Global Unions, Local Power: The New Spirit of Transnational Labor Organizing, by Jamie K. McCallum. ILR Press, Ithaca, NY, 2013, 232 pp., ISBN 978 0 8014 5193 5, $65.00, hardback.

Published date01 December 2014
AuthorJenny Jungehülsing
Date01 December 2014
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12085
BOOK REVIEW
Global Unions, Local Power: The New Spirit of Transnational Labor Organizing,by
Jamie K. McCallum. ILR Press, Ithaca, NY, 2013, 232 pp., ISBN
978 0 8014 5193 5, $65.00, hardback.
In the context of an increasing academic interest in labour’s fate in a globalized
economy, Jamie McCallum’s Global Unions, Local Power is an important contribution
to our thinking about the functioning of and prospects for labour transnationalism.
Situated in the broader debate on the possibilities for labour revitalization in view of
neoliberal globalization, it rejects both the widespread view of labour’s inevitable
decline and an excessive optimism based on the Polanyian assumption that capitalism
automatically produces its own countermovements. Instead, McCallum intends to
demonstrate that workers today do have strategic choices to make, at the local as well
as at the global level, and invites us to view labour as ‘an agent of governance in the
world economy’ (p. 150). His arguments are based on an empirical analysis of the
years-long global campaign that the UNI Global Union led against Group 4 Securicor
(G4S), and the subsequent implementation of the global framework agreement (GFA)
signed in 2008 in two regional contexts, South Africa and India.
One of McCallum’s main points is that the campaign he analyses is ‘a new kind of
labor politics’ (p. 153), which evolved in response to corporate globalization. He calls
this a ‘governance struggle’. In view of diminishing state regulations and increasing
power of multinational corporations, he argues, workers can no longer rely on rights
granted by nation-state governments — not at the national and even less at the global
level. Labour, thus, increasingly turns towards struggles for rules, targeting corpora-
tions aiming at the new rules that allow workers to exercise power. Whereas workers’
rights have always been embedded in state-regulated legal frameworks, McCallum
argues that governance struggles make workers’ associational power actionable pre-
cisely in the absence of such rights: they exert discipline and control over corporations’
business practices and create conditions in which workers are able to organize despite
lacking enforceable rights. The fight for GFAs, McCallum argues, is a major case in
point: he understands them not as granting rights, but as a means of modifying the
normative framework of employment regulation within a transnational corporation,
and hence as a means of giving rules to workers’ collective action at the global level.
His empirical analysis of the G4S campaign shows that by granting a path to union
recognition, employer neutrality and access rights for union staff to G4S worksites,
the GFA creates the conditions for workers to organize and experiment with new
strategies. He concludes that ‘modifying the normative framework of employment
regulation and the cultural logic that proscribed workers as submissive — in effect,
new rules governing the industrial context — was the central way otherwise powerless
security guards were able to fight back’ (p. 11).
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British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12085
52:4 December 2014 0007–1080 pp. 810–827
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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