The Transnational Labor Alliances Database Project: Methods, Problems, and Progress

Abstract

Transnational labour alliance (TLA) campaigns have been the subject of sustained scholarly inquiry for more than two decades. Nevertheless, little is known about the overall characteristics of TLA campaigns in general, in part because the full population of cases remains unknown. This article begins to fill this lacuna by introducing the Transnational Labor Alliances Database Project, an archive of primary and secondary documents and researcher-assembled case summaries created by the author over six years, with the help of over 100 undergraduate research assistants. This article explains the methodology of the project as well as several important limitations of the database in its current state. Additionally, this article provides a theoretical overview of key themes relevant to the analysis of TLAs and an empirical overview of broad trends in TLA campaigns. It makes a first step towards developing a typology of TLAs and argues that TLAs vary across at least five key dimensions: (1) who the main actors are; (2) what workers want; (3) where the campaign occurs; (4) why the TLA forms in the first place; and (5) how tactics are deployed.