The current crisis presents both challenges and opportunities for labour. On the one hand labour faces mass redundancies, increasing short time working and further casualisation. On the other, renewed debate has opened up about alternatives to neoliberalism. The acute challenges for labour presented by the crisis can best be met with a collective, coordinated and well informed response. The Global Labour Column aims to provide a forum in which labour movements and their allies around the world can connect, debate, and share knowledge and experiences. It is our hope that, by drawing on leading academic researchers and trade union leaders and activists, we will stimulate debate on union responses to the crisis and, more broadly, to the challenges of globalisation.

Articles will be short but with high quality and critical content. They will be free from academic or overly technical jargon. Pieces will be useful for union activists and labour researchers and should stimulate thought and debate. Contributions will include opinion pieces, journalistic summaries of academic papers, comments on government responses to the crisis, and commentary on unfolding struggles, discussions and debates within specific national contexts and by the global union movement.

The column, managed by the Corporate Strategy and Industrial Development (CSID) research programme at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, is part of the Global Labour University (GLU).

GLU is a network of Universities offering unique masters programmes to trade unionists around the world (Brazil, South Africa, India and Germany). GLU’s courses are jointly developed by universities and workers’ organisations and are aimed at students from trade union and social movement backgrounds in developed, developing and transition economies.

Nicolas Pons-Vignon and Phumzile Ncube are the editors of the Global Labour Column. They are assisted by a team of reviewers from the ILO, Wits university and beyond.
Harald Kroeck is responsible for the layout and posting of articles and is the webmaster of the Global Labour Column.


We thank the ILO Regional Office for Africa for its generous financial support.