Unions in a Globalized Environment: Changing Borders, Organizational Boundaries, and Social Roles (review)

The past half-century has seen three dominant waves of research in American industrial relations. The first (John Dunlop, Sumner Slichter and others) joined postwar social science in celebrating American institutions, including an industrial relations system that brought gains to workers while providing stable production. The second wave (Tom Kochan, Harry Katz, and others) responded to the collapse of that system with a new "transformation" literature, highlighting employer opposition, union decline, and strategic choice.

Bruce Nissen's edited volume is a useful contribution to the third wave, the labor revitalization literature of the 1990s and beyond. Responding to real world events such as the founding of the Organizing Institute in 1989 and the transformation of the AFL-CIO under John Sweeney beginning in 1995, the new literature (Kate Bronfenbrenner, Rick Hurd, Bill Fletcher and others) highlights innovative union strategies that break with business unionism to mobilize a resurgence of grassroots support. While the focus is mainly on domestic battles in the U.S., Nissen and colleagues take another step: to examine growing international impacts and linkages in a global economy, and the resulting pressures for internal and strategic reform.

Nissenopens with a concise overview of the book and its recurring social movement unionism theme. In a section on cross-border organizing and solidarity, Steve Babson uses the North American auto industry to argue that in the face of massive obstacles, including nationalism and corporate strategies that divide workers, international solidarity is nonetheless possible and even potentially powerful when unions innovate with inclusive, grassroots and coalition-building strategies. Henry Frundt broadens the perspective to identify four models of cross-border organizing in Mexico's maquila, arguing that sustained success requires combining elements such as activist networks, international publicity, cross-national union collaboration, and above all on-the-ground worker organizing. The chapter by Jeff Rechenbach and Larry Cohen of CWA present a concrete example of international solidarity in the Ameritech Alliance case, in which unions in Belgium, Denmark, Hungary and the U.S. combined efforts to defeat company union avoidance policies.

Two articles consider labor's responses to immigration. In spite of the traditional view of immigrant workers as resistant to organizing, Ruth Milkman's portrayal of rising Hispanic political and union influence in Los Angeles tells a different story—of new opportunities for labor in the face of vast inequality, in immigrant social networks, coalition building and urban union revitalization. Nissen and co-contributor Guillermo Grenier follow a similar logic in case studies of immigrant organizing in Miami, with findings that point toward the critical importance of both union leadership and organizational reform.

Concluding chapters build on Nissen and Grenier to highlight internal transformation as the essential ingredient in union revitalization. Fernando Gapasin and Edna Bonacich continue Milkman's focus on Los Angeles with a look at the challenges of organizing in manufacturing industries under "global/flexible capitalism." They explain that heroic efforts by the L.A. Manufacturing Action Project from 1992-98 failed because of weak union support and turf battles. Revitalized central labor councils and community coalitions can provide the essential framework in which leftists can join pragmatists in organizing success. Ian Robinsonprovides theoretical relief from the case studies of previous chapters with a rich analytical framework for the relationship between neoliberal restructuring (NLR) and social movement unionism (SMU). This bold effort suffers from too many variables, mechanistic relationships, and acronyms (NLR, SMU, POS, EOS—let's call them NJAs for "neo-jargon acronyms"), yet contributes importantly to the theoretical development that labor revitalization studies now require.

Paul Johnstonpulls together various threads of resurgence in private and public sector unionism to offer "a new interpretation of social movement unionism as a movement for expanded and deepened democracy, or . . . as a citizenship movement." Immigrant organizing such as Justice for Janitors points toward...