Going Global: Comparing Union Resourcefulness in Securing Inclusion in Supply Chain Labor Governance Initiatives

This article, based on stakeholder interviews and document analysis, compares the development of supply chain labor governance institutions in the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Germany beginning in the late 1990s. The authors address the puzzle of why the United Kingdom’s union-inclusive multi-stakeholder initiative (MSI), the Ethical Trading Initiative, rose to national dominance, while two similar MSIs failed in Germany (the Roundtable Codes of Conduct) and Sweden (DressCode). They find that these differing outcomes can be explained by the approaches of Northern unions to address problems of representation in relation to Southern workers in governance struggles, and how effectively they used the power resources at their disposal. The authors develop an agentic theory of union resourcefulness based on these findings, which complements extant structural arguments. Drawing on theories of ideational power resources, they show how sensemaking processes are central to marshaling and (re)creating power resources. This theorization of resourcefulness helps to explain outcome variation in unions’ ongoing struggle for influence in globalized production.