Multinational companies and trade union rights: How International Unions Alliances contribute to the effectiveness of International Framework Agreements

This article examines how international union alliances (IUA) contribute to the effectiveness of International Framework Agreements (IFAs) and, in particular, considers their ability to promote the process of organizing and negotiating collective agreements in countries where national governments struggle to ensure these fundamental rights are respected. The content of these agreements, which are generally the result of a bilateral agreement between the management of a multinational company and a Global Union Federation (GUF), usually rests on certain ILO conventions, including those relating to the right of association and the freedom to bargain collectively. Since studies on this subject have been initially limited to the analysis of their content and their potential contributions to the social regulation of multinationals, this article is aligned with more recent research devoted to the analysis of the effectiveness of IFAs as a tool for protecting workers' rights at the local level. Based on a longitudinal case study and a large body of empirical evidence gathered from multiple field surveys in Europe and South America, this research shows how such an agreement was mobilized within a European multinational company operating in the distribution sector. Although, in many ways, the different national contexts in which the IFA was applied were rather unfavourable to the implementation of such a system of social regulation, our results show that the IUA can promote the implementation of such agreements. These IUAs are also able to ensure the effectiveness of IFAs when they succeed in firstly shaping common interests between their members through the formulation of a collective project, by structuring and mobilizing important resources, by taking advantage of the emerging synergy of their own multilevel exchange dynamics and, finally, by combining the approach to dialogue and social pressures.