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At its core, Thom Workman's thesis is simple: labour is a major cost for businesses of all kinds, and thus an impediment to profits. As such, "transnational capital" seeks constantly to lower the cost of labour; when they do this by breaking down "trade barriers" to gain access to cheap labour or invoke international competitiveness to roll back wages, the process is called globalization. In Social Torment, Thom Workman starts by outlining the history of this shift from the "class compromise" of the twentieth century to the newly invigorated attacks on unions and the working class. And then he does something interesting; rather than spinning together a series of anecdotes to support his case, Workman looks at the numbers.