Wednesday, April 10 | Wasserstein Hall, Room 3007 | 12:15pm – 1:15pm ET
We’re excited to present the fourth and final talk in a semester-long series, Supply Chain Capitalism: Labor Solidarity Across Global Supply Chains. Chandan Kumar is a labor rights activist based in Pune, India. He is the organizing secretary for the Working Peoples’ Charter (WPC), an organizing, research, and advocacy network focused on the informal labor sector in more than thirteen Indian states. WPC members organizations include trade unions, NGOs, lawyers, academics, activists, and researchers.
The growing informality of the labor market has become a ‘blessing in disguise’ for a large number of companies, especially major corporations. As the world of work changes, so too do organizing efforts. It is imperative that trade unionism adapt to the changing nomenclature of the new world of work. The trade union movement has already been experiencing the difficulties of organizing in the post-liberalization era, but newer phenomena – global supply and value chains, platform economies, etc. – are more complex to comprehend. This talk argues that the workers’ movement must develop its capacity to utilize opportunities arising from the world of technology. Social media has become a major collectivizing agent in many circumstances of the recent labor movement. Such tools of social media should be strategically used to collectivizing and unionizing workers of the emerging sector of the knowledge economy. The trade union movement must think through how a new generation of organizers can harness traditional organizing methodologies such as tripartitism, social dialogue, etc. alongside new communication tools.
This series of talks is a joint effort of the Program on Law and Political Economy and the Center for Labor and a Just Economy. It will examine law’s role in structuring global supply chains. Across four installments, we will discuss how contemporary modes of supply, production, and capital ownership – or Supply Chain Capitalism – impact the distribution of power and resources between the global north and the global south and between capital and labor. We will pay particular attention to law’s role in enabling, sustaining or potentially disrupting these distributive and relational patterns.
All are welcome! For those who plan to join via the livestream:
Zoom links will be available on this page at least 24 hours before each session. Please see further event details below.
