among economists to document and conceptualise another aspect of the process of economies globalising, namely the increasing migration of labour. Evidence indicates an increasing mobility of labour, especially of overseas contract labour, across Asia, and the dominant explanation for this apparent internationalisation of labour markets is informed by the same neoclassical method that endorses the liberalisation of commodity and capital markets. Development, this perspective contends, impels the increasing mobility of labour, as labour shortages prompt employers to recruit overseas labour and employment opportunities encourage workers to migrate in search of higher paid work. Moreover, according to this thesis, it follows that the further liberalisation of labour markets will advance the economic welfare of labour in particular as well as underwrite continuing sustained development more generally (World Development Report 1995). The thesis appears to have won wide currency among many nation-states and the prominent international political economy institutions serving the Asia-Pacific region. This paper presents a critique of this perspective. It analyses the ever-increasing mobility of Asian labour and, especially since the 1980s, the increasing circulation of labour within Asia to highlight the concentration of overseas workers in the lowest paid and socially devalued occupations. Taking issue with the dominant vision that this globalisation of labour phenomenon represents a freeing up of labour markets, the paper locates the evident international labour market segmentation in the context of the continuing international force of the nation. Asian nationalism, in its variant forms, and the integral role of the different states in constituting the nation and defining citizenship, structures labour markets to overtly and covertly restrict the rights of both "documented" and "clandestine" migrant labour, engendering the emergence of international segmented labour markets. In considering this incipient and more pervasive commodification of international wage labour, the paper will explore the different ways in which migrant labour's under-class status is being resisted.