Global Unions, Local Power: The New Spirit of Transnational Labor Organizing by Jamie K. McCallum

Author:Jamie K. McCallum [McCallum, Jamie K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Labor, Globalization, Labor & Industrial Relations, Political Science, Business & Economics, General
ISBN: 9780801469473
Google: pcemAQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2013-10-17T09:38:45+00:00

Labor Transnationalism Then and Now in South Africa

South African labor history is rich and closely tied to the story of the nation as it looks today. Throughout that history we can identify three moments of labor transnationalism, which I refer to as communist/syndicalist, social movement, and institutional to identify the dominant influences in each period.2 The first, roughly from the early 1900s to 1960, refers to the period of worker organization that was influenced by American, Australian, British, and Scottish trade union traditions. The second period, from 1960 to 1994, largely reflects the deep analysis done by South African labor scholars on social movement unionism, a brand of militant community-based activism so fierce it has its own acronym, SMU. However, the most important point of departure for our purposes is the transition to the next phase, which takes us to the present, called “institutional internationalism,” and in my opinion it is representative of what is “new” about labor transnationalism, especially in South Africa. This is an important distinction since what is commonly referred to as “new” by South Africa scholars—grassroots or proletarian internationalism—is actually more indicative of the “old” models described earlier (see chapter 1). Institutional internationalism refers to numerous collaborative efforts by various unions and nonunion labor organizations but most significantly the case study under examination here.3

Central to the campaign against Group 4 Securicor (G4S)—because it helps explain what the SEIU and UNI were doing in South Africa in the first place—is the demobilization of one of history’s most audacious union movements. Why did the South African trade unions become more quiescent? As a starting point, it makes sense to consider some of the phenomena that explain the same historical trends in other labor movements—institutionalization, bureaucratization, corporatism—as an antecedent to today’s transnational activism.

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