ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses some of the aspects of globalization, an area where 'the rhetoric of the globalizers is wide of the mark'. It focuses on globalization's impacts on workers and labour organizations and their possible responses across a broad and diverse range of economies in the Asia Pacific. Views that globalization must produce a neoliberal response as the only possibility are similarly misplaced. Globalization is more contingent, with differential effects on, and responses from, states, economies, workers and organized labour. The role of labour, particularly its wages and costs in global capital's calculation of 'competitiveness', is not a simple issue. Globalization's impacts have produced problems for labour organization. Globalization will have impacts on states, economies, labour and work, although the exact nature and magnitude of these is less clear. Keith Abbott contended that globalization processes of integration may allow regional trade unions to transform.
