Globalization and Trade Unions : A Comparative-Historical Examination of the Convergence Thesis

Abstract

Trade unions are seen to converge through membership decline due to the challenges of globalization and deindustrialization. However, the ‘globalization will lead to convergence’ thesis is based on unfounded beliefs about the past that distort the interpretation of present trends. Although unionization spread across industrializing countries in the pre-1914 era of early internationalization, major variations in the political and organizational strategies emerged. Today, despite globalization and deindustrialization, cross-national diversity in unionization patterns as well as in union responses prevails. Moreover, trade union movements have been less severely affected by membership decline in the smaller export-oriented economies than the larger more domestic markets. National institutional and political factors as well as domestic structural changes seem to have played as much a role in the downward spiral of decentralization and deunionization as globalization. Thus we need to take into account the differential impact of national institutions and the strategic responses to seemingly unbending globalization pressures.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.