This introductory article to the special issue surveys the field of international labour studies and examines the key areas of growth over the past decade. It locates three core areas of the new literature: 1) the social construction of new labour forces across an expanding international division of labour; 2) the self-organising potential of workers, particularly within nontraditional sectors; and 3) the possibilities for transborder labour movements to help address the asymmetrical power relationships between globalised capital and localised labour. It argues that international labour studies as a field needs to make explicit its challenge to mainstream political economy by detailing how struggles over the construction, reproduction, utilisation and restructuring of labour forces are the contested social foundations upon which the global economy stands.

As the world currently stares into the abyss of a global recession, a new shake-up of the international division of labour is beginning to take place. Stung by a rapid shift in global demand, numerous light-manufacturing plants across China’s ‘sunbelt’export zone—from toy factories to shoes and electronics—have been closing down in large numbers. 1 The immediate effect has been to throw tens of thousands of workers into unemployment, leaving them vainly searching for jobs in a region that, over the past two decades, was synonymous with the extraordinary expansion of export industries forged on the backs of a huge migrant labour force. At present, however, the dynamic forces of creative destruction are casting an altogether different light upon the region’s human landscape. Industrial capital has reacted to overproduction, falling demand, rising wages, mounting worker activism, a new labour code and shifts in currency values by liquidating, merging or moving. 2 Thousands of discarded migrant workers now clog up railway stations as they attempt to return to the countryside where they face the structural violence of a chronic shortage of jobs. In a region that has seen growing levels of worker protests over the past decade, the spectre of social