Democracy
At the level of society, where workers are citizens and unions collective societal actors, the globalizing of capital strategies presents a problem of democratic control. Today’s societies have increasingly become dependent on private capital to provide them with jobs and income, and this dependency is greater in the poorer countries. At the same time, while societies are organized on a national basis, capital has a global outlook and moves with increased ease across borders to the location most favourable to its global strategies. To a certain extent, governments hide behind the mantra of the invisible hands of global capital and pretend to be powerless vis-à-vis capital. This has repercussions related to democracy, some of which we will briefly expose here (for a more detailed discussion, see Crouch in this issue).