Both books explore the nexus linking globalization, global governance, and labor, but from different perspectives. While Christina Gabriel and Hélène Pellerin's Governing International Labour Migration focuses on the management of migrant labor within a globalizing environment, Dimitris Stevis and the late Terry Boswell's Globalization and Labor examines whether global trade union federations are able to challenge global capitalism and to democratize global governance more broadly.

It is widely accepted that globalization processes put workers under pressure. In manufacturing, corporate relocation threats regularly trigger wage concessions and a deterioration of working conditions. These threats have been made possible through international treaties that enhance free trade. In contrast, in non-tradable sectors of the economy—such as personal services, health care, and construction—wage dumping is not associated with the free movement of capital and goods, but with the free movement of labor across borders. Yet, even globalist scholars have conceded that nation-states still control migration policy. Consequently, the world's labor markets still seem to be governed by different rules of operation across economic sectors and countries. Unsurprisingly, the challenge of international labor migration therefore remains largely absent in Stevis and Boswell's account of global union politics, with the exception of several important references to the early days of labor internationalism. But is it really justified to downplay the issues related to contemporary labor migration? The answer given by the volume edited by Christina Gabriel and Hélène Pellerin is a clear no.

The eleven contributions to Governing International Labour Migration discuss significant changes in international labor migration patterns. They see three major shifts: the rise of temporary labor migration, the increasing influence of transnational commercial law (lex mercatoria) on national migration policy since the mid-1990s, and the securitization of migration management after September 11. While Gabriel, Pellerin, and their colleagues do not dispute that nation-states play a major role in migration policy, they do contend that we are witnessing major shifts between state-centered, commercial, and human rights regimes of migration management.

Until very recently, state-centered frameworks ensured that migration policy was essentially about entry policies, citizenship and residence laws, and labor market and social policy regulations, reflecting the receiving state's authority over its territory. This created clear demarcations between insiders and outsiders, offering some immigrants a road to citizenship and equal social rights, while excluding others. The state-centered regime made it possible to include national welfare concerns, but it also subordinated migrants to the economic and political conjunctures of receiving countries, generating condemnations of national labor market and migration policies as protectionist and racist. In this context, the rise of new transnational juridical fields in the area of migration policy may be considered a welcome development. The examples from the European Union, America, and Asia on which Governing International Labour Migration draws, however, suggest that the emerging frameworks in migration management are dominated by neo-liberal economic interests rather than liberal human rights concerns.

In her chapter on the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), Pellerin shows that the Mode 4 section of the GATS and similar international treaties allow nationals of one member state temporary presence in another member state in order to supply economic services. She equally notes that the principles of nondiscrimination and reciprocity do not apply to migrant workers themselves, but to the corporations that are posting employees abroad to provide services. It follows that the protection of the rights of posted workers depends on their own employers. But employers have few incentives to compensate posted employees in line with the standards of the receiving country, because lower labor costs regularly represent the competitive advantage of foreign service providers compared to local firms. Whereas transnational free trade regimes do accept that the statutory minimum wages of the receiving country also apply to posted workers, Pellerin doubts that such guarantees represent a sufficient and sustainable barrier against wage dumping (p. 39). Given recent judgments of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), Pellerin's worries seem to be justified. In the Laval, Viking, and Rüffert cases, the ECJ stated that the fundamental right of businesses to supply cross-border services takes precedence over industrial and labor relations law and practices including the fundamental right to strike against wage dumping. By placing labor standards of the sending country above those of the receiving country, the court effectively turned the principle of equal treatment of posted and domestic workers on its head (see the European Trade Union Confederation's Web site, http://www.etuc.org/r/846).

Hence, the contemporary shifts in the governance of labor migration simply create new modes of inclusion and exclusion. The emerging lex mercatoria regime may provide employees with an opportunity to work as temporary migrants abroad. At the same time, the regime also excludes them a priori from access to the rights that are associated with permanent status as a worker and resident in a receiving welfare state, however skilled the migrants may be (Stasiulis, p. 110). In addition, the securitization of migration policy after September 11 further increased the marginalization of workers' rights concerns by attributing more authority regarding the migrant's legal status in the territory to the employer (Walters, p. 55). Employers in receiving countries may gain access to good value labor power and developing economies may receive more or less valuable remittance payments (Simmons, p. 76), but the question of workers' rights remains secondary in the quest for competitive advantages in both the sending and receiving countries. Whereas Governing International Labour Migration fails to provide practical answers to these challenges, Piper's chapter concludes the book by postulating that migrant associations and unions have key leadership roles to play. Will they generate new strategies and mobilize societies “to ensure the implementation of a rights-based approach to the management of migration” (p. 182)? This question brings me back to Globalization and Labor, which promises a critical account of global union politics.

In the contemporary political economy, unions adopt competing orientations. They may choose to lobby national governments to reintroduce protective tariffs, as during the first term of the George W. Bush administration in relation to the steel industry, or they can seek common ground with unions in other countries and jointly challenge free trade organizations at the regional or global level (p. 23). Unions may also adopt more or less egalitarian policies in relation to global capital and global governance. This leads Stevis and Boswell to a typology of union strategies that ranges from nationalist and non-egalitarian to cosmopolitan and egalitarian orientations.

The analytical focus on national, regional, and global decision-making levels and more or less egalitarian policy orientation addresses important dilemmas. They guide the reader through (1) the history of labor internationalism and nationalism, (2) the hesitant inclusion of social concerns into global public governance, and (3) the direct engagement of global union federations and European Works Councils with multinational corporations, which led to the adoption of a number of global union-management agreements on core labor rights. Whereas Stevis and Boswell don't believe that the global unions have risen to the challenge of global capitalism, they do note that the international labor movement made notable steps forward, especially compared to the legacy of labor internationalism during the twentieth century, which was marked by entrenched ideological and national divisions.

We may, however, ask whether a study with the title “democratizing global governance” shouldn't have distinguished between union strategies that have more and those that have less democratizing effects on global decision making. In many regions of the world, labor unions have contributed to democratization processes in the past. But unions have also adopted technocratic rather than democratic strategies when this suited their purpose. For example, business unionism, which is an important union tradition in Anglo-Saxon countries, tends to perceive the welfare of workers as an economic rather than political issue. It follows that unions may well be agents that translate the concerns of ordinary people into global egalitarian aspirations. But they may equally help international organizations, governments, and corporations to legitimize contentious decisions in exchange for economic gains: “Engaging institutions of governance and power, whether public or private, is a two-way street” (p. 43). Future studies of global union politics should therefore aim to measure the more or less democratizing effects of transnational union action, as implied by Stevis and Boswell's conclusion: “Global societal politics that avoid the question of the state, and the power that it embodies, are destined to become global interest group politics without broader visions of democracy and justice” (p. 155). However, to what extent do unions politicize regional and global governance? Does labor's transnational action contribute to the making of a transnational public sphere, or even a global people that may reclaim popular sovereignty over the “global state” (p. 79)? While both books under review underscore the importance of these questions, both also make clear that in many respects, they remain to be answered. There thus remains a broad agenda for future labor research and action.