Globalization is transforming the spatial organization of the world economy. In particular, it is leading to the “shrinking globe” phenomenon and the speeding up of social interaction between places across the planet. Given that international labor solidarity is a process of coming together across space, I argue that the spatial reorganization of global capitalism has important consequences for practices of solidarity. Specifically, I suggest that the spatial context within which they find themselves is likely to impact the types of political praxis in which workers engage. Thus, whereas globalization may encourage some workers to engage in traditional international solidarity campaigns it might also, paradoxically, lead others to focus on highly local campaigns, the consequences of which can quickly be spread far and wide as a result of the growing spatial interconnectivity of the planet that globalization has augured. Likewise, the spatial context within which they find themselves may lead some workers to defend their class interests while others defend their spatial interests. Equally, while some unions are focusing upon organizing what I call the spaces of production, others are organizing around the spaces of consumption. Given that workers’ spatial context impacts their spatial goals and political praxis, I argue that it is important to conceptualize international labor solidarity in explicitly spatial terms if we are to understand why different groups of workers may pursue radically different types of political praxis in different places and at different times.

It is commonly assumed that transnational activist networks have greater power to compel state and private sector actors to address rights-based grievances as networks grow and activists gain greater visibility in the mass media. However, evidence from case studies of transnational mobilization suggests that the opposite may hold true under given circumstances. This article examines the struggle for an independent union in the Tijuana-based Han Young welding facility, which in 1997 and 1998 became one of the most important tests to date of labor law and institutions across the U.S.-Mexico border. Drawing international press, the Han Young factory conflict eventually drew in national labor unions, a multinational corporation, state governments, the U.S. and Mexican congresses, powerful private-sector lobbies, Mexican district courts, labor secretariats, national and regional media in Mexico and the United States, and eventually then Mexican president Ernest Zedillo and then U.S. president Bill Clinton. Despite the prominence of the case, however, the Han Young struggle ended in almost total defeat for labor. Evidence from the Han Young case suggests that as conflicts become more complex and drawn out, transnational activists' real influence may decrease, as redress of particular demands requires increasingly complex and surgical interventions to resolve problems. When conflicts implicate internecine power struggles among government actors, solving problems requires confrontations not only over social demands, but also over implementation of agreements when they are reached.

The proliferation of garment industry sweatshops over the past 20 years has generated numerous cross-border (transnational) organizing campaigns involving U.S., Mexican, and Central American labor unions and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). This article examines one such campaign that took place at the Honduran maquiladora factory known as Kimi. The Kimi workers (along with their transnational allies) struggled for six years before they were legally recognized as a union, and they negotiated one of the few collective bargaining agreements in the entire Central American region. The factory eventually shut down, however. Based on Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink's “boomerang effect” model, this case study analyzes why these positive and negative outcomes occurred. It concludes with some observations about “the enemy” and offers short-, medium-, and long-term suggestions for the broader antisweatshop movement.

Recent accounts of transnational activism have examined a variety of social movement organizations (SMOs) but have paid little attention to labor transnationalism. This article utilizes and adapts this new transnational social movements scholarship to understand contemporary labor activism in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) countries. Exploring the preexisting networks and intramovement cleavages that helped spawn labor opposition to NAFTA, it focuses on labor activists' complaints under the treaty's labor side accord. I explore how rising political opportunities associated with the treaty and its new institutions created new political arenas, targets for activists, and incentives for cross-border collaboration. The cross-border political exchanges that formed part of labor activists' strategies to utilize these new institutions helped activists create new movement frames, transnational identities, and coalitions. While these outcomes support the findings of literature on transnational SMOs, they point to the particular dilemmas labor activists faced in confronting these issues due to their vulnerability, the status of unions as formal organizations embedded in national institutional structures, and the difficulty of imagining policies and strategies that might be effective in this new transnational sphere.

This article explores labor transnationalism in the Brazilian auto sector. It argues that industrial structure, state institutions and practices, and labor ideologies affect the form and frequency of labor transnationalism. In Brazil in the 1980s, labor transnationalism was mostly limited to information exchange and occasional economic support, and political pressure in the form of letters of solidarity from foreign unionists. By the 1990s, when Brazil opened itself to world trade in the auto sector by dramatically lowering tariffs and domestic content requirements, labor began to pursue new strategies. Yet while facing similar challenges in the same industry and at times within the same corporation, unions of opposing political tendencies pursued different strategies. Conservative unions responded to economic globalization by deepening their ties with the government and the business sector, while left-oriented unions increasingly made use of new forms of transnational actions. By the early 2000s, in Ford and Volkswagen, solutions to labor conflicts were achieved after Brazilian auto unionists traveled to the headquarters of the auto firms in Detroit and Wolfsburg and negotiated directly with corporate headquarters.