Dr. S.A Brandford
In the twentieth century, the right to work was largely a domestic question. It was mediated by national labour laws, bounded by borders, and tied tightly to citizenship. In the twenty-first century, that settlement is breaking down. Digital technologies have dislocated work from place, while states remain stubbornly territorial. The result is a growing tension between global careers and national power, one that increasingly defines who gets to work, where, and on what terms.
This tension is no longer abstract. It shapes the lives of software engineers in Lagos working for firms in California, content moderators in Manila servicing platforms headquartered in Dublin, fintech analysts in Singapore collaborating with teams in London, and remote researchers in Nairobi publishing with institutions in Canada. The digital age has globalised opportunity but not rights.
From National Labour to Global Work
Classical political economy assumed a relatively stable alignment between territory, labour, and authority. States regulated work; firms employed workers; borders filtered movement. Citizenship was the legal key that unlocked access to labour markets and social protection. This logic is embedded in welfare states across Europe and North America and, in different forms, in postcolonial labour regimes across Africa and Asia.
Digitalisation has disrupted this alignment. Cloud computing, collaborative platforms, artificial intelligence, and high-speed connectivity have enabled productive work to occur across borders in real time. A growing share of value creation is now detached from physical presence. Yet the legal architecture governing work visas, work permits, tax regimes, professional licensing remains overwhelmingly national.
This asymmetry produces a paradox: work is global, but rights are local.
Citizenship as Gatekeeper in a Borderless Economy
Despite narratives of a “flat world,” states have not relinquished control. On the contrary, citizenship and migration regimes have become more selective, not less. High-skilled visas in the United States, the European Union, Canada, and parts of Asia are framed as instruments of national competitiveness, not global justice. They privilege certain credentials, passports, and institutional affiliations while excluding others.
This selective openness reinforces global hierarchies. A data scientist from Berlin or Toronto often encounters fewer barriers than an equally skilled counterpart from Lagos or Dhaka. The difference is not competence, but citizenship. As political theorists such as T.H. Marshall and later scholars of global justice have argued, citizenship functions as a form of inherited advantage an accident of birth that structures life chances in profound ways.
In the digital economy, this inherited advantage now determines who can move physically, who must remain virtual, and who is rendered invisible altogether.
Platform Capitalism and the New Precarity
Digital platforms complicate the picture further. Freelance marketplaces, ride-hailing apps, content platforms, and remote work hubs promise borderless opportunity. In practice, they often reproduce old inequalities in new forms.
Workers in Nigeria, the Philippines, and parts of Eastern Europe compete in global labour pools where wages are arbitraged downward, protections are minimal, and accountability is diffuse. Algorithms, not labour inspectors, govern access to work. Contracts are replaced by “terms of service.” Disputes are resolved by automated systems with no meaningful appeal.
This is not simply a market failure; it is a governance gap. States tax digital labour inconsistently, protect it unevenly, and regulate it hesitantly. Multinational platforms operate transnationally, while workers bear the risks individually. The right to work exists de facto, but without the institutional guarantees that historically gave it substance.
State Power Is Not Disappearing, It Is Being Reconfigured
It is tempting to conclude that states are losing relevance. This would be misleading. State power has not vanished; it has become more strategic and, in some cases, more exclusionary.
Governments now compete for “global talent” while externalising precarity to those who remain outside their borders. Digital nomad visas, for example, welcome remote workers provided they already earn in strong currencies and pose little fiscal or political burden. Meanwhile, migrants seeking physical access to labour markets face heightened scrutiny and politicised resistance.
What we are witnessing is not the erosion of state power, but its recalibration. States are repositioning themselves as gatekeepers of mobility, regulators of data, and arbiters of belonging in a digital world they do not fully control.
Towards a Global Right to Work?
The idea of a global right to work may sound utopian, but it is not without precedent. International labour standards, human rights conventions, and transnational professional norms already exist. What is missing is enforcement capacity and political will.
A credible global framework would require at least three shifts:
Decoupling work from physical presence in legal and tax regimes, recognising remote labour as legitimate economic participation rather than regulatory anomaly.
Extending baseline protections fair pay, dispute resolution, data rights to digital workers regardless of nationality.
Reimagining citizenship and mobility, not as zero-sum privileges, but as shared governance challenges in an interconnected economy.
These are not purely moral arguments. They are pragmatic responses to a world in which value creation is global, but instability is also global.
Why This Matters for the Global South and the Global North
For countries like Nigeria, India, and the Philippines, global digital work represents both opportunity and risk. It can bypass domestic labour constraints and create new middle classes, but it can also entrench dependency on external markets and platforms.
For the United States, Europe, and advanced Asian economies, restrictive approaches may offer short-term political comfort but risk long-term innovation loss. Talent does not disappear when excluded; it reorganises elsewhere.
In this sense, the right to work globally is not a charity claim by the periphery. It is a structural question about how power, productivity, and legitimacy are organised in the digital age.
Conclusion: Work Without Borders, Rights Without Illusions
The digital age has made one thing clear: borders are no longer the primary limit to work, but they remain the primary limit to rights. Careers are global; citizenship is not. States still matter, but they operate in a transformed landscape where exclusion carries higher economic and ethical costs.
The challenge ahead is not to abolish state power, but to align it with the realities of global work. Until then, the right to work globally will remain partial, uneven, and contested available to some as privilege, to others only as precarious opportunity.
At NextGen Spectrum, this is the conversation that matters: not technology alone, but the political architecture that determines who benefits from it, who is left out, and who gets to decide.
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