ABSTRACT
Globalization created new problems for American labor. Strategies that had evolved to provide institutional stability for unions and less effective in the face of corporations willing and able to close operations and move them abroad if their demands were not met. The response of organized labor illustrates how, under changing conditions, feedback plus reflection may lead to change in strategies and even in goals. Organized labor increasingly moved toward demanding reform of the global economy as a whole, symbolized by demands for labor rights and environmental standards in international trade agreements to protect all the world's workers and communities from the race to the bottom. Its official objective became an upward harmonization of global standards that would take labor and the environment out of competition. The recessions of the early twenty-first century, marked by huge additional losses of industrial jobs and expanded offshoring of high-tech and other white-collar jobs, revived the labor movement's economic nationalism.
