Why the Global Labor Movement is in Crisis

Abstract

Abstract One of the great paradoxes of the current era is that the world working class continues to grow, while at the same time many labor movements are experiencing a crisis. How can we explain this paradox? The global simultaneity of the crisis suggests that the failure of individual organizational leaderships is not the main cause, but that more general factors play an important role. The article argues and attemps to partly explain why the first wave of founding workers‘ organizations (mainly in the North, from the 1860s until the 1920s) was not repeated elsewhere after World War ii; and why many movements in the North declined since the 1980s.