ABSTRACT

Workers’ organizing efforts have expanded over time, moving beyond the boundaries of individual workplaces to encompass larger circles of influence within corporate structures, entire industries and even whole global supply chains. This chapter explores the reasons behind this outward expansion and the factors that have facilitated or hindered it. Why have workers seen a need to organize more expansively? What is the relationship between local-level organizing and worker organization on the international scale? This chapter considers these questions through the lens of concentric circles of class struggle, which suggests that strong organization at the workplace level plays a vital role in helping workers achieve higher levels of organization. In other words, this smaller circle of worker organization provides the foundation for more encompassing circles of organization, including transnational labour alliances and other modes of collaboration involving a multitude of workers around the world.

Keywords: Union organization; scale of organizing; challenges for unions

INTRODUCTION

The first two decades of the twenty-first century saw a surge in strategic cooperation among workers and unions from different countries in response to myriad challenges and opportunities associated with economic globalization. Nevertheless, international organizing is neither new nor inevitable. Well before a wave of workers’ transnationalism swept the 2000s and 2010s, labour unions in the nineteenth century were widening their circles to encompass their brothers and sisters in other countries. Indeed, the very idea of “the labour movement” was originally conceived of as international (Hyman 2005). Nevertheless, as the twentieth century commenced, unions found themselves caught between the enticements of internationalism and the relentless rise of the nation-state. For the most part, the latter won. By the close of the twentieth century, however, disruptive forces were once more dramatically altering the nature of the terrain of work and employment with economies growing evermore global, and the relationship of workers and unions to the state – and to each other – started to shift yet again (see also Chapter 7). This led labour union leaders, who sought new strategies for sustainable and effective organizing, to expand their fields of vision and those of their unions ever more widely. In other words, outwards to the concentric circles beyond themselves.

Why have workers seen a need to organize in ever larger circles expanding outward from the workplace: within corporate structures, throughout entire industries and across whole global supply chains