Global Unions: Challenging Transnational Capital through Cross-Border Campaigns

by Kate Bronfenbrenner (Editor)

To meet the challenges of globalization, unions must improve their understanding of the changing nature of corporate ownership structures and practices, and they must develop alliances and strategies appropriate to the new environment. Global Unions includes original research from scholars around the world on the range of innovative strategies that unions use to adapt to different circumstances, industries, countries, and corporations in taking on the challenge of mounting cross-border campaigns against global firms. This collection emerges from a landmark conference where unionists, academics, and representatives of nongovernmental organizations from the Global South and the Global North met to devise strategies for labor to use when confronting the most powerful corporations such as Wal-Mart and Exxon Mobil. The workplaces discussed here include agriculture (bananas), maritime labor (dock workers), manufacturing (apparel, automobiles, medical supplies), food processing, and services (school bus drivers). Kate Bronfenbrenner's introduction sets the stage, followed by contributions describing specific examples from Asia, Latin America, and Europe. Bronfenbrenner's conclusion focuses on the key lessons for strengthening union power in relation to global capital.

Genres: Labor

280 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2007

About the author

Dr. Kate Bronfenbrenner is an American scholar and academic administrator. Since 1993 she has been the Director of Labor Education Research at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

Professor Bronfenbrenner obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in 1976, and earned her doctorate in 1993, both from Cornell University. She is considered a respected expert on labor union organizing and collective bargaining strategies, a reputation gained in part through her studies of anti-union tactics utilized by employers in NLRB-sponsored union organizing elections. She has also conducted research on the impact of outsourcing and offshoring on workers, wages, employment and unions, not only in the United States but worldwide.

Professor Bronfenbrenner is a member of both the United Association for Labor Education and the Industrial Relations Research Association.

Her late father, Dr. Urie Bronfenbrenner, was a well known researcher in the field of developmental psychology.

Reviews

[Brock · Rating 3 out of 5]

"...[M]any unions in the Global North are just beginning to figure this out. Most spent the last two decades thinking that it was the other countries that were stealing their companies and their jobs, not the seemingly stateless entities that own these firms. And as they reached out for help from unions in the Global South to aid them in their battles while simultaneously blaming them for stealing their jobs, it never occurred to them that the union in those countries had faced the world's most powerful corporate giants from the earliest days of their own unionization and might be able to teach them a thing or two about taking these companies on."

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

The contributions are variable, but there's some good stuff on unions in the Global South (and US/European arrogance in working with these unions), and the first chapter outlines comprehensive corporate research in a very useful way...a rather unique book that is immediately relevant to practice.