Social Partner or Social Movement?
European Integration and Trade Union
Renewal in Europe
Graham Taylor and Andrew Mathers
AbstractThis paper outlines recent examples of labor movement renewal in Europe in the context of European integration and globalization. It highlights an increasing tension between the strategy of social partnership pursued by official labor organizations and grassroots "social movement unionism." The paper demonstrates that the prospects for successful renewal involves linking workplace mobilization and organization with wider popular struggles to form a movement against the new regionalized forms of corporate and state power. This has direct relevance to current debates in the US concerning the tension between "service" and "organizing" models and demonstrates the need for vibrant autonomous workplace unionism as well as a political dimension to labor movement renewal.
The internationalization of the global economy, neo-liberal state restructuring, and the resulting transformation and consolidation of corporate and state governance have had an impact on the organizational and representational form of organized labor throughout the advanced industrial societies. National labor movements have become increasingly marginalized between the growing strength of transnational corporations and regulatory agencies, and the growing prevalence of decentralized and company-level collective bargaining. These developments have coincided with a protracted process of de-industrialization, resulting in a marked decrease in union density and a serious challenge to traditional forms of union strategy and identity.
The crisis is particularly severe in Europe, where, in many countries, [End Page 93] organized labor had an important social role as a corporate partner alongside capital and the state. The existence of various forms of corporatism in Europe has been instrumental in determining the response of trade unions to the process of neo-liberal restructuring. The dominant tendency has been for union hierarchies to seek an accommodation with neo-liberalism through various forms of "concession bargaining" and "social partnership." In the context of European integration, new forms of partnership have been developed at European, national, and company levels. For many in the European labor movement, the involvement of trade unions within these institutions provides the basis for the redefinition of union strategy and identity in an era dominated by intense international competition and domestic insecurity. There are, however, currents of resistance starting to develop within the European labor movement that challenge both the underlying acceptance of neo-liberalism and the strategy of social partnership. These currents take the form of a transnational "social movement unionism" that links diverse groups and networks in opposition to neo-liberal globalization.
In this paper we explore the development of trade union renewal in the context of European integration. Drawing on both primary and secondary data, we examine the role of the European Trades Union Confederation (ETUC) as a social partner at European Union (EU) level, national-level social pacts, and European works' councils (EWCs), and the way in which these developments have been resisted by new forms of radical trade unionism and by wider networks of resistance such as the European Marches network. The paper argues that trade union renewal is more complex than a simple dichotomy between "social partnership" and "social movement," and that there are signs of union renewal that simultaneously embrace elements of both models and form the basis for radical new forms of labor movement politics. In conclusion we highlight how these European developments provide valuable insights with regard to the strategies currently being pursued by the AFL-CIO and major U.S. unions in response to lean production and hemispheric integration.
European Integration, Neo-Liberalism, and the Logic of Exclusion.
The context for the current challenges facing the European labor movement is a process of integration that has posed an increasing threat to established forms of labor movement organization at the national and workplace levels. Integration developed in response to "Euro-sclerosis": The notion that European economies were uncompetitive vis à vis the U.S. and Japan owing to protected and uncompetitive national industries, [End Page 94] restrictive labor relations, and over-generous social welfare systems. In the U.K., neo-liberalism was imposed through a state-led assault on the organized labor movement by the Thatcher administrations of the 1980s (Clarke, 1988; MacInnes, 1987). In the wider European context, the U.K. route to neo-liberalism was not a serious option. The tradition of social dialogue or "corporatism" was well established in the key states of France and Germany, as well as the Benelux countries and Scandinavia. Both the social democratic left and the Christian Democrat center-right, moreover, shared the commitment to social dialogue. The ideological commitment to corporatism and the dynamics of neo-liberal reform have combined to produce a highly distinctive mode of governance within the EU: a form of multi-level governance (See Marks et al., 1996), in which an underlying logic of labor movement exclusion is legitimated through the language of partnership and dialogue.
While the complexity of European integration and the institutional form of the EU are beyond the scope of this paper (See Harrop, 2000, for a detailed exposition) there are several aspects of the integration process that impact directly on European labor relations (Cafruney and Rosenthal, 1993). The logic of exclusion is determined by the organizational logic of "subsidiarity" that permeates its operations—the notion that legislation and directives should be implemented at the lowest possible level. In practice, this has resulted in European regulatory directives being implemented by national and sub-national federal states in ways that have severely undermined nationally-determined forms of industrial relations and social protection. The process of European integration has thus allowed EU member states to escape Keynesian arrangements and apply neo-liberal reforms in a way that bypasses the democratic accountability of national parliaments and national forms of social dialogue between capital, labor, and the state. There has been no corresponding growth of democratic accountability at the European level. While there is a European Parliament directly elected by the people of Europe, it has limited influence. Real power is concentrated in the Council of Ministers and the unelected European Commission. National labor movements are consequently marginalized through a combination of the inter-governmental power of national parliaments and the multi-national power of European institutions.
The process of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) provides an excellent illustration of how European integration works according to a logic of exclusion. EMU developed in two main phases. Phase one, completed in 1992, was the creation of a single market for goods, labor, and [End Page 95] capital, and involved the development of European regulatory mechanisms in the areas of industrial and competition policy. The resulting liberalization and rationalization included the emergence of "Eurocompanies" in a small number of sectors (retail, banking, and insurance), the liberalization or privatization of state-owned public services and an increasing flow of foreign direct investment (FDI) into and out of the EU (Ramsey, 1995). These developments contributed to record levels of unemployment within the EU and this was compounded by the second stage of EMU: the development of a single currency and an independent central bank. EU member states were subjected to a number of "convergence criteria," designed to ensure a uniformity of exchange and interest rates, and monetary policies that constrained inflation and budget deficits within a narrow band. These criteria resulted in extreme deflationary pressure and put severe strain on established mechanisms of wage bargaining, industrial relations, industrial support policies, and welfare policies (Kaupinnen, 1998). The new "Euro" currency was launched in 1999 and the discipline of the convergence criteria was institutionalized through an ongoing "stability pact" (Pochet and Fajertag, 2000).
The EU's response to unemployment and poverty was an integrated employment policy that again combined subsidiarity with social partnership. The Employment Chapter of the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty enshrined the neo-liberal notion of "employability" as the touchstone of social development and economic growth in the EU. Employability involves subordinating social and welfare systems to the demands of the labor market. EU member states compile annual employment plans to demonstrate how the principle is being applied to specific national conditions. As a consequence, European social protection systems and labor markets are converging around "workfare" and flexibility. These arrangements have been supported through a popular discourse of social and civic partnership that has been practiced by trade unions and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) at European, national, and company levels.
Social Partnership and Social Dialogue in Europe: A Price Worth Paying?
As the process of European integration has intensified, the ETUC has developed an increasingly important role within European industrial relations. Formed in 1973, the ETUC is made up of 66 national confederations from across Europe, 14 European Industry Federations, and 38 Interregional Trade Union Councils (See Gabaglio and Hoffman, 1998, for more details of the development and form of the ETUC). The Treaty on European Union (TEU) (1992)—also called the "Maastricht Treaty"— [End Page 96] established the ETUC as an official social partner alongside the Union of Industrial and Employers' Confederations of Europe (UNICE) and the European Center of Enterprises with Public Participation and Enterprises of General Economic Interest (CEEP). The TEU placed an obligation on the EU to consult the social partners prior to the implementation of new social policy measures. It enables the social partners to engage in autonomous dialogue and conclude EU-wide agreements on employment and social protection issues. Progress has been limited by the unwillingness of UNICE to enter negotiations and a desire by employers to maintain collective bargaining at the national level (Zagelmeyer, 1998). The ETUC also failed in its campaign to have a Charter for Fundamental Rights (including rights to collective bargaining, industrial action, and consultation) incorporated into the European Treaty. Despite a coordinated campaign with the European Platform of Social NGOs, the measure was defeated by sustain opposition from UNICE, national employers, and nation-state governments.
The limited progress made in developing an effective and autonomous role for the labor movement at the European level has not, however, prevented the ETUC from emerging as an important supporter of European integration, in general, and developments such as EMU and employability, in particular. ETUC strategy has been to use its institutional access to pursue a Keynesian agenda of a coordinated European economic policy, promoting investment, and boosting unemployment. The ETUC's relative lack of success in achieving tangible concessions is a result of institutional tensions that undermines its effectiveness. The ETUC mirrors the intergovernmental form of the EU, and its strategy and identity is closely bound up with developments within and between national confederations and their respective nation states (Osterheld and Olle, 1998). Consequently, the emergence of the ETUC as a transnational actor has detached the ETUC from any representational base or mobilizational constituency. The ETUC is thus marked by a double asymmetry of European integration: While the ETUC has gained opportunities to influence specific details of European social policy it has been excluded from decisions on more fundamental questions regarding the form of governance associated with European integration (Dølvic, 1997: 310). The commitment of the ETUC to European integration has made it difficult for it to oppose its specific trajectory, even where this has had a negative impact on employment and social protection.
The process of EMU linked the process of European integration directly with cuts in public expenditure, welfare retrenchment, the development [End Page 97] of flexible and insecure employment, and mass unemployment. Indeed, EMU has provided both the economic discipline and the ideological legitimation for the neo-liberal restructuring of labor markets and welfare states. The majority of national union leaders and union confederations supported EMU, and in the context of a declining national power base the labor movement has, to some extent, colluded with the neo-liberal agenda in return for an undertaking by the public authorities and the employers to preserve existing levels of employment (Pochet and Fajertag, 1997: 11).
During the 1990s, a new form of social partnership developed in the form of tripartite and bipartite social pacts within EU nation states. New social partnership arrangements have been introduced in every EU member state, except the U.K. and France, including nation-states with a history of corporatism and social dialogue (Austria, Germany, Netherlands) and nations were there is no evidence of this tradition (Ireland, Portugal, Spain). These pacts involved a trade off, in which the unions agreed to wage moderation, reduced public expenditure, and flexible working arrangements in return for a commitment by employers and the state to prioritize the problem of unemployment. However, in the context of high unemployment, corporations and governments were not compelled to offer significant concessions in order to achieve pay restraint and the pledge to reduce unemployment remained unfulfilled (Martin, 1997). While there were examples of successful national pacts that either introduced new forms of tripartite corporatism to facilitate meeting the EMU convergence criteria or reconstituted existing mechanisms for the same purpose (See O'Donnell and O'Reardon, 1997, on Ireland, and Visser and Hemerijck, 1997, on the Netherlands) elsewhere many pacts came under severe pressure or broke down in the face of rank-and-file opposition and mobilization against EMU-induced austerity measures and unemployment (Pochet and Fajertag, 1997; Pochet, 1998). Ultimately, social pacts increased the tension within European labor movements even when they were 'successful' and were instrumental in de-linking union hierarchies from their membership (see, van der Toren, 1997, with regard to the Netherlands) and in the development of new currents of opposition at both the national and European level.
The process of European integration has also resulted in the development of new forms of partnership at the enterprise level. The 1994 Works Council Directive required all undertakings with 1,000 or more staff in the EU, or at least 150 in two or more member states to set up European Works Councils (EWCs) to facilitate employee consultation. [End Page 98] The main impetus behind the development of EWCs has been to improve competitiveness and productivity, and, consequently, have been used mainly as an instrument of human resource management, leading to the further erosion of existing national and sectoral collective agreements through the introduction of micro-corporatism and enterprise unionism.
There are examples where EWCs have provided the opportunities for trade union renewal and new international forms of solidarity. There is, for example, evidence that union activists have been able to subvert information flows within companies in order to develop transnational networks that undermined the operation of management benchmarking and performance indicators (Martinez Lucio and Western, 2000). There are, however, few examples of what Rubenstein (2001), exploring developments in the U.S. context, has termed "on-line" forms of union involvement. The dominant tendency has been towards exclusion and marginalization of autonomous workplace representation; even where the unions have actively supported the development of EWCs.
Case studies have highlighted the limited and management-controlled agenda of EWCs and their isolation from established national forms of employee representation (Wills, 2000). In the motor industry, for example, EWCs have been used by management to intensify competition between plants. The unions have used these arrangements not to build up international trade union strength but to obtain information that can be used in competition for production capacity in other plants (Hancké, 2000; Whittall, 2000). In non-union companies such as McDonalds, EWCs have clearly been developed as a mechanism of management communication with no meaningful consultation between management and workforce (Royle, 1999). The central issues of pay and working conditions are excluded from the EWC agenda, and to the extent that the operation of EWCs detach unions from national bargaining and detach workplace unions from company consultation mechanisms, EWCs have created an increasing dualism within European labor markets and the further weakening of national corporatist arrangements with few compensations at the European level. The increasingly visible limitations of the social partnership approach has, however, resulted in the emergence of new forms of resistance and mobilization that link rank-and-file activism inside and beyond the mainstream labor movement in an a transnational network against neo-liberal restructuring in Europe. [End Page 99]
The Limits of Social Partnership: A Current of Grassroots Resistance
The current of resistance to neo-liberal restructuring and social partnership has developed from isolated national mobilizations in defense of jobs and welfare, to European mobilizations that increasingly represent an alternative strategy for labor movement renewal. Despite the organizational, political, and ideological differences between European trade unions (Crouch, 1993; Hyman, 2001) the wave of mobilizations through which the new current emerged displayed important common elements and were drawn together by resistance to neo-liberal restructuring. The initial wave of strikes and demonstrations in the mid-1990s were largely a response to the austerity programs associated with the EMU convergence criteria. During 1996, IG Metall (German metal workers' union) successfully mobilized a national strike in defense of sick pay agreements that were jeopardized by social security reforms. In Italy, Belgium, and Greece, there were widespread public sector strikes against pay restraint, pension reform, and privatization.
The most widespread and militant strike action was seen in France towards the end of 1995. A plan to reform social security and a public sector pay freeze resulted in a wave of one day public sector strikes involving up to five million workers, and indefinite strikes concentrated in the transport, communication, and energy sectors. These strikes were accompanied by massive street demonstrations that by December involved over two million protesters. This level of support was an indication of the breadth of opposition to the EMU imposed austerity measures and resulted in a number of national demonstrations and general strikes. In 1996, there was a day of action in Spain involving over 650,000 people, and Germany and Italy saw their largest demonstrations since the war involving 350,000 and 1.5 million, respectively. There were one-day general strikes in Greece and Danish workers organized strike actions that involved almost all sectors. This wave of mobilization was an obstacle to further restructuring and threatened to derail the EMU project. In Germany and Italy, the figures on public debt were fudged to enable entry into the single currency, Greece was forced to delay entry, and in Denmark the Euro was rejected in a referendum. The mobilizations also represented a challenge to the social partnership strategy with social pacts being abandoned in Germany and Belgium and a European employment pact backed by the European Commission failed to get off the ground.
It is possible to identify, in this wave of mobilization, the beginnings of a current of grassroots resistance that represents an alternative [End Page 100] strategy for trade union renewal. This current has developed in subsequent years and while its main elements are most clearly identifiable in France they are also present in varying degrees in other European countries. Increasing discontent with social partnership has resulted in rising intra-union conflict leading to the formation of new critical tendencies such as 'Tous Ensemble' (All Together) in the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT) (associated with the French Socialist Party) and to growing support for breakaway radical unions such as Solidaires, Unitaires, Démocratique (SUD) that are particularly well represented in the transport and communication sectors where strike action was strongest in 1995. These tendencies and radical unions emphasize organizational control by rank-and-file activists, an issue that contributed to the development of new unions such as the Comitati di Base (COBAS) rank-and-file committees in Italy. These new unions have developed radical demands such as the shorter working week without loss of pay coupled to public sector job creation measures. Such demands have resonated with new independent organizations of the unemployed that have been engaged in struggles against unemployment and welfare reform.
In France Agir Ensemble Contre Le Chômage (AC!) organized national marches against unemployment and job insecurity in 1994 and was at the forefront of a prolonged campaign against poverty in the winter of 1997. In Italy, the COBAS supported mobilizations by the "socially useful workers," demanding regular public sector employment at union rates of pay to replace their temporary workfare-style employment. In Belgium, the Chômeurs pas Chiens (Unemployed not Dogs) highlighted the plight of those denied welfare payments by new social security regulations.
Developing links between workers, the casually employed, and the unemployed has been accompanied by unions taking up broader social issues. SUD has been a prominent supporter of the fight against deportation by the Sans Papiers (migrants without residency papers) and has established a student section that campaigns around education issues. The development of a broader social agenda was exemplified by the May 1997 "March for Social Justice" in London, involving striking Liverpool dockworkers alongside environmental activists. The mobilizations also spawned a new internationalism with solidarity rallies with the French strikers taking place in Rome, Athens, and Berlin. Meetings were also held between French and German trade unionists during which discussions identified common problems and the need for a common strategy to achieve the goal of a "Social Europe."
An important element in the emergence of a new critical current [End Page 101] within the European labor movement were the European Marches (EMs) against unemployment, job insecurity, and social exclusion. These were a series of transnational marches that snaked their way across the continent before converging in Amsterdam on June 14, 1997, for a 50,000-strong demonstration outside the EU summit meeting. This mobilization hinted at what would follow in Seattle, in that it brought together a coalition of labor and other social actors to demonstrate their opposition to the liberalization agenda of a powerful transnational institution. The EMs led the demonstration waving banners declaring: "Liberalisme—Chômage et Exclusion—Imposons L'Europe Sociale!" and "People's Europe not Bankers Europe." The network that was formed out of the EMs has been involved in organizing an international demonstration on the occasion of every EU intergovernmental summit since Amsterdam, including the mobilization of 30,000 in Cologne in May 1999 and an attempt to blockade the summit at Nice in December 2000. These events have included a combination of traditional labor movement forms of action, such as marches and street demonstrations with imaginative direct actions that are presented as "illegal but legitimate." These actions have included travelling to demonstrations on "free trains," blockading motorways, and occupying public and government buildings.
The EM network is a loose coalition of individuals and organizations at the forefront of the current of grassroots resistance. In union terms, this means radical unions such as SUD and COBAS, but in countries with a single national federation, such as Germany, there are tendencies of critical trade unionists within unions where the social partnership strategy is dominant. The links developed between the unemployed movements that mobilized in France in 1997-98 and in Germany in 1998 contributed to the unemployed associations forming the backbone of the network. European networks of activists and organizations involved in campaigning around European policies relating to migrants and women have also developed in and around the EM network. The network has developed contact with the Green and United Left group that has 43 members in the European Parliament.
The network has rejected the adoption of a detailed political program in favor of a set of demands for European-level employment and social rights, such as an unconditional right to a basic income and a pension. These demands were formulated at pan-European forums bringing together hundreds of grass roots activists from a range of unions, associations, and campaigning organizations. These forums, alongside the marches and demonstrations, have expressed a new form of internationalism [End Page 102] based on the practical exchange of experiences and ideas. The forums have adopted a common alternative agenda for a democratic and social Europe based around substantive rights of European citizenship available to all people resident within the borders of the EU. This highlights the possibilities of bottom-up, grassroots mobilization in the context of regional integration across the triad of global regions, and the dangers of partnership and social movement approaches that fail to connect with rank-and-file union members. Indeed, it suggests a strategy that goes beyond the partnership—social movement dichotomy and the need for a conceptual deconstruction of these categories with regard to their impact on union autonomy and renewal
Social Partner or Social Movement: Beyond the Dichotomy.
European integration is part of a wider process of regionalization, through which the EU, Japan, and NAFTA are emerging as the key blocs in the global economy (Hirst and Thompson, 1999). The EU is institutionally more developed than NAFTA and Japan, and, as a consequence, provides key insights into the possibilities and dangers that regional integration has for the labor movement. This provides an added dimension to the debate concerning the most effective model of union renewal in the context of intensified global competition. In the U.S. context, there has been a debate concerning the capacity of enterprise-based partnership arrangements to both improve competitiveness in the context of lean production and provide the basis for labor movement renewal. These partnership arrangements are commonly presented as win-win situations in which corporations gain from the increased productivity delivered by a unionized workplace and unions gain increased organizational strength, and, in some cases, significant increases in membership (Rubinstein, 2001). There have also, however, been significant mobilizations in opposition to lean production (Meiksins Wood, 1997; Moody, 1997a) and examples of community based unionism that have had significant success in the organization of marginalized workers (Gaspin and Yates, 1997). The latter highlights the potential of a radical social movement unionism (Moody 1997b, 1997c; Waterman, 1999) and indeed the AFL-CIO and leading unions such as the Teamsters and the Autoworkers, have revived an interest in organizing and developing links with other progressive movements and networks. The labor movement has played a key role in the mobilizations at Seattle and Quebec. These high profile events should not, however, obscure the challenge facing U.S. unions in terms of union density, and the important relationship between union density and the [End Page 103] wider political capacity of the labor movement (Rose and Chaison, 2001). While the relationship between lean production and union density is ambiguous, there are a number of more fundamental issues concerning the compatibility and coherence of the partnership and social movement models in an overall strategy of union renewal.
The analysis of European trade unionism suggests that it is possible to make a conceptual distinction between different types of partnership and social movement unionism that have markedly different implications for trade union renewal. In the context of a prolonged crisis of Keynesianism and European integration, a range of alternative union identities have emerged as possible models of renewal. On the basis of whether unions strategy is premised mostly on the workplace or on wider social issues, and on whether union strategy is premised on the individual or collective interests of workers, Hyman (1999) identifies company unionism, social partnership, social movement unionism, craft guild, and friendly society. This insight is developed from Hyman's three-dimensional model of European trade unionism (Hyman, 2001), which suggests that European trade unions have occupied a position somewhere between class, market, and society. This was manifested in class-based oppositional unionism, enterprise-based company unionism, and the involvement of unions as social partners in civil society.
This model allows for a more complex and nuanced analysis of partnership as it has developed in Europe; one that is increasingly relevant in the U.S. context as the two-dimensional model (class and market) that has dominated U.S. industrial relations is augmented by an increasing interest in the wider social and political role of the labor movement. In the context of European integration, organized labor has been accepted as a social partner only to the extent that it has accepted the neo-liberal agenda. This has important implications for the form of partnership underpinning contemporary social pacts and in particular the forms of partnership that have developed at the European level. There is an important difference between the forms of neo-corporatism or social partnership that existed at the national level prior to the 1990s and the form of the social pacts that developed in the past 10 years in the context of EMU. While the former was in many cases a result of an "institutionalization of conflict" based on a "culture of compromise," the latter were based on an "institutionalization of partnership" (Therborn, 1992; Katenstein, 1984). While neo-corporatism marked an engagement with capital and the state, contemporary forms of partnership constitute a defensive from of disengagement and retreat. The above dangers are also evident with regard to [End Page 104] the argument that union renewal could be premised on a social movement-type politics in civil society. During the Keynesian, era the social power and influence of European labor movements derived from their economic and political power within the workplace and the state. The notion that the labor movement could be reconstituted as part of a rainbow coalition engaged in a struggle for democratic values against neo-liberal globalization (Waterman, 1999) is clearly problematic if it is not premised on a revitalized workplace trade unionism and a critical engagement with the state (Moody, 1997b).
The limitations outlined above have become increasingly obvious as union hierarchies committed to consensus and partnership have nevertheless developed a campaigning social movement approach. In Europe, this is illustrated in the failure of the ETUC campaign for a Charter of Fundamental Rights (including the right to organize and take industrial action) to be incorporated into the Treaty of European Union. The ETUC initially attempted to achieve this objective through partnership and dialogue within the EU. When this failed, the ETUC successfully mobilized 70,000 trade unionists at a demonstration at the Nice intergovernmental conference in December 2000, where the measure was being discussed. Despite this impressive mobilization, European ministers reacted to opposition by employers' organizations and several European governments and rejected incorporation of the Charter. This highlights the important reciprocal relationship between mobilization of membership and the ability to influence the external environment. (Hyman, 2001: 60-1). Also present at the Nice Summit, however, was a smaller counter-demonstration representing an important current of grassroots resistance in Europe. The current of opposition in Europe highlighted the possibility of a radical social movement unionism that linked rank-and-file activists and workers across national boundaries, and with activists from a range of other struggles in a concerted struggle against the effects of neo-liberal restructuring. The oppositional networks attempted to mobilize rank-and-file activists around a campaign that linked quantifiable demands around an effective transnational mobilization. The demand for a basic income for all citizens of the EU by the EM Network, for example, was set at 50 percent of GDP per head of population in order to overcome divisions and diversities within and between national labor organizations, and transnational networks and movements. In Europe, the mobilizations drew their strength from the way in which they involved direct confrontations with corporate and state power that linked rank-and file trade unionism with a wider struggle for social transformation. This strategy of strength [End Page 105] through diversity is unlikely to be generalized through the wider labor movement without a process of "social dialogue" occurring within the labor movement itself (Hyman, 2001: 174), including a reinvigoration of union democracy, in order to increase the accountability of union leaders to the rank and file (Moody, 1997b: 59-60).
The development of regionalized institutions in North America has barely
started, but the experience of the European labor movement highlights
the limits and possibilities of social movement unionism in a globalized
regional economy. In the context of the Free Trade Area of the
Americas (FTAA), the AFL-CIO has adopted a campaigning social movement
approach. Through the ambitious Campaign for Global Fairness, there
has been an attempt to develop a transnational solidarity around the
principles that workers' rights should be incorporated into trade and
investment agreements, and that corporations should be held responsible
for their actions at both the global and local level. There have been
important transnational mobilizations, such as at the Summit of the
Americas in Quebec City during April 2001, that involved unionized and
non-unionized workers, as well as students, women, environmentalists,
and indigenous populations. The evidence from Europe suggests that these
multinational campaigns are unlikely to be effective if divorced from a
vibrant and autonomous workplace trade unionism, and a critical engagement
with corporations and state agencies. Social movement unionism provides
the basis for union renewal in the global context but its ultimate
success will be measured by the extent to which it facilitates the
(re)building of the independent political and economic power of labor.
Graham Taylor is a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of the West of England, Bristol, Coldharbour Lane, Bristol BS16 1QY United Kingdom; e-mail: graham.taylor@uwe.ac.uk.
Andrew Mathers is a visiting lecturer in sociology at the University of the West of England, Bristol, Coldharbour Lane, Bristol BS16 1QY United Kingdom: e-mail: andrew.mathers@uwe.ac.uk.
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