National Labor Movements Research Articles

The chimera of new forms of worker organisation: why trade unions matter in rebuilding national and global labour movements

The decline in union representation is occurring globally even as the working class has been growing, especially in the Global South. The decline in the global organised workforce contradicts expectations that trade unions would grow in response to growing levels of exploitation prevailing especially in poor countries integrated into global production chains. However, trade unions are not growing stronger but are weaker as industrial and service workers are growing in number. This article reprises the concept of new forms of worker organisation (NFWO), advocated and advanced over the past 25 years and rooted in independent labour entities, including worker centres, syndicalist organisations, and autonomous, unaffiliated unions, and even NGOs. The record of these entities thus far demonstrates that new forms of worker organisation are expanding in response to rank-and-file activism but are ineffective as a replacement for traditional union models in building and consolidating labour power to challenge the rise of precarious and contract labour. This article examines the mixed record of new labour organisations and their failure to confront neoliberal capitalism. To remedy this structural defect, this article contends that existing unions must engage in activism rooted in the precarious working class of the Global South to build trade union power.

From Embedded Autonomy to Counter-Hegemonic Globalization: A 60-Year Adventure in Exploring Comparative Political Economy

I got hooked on sociology as a 20-year-old. Engaging with the world as a sociologist, together with colleagues, comrades, and students, has been immensely rewarding for six decades. My work has centered primarily on what were once called developing countries and now comprise the Global South. This article recounts my sociological adventures, from efforts to understand the world as I found it in the early 1960s to my responses to current reactionary trends. I start with my earlier work— Dependent Development (1979) and Embedded Autonomy (1995)—and then move to more recent efforts to construct paradigms of progressive twenty-first-century possibilities. I discuss, first, how a 21st century developmental state might incorporate deliberation and state-society synergies to expand human capabilities, and second, how an amalgam of global and national labor movements together with transnational advocacy networks might pursue a counter-hegemonic globalization capable of confronting global neoliberal capitalism.

Minority Nationalism and Socialism

What has been the relationship between nationalism and socialism in the history of the Finnish social democratic labour movement? This article explores this question by focusing on the Swedish-speaking socialist politician Karl H. Wiik (1883–1946), who was a central figure both in the Swedish-speaking and in the national Finnish labour movement.
 By examining Wiik’s role as a political and ideological foreground figure of the Swedish-speaking labour movement in Finland, the article discusses the relationship between national issues, class and socialism in the history of the Finnish social democratic labour movement. The article asks how language was connected to ethnic identity. Also, the article examines how both nationalism and ethnic identity was connected to social democracy as well as to socialist politics.
 On a more general level, the article contributes to the study of nationalism and especially to the study of the engagement of ethnic or linguistic minorities in the history of the labour movement. By focusing on the minorities in the labour movement, it is possible to problematise the historical narratives of the majority. The article links the multinational history of the Finnish labour movement to that of the international labour movement, where the questions about socialism and nationalism have been high on the political agenda.

The Concept of “Real socialism” in the Foreign Economic Policy of the USSR, the 1960s — the First Half of the 1970s

The concept of “real socialism” during the period of détente in the 1960s — the first half of the 1970s acquired in the USSR an expanded interpretation, adopted for the needs of external economic course. The archival collections of working documents of the party leadership of the USSR prove commitment to the class Marxist-Leninist priorities of the Soviet foreign policy — the world socialist system, the national liberation and world labor movements. The well-known Soviet social achievements (state education and health care, full employment, etc.) were still widely advertised. At the same time, the "real socialism" increasingly includes recognition of the diversity of forms, methods and rates of socialist construction in the countries of people's democracy, the complexity and contradictions within the world socialist system. With the proclamation by the Soviet Union of the ideological struggle as the main form of class struggle in international relations, the idea of "real socialism" began to be used in order to characterize the pragmatic course for mutually beneficial cooperation with states of the opposite socio-economic system (long-term trade agreements with countries of the Common Market, attempts to improve relations with the European Economic Community, the inclusion in the Helsinki Act of economic “second basket”). Besides, the idea of “real socialism” detached the constructive course from the universal revolutionary theory and ideology of communism. The evolution of the concept of “real socialism” in the USSR reflected pragmatism and hopes for broad economic international cooperation in order to overcome the “shortcomings” and “difficultiesѼ of the Soviet national economy.

Transnational Radicalism and the Connected Lives of Tom Mann and Robert Samuel Ross by Neville Kirk

<i>Transnational Radicalism and the Connected Lives of Tom Mann and Robert Samuel Ross</i> by Neville Kirk

Arbeitergeschichte

This article deals with the relations, tensions, and points of convergence between global, national, regional, and local labor historiography. It takes a European perspective on the field and proposes some new approaches. Further, the article seeks to show how different topics might be fruitful for future research and might allow for collaboration between historians working both with more local and more global scopes. These topics include: free and unfree labor and related debates on the changing concept of the working class, the informalization and precarity of work in the past and present, changing life-course patterns, and trans-border connections between national labor movements. Comparisons across time, across cultural borders, and the analysis of entanglements can help strengthen historians’ research.

Report on Intern Rights Advocacy in 2013-2014

2013-2014 was a milestone for intern rights, with significant accomplishments in the fight to have interns recognized as employees with rights to both pay and workplace protections reviews activist efforts to bring an end to the precarious position of unpaid and underpaid interns in the United States, from the work of the advocacy group Intern Labor Rights and other organizations, to efforts on the judicial and legislative levels. We highlight the movement’s accomplishments in 2013-14 and look forward to the goals it hopes to attain in the near future, all the while contextualizing this is- sue within the larger framework of national labour and wage movements.

National Labor Movements and Transnational Connections: Global Labor’s Evolving Architecture Under Neoliberalism

The neoliberal era has undermined worker’s rights and labor's power at the national level, but has also been characterized as an era of 'the new labor transnationalism'. Shifting fortunes at the national level have been fundamental to expanding openness to transnational alliances. An analysis of campaigns connecting U.S. labor to the Honduran CGT, the Bridgestone-Firestone workers in Liberia, the Gerdau Workers World Council, and other national unions in both North and South show how adversity at the national level has pushed U.S. labor toward transnational alliances. Conversely, the growing global role of major countries in the South has expanded their potential contribution to transnational alliances, as illustrated by Brazilian labor's involvement with both European unions like the Dutch FNV and U.S. unions like the UAW and the USW. New connections among national labor movements are complemented by the expansion of Global Union Federations and new governance instruments like Global Framework Agreements, which articulate multi-country connections. Assessing the connections among national labor movements and the new global organizational infrastructure that have emerged under neoliberalism is a necessary foundation for building better theories of labor’s evolving contestation with global capital.

The Congress of South African Trade Unions and Free Trade: Obstacles to Transnational Solidarity

This article considers the response of the largest trade union federation in South Africa, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), to an extended free trade agenda, which has formed a key part of neoliberal restructuring during recent decades. It focuses in particular on South Africa's position in multilateral trade talks and its negotiation of three Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). COSATU's critique of these FTAs is considered and in particular the analysis focuses on its attempts at building transnational solidarity with other national labour movements. It argues that despite COSATU's opposition to trade liberalisation there are a number of obstacles to developing effective international links.

Labour perspectives on the new politics of skill and competency formation: International reflections

Skill/competency approaches to workplace-based policy seek to assess and train for discrete individual competencies with the goal of increasing employability and productivity. These approaches have become increasingly prominent across a range of advanced capitalist countries. A substantial critique has emerged over this same period regarding issues of instrumentality and social control, as well as the failure of skill/compentancy approaches to articulate a meaningful understanding of human learning capacities. In this article, these critical perspectives are clarified further by a review of contributions to understanding the skill/competence question emerging from sociology of work literature. Building from these critiques, this article outlines recent experiences with and perspectives on skill/competency frameworks amongst different national labour movements. Included in this outline is a more detailed, comparative analysis of Norway and Canada; here we see the lofty ‘new’, ‘knowledge economy’ rhetoric – in two countries where one might expect to see it blossom in application – brought down to earth by the realities of industrial relations, employer intransigence and intra-labour movement differences. ‘Skill/competence’ proves to be a floating signifier that, amongst both employers and labour, stands as a proxy for ‘power/control’ struggles. Degenerating in this way, from a labour perspective, the new politics of skill/competency formation is seen to have spiraled toward irrelevance in Norway and Canada; awaiting, in both countries, a re-invigoration through attention to changes in the participatory structure of the labour process itself.

“Pulled Apart, Pushed Together”

This is a study of horizontal and vertical solidarity within a national labour movement, based on a nationwide survey of members of affiliated unions of the Congress of South African Trade Unions. On the one hand, the survey reveals relatively high levels of vertical and horizontal solidarity, despite the persistence of some cleavages on gender and racial lines. On the other hand, the maintenance and deepening of existing horizontal and vertical linkages in a rapidly changing socio-economic context, represents one of many challenges facing organized labour in an industrializing economy. COSATU’s strength is contingent not only on an effective organizational capacity, and a supportive network linking key actors and interest groupings, but also on the ability to meet the concerns of existing constituencies and those assigned to highly marginalized categories of labour.

De-Linking Labor

This article evaluates the thesis that the relationship between national labor movements and social democratic political parties has become `delinked' in the past two decades as a result of globalization. As globalization has undermined the political relevance of unions, social democratic parties have pursued independent, and more conservative, policies and have courted a diversity of other interest groups. This thesis is tested using a pooled time-series multiple regression analysis of 16 advanced industrialized countries spanning the period 1950-95. Globalization - measured both in terms of a country's general `openness' to the world economy and specifically in terms of international trade and direct investment abroad - is found to be positively related both to the widening success gap between unions and social democratic parties and to the growing policy conservatism of social democratic parties.

The role of information in labor movements: A comparative study of India and the USA

In this paper, the following question is posed: to what extent does information—its availability, accessibility and communicability—affect the orientation of national labor movements? This question is interesting at the present juncture in time because of great changes currently in progress in information technology and in the worldwide organization of industrial production. The case of India is examined, and comparisons made with the US. The premise of this paper is that analyzing the past may provide pointers to expected changes in the future, and may indicate productive strategies for intervention.

Public Sector Unions, Corporatism, and Macroeconomic Performance

What accounts for the apparent breakdown of the positive relationship between powerful trade union organizations and macroeconomic performance? Is corporatism a relic of a different age, a luxury of the long postwar boom? Although the authors answer the latter question in the negative, they do contend that existing arguments about the macroeconomic consequences of corporatism should be significantly modified to take into account the impact of the growth of public sector unions on the relationship between institutional structure of labor movements and economic outcomes. The deteriorating performance commonly attributed to corporatism in the 1980s was limited to countries in which unions in the public sector and other sectors not exposed to international competition increasingly dominated national labor movements. Encompassing trade union movements can still generate wage restraint, but only where the union movement is dominated by unions in the exposed sector that are subject to the constraints posed by international market competition.

Child Care in Canada and Sweden: Policy and Politics

An analysis of child care arrangements provides a window into the varying gender asumptions that underpin different welfare states. This paper examines policies affecting child care (both daycare and maternal or parental leave) in Sweden and Canada. Child care arrangements in the two countries differ in ways that the literature on welfare states leads one to expect. It would be a mistake, however, to stop here with the “liberal” Canadian and “social democratic”. Swedish models frozen in time and space. Child care arrangements are historical products, and unfinished ones at that. In this paper I analyze the politics surrounding the development of postwar child care policies in Sweden and Canada. I argue that, although child care arrangements in the two countries appear to fit the models developed by theorists who focus on the relative strength and strategic capacity of national labor movements, feminists, organizing in ways appropriate to the political conditions in which they found themselves, had an important role to play. The final part of the paper examines the contemporary developments in both countries.

Global Regulation and Labour Strategy: The Case of International Labour Standards

Internationalisation of capital grew rapidly in the post-war period, driven initially by US-based TNCs. International capitals were able to trade off production conditions in different economies against national regimes of regulation. Consequently, these regimes were increasingly subject to amendment in order to attract mobile investment. Such changes were particularly significant for local and national labour movements. Growing mobility of capital undermined the organisational and locational specificity of labour. Labour's response was to seek to internationalise collective bargaining in an attempt to impose a measure of international regulation on international capital. This response, first theorised in the 1960s, has generally failed. However, with the growth of international regulation of capital in recent years -for example, the WTO, proposed measures to control international investment, international production standards, the creation of powerful economic blocs prepared to place labour standards on the agenda (NAFTA, EU, APEC) - the possibility has arisen for labour to take advantage of international regulatory developments to press for the international imposition of core Labour standards. Initiatives taken by the ICFTU-APRO in the Asian/South Pacific region illustrate this development. However, given the nature of contemporary international regulation, labour strategies in this area are not guaranteed success.

The CIA in national and international labor movements

In his introduction to Compromised Campus, Sigmund Diamond writes that "Universities and labor unions are institutions of critical impor? tance to democratic society" and that it was his original intention as a historian to report on "The relations of the FBI and the Universities and the Labor Unions," but that "given the limitations of the evidence," he was forced to limit his study to the universities. He states that, "My greatest regret, as I have said, concerns the absence from this account of the FBI's involvement in the labor movement." This writer shares Professor

The Persistence of the "Frontier Thesis" in America: Gender, Myth, and Self-Destruction

In 1893, the United States experienced the worst economic depression in its history. The depression was accompanied by a series of violent workers' strikes, a march on Washington by Civil War veterans, the growth of a national labour movement, and massive immigration of non-English speak- ing, non-Protestant, southern and eastern Europeans. To many commen- tators it seemed as if American society was splitting apart, about to explode.

The regulation of unstable growth: I'éecole de régulation and the social structure of accumulation

The economic growth condition of parallel developments in consumption and production has been placed by the French regulation school and the social structure of accumulation approach in the policy context of the distribution of class income. The implications are that there exists some unique income distribution compatible with growth, and that the post-1973 growth slowdown was the cause of labour becoming so strong as to ‘weaken’ capital. This condition of growth has close affinity with early growth theory and is presented here in terms of a Harrod-Domar ‘knife-edge’ instability. Starting from this perspective, I argue first, that the conditions of long-term growth cannot be applied to medium-term policy horizons, and secondly, that this domestic regulation is no longer dominant in an international environment in which national economies have increasingly become more open to trade and/or capital transfers. This consideration, illustrated by the instances of Canada and the NICs, suggests the existence of a different form of growth/income regulation in which the ‘knife-edge’ is exported. The policy implications for the national labour movement is then more complex and perhaps less constraining than that suggested by the two approaches under discussion.

Labor Law in America: Historical and Critical Perspectives

research proposals?others were offered verbally?fell into five overlapping categories: factors uniting, dividing, or integrating the labor movement at the national level or beyond (national integration, nationalism and internationalism, immigration, ethnic and racial antagonisms); the cross-cultural comparison of specific institutions, or of the interaction of such institutions (mutual benefit societies, workers' parties, trade unions, cooperatives, etc.); the influence of various groups active within or alongside the movement (cadres of diverse background, intellectuals, artists, the young, labor journalists); the relationship between labor and other social groups (farmers) or forces (religion); and political activities and ramifications of the movement. In fact, the call to reconsider the multifaceted intersection of class activities and those of the state recurred throughout the conference. Without minimizing the complex theoretical and practical problems involved, the wide-ranging discussions disclosed the potential richness and promise of systematic, comparative labor history. As John Saville put it, the discourse of the conference shifted from that of crisis to that of challenge. The assembly did not attempt to set an agenda for research. A few groups planned to pursue specific projects, and the IISH is prepared to lend moral and possibly material support to promising proposals, some of which may be taken up in a postgraduate research program that it plans to initiate. The Institute has put labor historians doubly in its debt, first, for the appearance of the Formation volumes, which will long serve as handbooks on national labor movements, and second, for its initiatives in comparative labor history, of which the Alkmaar conference is an impressive example.