Southern Perspectives on Transnational Unionism: From the Global to the Local or From the Local to the Global?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Based on the account of trade union representatives from the mining sector in Ghana and Mexico, this paper offers a re-reading of the debate on transnational unionism between developing global coalitions and local networks. Trade union strategies are captured under three analytical fields: spaces of transnational unionism, modes of interaction, and frames of reference. The paper’s objective is to understand how national trade unions articulate the local and the global, and identify the factors that push and pull them into the transnational space.While trade unions in both countries have undergone a process of union renewal, their transnational strategy differs: Ghanaians are engaged in capacity building and Mexicans in coalition building. Strategies of transnational unionism are shaped by national contingencies. First, the Ghanaian trade union intervenes mainly at the African regional level through education and training programs for the rank and file, while the Mexican trade union is present at both the North-American regional and transnational levels, particularly through solidarity campaigns. Second, while Ghanaians maintain weak ties with other trade unions, the Mexicans are engaged in a wide repertoire of action with the North-American trade unions and international federations. Third, Ghanaians conceive their interests on the basis of a strong clan-based identity and see transnational unionism as a mean to increase their resources, while Mexicans build broader coalitions based upon class identity.In both cases, strategies of transnational unionism go beyond the dichotomy of the local and the global. They are socially constructed, locally embedded and are shaped by the dynamics of the political economy in which the trade unions are rooted and the supranational structures of opportunity available to them.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".