HERE, THE JOURNALIST Paul Mason celebrates the forgotten players in the history of the postindustrial working class and the global labour movement that began almost 200 years ago. The book (sub-titled How the Working Class Went Global) is perfectly timed, arriving in the baby years of a new millennium, with “globalisation” the longest word on the lips of many.

Mason, a BBC business correspondent, hopes to reach out and touch the 21st-century equivalent of those whose blood, sweat and tears were spilt in bringing about change. Their modern heirs are those activists who took to the streets of Seattle, Genoa and elsewhere to rail against globalisation and those on the factory floors, working for the monolithic corporations created by globalisation.

What jars, from the outset, is the comparison between the pioneers of trade unionism and organised working-class labour, and “the kids in combat trousers protesting outside a Nike store”. Most of these “kids” can be called upon to attach themselves to any march as long as its enemy is Bush, Blair or Ronnie McDonald. In the antiglobalisation marches in Britain, when the balaclava is lifted from the demonstrator smashing the golden arch it invariably reveals an old boy of Eton or a defector from the City.

Such characters existed throughout the history of the labour movement, usually as the middle-class anarchists and hardline revolutionaries who hampered the pragmatic representatives of the proletariat, determined to improve working conditions and wages.

Thankfully, it is these latter with whom Mason largely concerns himself throughout Live Working or Die Fighting. And he does suggest that Seattle was a departure from the usual demonstration of this nature: “[But] what ensured the Seattle demonstration would shape history was the presence of organised labour. Whatever else you can say about a steel-worker from Pittsburgh, you cannot truthfully describe him as a hand-wringing liberal, especially when he is steaming into a line of riot cops.”

The author has a family link to the subject: from a working-class Manchester background, he is the son of a factory worker who, unusually, was a homeowner at the time of Mason’s birth in 1960. This connection is not expanded upon until the after-word, but it makes for the most interesting writing.

Mason sometimes sounds like a young radical from another era hectoring someone at the student bar, pausing only to run his tongue along a Rizla’s edge. Once that particular tone passes, the book morphs into something significant. The research is exhaustive, with contemporary interviews and quotes from the speeches of ordinary 19th-century men and women.

The material oscillates across time and space, making comparisons between the predicament of, say, a Nigerian worker in a slum in Amukoko in 2005 – two miles from a railway that takes you past the brand names of Guinness, Dunlop and Dulux – and workers in Paris in 1867. The main distinction between then and now and here and there is the extent to which modern communications have made the plight of some of the workforce in the developing world known internationally. This darting between recent events and the historical begins to grate as it is applied to every chapter. And some of the comparisons are slightly laboured.

As a Londoner with some connection to dockland history, the events of 1889 documented here are of interest to me: Tom Mann, and a cast of thousands, altered the course of working-class history in the first step towards “creating mass trade unions”. That’s not to say that change wasn’t in the air; parliamentarians, recognising that universal suffrage was inevitable, began, from the fag end of the 19th century, to talk up reform, as they would soon need the vote of the masses to stay in power.

At Canary Wharf, Mason suggests that the workforce of, largely, migrant cleaners is organising itself in the spirit of the dockers who once laboured there. Yet these employees – from Nigeria, Ghana, Somalia – are divided by tensions that exist among them. In the West, in the modern age, diversity in the workplace doesn’t necessarily equal unity and solidarity.

Harvill Secker, £12.99; 320pp £11.69 (free p&p) 0870 1608080 timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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