The under-development of multinational collective bargaining has generally been equated with legal and institutional differences between major host and source nations of direct foreign investment. Such an analysis is deficient in that it imputes a neutral role to management action in discouraging such a development. Analysis of the labour utilisation practices of multinational enterprises reveals their impact on labour stratification and segmentation. An important outcome of multinationality is to create considerable vulnerability, within many multinational enterprises, to effec tive nationally based union action. Labour responses to the multinational enterprise exploiting these structural paradoxes appear to represent the most cost-efficient way forward for organised labour.
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