Trade Union Pedagogy and Cross Border Action

This article examines the potential of global trade union pedagogy to address the structural and political challenges of cross-border trade union action. It does so by proposing an analytical framework that draws from labour relations, political sociology and education in order to explain education processes and outcomes as responses to the pitfalls of global labour campaigns and the inadequacy of global and local labour institutions. We proceed to assess the value of our framework by elaborating on its different dimensions -framing, synthesizing, connecting and regenerating- in relation to the education work of a Global Union Federation, namely the International Transport workers’ Federation. We find that an actor-centred approach that combines top-down, bottom-up as well as horizontal processes of collecting knowledge from different contexts and making links between different countries, industries and parts of supply chains can help actors realise that their seemingly very diverse concerns are essentially different manifestations of the same problem.