Books and the Arts 125 His most recent research has focused on transna- tional corporations, global unions, and global frame- work agreements. Is Global Governance the Solution for Labor? Global Unions, Local Power: The New Spirit of Transnational Labor Organizing By Jamie K. McCallum Cornell University Press, 2013 ISBN: 978-0-8014-5193-5 Reviewed by: Marcel Paret DOI: 10.1177/1095796015578148 It has become commonplace to question labor’s contemporary relevance. Confronted with grow- ing capital mobility, flexible labor regimes, and the persistence of free-market ideologies, union densities have been decreasing across the globe for decades. Some commentators would argue that the working class needs new organizations to lead the way. Global Unions, Local Power dares to tell a union success story. Against this backdrop, Jamie McCallum’s Global Unions, Local Power (GULP) dares to tell a union success story. The story is about the SEIU’s global campaign against Group 4 Securicor (G4S), the world’s second largest employer (following Wal-mart) and global leader in the security services business. Beginning with failed attempts to organize security guards in the United States, it traces the SEIU’s efforts to revamp the campaign by building linkages with unions abroad, from the rich countries of Europe, to Australia and New Zealand, to poor countries in Africa and Asia. Through this story, McCallum seeks to chart a new path for organized labor. Governance Struggles GULP rests its hope for labor renewal on “gov- ernance struggles,” which seek to “exert a degree of discipline and control over the busi- ness practices of transnational corporations and free-trade pacts” (p. 11). Rather than pressuring employers to raise wages or benefits, or demanding that nation-states protect labor rights, governance struggles aim to establish new “rules of engagement” that are favorable to unions and union organizing (p. 12). An impor- tant example involves the struggles for neutral- ity agreements, whereby employers agree to refrain from actively opposing union organiz- ing efforts. Governance struggles are not necessarily restricted to the international level. Indeed, McCallum views the popular “corporate cam- paign” strategy within the United States as typi- cal of this approach, as it seeks to alter the broader context in which union organizing occurs (p. 13). But with the decline of nation- state protections and the globalization of busi- ness operations, he argues that governance struggles are becoming increasingly central to attempts at labor internationalism (pp. 12-14). Governance struggles became popular in the 1990s with attempts to insert social clauses into free-trade agreements and to establish codes of conduct for employers in transnational supply chains. But today, the most common examples involve global framework agreements: “non- binding contracts” between global union feder- ations and transnational corporations that aim to “secure labor standards throughout a com- pany’s operations” (p. 37). This tactic featured prominently in the G4S campaign. The G4S Campaign GULP is brilliantly researched and well orga- nized, telling a compelling story about the “new spirit of transnational labor activism” (p. 2). Drawing on interviews with organizers and at UNIV OF UTAH SALT LAKE CITY on June 4, 2015 nlf.sagepub.com Downloaded from