Organized Labor's Images of Multinational Enterprise: Divergent Foreign Investment Ideologies in Argentina, South Korea, and Spain

Abstract

This paper conceptualizes how organized labor in newly industrialized countries both responds to and shapes the presence of foreign multinationals. Four images of multinationals—as “villains,” “necessary evils,” “arm's length collaborators,” and “partners”—are documented and compared using evidence drawn from three countries during the 1950–99 period. Organized labor flatly opposed foreign multinationals early on, under authoritarian regimes, in all three countries—Argentina, South Korea, and Spain—but that stance shifted over time in divergent rather than convergent ways. In Argentina, organized labor alternately viewed multinationals as villains and as a necessary evil, and in Korea it deemed them fit for limited, arm's length collaboration. In Spain, by contrast, unions gradually shifted toward a willing acceptance of multinationals as partners. Organized labor's images of multinationals are found to have resulted from two key factors: democratic versus authoritarian political regimes, and modernizing versus populist labor union mentalities.