Cross-Sectoral Coalition-Building As a Transnational Power Resource

The Power Resources Approach has been widely deployed to analyse national union strategies but rarely to examine power resources and networks beyond the national level, where they are deployed through transnational initiatives but also by international labour movement organisations, most notably the Global Unions. As we have demonstrated elsewhere, potential also exists to combine different kinds of power resources simultaneously at different scales.

This paper explores how Global Unions use cross-sectoral coalition-building as a power resource in three different types of transnational labour campaigns. The first is a global union campaign for seafood workers’ right to unionize, which ultimately failed to grow into a cross-sectoral coalition. The second is a campaign targeting Amazon that seeks to generate broader leverage for workers by collaborating with a wide range of non-union actors concerned with everything from Amazon’s environmental footprint to tax evasion to digital privacy. The third is the global campaign for an international convention on workplace violence and harassment involving all the global unions and hundreds of feminist organizations, as well as a wide range of development and human rights non-governmental organizations.

Through our analysis of these campaigns, we identify the benefits and challenges of cross-sectoral coalition-building for the global labour movement in conjunction with the deployment of specific combinations of other power resources at various scales. Based on this analysis, we argue that global unions are tactical and pragmatic in their search for opportunities to increase their power, seeking to maximise their access to resources, but also their efficacy and alignment with their own organizational priorities and goals – and that, in the right circumstances, cross-sectoral coalition-building offers them a way to secure this result.