ISSN: 1918-6711
The Global Labour Journal is an online, open access, academic journal that serves as a forum to capture the plentiful and diverse scholarly work emerging on labour activities worldwide, with the aim of understanding, recording, and promoting the transition of the labour movement to a new form of global unionism, and highlighting the ways labour activities are increasingly shaped by global forces.
The Global Labour Journal serves the labour studies community by accepting academic work on a wide variety of workers and worker-related issues. These range from single-country to comparative to international studies of workers and their organisations in the Global North and South. We are especially interested in receiving submissions from regions of the world that are often neglected in labour studies.
A key area of focus is the informal sector of labour, and the accompanying shift of focus away from the "traditional" workplace as well as "traditional" workers as the central locus of action. Other key areas of inquiry are migration, the transition from peasant agriculture to mass agriculture, and the impact of new multilateral institutions on global labour activities.
The Journal also accepts articles that represent the diversity of labour identities and emergent labour strategies, forms and organisation. This diversity includes responses to corporate restructuring, "traditional" modes of unionisation, labour service organisations, new social movements, works councils, sector-wide bargaining institutions, institutions that mediate conflict and political parties with links to labour. The Journal seeks to explore the role of globalisation in breaking down boundaries between the global/local and the public/private as they relate to labour activities.
The Journal does not espouse a particular political line, but welcomes a wide variety of approaches and analyses. Our aim is to provide a global forum for scholarly work on a comparative sociology of labour movements.
The Global Labour Journal is a multi-disciplinary journal. Submissions should speak to a wide audience. We welcome work from various academic disciplines and sub-disciplines including Anthropology, Area Studies, Cultural Studies, Development Studies, Economics, Gender Studies, Geography, Global Studies, History, Political Economy, Politics and International Relations and Sociology.
Similarly the Global Labour Journal welcomes both theoretical contributions and empirical analyses. Various methods and research techniques can be used, including case study, comparison, conjunctural analysis, discourse analysis, ethnography, historiography, quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis and sructural analysis.
Should you have any questions about the suitability of your manuscript for submission to the Global Labour Journal, please feel free to contact the Managing Editor.
The Journal works closely with its sister publication, the Global Labour Column, which is based at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. The Column covers much the same topics as the Journal, but in the form of shorter analyses, critical comments and opinion pieces. The Journal and the Column exchange the names and email addresses of potential authors on a regular basis. If we choose to pass your details on to the Column, they may or may not contact you and invite you to contribute an article. Please let us know if you do not want us to share your name and email with the Column.
The Global Labour Journal operates a rigorous double-blind review process, meaning that the identities of authors and reviewers are always concealed from one another. All submissions are read thoroughly by the editors to determine whether or not they should be sent for external review. If your paper is deemed unsuitable for the Journal, it will be returned to you without being sent to review.
Once it has been determined that a submission is suitable for publication, it will be assigned to two independent reviewers. Reviewers are chosen on the basis of their familiarity with the subject matter of your paper as well as their availability for completing the review within the allotted time.
We endeavour to complete the review process as quickly as possible but we are bound by the response times of our reviewers. We regret any delays that authors may experience during the course of the review process, as these are often out of our control.
The Global Labour Journal is published three times a year – in January, May and September.
This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. We do not charge subscription fees, nor do we charge authors fees to publish their articles.
Publication Ethics
The Global Labour Journal is an online, open access, academic journal that serves as a forum to capture the plentiful and diverse scholarly work emerging on labour activities worldwide. The Journal does not espouse a particular political line but welcomes a wide variety of approaches and analyses. Our aim is to provide a global forum for scholarly work on a comparative sociology of labour movements. Within this framework, it should be noted that the positions and opinions of the articles we publish are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Journal’s editors.
We expect all those involved in the publication process – authors, reviewers and editors – to adhere to professional and ethical standards of conduct in the whole spectrum of work, from initial research and writing, to reviewing and making decisions about publication. It is part and parcel of our rigorous, double-blind review process to check whether submitted manuscripts have been plagiarised, or whether they contain elements that amount to plagiarism. In sensitive cases, we check whether interview partners have been protected sufficiently by the authors of a submitted piece, for example through anonymisation.
Should the GLJ Editorial Board discover that there has been unethical behaviour at any stage of the process, we will take appropriate steps to correct the matter.
The Global Labour Journal is the official journal of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on Labour Movements (RC44) and is supported by the Center for Global Workers' Rights (CGWR) at Penn State University in State College, USA, and the Department of Business Economics, Health and Social Care (DEASS) at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI). It is co-hosted by the Global labour University (GLU) and the Society, Work and Politics Institute (SWOP) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Global Labour Journal, is an open access, fully peer reviewed online journal launched in January 2010. It serves as a forum to capture the plentiful and diverse scholarly work emerging on labour activities worldwide and highlight the ways that labour activities are increasingly shaped by global forces.
The Global Labour Journal is the official journal of the Research Committee on Labour Movements (RC44). At its inception, it was co-hosted by the Global Labour University, and was sponsored by the International Center for Development and Decent Work (Kassel, Germany), the Center for Global Workers’ Rights (Penn State University, United States) and the International Labour Organization (Geneva, Switzerland). The GLJ continues to be co-hosted by the Global Labour University, as well as the Sociology, Work and Politics Institute (SWOP) at the University of the Witwatersrand. Its present sponsors are the Center for Global Workers' Rights (CGWR) at Penn State University in the United States and the Department of Business Economics, Health and Social Care (DEASS) at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI).
The Global Labour Journal is a proudly open-access venue for research on global labour studies. The Journal needs support to continue its work and to preserve its open-access status. Your support will help keep important research and debates freely available to academics and labour activists throughout the world regardless of finances or institutional affiliation. Thank you!
