Labor Studies Journal

Although the need to organize workers at the global level has become widely accepted, there are to date few concrete studies of global organizing campaigns. Four staff members from the International Union of Foodworkers (IUF) analyze the IUF's Nestlé/Coca-Cola Global Organizing Project in the light of the emerging literature on this topic. The IUF launched this ambitious organizing campaign in response to institutional demands and opportunities. Resources were identified to hire organizers working in the Global South to coordinate and support unions organizing at major global companies. Several case studies illustrate how a complex multilayered strategic organizing approach has succeeded in making headway against fierce antiunion resistance in some developing countries. The analysis also suggests that long-term sustainability of strategic global organizing efforts requires their successful application to organizing workers at global companies in industrialized countries as well as in the Global South.

This article focuses on how the Vietnamese General Confederation of Labor (VGCL) responds to workers' strikes. A complex, non-monolithic VGCL has developed a “third sleeve,” its dynamic pro-labor press, which plays strategic mediating roles among the state, labor unions, and management. The labor newspapers use their forums to champion workers' rights and interests and empower labor unions that negotiate with state bureaucracies and management on the workers' behalf. Simultaneously, the labor press must respond to policies and agendas of the VGCL and the state, which still hold to their power to monitor and control workers' collective action.

Workers' participation in the management of their work lives is widely regarded as vital to the success of contemporary organizations. One form of nonunion employee representation, widely acclaimed in Europe and rare but receiving increasing attention in North America, is the workers' council. The authors provide a review of the experience, role, structure, and functions of workers' councils in the Former Republic of Yugoslavia, a country that undertook one of the most comprehensive programs of worker self-management, including the widespread and legally mandated use of workers' councils. The authors then discuss key issues and concerns about workers' councils.

Drawing on case study data, this article analyzes contrasting workplace union responses to organizational restructuring in the United Kingdom's aerospace industry. It critically evaluates two distinct union strategies that resonate with contemporary debates governing the future role of trade unions in the British workplace. The first response is based on “partnership” with management while the second reflects traditional “oppositionalism” via the assertive defense of rank-and-file member interests. The article highlights inherent weaknesses in partnership strategies arising from problems of management intention and union incorporation. By contrast, while militant opposition was more successful in constraining the exercise of managerial prerogatives, the traditions of “sectionalism” (or “localism”) in plant-based union organizing meant that this strategy was limited to securing a partial and transient defense of jobs and labor standards.

According to business pundits of the 1990s, the United States had finally liberated itself from the shackles of an Old Economy. Technology, entrepreneurialism, and the reduction of social regulations promised to restore American economic competitiveness. Nowhere else in the United States did this ideology achieve greater legitimacy than in the American South, where traditional southern conservatism merged with corporate neoliberalism to produce a potent ideological compound. Despite the enthusiasm for the New Economy, the driving force of public policy in the region had a decidedly Old Economy tack to it. At the center of economic development strategy was the willingness to use huge subsidies to lure mobile corporations to invest. The corporate subsidies program reflected the key assumptions of the New Economy ideology. Despite the overheated claims, the strategy failed to deliver freedom or prosperity to southern workers.