Abstract
As an activist involved in cross-border labor solidarity campaigns I have often thought that there has been a real lack of critical analyses of cross-border strategies in response to globalization that could help guide organizations with collective experience and a theory for shaping strategy.
As a labor studies professor who teaches on labor in the global economy, I always look for texts which go beyond the anecdotal. There are some, like Ralph Armbruster’s 2004 Globalization and Cross Border Labor Solidarity in the Americas, which have good case studies and begin a theoretical framework for analysis, but they are limited in scope and quickly grow out of date.
Mark Anner’s Solidarity Transformed is a real step forward. It breaks new ground theoretically and provides interesting comparison case studies ranging across nations, industries and unions. Written by an activist, this book blends research with the author’s own experience working with unions in El Salvador starting in the 1980s.
Anner asks how unions have responded to globalization and how they shape strategic alternatives within the political and industrial contexts in which they operate. To find out he interviews numerous workers, union leaders, management and government functionaries in El Salvador, Honduras, Brazil and Argentina, as well as the U.S., Europe and multinational labor bodies. Anner finds that “… there is no one dominant or predetermined path for labor in the era of neoliberal globalization.”
Anner investigates apparel production in the Export Processing Zones of El Salvador and Honduras and compares it to the supply chains, ownership, subcontractors, and work processes in the auto plants in Argentina and Brazil. He contrasts the subcontracting in apparel with the modular production, teams, and flexible pay schemes in auto to demonstrate how globalization has segmented work and fragmented workers, shifting power and creating a new strategic context for labor.
Anner adopts Gary Gereffi’s 1994 distinction between “producer-driven commodity chains” and “buyer-driven commodity chains” to explain the different global solidarity strategies in the two industries. In the buyer-driven garment industry, the response is the Transnational Activist Campaign where unions and worker organizations create short-term alliances with NGOs to appeal to consumers to target brands and retailers. Autoworkers and others in producer-driven industries, however, have used the Transnational Labor Network, a more formal, long-term cross-border mechanism which targets transnational corporations.
The second key factor, the nature of state transformation, is examined by contrasting El Salvador and Honduras. In El Salvador state repression of labor organizing has been markedly more brutal (at least until the 2009 Honduras coup); thus the labor laws and political climate in Honduras in the 1990s permitted some union advances and shaped labor’s response to globalization.
To investigate the third factor—union structure, history, culture and ideology—Anner broadens his inquiry beyond the left oriented unions, which have been the quickest to embrace cross-border strategies, to look at moderate and conservative unions, which are more predisposed to make cross-class alliances with employers within their nations. Here we learn about two other distinct responses to globalization: the radical flank response in which moderate unions win recognition from an employer because they offer to cooperate and stay within their borders and the microcorporatist response in which moderate or conservative unions eschew anything more than global information exchange with other unions and make pacts with employers on a national basis. This latter response has also been common in the U.S., particularly in the auto industry.
The depth of Anner’s analysis of management, government, and labor responses in the four countries is impressive and will give the reader many tools for understanding the challenges workers face in today’s globalized workplace.