Eleventh Global Studies Conference

Abstract

In this paper, we contribute to recent research on globalization and transnational class formation and action. Theoretical debates about globalization and the formation of transnational collective actors have outstripped empirical research, much of which has focused on the analysis of corporate interlocks among transnational firms. Corporate interlock research has been the empirical foundation for research on capitalist class cohesion and action at the national and international level, but there are important limits to these data and the methodological approach used in these analyses (Burris and Staples 2012). New analyses, using new data sources, will contribute to advancing this research. Our contribution to this effort consists of analyses of the votes of member country delegates at the annual conferences of the International Labor Organization (ILO). Several characteristics of this dataset afford unique opportunities to contribute to debates about the relationship between economic, social, and cultural globalization, and patterns of transnational class formation and action. Annual measures of delegates’ votes between 1919-2017 were created in 1919 in the context of the Paris Peace Negotiations, in large part as a means of co-opting restive European national labor movements. The ILO has functioned for nearly a century as the organizational center of an emerging world labor regime. Although the identity and core purpose of the ILO have been the subject of debate and contention over the years, the articulation, adoption, and dissemination of international labor standards were originally the defining task of ILO and have remained an important function throughout the organization’s history. The nearly 200 international labor conventions defined and adopted by the ILO between 1919 and the present constitute the regulatory backbone of the world labor regime that formed over the course of the twentieth century, and the ILO bureaucracy provides its organizational hub. Our data track conference delegates’ votes on revisions and final decisions regarding international labor conventions, but also delegates’ votes on questions of member recognition, budget, committees, bureaucratic procedures, and a range of other issues. Our data thus allow us to observe representatives of these organized interests, over much of the twentieth century and into the present, as they negotiate global standards regulating the capital-labor-state relationship. We use a wide range of covariate data to “control for” variation in economic, political, and social structures, at the national and global level and over time, and thus contextualize our analyses of global class cohesion and conflict in the formation of the twentieth-century world labor regime. We combine network and longitudinal regression methods to test hypotheses derived from the recent literature on globalization and transnational class formation and cohesion.