ABSTRACT
Globalization is a highly complex phenomenon encompassing the increasingly rapid flows of capital, goods, services, peoples, ideas, values, and images across national boundaries, and the greater integration of the global economy. This chapter focuses on two specific and interrelated aspects of this phenomenon-the ongoing globalization of production and the attempted globalization of labor standards-in order to explore a particular set of tensions that have been highlighted by them. These are the tensions among what appear to be a compatible set of social goals, which have been repeatedly endorsed at the international level: labor standards, women’s rights, and poverty eradication. The existence of these tensions helps to explain why high levels of global collective action in support of labor standards coexist alongside relative inaction at the national level by those on whose behalf the demand for labor standards is being made.
