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Abstract
Workers are increasingly cooperating across national borders in campaigns aimed at influencing employers to improve wages, working conditions, and labor rights. To date, however, there are no systematic studies of why some transnational labor alliances succeed while others do not. This dissertation thus develops a causal theory of success and failure in transnational labor alliances. I hypothesize that transnational labor alliances succeed only when they exercise a type of power that threatens the core interests of the employer in question. Moreover, workers must coordinate both within their own organizations and across national borders in order to exercise power on the international scale. Using across- and within-case methods of comparative analysis, I test this hypothesis through an examination of six recent transnational campaigns featuring alliances spearheaded by workers from Australia, Cambodia, Indonesia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These campaigns occurred in the shipping, retail, security services, and luxury hotel industries between 1995 and 2010. The data, collected through extensive fieldwork, offer evidence that intra-union coordination, inter-union coordination, and a context-appropriate power strategy are all necessary conditions for transnational labor alliances to succeed.
