Governing Work and Employment Relations in an Internationalized Economy

Growing internationalization of economic activity has corroded the capacity of national institutions to regulate work and employment. In this changing context, established international institutions have generally not proved adequate to the resulting challenge. New initiatives have emerged to address the growing regulatory gap at the international level, variously aimed at cross-border flows of capital, labor, goods, and services. Most of these initiatives entail the addition of new institutional arrangements and regulation at the international level alongside, and not in place of, national frameworks. The resulting multilevel arrangements raise particular governance challenges. The solutions conventionally proposed neglect the role of power relations in shaping arrangements and hence their contested nature. This research and policy article examines the academic research on internationalization and work and employment regulation at the national level, the response of established international institutions, and the rise of new regulatory initiatives at the international level. It applies and modifies Streeck and Thelen’s framework for analyzing different types of gradual change and elaborates ways forward for new, multilevel arrangements that take account of power relations.