National Terrains and Transnational Articulations: Global Labor's Evolving Architecture Under Late Neoliberalism

The neoliberal era has undermined worker’s rights and labor’s power at the national level,  but there have been some positive developments in the transnational articulation of national labor movements. The growth of global corporate empires has expanded opportunities to use connections among national labor movements for “reverse whipsawing” – applying labor’s strength in one national terrain to increase the power of labor in another national context where it is weaker.  Extreme adversity at the national level has pushed U.S. unions toward a new transnationalism.  Brazil shows how the more important global economic role of major countries in the South, when combined with a strong national labor movement, can create fruitful opportunities for transnational alliances. The growth of Global Union Federations, which has outpaced the growth national unions, and the development of new governance instruments like Global Framework Agreements, have also created opportunities for articulating the efforts of national labor movements and strengthening labor’s ability to mobilize globally.  These developments must be balanced against global labor’s inability to find effective ways of supporting the ability of insurgent workers to become a political force in the home of world’s largest national working class and the likely future hegemon -- China.  Assessing both recent advances in the architecture of the global labor movement and its future prospects as positions in international hierarchy of nations shift is an essential task for global labor studies.