Varieties of Power in Transnational Labor Alliances

Abstract

Workers exercise three distinct types of power when they cooperate in transnational campaigns: structural, institutional, and coalitional power. These power types entail the capacity to physically disrupt an employer’s operations, hold an employer accountable through legal or regulatory institutions, and mobilize nonlabor stakeholders to whom the employer must respond. In developing a framework for understanding workers’ power in the global economy, this article integrates significant works in labor geography, comparative institutional analysis, and union revitalization studies while demonstrating how workers’ embeddedness in global production networks, national institutional frameworks, and social networks enables them to challenge employers on the international scale.