Varieties of Power in Transnational Labor Alliances

Structural Power

Structural power is the ability of workers to influence employers because of their location in the economic system (Wright 2000, 962; Silver 2003, 13). Following Wright, Silver divided structural power into two subtypes: marketplace bargaining power is the capacity of workers to influence employers because of low unemployment, scarce skills, or the ability to withdraw from the labor market and survive on nonwage sources of income (Silver 2003, 13). Though an important source of labor power in general, marketplace bargaining power rarely comes into play in transnational labor alliances, which often emerge because the workers involved lack alternative employment opportunities and decommodifying support systems in the first place. More relevant to transnational labor alliances is Silver’s other subtype, workplace bargaining power, which “accrues to workers who are enmeshed in tightly integrated production processes, where a localized work stoppage in a key node can cause disruptions on a much wider scale than the stoppage itself” (p. 13).

Workplace bargaining power is perhaps the most direct and intuitive form of labor power. It involves physical action (or sometimes inaction), such as preventing the delivery of parts to an assembly line that relies on just-in-time production or shutting down an entire transport system by striking at key transit stations. Workplace bargaining power is not simply industrial action but industrial action that impacts an employer’s operations beyond that particular site of action (Selwyn 2007, 549). It is selective and tactical (Juravich 2007, 21). A relatively small number of strategic strikes might not only “disrupt the output of an entire plant” but could also “bring all downstream plants, and even an entire corporation, to a standstill” (Silver 2003, 15). In extreme cases the impact could ripple through an entire industry or national economy.

On one hand, structural power is not new, historically speaking, nor is it possessed solely by transnational activists. The “bread and roses” strike by textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912 occurred at a company whose “structure meant that the company could be brought to its knees by the withdrawal of labor in a simple strike. . . . This was a local strategy, one often based in craft unionism or unions at the local level” (Juravich 2007, 20). Similarly, the United Auto Workers’ (UAW) famous sit-down strike at the Fisher body plants in Flint, Michigan, in 1936 and 1937 was an exercise of structural power. “By targeting the Fisher plants, the UAW understood the vulnerabilities of GM and was able to take full advantage of them” (Juravich 2007, 21).

On the other hand, there is something new and distinctly transnational about workers’ use of structural power in recent years. According to Piven (2008), economic globalization creates new interdependencies that can be exploited by organized labor. Employers depend, for example, on complex supply chains whose individual links are vulnerable to strike action, just-in-time production that “removes the protective cushion of accumulated inventories,” and an elaborate electronic infrastructure likewise vulnerable to interference (Piven and Cloward 2000, 423). These vulnerabilities enable labor to create the “bullwhip effect” in global commodity chains, that is, “a small disruption at one point in a supply chain [that] becomes increasingly magnified further up or down the chain” (Selwyn 2007, 549).

Selwyn’s (2007, 2011) studies of fruit pickers in northeastern Brazil, for example, show how farms producing grapes for export must meet strict quality requirements and hence depend heavily on a labor force that is detail oriented yet efficient in its work. “The precision required to produce export quality grapes means that even the shortest delay can reduce fruit quality substantially and leave farms with below-export quality produce” (Selwyn 2007, 549). In contrast to fruit pickers on farms producing grapes for domestic consumption or low-quality export, those working on high-quality export farms have much more potential to affect the competitiveness of their employers, if not their country, in those markets.

The geographical expansion of firms’ operations also creates new opportunities for the use of structural power by transnational labor alliances. The successful campaign targeting United Parcel Service (UPS) in 1997 is an example. Through the ITF World Council of UPS, the Teamsters union in the United States reached out to other workers worldwide, who initiated actions in solidarity with the Teamsters. UPS workers in Belgium commenced a wildcat strike, German and Dutch employees of Mercedes-Benz and Philips convinced their respective employers to stop using UPS services, Filipino workers used a motorcade to shut down UPS operations in Manila, and the French union CGT threatened to halt UPS deliveries into Paris Orly Airport (Urata 2010, 61). In response to these transnational acts of structural power, UPS agreed to longer rest periods, improved occupational safety measures, renewed health insurance plans, and a new collective agreement with the Teamsters (Urata 2010, 64).

Institutional Power

Only so much about workers’ power can be understood by analyzing their location in the economic system and the spatial and scalar makeup of particular work sites or industries. Equally important is institutional context: the constellation of laws, regulations, procedures, practices, and other formal and informal rules that persist over time, structuring actors’ incentives, channeling their interests, and creating rational expectations of one another’s behavior. Institutions are of special significance to understanding power dynamics because they are themselves the product of past and ongoing power struggles (Mahoney and Thelen 2010; Streeck and Thelen 2005; Thelen 1999; Hall 1986). For organized labor, national institutional context is especially important since industrial relations laws, collective bargaining procedures, welfare states, court systems, and other national-level institutions significantly shape workers’ employment conditions, legal rights, and relationships with employers (Hall and Soskice 2001).

Differences among national institutional contexts can both hinder and help transnational labor alliances. On one hand, national institutional differences generate conflicting loyalties and priorities among potential labor allies. On the other hand, workers’ embeddedness in different institutional settings can benefit transnational labor alliances when workers in one country use their more advantageous institutional position to support less privileged workers in another country, that is, when the former are willing and able to exercise their institutional power.

By institutional power, I mean the capacity of workers to influence the behavior of an employer by invoking the formal or informal rules that structure their relationship and interactions. Institutional power could be as straightforward as taking an employer to court for the alleged violation of labor laws, or it could be as complicated as the actual or implied threat of a breakdown in the stable, cooperative relationship between a union and management on which the company relies for its productivity and overall competitiveness. Though institutional power derives most often from national or subnational political and economic institutions, it is also potentially present in the formal and informal rules that structure actors’ interactions on the international level. For instance, regulations upheld by the European Union sometimes provide protections for workers beyond those they possess nationally (Juravich 2007, 18). Moreover, even when legally nonbinding, a company’s formal commitment to international codes of conduct signal a willingness on the part of that company to meet certain expectations; failure to do so can prompt workers to lodge an official complaint with an international regulatory body with the capacity to pressure that company into compliance (Merk 2009, 609).

Vast disparities in workers’ institutional power—such as channels for addressing workplace grievances or laws protecting freedom of association—are clearly evident between the advanced, industrialized democracies of North America, Western Europe, and Asia-Pacific and the majority of developing countries in Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe. Yet even among the economically advanced countries, there remains a noticeable divide between the relatively strong institutional power of workers in the coordinated market economies (CMEs)—countries characterized by high firm coordination, patient capital, relatively centralized collective bargaining, and formal employee participation in corporate decision making—and the weak institutional power of workers in the liberal market economies (LMEs)—countries in which business strategies are premised on minimal regulation, high labor market flexibility, and cost-driven competition (Hall and Soskice 2001).

For example, while American workers have virtually no access to the decision-making machinery of large corporations, German workers have legal rights to codetermination, including representation on companies’ supervisory boards and the right to information and consultation on matters of employee concern (Greven 2008, 6). In Germany, as in other CME countries, institutions promoting social partnership “are valued because they underpin and sustain the long-term and trustful relations between workers and employers that are so important for the success of manufacturing strategies based on flexibility and high-quality production” (Thelen 2005, 47). Differences between CMEs and LMEs thus equate to differences in workers’ institutional power.

In the dozen years since the publication of Hall and Soskice’s (2001) edited volume, the varieties of capitalism (VoC) approach has attracted numerous corrections and criticisms. These include reassessments of the role of the state, additions and refinements to the two ideal types, questions about the framework’s applicability beyond the core manufacturing sector, deeper explorations into the mechanisms of institutional change, and continued debate over whether CME institutions are converging toward the neoliberal model (e.g. Becker 2009; Schmidt 2006; Pierson 2004; Howell 2003). One criticism is especially pertinent to the analysis of workers’ institutional power: the contention that national institutions are far less of an important of a factor influencing the strategies of employers and unions than VoC scholars claim. Arguably, VoC scholars tend to ignore or treat as exogenous the broader international economic context. As Lillie and Greer (2007) argued,

With the decline of nation-level class compromises, national industrial relations institutions no longer perform the function comparative institutionalists ascribe to them, they do not channel capital and labor into particular patterns of behavior based on national comparative advantages. . . . As actors shift among national settings and draw on rules and resources from supranational contexts, new configurations of interest and balances of power emerge, in ways that nationally bounded institutional analysis finds difficult to predict and understand. (pp. 575-76)

If national institutions no longer encourage employers to behave the way VoC scholars predict, then the impact on workers’ institutional power would be game changing, especially in CME countries. This appears to be the case in industries such as construction, shipping, and manufacturing, in which transnational capital and labor markets have prompted CME employers to adopt neoliberal practices. Yet there is also evidence that CME institutions still encourage employers to engage in cooperative labor relations in ways not evident in LMEs. Over 90% of international framework agreements (IFAs) have been signed within the past decade by multinational corporations headquartered in the fifteen continental European Union countries or Norway and by request of the union in the company’s home country (European Industrial Relations Observatory 2013). For the most part, these IFA “negotiations have taken place as an extension of the continental European style of labor relations,” and even in those cases in which unions had to pressure management into negotiations, in general “both sides quickly adjusted to the task of developing an atmosphere of social dialogue and pursuing constructive and mutually acceptable solutions” (Fichter, Helfen, and Sydow 2011, 78). In contrast, IFAs signed by LME-based corporations are few, and most came only after bouts of intense conflict.

There is also evidence that unions from LME countries request help from their CME counterparts precisely because they seek to leverage the latter’s stronger institutional power. For example, in 2003, the Swedish union Handels assisted the American union UNITE in a dispute with multinational retailer H&M by arranging meetings between UNITE officials and H&M’s CEO, Stefan Persson (Hyde and Ressaissi 2009). Handels’ positive, cooperative relationship with H&M managers lay in stark contrast to UNITE’s negative experience with management in the United States. In another instance, the Communications Workers of America (CWA), facing trouble in their attempt to unionize employees of Deutsche Telekom’s U.S. subsidiary T-Mobile, formed an alliance with the German union Ver.di. “Our role as Ver.di is to use our relationships and our contacts on every level in the company . . . to support CWA’s efforts here in the United States,” explained Ver.di official Ado Wilhelm on a visit to the U.S. “Ver.di will use its seats on Deutsche Telekom’s supervisory board to press German managers to accept union representation at T-Mobile USA and then coordinate any bargaining that follows” (Morgan 2009).

Clearly, national institutional frameworks still afford economic actors certain advantages and capacities. The key question is not whether institutions still matter but, rather, in what ways do national institutions continue to shape actors’ relationships and power dynamics, not despite but in light of employers’ and workers’ deepening engagement with other geographic scales, including the international scale? In other words, how do national institutional frameworks condition the possibilities for power in a multiscalar world? Integrating comparative institutional analysis with theories of geographic scale not only resolves the tension between VoC approaches and those concerned with processes of internationalization but also deepens our understanding of institutional power in the context of transnational labor campaigns.

Although early VoC scholarship exhibits a functionalist view of institutional feedback, later writings emphasize that actors and strategies play a crucial role in both reinforcing and altering national institutional frameworks. Hence, the claim that the “self-reinforcing sets of national institutions emphasized by institutionalists have lost the coherence needed to self-reinforce” (Lillie and Greer 2007, 555) misses the crucial point made by comparative historical scholars that institutions are not at all self-reinforcing but rather, even in times of apparent stability, actively shored up or contested by actors who strategize, form coalitions, and exploit institutions’ inherent ambiguities to maintain, redirect, or alter them (Mahoney and Thelen 2010; Streeck and Thelen 2005). National institutions are constantly changing—in part due to internal dynamics, in part due to international factors—and understanding these changes is in fact essential for understanding that institutions and agency are two sides of the same coin.

Integrating studies of national institutions and transnational processes is therefore not about “bringing agency back in” but about analyzing the extent to which national institutions still impact power relations even when actors are no longer nationally bound. In lieu of approaches that privilege either the nation-state or the international economy, a global production networks (GPNs) perspective can help illuminate the present nature of employers’ and workers’ strategies, power, and preferences. GPNs “can be thought of as the globally organized nexus of interconnected functions and operations of firms and non-firm institutions via which goods and services are produced and distributed” (Coe and Jordhus-Lier 2011, 221). As Rainnie, Herod, and McGrath-Champ (2011) argued, the GPN approach, unlike those focused only on global commodity chains, “restores the territoriality of institutional and regulatory contexts and the state as an actor,” enabling the researcher to consider how production networks “are constituted and reconstituted by the economic, social and political arrangements they inhabit” (p. 159). Thus, in the context of GPNs, workers’ power is as much about actors’ political and institutional ties as it is their economic location (Coe and Jordhus-Lier 2011, 222).

The GPN perspective fits well with Coe and Jordhus-Lier’s (2011) call for a “constrained agency” approach to space and scale. The fact that actors exercise power spatially by jumping or creating scales does not mean that national institutional differences no longer matter. Strategic uses of scale, such as a local company’s use of international labor markets, link different institutional contexts together through networks of actors whose abilities to accept or contest each others’ scalar strategies both condition and are conditioned by the institutional settings of specific places. “Networks are the product of scaling practices, just as much as scale is produced in and through networks of connectivity; networks connect places, and the differences among these places matter” (Sadler and Fagan 2004, 41, emphasis added).

Therefore, it is true that “industrial relations actors now operate in a trans- and supranational environment” (Lillie and Greer 2007, 552), but not all such actors have equal capacity to eschew deep-rooted national institutional frameworks, nor do all actors have an interest in doing so in the first place. Even those who do strategically jump scale often find themselves bound by prior commitments, investments, and practices that constrain, though perhaps do not completely obstruct, new courses of action. Hence, while transnational processes and actors’ scalar strategies create complications for institutional analysis, the multiscalar world is not a hopelessly unpredictable free-for-all. As Sadler and Fagan (2004) emphasized, “global processes are mediated politically by national states in ways that reflect particular local and national legacies and trajectories” (p. 28).

In sum, institutional power is neither simple nor static. Its exercise depends not only on workers’ capacity to invoke protective laws, regulations, and procedures but also on their capacity to rescale conflict to locations in which employers remain bound by institutional frameworks. Moreover, institutions change, but this fact does not preclude the persistence of identifiable patterns of interaction that shape the relationship between employers and workers over time.

Both structural and institutional power are capacities workers have by virtue of their direct relationship with employers. The former derives from workers’ embeddedness in the production or distribution of goods and services in the global economy, while the latter comes from workers’ embeddedness in institutionalized rules that regulate the employment relationship. Globally, however, the majority of workers have neither the structural capacity to disrupt economic processes nor the institutional capacity to invoke protective laws and rules. Nevertheless, most workers are embedded in wider networks of social relationships through which they have ties to community organizations, consumers, voters, shareholders, journalists, political leaders, and various other actors with the potential to influence the outcome of conflicts between capital and labor. Workers can therefore leverage the influence of actors outside the direct employment relationship. Those who do so exercise what I call coalitional power.

Coalitional Power

Almost all workers have access to networks of social relations by virtue of the multifaceted aspects of their lives. Workers are not just workers. They are citizens, consumers, and family members (Coe and Jordhus-Lier 2011, 218), who interact with neighbors, community leaders, religious associations, students, politicians, pensioners, and countless other actors and interest groups. “The politics of production are therefore neither confined to the workplace nor to the industrial relations of the nation-state” (Lier 2007, 816). To gain leverage in conflicts with employers, workers can draw on these social connections, especially when conflicts concern issues salient to key stakeholders (Carmichael and Herod 2012, 205). The capacity of workers to expand the scope of conflict by involving other, nonlabor actors willing and able to influence an employer’s behavior is what I call coalitional power.

Workers’ efforts to draw strength from their local social ties and form coalitions on the basis of “place consciousness” (Ellem 2010, 351) have been most thoroughly dissected in the literature on community unionism (e.g. Tattersall 2005, 2008, 2010; Nissen 2004; Wills and Simms 2004; Ellem 2003; Wills 2001; Banks 1991). Community unionism involves unions joining forces with other actors at the local level to address issues of shared concern such as the provision of public services or a living wage. Union-community coalitions can also help renew unions by strengthening their connections with women, minorities, immigrants, and other traditionally excluded groups, as unions organize new members on the basis of shared identities and interests (Wills 2001, 466; Tattersall 2010, 22; Anderson, Hamilton, and Wills 2010, 384). Rather than a mere add-on to existing union practices, community unionism can be a means of renewing and revitalizing unions (Tattersall 2010, 3; Ellem 2005, 354).

According to Tattersall (2010), union-community coalitions are most effective when they are “deep”, that is, long term, reciprocal, and positive sum (p. 161). Deep coalitions tend to depend on a frequency of face-to-face interaction and intimacy of mutual understanding that only the common context of place can provide. Since union-community coalitions depend so crucially on mobilizing actors in place, it seems counterintuitive that transnational labor alliances can exercise coalitional power. It is important to clarify, however, that community unionism and coalitional power are distinct. Community unionism is a long-term strategy for building power by better integrating trade unions into their local communities (Yates 2003, 232), while coalitional power describes the capacity of workers to cooperate with other actors in general, a capacity that includes but is not limited to workers’ local, place-based ties.

For transnational labor alliances, not all coalitions need to be deep to be effective. Coalitions with consumers or shareholders, for example, could be short-lived yet still useful for the purposes of a transnational campaign. Hence, with any exercise of coalitional power, “there is a question to be asked about the geographical scope of community. In some instances, the community is inherently local and the issues with which the union is engaged are also so defined. In other cases, community is invoked in a much more expansive sense” (Sadler 2004, 45). Communities need not be based on direct, personal acquaintance; they can be “imagined” (Anderson 1983), as in a community of citizens of a nation-state, an academic community, a community of business leaders, or a community of political activists.

That is not to say, however, that there is no role for deep coalitions in transnational campaigns. Rather, because transnational labor alliances exercise power at multiple different scales simultaneously, deep, in-place coalitions of workers and local community members can anchor and enhance the effectiveness of campaign tactics in several different countries at once. Indeed, “the coalition-building activities of organised labour, and the growth of labour internationalism, are potentially mutually reinforcing” (Sadler 2004, 44).

Despite its broad applicability, coalitional power reflects a single underlying logic captured in what E. E. Schattschneider (1960) referred to as “expanding the scope of conflict.” Schattschneider argued that the outcome of a conflict between A and B depends heavily on the extent to which other actors become involved. Because the inclusion of additional actors tends to disproportionately favor the weaker party (B), B will attempt to involve other actors to tip the balance of power against A. “Private conflicts are taken into the public arena precisely because someone wants to make certain that the power ratio among the private interests most immediately involved shall not prevail” (p. 38). Yet just as B seeks to expand the scope of conflict, A seeks to restrict it in order to maintain the upper hand. “If A is a hundred times as strong as B he does not welcome the intervention of a third party because he expects to impose his own terms on B; he wants to isolate B” (p. 40).

Such struggles over scope are inherently spatial. While expanding the scope of conflict may mean mobilizing support within a particular locality, as with union-community coalitions, it could also mean mobilizing other actors across space and at various scales, as when transnational labor alliances leverage the influence of transnational environmental activists or global human rights nongovernmental organizations. Restricting scope is also a spatial strategy. For example, an employer might attempt to keep a labor dispute local by denying foreign investigative journalists access to local work sites. Hence, both “the capacity to move beyond the local spaces . . . by building linkages to actors located elsewhere” and “the ability to confine one’s opponents to operating at a particular spatial scale by preventing them from building such scalar links” (Herod, Rainnie, and McGrath-Champ 2007, 257) affect the exercise of coalitional power. In other words, controlling the scale of conflict can be an effective strategy for expanding or restricting that conflict’s scope.

Antisweatshop campaigns illustrate the complementary nature of jumping scale and expanding scope. Because traditional industrial action in garment factories (mainly in developing countries) fuels whipsawing and capital flight (Silver 2003), workers have initiated campaigns that instead encourage consumers (mainly in developed countries) to put pressure on retailers to source their garments from factories with ethical labor practices (Johns and Vural 2000, 1202). Campaigns to improve garment workers’ rights thus shift the scale of conflict from the local factory floor (the “sphere of production”) to various overseas retail stores and other “spaces of consumption” (Sadler 2004, 38; Johns and Vural 2000, 1196), thereby simultaneously expanding the scope of conflict by enlisting the support of countless potential purchasers of these stores’ products (Merk 2009, 606). Because they have the capacity to threaten companies’ profits and public images, consumers are better positioned than the factory workers to alter the behavior of retailers and the garment manufacturers that supply them.

Understanding the dynamics of coalitional power demands greater attention to the ways in which actors’ “strategies are shaped by multiple relations beyond the particular power relations at issue” (Piven and Cloward 2000, 414). A spatialized understanding of actors’ efforts to expand and restrict the scope of conflict therefore sheds light on the use of coalitional power by transnational labor alliances, whether the unions in these alliances form coalitions through local community networks or draw support from “communities” in a more expansive sense.

Context-Appropriate Power Strategies and the Link to Success

I have argued above that transnational labor alliances exercise three distinct types of power in their conflicts with employers: Structural power derives from workers’ embeddedness in international trade, time-sensitive production processes, and other features of the global economic system. Institutional power derives from workers’ embeddedness in formal and informal rules, regulations, and procedures at the subnational, national, and international scales. Coalitional power derives from workers’ embeddedness in local communities and wider social networks constituting a diverse assortment of influential nonlabor stakeholders.

While labor alliances can exercise any combination of power types over the course of a transnational campaign, simply exercising power does not guarantee a campaign’s success. Success—defined as at least one partner in the labor alliance obtaining either material benefits (e.g., higher wages, better working conditions) or strategic gains (e.g., collective bargaining rights, union recognition) without suffering losses significant enough to outweigh those gains—requires workers to compel the employer to do something it otherwise would not have done. Structural, institutional, and coalitional power achieve this result only when their exercise directly impacts (or threatens to impact) an employer’s core interests, meaning that on which an employer depends for fulfilling its present material needs and long-term strategic goals. In short, success requires workers to use a power strategy that is context appropriate.

This article has proceeded mainly from the perspective of workers. Yet because power is relational (Knight 1992; Lukes 1974, 2005), it makes little sense to talk about A’s exercise of power without reference to the impact those actions have on B. Therefore, in order to predict the circumstances under which structural, institutional, or coalitional power will be most effective, one must consider not only the actions of workers but also the substance of an employer’s core interests, as well as the specific role labor and other actors play in ensuring that that employer’s core interests are fulfilled. A context-appropriate power strategy is thus one that takes into consideration relations of interdependence.

Just as workers depend on employers for their livelihoods, employers also depend on workers (and other actors) to generate profits, expand into new markets, and secure the longevity of business operations. As Piven and Cloward (2000) pointed out, “capital and labor remain locked together in relations of interdependence that are the fulcrum of worker power” (p. 423). Viewed from this perspective, structural, institutional, and coalitional power can be considered subtypes of what Piven (2008) referred to as “interdependent power,” defined as “the ability to exert power over others by withdrawing or threatening to withdraw from social cooperation,” broadly defined (p. 5).

For instance, because employers have an interest in the smooth and profitable functioning of business operations, they depend fundamentally on workers’ performing their assigned tasks. When workers withdraw their labor or otherwise directly disrupt the production or distribution of goods or services—that is, when workers exercise structural power—they directly threaten that company’s profits and viability. Nevertheless, structural power will be less effective on an employer that can endure extended disruptions, easily replace its workforce, or isolate instances of industrial action to avoid ripple effects through its supply chain or production network.

Likewise, when workers invoke the authority of rules, regulations, and other institutions—that is, when they exercise institutional power—they do so on the assumption that the employer with whom they are in conflict has an interest in complying with those institutions. An employer whose long-term viability is premised on continued compliance with certain international codes of conduct, or a firm whose production strategy is built around structures of shared decision making between management and union representatives, is more likely to negotiate with workers within a given institutional framework than an employer for whom those institutions are not important. In some instances, however, the exercise of institutional power by labor alliances is not effective, given an absence of third party sanctions, lack of resources to pursue court cases, or an employer’s ability to rescale conflict to a different institutional setting.

If structural and institutional power are effective because employers depend on workers to produce and deliver goods and services and on institutions to regulate labor relations, then coalitional power is effective because employers depend on nonlabor actors such as consumers who make purchases, investors who provide capital, and innumerable others whose actions are indispensible for the functioning of capitalism. When workers leverage the capacity of nonlabor actors to boycott, disinvest, exert political pressure, or cause lasting damage to a company’s global brand—that is, when workers exercise coalitional power—they threaten that company’s core interests. Yet as with structural and institutional power, coalitional power is more effective on some employers than others. For example, a company that does not depend for its profitability on maintaining a positive public image will be less vulnerable to consumer-based campaigns than one for whom public image is essential, such as a restaurant or retail chain.

Future studies should explore more deeply the way in which interdependent relations condition the effectiveness of workers’ power strategies and, ultimately, the success or failure of transnational labor alliances. Still, it is important to recognize that the ability of both workers and employers to consciously strategize and recalibrate their approaches as conflicts unfold creates a dynamic interplay between structure and agency that renders the outcomes of transnational campaigns impossible to fully predict. Although a labor alliance can assess the context appropriateness of its power strategy and calculate how best to exercise power across space and at which scales, labor cannot control the political and economic context in which a transnational campaign plays out, how an employer exercises its own power over the course of the campaign, or the windows of opportunity that invite the use of certain power strategies at certain times.

Power is a concept central to all types of conflict yet only now becoming integrated into analyses of transnational labor alliances. By analyzing structural, institutional, and coalitional power in the context of space, scale, and scope, I sought in this article to shed light on the specific ways in which transnational labor alliances exercise these three varieties of power, how rescaling and expanding the scope of conflict contributes to the effectiveness of workers’ power strategies, and why power only sometimes leads to success.