Abstract
Global Unions, Local Power is about the Service Employees International Union’s (SEIU) campaign to organize Group4 Securicor (G4S), which employs roughly 657,000 security guards in 125 countries. Jamie McCallum argues that the campaign represents a “new spirit of labor transnationalism.” The campaign had two distinguishing characteristics.
First, it centered on “governance struggles,” which are fights to change the rules of engagement with the employer, not fights to win citizenship or social rights from the state. This is important because, in a time when worker rights are under attack everywhere, workers and their unions are finding new ways to build power and forge some dignity on the job. Though governance struggles include the “codes of conduct,” made famous by anti-sweatshop campaigns on American college campuses, the spirit is really made flesh by (1) the comprehensive corporate campaign, which combines worker organizing with media wars that target the exploitative practices of a recalcitrant employer, and (2) the global framework agreement (GFA), which covers all of the employer’s employees around the world. The most important rule in a GFA is employer “neutrality,” the promise that the boss will not wage an antiunion campaign should workers decide to organize.
The second distinguishing characteristic is that SEIU’s governance struggle for a global framework agreement revitalized not only its global union federation, Union Network International (UNI), but also workers and activists on the ground, who became politicized by the transnational campaign, learned to organize, and thus increased their unions’ membership. Importantly, this is not an exclusively top-down process for McCallum, because the successes and challenges of local unions can also make transnational strategy more effective.
McCallum builds this argument in six chapters. In his introduction and first chapter, McCallum lays out his main claims and their theoretical basis in the work of Frances Fox Piven and others. Chapter Two recounts the prelude to the G4S campaign, in which the SEIU’s “organizing model” went global, capturing the imaginations of European unions, who were often much stronger in terms of union density but relatively inept at organizing the unorganized. Chapter Three chronicles the road to winning the 2008 GFA with G4S. Chapters Four and Five then offer a comparative study of the implementation of the GFA in South Africa and India, respectively. In Chapter Four, we discover that the GFA had a local “mobilizing” effect in South Africa: the employer did not campaign against the union, and workers used the GFA to advance demands and increase their membership. Chapter Five is about the less successful implementation of the GFA in India, where local unions, who had loyalties to competing political parties, had little mobilizing success but were able to bring reform to national legislation to improve standards in the security industry. In his conclusion, McCallum presents the lesson that workers are not doomed by neoliberal economic restructuring. Union strategy matters, and workers can win even when all hope seems to have faded.
This argument is convincing for three reasons. To begin, it is not the kind of irrepressibly optimistic book on labor internationalism that predicts that the workers of the world will soon unite. McCallum gives us both the good and the bad of SEIU, UNI, and their often fraught relationships with local unions. For example, he spends a great deal of time discussing how the Communist-affiliated Kolkata union, CITU, essentially repudiated the SEIU/UNI strategy. Next, I recognized myself in this narrative. I was trained by SEIU in the organizing model in the 1990s. I was working as a researcher for the United Farm Workers in California when SEIU’s legendary organizers Stephen Lerner and Richard Bensinger were helping the post-Cesar Chavez leadership shift from a servicing to an organizing model. I remember taking the organizing model to my local union, an American Federation of Teachers affiliate; our staff and stewards were both amazed by the increased mobilizing capacity that a scientific approach to member organizing brought us and scandalized that we would dare count people and rate them on a pro-union scale of 1 to 4. Last but not least, one cannot help but be impressed by the painstaking ethnographic research on India, South Africa, the United States, and Europe.
Though the overall quality of the book is very high, it does raise some questions, most minor and one major. Though I myself have never organized workers under a neutrality agreement, I have heard more than one organizer complain that the absence of an antiunion campaign from the boss makes it feel as if there is no struggle—organizing ends up feeling more like sales than solidarity. It is possible that McCallum does not encounter this phenomenon, but it is worth inquiring into the limitations of neutrality agreements. Next, it is strange that McCallum used the Indian case alone to discuss the informal sector, when there is an entire generation of young South Africans who have never known formal-sector wage work. And it is worrisome that McCallum’s research will telegraph these new strategies to transnational employers and thus undercut the very spirit of labor organizing that he seeks to promote through this book.
My last concern, which is major because it questions a key claim of the book, has to do with the way in which McCallum insists that governance struggles are about rules and not rights. In the absence of formal juridical rights, workers could be read as attempting to re-establish rights on the job, creating democratic communities of interest at work. One might go so far as to say that they are pressing for a new kind of industrial citizenship. This tension appears throughout the book, but never more so than in cases like India where SEIU/UNI and local unions shifted strategy to highlight the violations of worker rights in the global South to put media and public pressure on the employer. Is it necessary to distinguish so sharply between rules and rights? What intellectual and political work does it do for him or for the labor movement in the end?
None of these criticisms, however, should be taken as a negative review. As in any good book, McCallum prompts us to ask more questions and seek better answers. Overall, this book is one of great integrity and may well become the standard against which all future work on transnational unionism will be measured.