Transnational Trade Unionism

Building Union Power

Peter Fairbrother, Christian Lévesque, Marc-Antonin Hennebert, Peter Fairbrother, Christian Lévesque, Marc-Antonin Hennebert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136681912
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Transnational trade union action has expanded significantly over the last few decades and has taken a variety of shapes and trajectories. This book is concerned with understanding the spatial extension of trade union action, and in particular the development of new forms of collective mobilization, network-building, and forms of regulation that bridge local and transnational issues.

Through the work of leading international specialists, this collection of essays examines the process and dynamic of transnational trade union action and provides analytical and conceptual tools to understand these developments. The research presented here emphasizes that the direction of transnational solidarity remains contested, subject to experimentation and negotiation, and includes studies of often overlooked developments in transition and developing countries with original analyses from the European Union and NAFTA areas. Providing a fresh examination of transnational solidarity, this volume offers neither a romantic or overly optimistic narrative of a borderless unionism, nor does it fall into a fatalistic or pessimistic account of international union solidarity. Through original research conducted at different levels, this book disentangles the processes and dynamics of institution building and challenges the conventional national based forms of unionism that prevailed in the latter half of the twentieth century.

1

Understanding Transnational Trade Unionism

Peter Fairbrother, Christian Lévesque and Marc-Antonin Hennebert

Transnational trade unionism is becoming increasingly important for workers around the world. Transnational trade union organisation and action, a form of trade unionism defined by cross-border activity and focus, has become features of contemporary employment and work over the past decades. These types of trade unionism take a range of forms and have followed a number of distinct trajectories. The context for these developments is the changing political economy of work and employment. Multinational corporations have acquired significance in relation to finance, production and trade relations. Concurrently, and as part of corporate development, governments have increasingly embraced a neo-liberal agenda, with decisive implications for union embeddedness within the international political economy (Cramme and Diamond 2009). Of equal note, the global unions, the international confederations such as the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and the global union federations (GUFs) have been transformed from relatively remote bodies to more active and engaged global trade unions (Croucher and Cotton 2009). This book is concerned with understanding these emerging forms of trade unionism, in particular the development of new forms of collective mobilisation, network-building and regulation that bridge local and transnational issues via trade unions.

There has been much debate about trade unions, with unions having been depicted as ‘old social movements’ (Castells 1996; Touraine 1982). The argument presented in this book is that the distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ is rather opaque and loses sight of the ways in which trade unions have resources and capacities to renew themselves, often in uneven and contested ways. Thus, we claim that unions retain relevance in the changing international political economy as collective organisations able to articulate the class interests of members. Unions derive their legitimacy from such representation and the expression of their interests (Offe and Wiesenthal 1980; Dufour and Hege 2010). Our argument is that unions can build a counter legitimacy to the apparent legitimacy of corporations and states to secure their bottom line in terms of profit and economic gain. Trade unions, thus, have a transformative capacity that may be unevenly realised, and is certainly contested, both by employers and states as well as within trade unions. Nonetheless, transnational unionism opens up possibilities, and this book explores the conditions for them.

A second debate focuses on unions within a global world, with much analysis raising varied questions about unions’ capacities to deal with these changes. One strand of writing focuses on forms of organisation, and union resources and capacities, to address the impacts of globalisation (Bronfenbrenner 2007; Cohen 2006; Lévesque and Murray 2010). One dimension of this debate examines the external and contextual forces that may shape the way unions have begun to organise and operate transnationally, at the workplace and at other levels. Nonetheless, as frequently noted, unions remain bound by views that unions are nation-state based, even when cross-border alliances are in place (Tattersall 2007; Myconos 2005). From the other side of the relationship, there have been many recent changes in the ways that trade unionism has developed internationally. Over the last few decades, international union bodies, such as the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), the International Trade Secretariats (ITSs) and other organisations have reorganised and relocated themselves to address the changes in process (Gumbrell-McCormick 2000; Windmuller 1980). These developments have also involved re-evaluating relations with either national union confederations or individual unions. These various features of transnational unionism are also taken up in this book.

Trade unions are part of a changing set of international class relations, defined by the way in which capitalist firms operate internationally as part of increasingly complex global value chains, linking production and consumption across territories and regions and linking north and south, often in heterogeneous ways, as part of the profit-maximising strategies of firms (Coe et al. 2007). These relations are often underwritten and shaped by government policy at state levels as well as in relation to international forms of regulation. International agencies, such as the International Monetary Fund, have pushed for the implementation of neo-liberal policies, thereby contributing to a reduction of the relative autonomy of nation states. This process not only affects developing countries, but also developed countries, as underscored by the successive Greek crises. In these circumstances, trade unions both seek to shape and influence these complex relations and, in turn, are moulded by them. In short, trade unions seek to realise their interests in relation to their class location in this emerging world, which in turn requires that workers have the capacity to realise their interests and concerns (Harvey 2000; Wright 2000).

Transnational Trade Unionism

Over the last two decades, there has been growing interest in transnational cooperation, labour internationalism, transnational labour solidarity and several related themes. These themes rest on an assumption that the national form of unionism can be refocused on an international level. This aspect has been well documented in union histories (Gumbrell-McCormick 2003) and has become a key focus in more recent contributions (e.g., Anner 2007).

A more focused definition draws attention to the importance of cooperation across borders. Greer and Hauptmeier (2008) define labour internationalism as:

spatial extension of trade unionism through the intensification of cooperation between trade unionists across countries using transnational tools and structures. (p. 77)

This focus on cooperation has been taken up by a number of scholars. Gordon and Turner (2000: 257), for example, consider that perception of interdependence is a precondition for transnational union cooperation, while Kay (2005) goes further and argues that labour internationalism is precisely:

a process of creating a transnational culture based on cooperative complementary identities, defined as a shared recognition of mutual interest coupled with a commitment to joint action. (p. 725)

However, several scholars have pointed to the difficulty of building complementary identities and commitment to joint action (Johns 1998; Gajewska 2009). This emphasis led Lillie and Martinez (2012) to assert that:

Trans- and—inter-national strategies can only be understood in the context of the interaction between unions’ embeddedness in national regulation, and globalizing production, resulting in transnational unionism consisting of a set of relationships between competing national players with competing visions of the ‘global’ within global production structures. (p. 75)

While ‘spatial extension’ appears to be a defining feature of transnational trade unionism, it is also a place for cooperation between trade unions as well as a site of potential conflict and competition.

A complementary range of studies has focused on various forms of international activity, solidarity and engagement involving workers and activists from civil society, including trade unionists. This focus is illustrated by two core publications on the subject by Tarrow (2005) and Webster et al. (2008). In the first book, Tarrow (2005) focuses on what he terms ‘transnational activism’. The focus is very much on the way that labour activists are increasingly in positions to reshape and focus their activities on a transnational level rather than functioning as domestic actors with restricted views and understandings of the broader context in which they organise and operate. For Tarrow (2005: 25), international alliances are defined as structures of relations among trade unionist and supranational institutions that produce opportunities for actors to engage in collective action at different levels. Alongside this contribution, the text by Webster et al. (2008) emphasises the capacities of labour movements to integrate different struggles at various spatial scales and to counter the oppressive and seemingly inescapable dominance of capital, particularly an increasingly globalised capital.

One implication of these observations is that transnational union activity, be it via individual trade unions or other union organisations, is likely to be uneven, reflecting the way that the pace of change varies throughout the world. These are not unilinear processes; rather, they are varied within countries and from country to country. Not only do particular states play a part in the globalisation process, but broad patterns are at work, with India and China emerging as major players (Pringle and Clark 2010), while countries like the United Kingdom and Japan are repositioning themselves in less dominant ways than in the past. In addition, forms of work and employment are changing, particularly in the advanced capitalist countries. These features raise questions about the forms of transnational trade unionism that may be emerging.

Forms of Transnational Trade Unionism

Transnational trade unionism refers to the way that union actors in local, national and international arenas organise and operate so that local and global interests are inter-connected. In the course of these developments, unions are involved in processes, as agents, to articulate a set of inter-linked relations between the local and the global (Barton and Fairbrother 2009).

Several scholars have attempted to capture the evolving forms or models of transnational unions. Hyman (2005) distinguishes various models of organisation and action by international trade unions, ranging from an agitator to a bureaucratic model. Hyman argues that there is an enduring tension between internationalism from below and from above. In a similar type of account, Martinez (2010) attempts to go beyond the opposition between network and bureaucratic models, suggesting that both can be more or less democratic. Drawing on a spatial/social matrix, Munck (2010) makes a distinction between various parameters of the labour movement repertoire of collective action, which vary according to the focus of action (market or society) and its spatial scale (local/global). These contributions suggest that transnational unionism is a contingent and contradictory process involving various forms of action at different spatial scales that can be more or less formalised and centralised.

The most obvious form of action is international organisation and operation linking national unions and global union federation and confederations. In this respect, the way unions signify their involvement and activity in relation to cross-border activity is as members of GUFs and via national union confederations, which in turn are members of the international confederations. There has been increasing activity by the ITUC, formerly the ICFTU, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dismantling of the regimes in Eastern Europe. The ICFTU expanded mainly at the expense of the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), which lost most of its European affiliates and a large number of its members in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Nonetheless, locally or nationally-based unions can develop internationally focused capacities and seek to express transnational objectives and purpose without relying on overarching organisations. In such cases, unions use domestic resources to indicate support for trade unions and union members across borders (e.g., demonstrations of support/campaigns for others elsewhere), unions contact other unions across borders to promote or deal with domestic cases or unions address the implications of decisions taken off-shore that impact on unions locally by seeking support from unions elsewhere (e.g., decisions taken to reorganise plants in one country by corporations based in another).

More complex forms of transnational unionism are those that qualify the starkness of unionism from above or below and emphasise the nested nature of this type of unionism. Two forms stand out. The first form involves trade union organisation across borders in alliances or coalitions, together with international union organisations. Often under the auspices of both GUFs and European federations, clusters of unions have begun working with each other on World Works Councils and European Works Councils (EWCs) (Papadakis 2011; Stevis 2010). In the second form, national unions have sought each other out, establishing cross-border alliances and extending their national practices as inclusive, active and campaigning unions in the international arena (Bergene 2007; Bronfenbrenner 2007). Such practices are evident in unions, such as in the maritime sector (Lillie 2005). Complementing this aspect, such unions also seek to define their immediate concerns as international ones, either by example or in relation to employer practices internationally. This activity is a way of framing national events and activities as international in both reach and implication (Tarrow 2005).

Another form of transnational unionism involves unions that organise and represent members across borders, sometimes as a single union and in other cases as de facto unitary organisations or as formal partnerships. One variant involves mergers between national unions across borders (e.g., Nautilus and the financial unions in Scandinavia). In 2009, Nautilus International was created from a merger between Nautilus UK and Nautilus Netherlands, representing professional maritime staff with an integrated executive. There are few examples of this form of transnational unionism, although there are indications that unions are beginning to think of lesser versions than complete mergers. Examples of formal partnerships include the alliance established in 2008 between two major unions, the United Steel-workers (US) and UNITE the union (UK), who signed a framework agreement establishing a new global union entity called Workers Uniting. This union has three million members in the US, Canada, Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, and the stated purpose of the partnership is to ‘challenge global capital’.

The varieties of transnational unionism are best characterised by experimentation. Trade unions at different spatial scales are creating new mechanisms and new rules and developing new narratives to increase their capacities. In undertaking these possibilities, trade unions are addressing questions related to power.

The Question of Power

The question of power is central to our understanding of trade unionism in general and of transnational trade unionism more specifically (Hyman 1975; 2005). The very existence of trade unions indicates the presence of asymmetrical power relations between labour and capital. Power and its twin sister domination are embedded in employment relations, and trade unions need to exercise power over other actors to realise their purpose (Edwards 1986). Trade unions at the local, national or international levels are primarily concerned with influencing other actors, such as the state and employers, to do something that they might not otherwise do. Power is thus a relational concept.

While there is much debate about the concept of power (Bourdieu 1980; Friedberg 1993; Lukes 2005), there is strong agreement about the fact that power encompasses a variety of logics and arrangements. As argued by Held (1995):

power expresses at one and the same time the intentions and purposes of agencies and institutions and the relative balance of resources they can deploy with respect to each other. (p. 170)

Focusing on the resources deployed by actors, Wright (2000) distinguishes two general forms of power: structural and associational. First, structural power results from workers’ positions and locations within work and employment relations and more generally within the economic system (Wright 2000; Silver 2003; Silver and Arrighi 2001). In many industries, such as the automobile and maritime industries, workers traditionally were in a position to use structural power because the labour process was characterised by large numbers of workers undertaking routine but essential core tasks. This form of the labour process has been in decline in developed countries, although in developing countries it still remains a feature of the plants and workplaces that supply many of the goods to the developed countries. Hence, while the car factories, for example, in developed countri...