Free trade globalization has had largely negative impacts on workers by driving down wages and allowing capital to move when workers organize and demand better pay and working conditions. Free trade agreements like NAFTA have also destroyed local industries and hurt farmers in the global South who cannot compete with cheap products from the U.S.
Global trade also creates new possibilities for the workers of the world to unite. Transnational organizing campaigns targeted at multinational companies and global union federations have made concrete gains, helping workers improve working conditions and build working-class power.
- Tamara Kay. 2005. “Labor Transnationalism and Global Governance: The Impact of NAFTA on Transnational Labor Relationships in North America.” American Journal of Sociology 111(3):715–56.
- Jamie K. McCallum. 2013. Global Unions, Local Power: The New Spirit of Transnational Labor Organizing. Cornell University Press.
- Gay W. Seidman. 2007. Beyond the Boycott: Labor Rights, Human Rights, and Transnational Activism. Russell Sage Foundation.
- Jill Louise Esbenshade. 2009. Monitoring Sweatshops: Workers, Consumers, and the Global Apparel Industry. Temple University Press.
Even in sweatshops and among immigrants in precarious jobs, workers are finding new ways of organizing. Workers in the global South are protesting and unionizing in factories that make consumer goods, despite state repression and the power of multi-national corporations. Migrant workers in the informal sectors of the U.S. are getting around the barriers of labor law to organize outside traditional unions.
- Janice Ruth Fine. 2006. Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream. Cornell University Press.
- Ching Kwan Lee. 2007. Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt. University of California Press.
- Biju Mathew. 2005. Taxi!: Cabs and Capitalism in New York City. Cornell University Press.
- Ruth Milkman and Ed Ott. 2014. New Labor in New York: Precarious Workers and the Future of the Labor Movement. Cornell University Press.
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