The Fight to Globalize Labor: Transnational Labor, Free Trade Agreements, and International Law

This paper evaluates, through textual and legal case analysis, the long history of transnational labor activists’ attempts to institutionalize international labor norms and law through bilateral and multilateral United States free trade agreements. This paper emphasizes that present scholarship ignores the importance of the symbolic dimensions of law and movement strategy in evaluating this history. The transnational labor movement has hoped that creating international institutions, including protections in trade agreements, which protect labor rights will create systems that globalize labor in parallel to capital’s globalizing legal institutions, such as the World Trade Organization. Labor’s ability to globalize depends on whether international labor law is understood merely as instrumental law­, dependent on central state power, politics, and enforceability, or whether international law also gains force from symbolic dimensions of norm-creation that help construct identities, values, and global norms. This paper builds on concepts of transnational advocacy networks to describe the development and actualization of transnational norms through the mediating domestic social structures of national states.  This approach highlights how present scholarship fails to fully account for activist definitions of success or choice of tactics and considers how the symbolic dimensions of law explains the processes through which labor globalizes under conditions of severe constraint.