The Migration of Struggle

Abstract

Tracking the flow of outsourced work across borders and into the growing basin of precarious, non-unionized, and low-wage employment, this chapter looks at how the cybertariat is confronting communicative capitalism’s formidable powers of mobility. The chapter’s analysis of the relationship between the globalization of customer relations and the transnationalization of worker resistance opens with an overview of the trends shaping the transnational portion of the call centre industry, or what I refer to as global call centre capital. The “Calling for Change” campaign launched in 2008 by the upstart New Zealand union Unite in cooperation with the Australian National Union of Workers is a particularly compelling example of how capital flight can generate collective organization and conflicts in its wake. Crossing the Tasman Sea to pursue call centres outsourced from Australia, the campaign utilized a medley of tactics including brand tarnishing, picketing, wildcat, and even hunger strikes. The organizing arising at the other end of the outsourcing from Australia is especially significant, I argue, as its protagonists come from sectors of New Zealand’s workforce that are well outside those traditionally represented by the country’s labour movement, including women, teenagers, migrant workers, and indigenous populations. As such, the case not only offers insights into the feminization and racialization of the cybertariat, but also into its potential to animate a labour transnationalism that can produce a counter-force to the mobility of global capital’s most communicative sectors.