Review of McCallum, J. (2013) Global Unions, Local Power: The New Spirit of Transnational Labor Organizing

The nature of globalization's impact on workers is contested.There are two dominant paradigms; the first, the neoclassical liberal paradigm, views a liberal trading order as the main manifestation of globalization and beneficial to the majority of workers.It accepts that there will be job losses and growing wage inequality, and believes the best way for workers in industrial countries to respond is by increasing their human capital through job retraining.The solution to the 'globalization problematic' from a neo-liberal perspective Paul Bowles suggests 'is for the adjustment costs to be minimized perhaps by protection from import surges, but more importantly by longer term retraining programs which shift workers in industrial countries out of those industries in which developing countries have a comparative advantage' (Bowles, 2010: 16).The second paradigm, what Bowles terms anti-neoliberal globalism, starts from the proposition that globalization is a political project to increase the power of capital over the nation state and labor.Workers responses vary from global social democracy to support for 'delinking' from the global capitalist system.The policy instruments for labor include corporate codes of conduct, including the demand for a social clause in trade agreements, global unionism, international minimum wage campaigns, international labor standards, regulation of global capital, and reestablishing the political autonomy of the state (Bowles, 2010: 17-20).There is, however, a third approach, predominantly in the global South, which sees labor as an active agent responding to globalization by developing new forms of organization, new strategies and new sources of power.While Jamie McCullum is located within this third view, he takes the approach a step further in Global Unions, Local Power: The New Spirit of Transnational Labor Organizing by arguing that labor is an agent of global governance.Workers, he suggests, are not simply victims of the global juggernaut; they can change the rules of global engagement.Indeed, he argues that a new form of labor internationalism is emerging through the creation of a new field of rules that enables workers to exercise power at the local level.Global Framework Agreements are part of this strategy to expand the bargaining power of national unions over entire industries by forcing major companies to play by union rules.McCullum illustrates this theoretical argument through an analysis of a global campaign led by the global union, UNI (Union Network International), against the multinational, G4S (Group 4 Securior), the largest employer in Africa and, surprisingly, also on the London Stock Exchange.The narrative begins in the United States with the Service Employee International Union (SEIU), an affiliate of UNI, and its successful Justice for Janitors Campaign.McCullum shows how the organizational model they developed was globalised and transferred to the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and then to Europe, and the Netherlands and Germany in particular.

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