Labour as a transnational actor, and labour’s national diversity as a systematic frame of contemporary competitive transnationality

Abstract

This paper argues that one strong and still largely uncontested theoretical heritage of mainstream approaches to capitalist diversity, and particularly the varieties of capitalism framework, is the binding of labour’s agency to national institutions and (cultural and ‘mental’) ‘paths’. This has been the main paradigm within political and trade union debates, too, especially in Germany, where the proposal to strengthen ‘typical German institutional advantages’ (namely co-determination) in the face of European and global competition is widespread. After a critical presentation of these approaches, the article proposes, following empirical findings and relying on concepts from the transnational migration literature and the debate in geography on scaling, to analyse local-oriented action by labour as itself being a specific form by which labour’s transnationality is constructed. However, in the cases presented, this specific form of construction turns out to be a competitive one, with ideological frames of cultural and mental divisions in Europe and beyond in systematic use.