"The more worrying feature of the new global corporate structures is their capacity to devastate national labour markets by transferring their operations to cheaper locations overseas"
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What makes Jameson’s line land is its refusal to treat globalization as an abstract “integration” story. He zooms in on a very specific power: mobility. The “new global corporate structures” aren’t just bigger companies; they’re systems engineered to slip national constraints. The worry isn’t competition in the old sense, but a structural asymmetry where capital travels at near-zero friction while labor remains tied to place, law, language, and family. That imbalance is the engine of the sentence.
“Capacity to devastate” is doing moral and analytical work at once. It’s not “disrupt,” not “reshape,” not “pressure.” Devastate implies a landscape after the event: emptied factories, hollowed wages, whole regions redefined as “left behind.” Jameson’s intent is to name offshoring as a weaponized option embedded in corporate design, not an unfortunate side effect. “Transferring their operations” sounds bureaucratic, almost bloodless, which sharpens the subtext: decisions that read as routine in boardrooms register as calamity in labor markets.
The phrase “national labour markets” also signals the trap. Nations can still promise social contracts, worker protections, and industrial policy, but those tools assume the firm is domesticated by geography. Jameson is pointing at the historical moment when that assumption collapses: late Cold War and post-1980s neoliberal reordering, when deregulation, trade liberalization, and containerized logistics made relocation less exceptional and more like baseline strategy.
Underneath the warning sits a political diagnosis: democracies negotiate with employers who always have an exit. That threat disciplines wages, weakens unions, and recasts workers as costs to be optimized against the world.
“Capacity to devastate” is doing moral and analytical work at once. It’s not “disrupt,” not “reshape,” not “pressure.” Devastate implies a landscape after the event: emptied factories, hollowed wages, whole regions redefined as “left behind.” Jameson’s intent is to name offshoring as a weaponized option embedded in corporate design, not an unfortunate side effect. “Transferring their operations” sounds bureaucratic, almost bloodless, which sharpens the subtext: decisions that read as routine in boardrooms register as calamity in labor markets.
The phrase “national labour markets” also signals the trap. Nations can still promise social contracts, worker protections, and industrial policy, but those tools assume the firm is domesticated by geography. Jameson is pointing at the historical moment when that assumption collapses: late Cold War and post-1980s neoliberal reordering, when deregulation, trade liberalization, and containerized logistics made relocation less exceptional and more like baseline strategy.
Underneath the warning sits a political diagnosis: democracies negotiate with employers who always have an exit. That threat disciplines wages, weakens unions, and recasts workers as costs to be optimized against the world.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work |
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