The Future of the US Labour Movement in an Era of Global Economic Integration

Abstract

Regional and global economic integration have substantially eroded the ability of US unions to protect their members’ wages, benefits and employment security. An immobile workforce increasingly confronts hypermobile capital which can make good on threats to flee to lower-waged countries like Mexico or Malaysia if its US employees fail to provide sufficient concessions (cf. Tilly 1995). The growing power imbalance between capital and labour has been exacerbated in recent years through the codification of international neo-liberalism in the form of regional and global free trade and investment pacts, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the new World Trade Organization. By removing restrictions on the flow of goods and capital, these agreements ease the relocation of enterprises and place workers around the globe into direct competition for jobs. Today, for example, multinational corporations (MNCs) employ upwards of a half-million workers in about two thousand assembly plants in the export processing zone along the US border in Mexico. Many of these ‘maquiladoras’ are transplants from the US that have fled the higher wages and more restrictive labour and environmental standards in place in the US Engineering this shift toward global neo-liberalism have been centrist and right-wing political regimes in North America and elsewhere which have been altogether hostile to labour’s interests.