Baba Aye's

1. Introduction The last thirty years have witnessed the rise and (arguably, since last year) fall of neoliberalism as an ideology and modus operandi of advanced capitalism. These have also been the decades of contemporary globalization as a phenomenon that is intertwined with and quite often is taken as being synonymous with neo-liberalization –often considered as driven by American hegemonism- (cp: Laclau and Mouffe, 2001; Held and McGrew, 2000; Agnew, 2005) . The two seemingly self-reinforcing concepts and their practices have had significant impact on critical thought and praxis with a wide range of literature, some sceptical, some supporting and some advancing transformative views on globalization (cp. Held and McGrew, 2000), neoliberalism and neoliberal globalization. This is not surprising; almost unimaginable quanta of wealth fictitious and real have been generated in the last thirty years. Yet, never before has such magnitude of inequalities which have been recorded in the sam

Neoliberal Globalization and the Informalization of Work; a Critical Class Analysis of Trade Union Strategies in Nigeria and South Africa Baba Aiyelabola Introduction Thatcher’s emergence in 1979 signalled the beginning of ‘the globalization of neoliberalism’, a hegemonic project of the transnational capitalist class (Sklair, 2001) which has had dire consequences for the working class globally and within countries. We shall utilize a neo-Gramscian perspective for our class analysis of the impact of this neoliberal counterrevolution with its TINA mantra which started in 1973 as “a war” in Chile. This war of a “few winners” against the ever more “precarious popular classes” (Amin, 2007) has entailed the restructuring of work, work relations and the ‘forms of state’; in the interest of capital. Social and economic inequalities have risen like never before in human history, unemployment and under-employment in absolute terms have been on the rise. The “many losers” in the neoliber