Since the 1990s, observers have seen globalization impairing labor’s rights. We take Charles Tilly as an exemplar of this view, subjecting his 1995 article to critical appreciation. We argue that Tilly, known for his work on the National Social Movement, overlooked the fact that some unions under pressure from global neo-liberalism can employ a protest repertoire employing their citizen rights, while others continue to use labor rights. We use port workers, who are directly exposed to globalization, to show how different political opportunity structures and different strategic choices influence these choices. In Sweden, our exemplar of a neo-corporatist system, we find that the employment of labor rights continues to be robust; in the USA, our exemplar of a fully-fledged neo-liberal system, we find much greater recourse to a repertoire calling on citizen rights. Finally, in Australia and Great Britain, countries undergoing a shift to neo-liberalism in the 1980s and 1990s, we show that strategic choice influences how effectively unions adapt to shifts towards neo-liberalism: Australian unions effectively used citizen rights while the British port unions failed to make this strategic shift.

This paper notes the tendency of 'social movement unionism' scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic to focus on and prescribe the citizen repertoire as the single most important repertoire of labor for challenging neoliberal globalization. Consistent with liberal conceptions of civil society and theories of participatory democracy, it implicitly dismisses political unionism as a path to labor's revitalization. It also assumes epochal change and confines neoliberalism to the post-Washington Consensus era. Deviant case analysis of Italian labor's use of two repertoires (the citizen and the labor repertoire) and of its two regimes of capitalism (in succession, a post-WWII neoliberal regime and a post-1970 corporatist regime) over the course of the 'American Century' gives pause to both these contentions. This study relates labor's citizen repertoire to the era of US hegemony that promotes changes in party-government that tend to reproduce the image of the archetypically neoliberal American polity: a polity that is devoid of 'labor' as a recognized category of the political community, is low in social rights, and, relatedly, is devoid of a party of labor. In this neoliberal political order, labor is perennially locked into the category of 'citizen' and reliant on the citizen repertoire. By contrast, the survival of parties of labor in non-US polities during the post-war wave of neoliberalism permitted union movements a route away from labor-decategorizing orders -political unionism. Now, in the postWashington Consensus wave of neoliberal regime change, that route is more onerous owing to Third Way changes in parties of labor. The major challenge for labor movements that have experienced regime change to a neoliberal polity is in directing their efforts and even their new citizen repertoire to the task of recapturing parties of labor or to creating new ones -or risk long-term US-style labor decategorization. . 2 The episode of contention described in this section, focusing on the 'Trainstopping' action, was compiled by the author by means of ethnographic research conducted in 2005 in Florence, Genova, Livorno, Ravenna, Rome, and Salerno. Semi-structured and unstructured interviews of between 1 and 3 hours were conducted with disobbedienti activists and union officials, and all information provided by each interviewee was cross-referenced with others and with available newspaper and online coverage.

This article uses ethnographic methods, archival research, and systematic process tracing to suggest how McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly's certification mechanism helps to explain systemic impediments to docker solidarity during the EU docker's campaign, 2001-3. By cross-referencing semistructured interviews across docker INGOs and unions in nine OECD countries and triangulating those interviews with internal communications, I found that although the leaders of the International Transport Workers' Federation and the European Transport Workers' Federation were keen to cooperate with leaders of the competing International Dockers Council, national unions affiliated to the ITF/ETF possessed a special power to prevent cooperation. The “national sovereignty clause” in the ITF/ETF constitution endows existing affiliates of the ITF/ETF with the power to veto applications for affiliation by other unions in their national domain. It also can prevent ITF/ETF leaders from communicating with those excluded unions and their representatives. Thus, ITF/ETF certification is founded, not on mutual recognition among all groups of workers, but rather in the denial of recognition to some. This study traces the origins of the clause to the post-WWII construction of the US-led hegemonic order, when ITF leaders colluded with the American Federation of Labor in dividing labor worldwide along Cold War lines. The study identifies the by-pass mechanisms that today's ETF leaders used and which temporarily enabled cooperation across the INGO divide. It also detects a long-term uneven and unequal representation of southern European unions that can skew the frames and goals of a campaign to reflect the interests of more solidly represented regions of labor. This analysis shows that the study of labor transnationalism is enriched by a combination of ethnographic and indepth historical inquiry, which can help us avoid the Kantian imperatives that seeped into the study of transnational actors after the end of the Cold War. And it shows that, by pushing us deeply behind “campaign time,” the combination of ethnography and archival sleuthing helps students of contentious politics to detect longer processes and bigger power structures than we have been apt to do—structures such as world orders established by a hegemonic state.

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