Gewerkschaften in der "Globalisierungsfalle"?

The article focusses on the process of "globalization" as fiction and reality in order to outline both: the threats to the cooperative institutional concept of the so-called "rhenish capitalism" and the necessity of renewed trade union politics and policies within national and European labour markets. The basic proposition made is that the process of "disembedding", which characterizes the globalization process, has to be answered by strategies of re-embedding labour and money markets by building up new forms of regulation regimes. Taking the example of Germany and the German trade unions, the author argues that trade unions are not only victims of the "globalization trap", but also actors in a new framework of economic and social challenges - if they accept to be so. They have to build up new forms of solidarity beyond trade boundaries and to push forward to socially and ecologically regulated processes of production ("re-regulation") by resisting the politics of deregulation and by influencing the economic restructuring process. (Prokla / FUB)