Business Books: Study of trade unions draws uncomfortable parallels with today, writes David Begg.

In the period between July and September 1818 the Lancashire region of Britain was gripped by strikes. Prominent among them were the Spinners, on whose behalf Robert Peel had been campaigning for an 11-hour day.

Campaigning for reduced working hours finds a topical resonance with trade union activity in our own country today.

Paul Mason will be known to most as the business and industry correspondent with BBC's Newsnight. In Live Working or Die Fighting, Mason's thesis is that globalisation has created a wholly new working class in the developing world, a class now reliving stories first played out in Europe and the US over 100 years ago.

Mason details the history of the trade union movement from its early years, until its near destruction by fascism in the 1930s. He draws parallels between epoch-making events in history and the experience of workers today: miners in Bolivia; Somalis cleaning investment banks in London's Canary Wharf; Chinese workers making batteries for mobile phones.

The parallels are more uncomfortable than most would like to admit. Here is a description of conditions in textile factories in England, in 1818: "Factory workers became visibly bent and shrunken. The most common industrial diseases were crippled knees, failing eyesight and a curvature of the spine; many had limbs torn off by the machines.

"In many factories there was a pervasive subculture of violence, rape and casual sex, 'a licentiousness', one reformer observed, 'capable of corrupting the whole body of society like an insidious disease, which eludes observation, yet is fatal in its effects'."

Almost 190 years later, we hear the story of Chinese manufacturing worker, Li Qui-Bing, who was working for 12 hours without a break making plastic flowers, when a machine sliced his leg off below the knee.

In its documentary excellence, Mason's book clearly echoes the work of Barbara Ehrenreich in Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America: "The factory hadn't bought insurance for us. We took the factory to the law courts, but they refused to hear the case. We had to go to the Labour Bureau for arbitration, but the Labour Bureau refused to hear us. We were kicked around all over the place, like a football. Nobody looked after us".

The workers who first organised against this abuse were cut down by the swords and guns of the Hussars in the 1819 Peterloo massacre. Today, death squads in Colombia do similar work, while organising in China can result in a 12-year sentence, something to bear in mind when we hear the Chinese economic miracle being extolled.

Mason believes that what happened in Manchester in 1819 was a literal microcosm of the movement to come: grassroots trade unionism; a workers' militia (albeit without guns); the general strike; the world-within-a-world of the socialist education club and, above all, delegate structures designed to combat bureaucracy.

The negatives were foreshadowed too: orators who mesmerised workers with calls to action but refused to act themselves; money embezzled in the midst of a strike; the brutality of skilled Spinners towards unskilled women and children.

He contends that the struggle against fascism exhausted the labour movement and, more particularly, the postwar accommodation with capitalism robbed it of its radical impulse.

Thus, it was easy prey for Thatcher and Reagan when they moved to deconstruct that settlement.

But dissatisfaction with globalisation has brought forth strong opposition, as seen in the "Battle of Seattle", in 1999. What made that occasion historic was the involvement of organised labour. Thus, the lesson for modern day anti-capitalists is that what they are doing is nothing new and they should look to and learn from the history of the labour movement.

It is worth reflecting, as Mason acknowledges, that this is not the first era of globalisation, which began in 1870 and ended in the bloodied trenches of the first World War. In the aftermath, liberalism dominated but its failure paved the way for the rise of fascism and, ultimately, a second world conflict.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a resurgent liberalism trumpeted total victory and the end of history, although a chastened Francis Fukuyama would later retract his intellectually childish claim. Ultimately, history cautions that some way must be found to harness globalisation to the needs of humanity.

Trade unions are the only actors in the market system whose function is redistribution, a factor somewhat overlooked by the author. Even those who believe in a capitalism "red in tooth and claw" must realise that its inherent inequality requires a foil, that its very operation summons one into being. Witness Irish Ferries and the 160,000 people who took to the streets on December 9th, 2005.

The author also overlooks the potential of "political Islam" to act as a destabilising force for globalisation. After all, the former holds to a set of values more coherent than those of the anti-globalisation movement and finds much of what constitutes modern capitalism wholly repugnant.

The book opens with a story of a Liverpool docker furtively burying a time capsule beneath where the foundation stone of Liverpool Cathedral is to be laid the next day. It is the summer of 1904 and the capsule contains labour publications and artefacts.

The young docker is Jim Larkin and his subsequent role in building trade unionism in Ireland receives honourable mention here. It is an appropriate tribute on the 100th anniversary of the great strike he organised in Belfast, which united in common cause Catholic, Protestant, dissenter and even the police.

Mason clearly has deep roots in the labour movement. He grew up in Leigh, an English coal and cotton town. He laments that 20 years of globalisation have shorn away most of what was permanent and certain there: "The miners' union was destroyed, manufacturing has moved to China, and if you look for union activists now you will find them mainly in education and local government. The labour market in which workers from Leigh compete starts at their doorsteps and ends at a bus station in Bangalore or a slum in Shenzhen."

This book is a salutary reminder that, despite the glitz of modernity, there persists an enduring struggle between capital and labour from which no generation or nationality is exempt.

David Begg is general secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions.

Live Working or Die Fighting By Paul Mason. Harvill Secker €19.50