The Arena of Global Production Networks, Global Framework Agreements and Trade Union Networks
For the past decades of economic globalisation, unions around the world have been on the defensive; their role as voices of the political and economic interests of working people has been marginalised. In a climate of outsourcing, offshoring, flexibilisation and casualisation of work, the loss of union power and the deregulation of labour markets has flourished and opened the way for increasing precariousness and agency work - the "triangular trap"[1].
While continuing to fight to protect their hard-won regulatory instruments within their national domains, trade unions have also begun to look for transnational approaches to combat unfettered international competition that is fed by a race to the bottom over labour costs. The challenge is in developing a strategy that will serve as a political and organisational answer to the dilemma they face – namely, how to bring the power of unions, as locally or nationally organised entities, to bear on the transnational regulation gap in labour relations.
I would argue that the most important tool unions have devised for this task is the global framework agreement (GFA). In contrast to the unilateral and voluntary character of corporate social responsibility (CSR) measures, GFAs are bilateral, negotiated and signed as a policy document between transnational corporations (TNCs) and Global Union Federations (GUFs). Based primarily on the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) Core Labour Standards and other ILO Conventions, they lay a foundation for conducting labour relations in a delineated space or arena, that is, throughout the operations of a TNC and its global production network of suppliers, sub-contractors, and other business partners. GFAs also include mechanisms for monitoring and internal procedures for conflict resolution.
During the 1970s, efforts at bringing the collective voice of labour into the TNC power equation through world company councils failed – ignored by the TNCs they were supposed to influence. Attempts at regulating TNCs through lobbying at international institutions have been largely ineffective as the unsuccessful bid to anchor a “social clause” in the WTO in the 1990s demonstrated. Instead, global unions met TNCs head on, responding to the spread of corporate codes of conduct and unilateral CSR policies with GFAs. And since 2000 – more than a decade after the first GFA was signed – the number has grown exponentially; today there are more than 90 signed agreements, of which 85 are currently active.
In a three year multinational research project funded by the union-supported Hans-Boeckler-Foundation in Germany, we analysed all 73 GFAs signed before 2011 and took a sample of 16 of them for case studies. All 16 agreements were signed with corporations headquartered in the European Union (EU) and with subsidiaries in four countries from four different continents with different national systems of labour relations and different positions in the global division of labour: Brazil, India, Turkey and the USA.
GFAs are a milestone initiative. But as our field research[2] shows, and as many of the critics have pointed out, there are still miles to go. In all four countries we found a widespread lack of implementation. This can be explained by a combination of factors. While implementation is left up to local actors, these representatives of labour and management are rarely directly involved in the negotiation of GFAs. Thus, they lack a sense of "ownership". Secondly, the existence of GFAs was largely unknown among managers in TNC subsidiaries and in the local trade unions. Often, the agreement had not been disseminated to the subsidiaries, or if it had been, its significance as a joint labour-management policy regulation, applicable throughout the corporation, had not been adequately conveyed to the local actors. When unions did know about the GFA, they generally had no understanding as to how they could use the agreement to gain recognition and to support a bargaining agenda.
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