Constructing Workers: Working-Class Formation under Neoliberalism

Abstract

This introduction to “Constructing Workers” places the contributions to the special issue in the context of a review of central themes in a broader literature on the definition of workers, their public identities, and their rights. This literature has developed over the past 30 years in sociology and, especially, in social and labor history. At the same time, a more recent literature has emerged, most clearly in the USA, but also in other national settings, on the changing role of labor unions and other types of labor organization in an increasingly global economy. The two sets of scholarship are growing closer together and addressing importantly related themes, relevant both to more incisive sociological and historical understanding of the modes of labor organizing and regulation and to contemporary efforts to combat neoliberal restructuring of labor and class relations.