Gewerkschaften und Global Governance: Grenzen und Möglichkeiten einer grenzüberschreitenden Regulierung von Erwerbsarbeit.

Against the background of globalization and the erosion of the nation-state's steering capacities new cross-border regulations are developing in the key area of trade union activity. It is a matter of academic controversy what limits they are subject to and what opportunities these new and complementary regulations outside the nation-state might provide to compensate for the steering deficits in the nation-state or to make it possible to react to various forms of internationalization of the economy, such as labor migration, capital exports and imports, transnational company mergers and cooperation, and the establishment of transnational production chains. In political science the concept of »global governance« is used to analyze specific forms of political problem solving and regulation in the international policy arena without restricting the view through »methodological nationalism« (Ulrich Beck). »Governance,« as distinct from government, takes in various formal and informal kinds of transnational regulation which manage without a sovereign - in other words, with the competence to take binding decisions and to implement collective decisions - central authority or »world state.« Besides governments, non-state actors are also involved in their negotiation and implementation, including national and global trade unions which perform important functions with regard to articulation, steering, participation, and legitimation. Notwithstanding widespread assumptions about the »total impotence« of international trade union policy and the general »ungovernability« of a cross-border economy in future the rudiments of a global system of social regulations and industrial relations will develop. It is true that they share the structural short-comings of the overall global governance architecture: already at the program level a »networked minimalism« is manifesting itself and the concrete policy results remain meager and their scope limited. In addition, this concerns »soft law« whose implementation takes place only in the shadow of hierarchy, under pressure from a confrontational public or with regard to the threat potential of powerful national trade unions or functional national labor relations. Finally, global governance is characterized by a serious democratic deficit. Regulatory procedures lack democratic legitimacy and control and the participating actors represent only particular groups in society and their internal decision-making structures are characterized by communication between elites, informal procedures, long legitimation chains, and regional power asymmetries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]