ABSTRACT
To date, much writing on how unions should adapt to the new realities of the global economy has assumed, somewhat uncritically, that workers will naturally have to operate transnationally if they are to successfully challenge transnational corporations (TNCs). In this chapter I want to question the uncritical acceptance of this argument, for I believe that it is based upon what is, at best, a partial reading of the nature of the contemporary transformation of the world’s economic geography. Specifically, I suggest that whereas the traditional ‘transnational solidarity’ model in which workers attempt to make common cause globally with their confederates who work for the same TNC overseas may be crucial to their success in some cases, in other instances a second model may also provide workers with an effective means of challenging TNCs, this being a model which focuses not upon the global scale of worker organization but, instead, upon the very local scale of organization.
