Transnational labour governance: Crafting the authority and regulatory effectiveness of global agreements

The development of cross-border social dialogue to improve conditions for global workers includes transnational company agreements. These private governance agreements, inter alia , encourage company and union parties to share responsibility for protecting labour rights and standards throughout their operations. In particular, the Global Framework Agreement (GFA), with declared global reach inclusive of suppliers and robust joint measures for regulatory compliance, contributes a significant resource of potentiality for actor utility and local application. This article shows that concrete asymmetries of political-economy power in multinational companies are affected by attribution and expression of moral-political authority engendered by the GFA, and diverse actor responses to that authority. Generation and distribution of that authority among parties facilitates action toward more responsible and effective multilevel transnational labour governance.