Power Resources in Global Labour Governance

Power resource theory (PRT) is experiencing a comeback. Initially devised to explain the emergence of the welfare state as a result of the growing strength of labour, PRT has been increasingly applied also by labour relations scholars. Over time scholars have increasingly expanded the taxonomy of power resources. While definitional boundaries are still somewhat blurred, there is now a certain agreement that, beyond the power that workers accrue from their position in the production process and from their collective organization, one should also look at the institutions fostering or weakening workers’ rights, and to the resources that labour can gain from building broader alliances and from its influence on society at large.

Unsurprisingly, given that the original research question leading to the development of PRT was to explain the emergence of national welfare states, initial PRT-inspired approaches suffered of a degree of methodological nationalism. This applied also to its application to industrial relations. When the effect of transnational forces was considered, it was essentially seen as an exogenous shock that affects actors’ power resources at the domestic level. Thus, for instance, Wright (2000) conceptualised globalisation as a form of external pressure that, through heightened international competition, affects negatively the power of the working class. Over time, however, scholars using the PRT have become more attentive to the politics of scale that is generated by the growing entanglement of national industrial relations within an increasingly transnationalised global economy.

In this theoretical essay, I discuss five recently published books that advance our knowledge of power resources within global labour governance. The aim of the essay is twofold. First, it shows the potentialities but also the limitations of a transnational theorization of workers’ power resources. Second, it contributes to broader debates on workers’ agency in global labour governance and global value chains.