Successful cross-border organizing in developing nations demands that transnational corporate campaigns operate in tandem with local drives for a union contract. On-site organizing drives are most effective via quiet leadership development and house visits, which prepare sufficient participants to request negotiations. Only at this point are widespread in-plant publicity and international attention beneficial. In the export apparel sector's historical context, specific organizing drives in the Do minican Republic, Guatemala, and Honduras validate such an approach. They also verify the primacy of local participation and close union com munication with outside monitors in the functioning of transnational cam paigns.
In response to private sector's utilization of 'free trade agreements' to unbridle corporate investments in union-free environments, North and South American labor unions have attempted at least five types of responses: developing activist networks; campaigning for corporate sourcing codes; advocating trade-based labor standards; coordinating with developing country unions; seeking women's empowerment. After assessing each response, the study evaluates the US Guatemala Labor Education Project as a model that combines them all. It argues that with various degrees of success, such labor strategies extend beyond traditional class boundaries.
Free and fair trade can assume various meanings, depending on who defines the terms. This study draws on the Gramscian notion of hegemony to link meaning and social structure. Taking bananas as a test case, the study employs documents, interviews, and on-site observation to explore five meanings of fair trade: supporting smallholder markets; assuring historical shipping arrangements; encouraging national development; guaranteeing decent working conditions; and preserving ecological balance. Structurally, the first two meanings emerged within the banana trade’s competing hegemonic systems, one dominated by three US-based transnational corporations and the other by former colonial powers in the European Union that favored their own shipping. Although the battle finally required WTO intervention, as Gramsci points out, hegemony can also comes from below. Independent national banana growers made direct trade arrangements with supermarkets. Militant unions became especially active within the TNC system, while small-scale producers and “Fair Trade” advocates refined the EU approach. They each have forced fresh approaches to product certification. As TNC domination weakens and independent producers cultivate supermarket outlets, the expiration of EU banana quotas in 2006 may determine which of these competing approaches to trade prevails. A bottom-up alliance among labor, smallholders, and consumers/environmentalists threatens to inspire a fresh hegemonic trade discourse.
What is required for sustaining an alliance between union and environmental activists? Applying grounded theory to a case study in the Costa Rican banana sector, this article reveals five historical phases. First, unions and environmentalists identify common opportunity structures for joint action. Second, a preexisting network becomes a resource for mobilization. Third, the new coalition engages in communicative action that leads to shared identity and cultural framing and a foundation for handling exogenous global forces. Market policy changes in the fourth phase stimulate a transnational activist network and framing linkages. Dramatic supply disruptions in the fifth precipitate autonomous organizational approaches that require reframing, identity extension, and flexibility. This study argues that the Costa Rican case can be generalized to other labor-environmental coalitions if such alliances create simple, open structures that agilely adapt to external opportunity structures and expand frames that encourage collaborative autonomy and dualistic collective definitions.
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