In order to place labor at the center of our analysis of the world economy, we must first determine just how workers in commodity chains derive their power and assess its potential as leverage for workplace gains. Labor scholars extensively discuss workers' bargaining power, not only in broad terms, but specifically as a result of their structural positions in economic activities. The key question is not only what this sort of "positional power" of workers entails, but how it can translate into concrete gains in the workplace.

Positional power, in Luca Perrone's classic exposition, refers to the "varying amount of 'disruptive potential' endowed on workers by virtue of their different positions in systems of economic interdependencies." Michael Wallace and his colleagues extend this definition by specifying the spatial locations that labour interests might disrupt: their own local workplace, or industries "upstream" or "downstream" in the productive network. In this framework, positional power is thought to be greatest when it has disruptive potential beyond the local context of work.