The effects of global framework agreements on production and distribution relations

The subject of this study is global framework agreements, an international social policy instrument developed by the international trade union movement in the last quarter of a century in response to the crisis of certain types of wage unionism that emerged in parallel with the crisis of traditional labour relations. Global framework agreements are documents concluded between global trade union federations and multinational companies with the aim of regulating labour relations and internationalising labour standards along the supply chains of multinational companies. The study aims to discuss the potential of global framework agreements to affect production and distribution relations. In line with this purpose, the social policy perspective on which the study is built emphasises the quality of social policy to develop the field of struggle of labour on the one hand and to reproduce social stratification on the other. This perspective makes it possible to understand the effects of the representatives of the capital and labour fronts, which constitute the parties to the global framework agreements, on social policy in the historical process. From this moment on, the tendencies of the capital and labour front in the historical process from the welfare state to neoliberalism have been followed and the emergence of global framework agreements has been discussed within this framework. The study analyses the effectiveness of global framework agreements in terms of content, scope and implementation, and concludes that global framework agreements can make a limited contribution to relations of production and distribution in favour of labour. Since global framework agreements are produced "from within" rather than "against" neoliberal policies, the historical tasks that can be attributed to the agreements will be limited to the framework drawn by neoliberalism. However, if global trade union federations treat global framework agreements not as an end in itself, but as an outcome of their activities to develop their organising and struggle capacities, they can become a tool to intervene in relations of production and distribution.