Labour Internationalisms from Above and Below

Much of the literature on transformations within the global economy positions labour as passive and immobile in the face of capital’s increasingly nimble and aggressive. The marginalization and/or omission of workers’ agency and resistance to processes of neoliberal globalization operates to reinforce the narrative that workers have no option but to surrender to global capital. In truth, workers have been anything but resigned to this fate. Practices of international labour solidarity through trade unions and other working-class organizations and movements have a long and diverse history – and constitute significant sites of resistance to intensifying forms of exploitation and oppression.

This session focuses on the concrete ways in which workers build international solidarity, who leads these initiatives, and why the process of building these solidarities matters. In teasing out these questions, it reveals some of the challenges to creating and sustaining these practices. Situating their empirical and theoretical contributions within the research on both labour internationalism from above – led by national and international union leaders – and from below – led by rank-and-file workers, non-union workers, community activists and other social movement actors – panelists will speak to the significance of different methods of building international labour solidarity and why these are important for thinking about strengthening practices of labour internationalism.