The article discusses the local impact of international framework agreements (IFAs). It presents findings from empirical research carried out in two Spanish MNCs, and it examines how the commitments stipulated by the texts of the IFAs translate in local practice in different subsidiaries in Central and SouthAmerica. The article follows the policy cycle of both agreements, and it further evaluates them as emerging private institutions of global industrial relations governance. The main findings reveal a paradox. The generic character of IFAs encourages corporate consent for their adoption, but, in practice, it gives precedence to local laws and hence renders the enforcement of compliance difficult, and, in some cases, unfeasible. And where local laws contravene or lack compatibility with International Labour Organization conventions, the central premise of IFAs as instruments of global governance is largely undermined.
Democratization beyond the nation-state level has been on the scholarly agenda of international political economists since the early 1990s. Academic debates have generated a mushrooming literature on the ‘democratic deficit’ of global governance. In the field of industrial relations, scholarly interest on the relevance of democracy has translated into a rich body of literature on workplace democracy. Yet, research has been concerned with the national and local levels largely neglecting the transnational dimension. This article discusses the potential of International Framework Agreements (IFAs) to address the democratic deficit of the global governance of labour. In doing so, it borrows notions largely established in the field of international political economy and applies them to an industrial relations problem (i.e. impact of IFAs on the ground) drawing on case-study evidence from three IFAs in the telecoms, energy and apparel sectors. The article examines what accounts for IFAs’ capacity for representation, legitimacy, accountability and transparency.
In this article, we examine the potential of global union pedagogy to address the structural and political challenges of cross‐border trade‐union action. We do so by proposing an analytical framework that draws on labour relations, political sociology and education to explain educational processes and outcomes as responses to the pitfalls of global labour campaigns and the inadequacy of global and local labour institutions. We proceed to assess the value of our framework by elaborating on its different dimensions – framing, synthesizing, connecting and regenerating – in relation to the educational work of a global union federation, namely the International Transport Workers' Federation. We find that an actor‐centred approach that combines top–down, bottom–up as and horizontal processes of collecting knowledge from different contexts and making links between different countries, industries and parts of supply chains can help actors realize that their seemingly diverse concerns are essentially different manifestations of the same problem.
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