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Globalization and International Labor Solidarity—Intro- Duction to a Theme Nordic journal of working life studies Volume 4 ❚ Number 1 ❚ February 2014 Globalization and International Labor Solidarity—Intro- duction to a Theme ❚❚ Christer Thörnqvist Associate Professor, University of Skövde, Sweden The never ending story of international labor solidarity—and the lack of it Is cross-national trade union cooperation and labor solidarity a forgotten item on Nor- dic working life researchers’ agenda? And if so, why? Is not the matter more crucial today than ever, considering the challenges from globalization? True, there have not been too many studies in the field by Nordic scholars, and also true, the field is in great need of research considering the great labor market changes both nationally and glob- ally over the last few decades. In order to find a remedy for this lack, a special workshop was dedicated to the subject at the Nordic Working Life Conference in Elsinore, April 2012. The response among the Nordic academics was not exactly overwhelming, but there were several highly interesting papers, bringing up new aspects or shedding new light on old ones. Some of the papers are now compiled in this special issue of Nordic Journal of Working Life Studies. All of them are individual texts and can be read sepa- rately. This introduction is just an attempt to put the articles into their common context, that is, to outline the framework within which they belong by highlighting some items they share. The long-term perspective The point of departure is deeply historical; after all, the urge for cross-national labor solidarity is 150 years old. Exactly 150 years old this year, if we view the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association, later also known as the First International, in 1864 as the start. The major direct incentive for cross-national collaboration between trade unions and workers’ parties was the importation of strikebreakers from continental Europe to the UK in the early 1860s (Lorwin 1929). Yet there is no straight line from the International Workingmen’s Association onward. The frictions between Marx and Bakunin and their followers is well known, but when it comes to trade unions and in- ternationalism, the ideological and strategic differences between Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle was more crucial. The strongest national labor movement at the time for the First International was the German one, and as one of the founders of what would come to be the German Social Democratic Party, Lassalle made a great impact, also after his untimely death in the notorious duel in 1864. In practice his influence was stronger than Marx’s in Germany. Consequently, Lassalle’s theories about das eherne Lohngesetz, in English the “Iron Law of Wages,” strongly impacted on the labor movement both in Germany and in other continental European countries. Trade union struggle within the capitalist system, Lassalle argued, was more or less futile, since capitalists could always outplay workers 1 2 Globalization and International Labor Solidarity Christer Thörnqvist against each other to take any job for minimum remuneration just to stay alive. There- fore, the only way for real improvement was to fight for all-encompassing suffrage and win power over the national political system. In other words, already from the start, the international labor movement was divided between Marxist internationalists, stressing cross-national trade unionism, and Lassallean “nationalists” emphasizing the political parties’ national role (Moses 1982).1 The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 was a decisive blow against what was left of European labor internationalism. Despite the promises made to the Second International, labor parties and trade unions dropped their internationalist ideals that no working men should fight each other and rallied around their national governments (Abendroth 1966, chapter 4). International trade unionism no doubt both recovered and stayed healthy, and survived challenges from the communist split following the Russian revolution and the frictions during the Cold War, when especially American trade unions threatened the ideological content of the movement. Still the frictions between national and international, as well as between political approaches and trade unionist activities, have remained. In addition, there have been crucial discrepancies due to religion and language within single countries and, in the aftermath of the decolonization, between the North and the South. Especially the latter has increased. According to the theme of the Elsinore workshop as well as of this special issue, the question is if the tradition- al concept of international labor solidarity needs to be redefined due to globalization, changes in employment, and state–capital relations. Are present day solidarity questions transferred from union collectives to public welfare-state and legislation issues, nation- ally implementing ILO conventions or EU regulation on human rights and equal labor standards—or just considered a voluntary ethical choice for individual consumers and companies? A long period of deregulation, offshoring, outsourcing, increased inequality, unem- ployment, and lost union battles have changed conditions for labor. The current crisis causes unemployment globally and governments cut in social welfare with austerity pro- grams. How is working life and unions affected in the North and the South, in different regions and countries to this increase in insecurity, and decrease in union influence on collective agreement, labor contracts, and labor market regulation? Will eventually a re- vitalization of labor struggle and international solidarity come as a result of neoliberal economic policies or is labor losing ground? There have been a strong social movement labor agenda in Latin America and currently against EU austerity policies in Southern Europe. Multinational companies (MNCs) have put corporate social responsibility (CSR) on their agenda. How are labor, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and unions reacting and cooperating in the age of global labor market flexibility and insecurity? Trade union decline Trade union density has, with a few exceptions, declined worldwide since the heydays in the first three or four decades after the Second World War (Frege 2006). In the words of Craig Phelan: “It is a bitter irony that trade union decline is occurring precisely when the labour movement is needed most” (Phelan 2006, p. 24). To some extent the drop in membership is not surprising, considering the transformation of working life in general. There have been profound changes in the sectoral and occupational structure of the Nordic journal of working life studies Volume 4 ❚ Number 1 ❚ February 2014 3 economy that have worsened the conditions for labor organization. Traditional sectors such as manufacturing have declined, at least in the already industrialized countries, in relation to private-sector services and the emergence of the information technology sec- tor. For the trade unions this means that their membership base has been changing since their traditional stronghold of membership linked to manufacturing is shrinking in such a way that they are forced to look for compensation in new sectors, sectors based more on small workplaces with few employees. Because of the transformation, there is also a decline in full-time jobs in vertically integrated firms based on conventional, open-ended labor contracts (Traxler 2007). But there are also features that cannot be explained solely by indispensable struc- tural changes. Outside the OECD area, the number of employees in manufacturing is still high, in many countries even increasing both in absolute and relative figures, so the transformation of the Western economies cannot be the whole answer to the global union decline. It should further be noted that even though the political repression of labor in the non-OECD countries has many times been exceptionally hard, it barely became even harder in the 1980s and 1990s, when the trade union density dropped the most in Asia, Latin America, and Africa (Fredge 2006, pp. 228–232). Globalization Besides being debated by the trade unions themselves, both nationally and internation- ally, the decline in membership has attracted much attention by academic scholars. This special issue is no exception. Yet, the main focus is—as the title of the issue hints—not on national unions; one feature that has been increasingly highlighted at pace with the globalization debate from the mid-1990s onward is how the preconditions for interna- tional trade union work have changed. “Globalization,” almost no matter the definition, is today stressed as the most crucial parameter to understand diminishing labor power at national as well as cross-national levels, as we will see in the contributions. The logic is very clear-cut; any economic internationalization threatens to devaluate the benefits of associations that still operate in the areas of the nation (Traxler 2007, p. 156). More- over, we do not need to either accept any of the many definitions of “globalization” or to elaborate a new one in order to see why trade unions and labor solidarity face problems that were not present in the heydays of postwar economics; there are some undeniable empirical facts and trends that rather much speak for themselves.2 The most obvious such trend is the growth of MNCs. At the turn of the Millen- nium there were for the first time more MNCs than nations at the Top 100 list of the world’s largest economies: 51 corporations vs. 49 countries, based on the comparison of corporate sales and country GDPs. Of course no MNC could compete with the largest national economies. Yet, to put it in perspective, the biggest corporation, General Mo- tors, came in as number 23, just before this journal’s editorial home country, Denmark. The 1999 sales of each of the top five corporations (General Motors, Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil, Ford Motor, and DaimlerChrysler) were bigger than the GDP’s of 182 countries, and the Top 200 corporations’ combined sales were bigger than the combined economies of all countries minus the biggest ten (Anderson and Cavanagh 2000, p.
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