A mere 157 years and six months after two European political philosophers concluded a pamphlet with the words “Workers of the world, unite,” it may actually be beginning to happen.
Last Thursday, August 25, a number of unions from around the world came to Chicago to announce that they are forming a new alliance that will fund and coordinate the organizing campaigns of janitors and security guards in (initially) India, Poland, Holland, Germany, South Africa, and the United States. As recently as two years ago, it was unlikely that any labor-force futurologist would have predicted that the first de facto global union would consist of the people who guard and clean office buildings and factories. But in the past couple of years, cleaning and security contractors from all over the planet have been purchased by a handful of chiefly European-based multinationals. The two largest -- Securitas, based in Sweden, and Group 4 Securicor, a British-Danish amalgam -- employ 600,000 workers between them and are growing rapidly.
The leading U.S. security companies -- Burns, Wackenhut, and the once-legendarily-goonish Pinkertons -- are now owned by the multinationals, too, but the experience of the guards, here and abroad, has been anything but uniform. Securitas, which owns Burns and Pinkerton, is that rarest of all 21st-century phenomena: a model employer, offering its workers extensive training and benefits. But Group 4 Securicor, alas, is very much an employer for our time. Its Wackenhut employees make do without much in the way of benefits or training; indeed, Wackenhut has been cited repeatedly for its preparation and performance at the nuclear facilities it guards in the United States. In Indonesia and Kenya, Group 4 has sought to bust long-established unions. In South Africa, says Jackson Simon, leader of the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU), airport security guards lost their permanent-employee status, and with it access to government benefits, when Group 4 made them shift to month-to-month contract work last November.
But while autoworkers and their union leaders have long been conscious of working in a global marketplace for global employers, that realization -- and that reality -- is new for janitors and security guards and the unions that represent them. “I was guilty of this, of arguing that globalization was a distraction for us,” says Stephen Lerner, director of the property-services division of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and architect of that union's Justice for Janitors campaign. “What I've now realized is that while the jobs can't move, you need a global labor movement once the companies are global. If a company is nonunion everyplace else, you can't keep it union here” -- an experience that unions in the increasingly rickety workers' paradise of Europe are beginning to realize.
Lerner's boss, SEIU President Andy Stern, describes the first time he realized his union would have to go global. “My dawning realization came in Minnesota a couple of years ago, where we had to hold three elections to win the right to represent some school-bus drivers. I was wondering, ‘Why was this so hard?' Normally, our in-state political leverage and the workers' solidarity would have been enough to overcome employer resistance. But the company was owned by this British employer who was immune to local politics and local conditions.”
But it was the property-service sector that became truly globalized -- and not only the employers. In the United States and many European nations, the janitorial and security workforces are composed disproportionately of immigrants. The workers, the contractors, and the capital are global, says Lerner. “Everything travels across the world, except unions.”
Beginning last Thursday, though, the unions are traveling, too. Their current odyssey began some years ago, when AFL-CIO President John Sweeney shifted the focus of the federation's international department from fighting the Cold War -- a difficult chore after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but some pre-Sweeney AFL-CIO hands knew no other kind of international work -- to winning global support for unions involved in strike actions here, and attempting to create a global trade order that didn't function solely for the benefit of corporations and investors. At the 1999 anti-World Trade Organization (WTO) demonstrations in Seattle, the AFL-CIO sponsored a remarkable, if now forgotten, rally of 20,000 workers from around the world that featured one South African autoworker who suggested that his employer, Ford Motors, should have a global agreement establishing a uniform code of conduct and workers rights in every country where it has plants.
But the Fords of this world are mobile. They close factories in higher-wage countries to move the work to lower-wage countries. Workers in the manufacturing world are at a profound disadvantage in bargaining with such employers. Janitors and guards may work for lower wages than United Auto Workers (UAW) members, but experience no such impediment on their bargaining, or organizing, ability. “If you stage a job action, a manufacturing company can pull up stakes and you lose the jobs,” says Lerner. “In property services, a job action may cause one company to go and another to come in, but the jobs are still there. You can be more daring; you can take greater risks.”
Another U.S.-based union that has pushed the global envelope is the Communications Workers of America (CWA). Under the leadership of Larry Cohen, who became the CWA's president on Aug. 29 at that union's convention, the CWA helped put together a consortium of telecommunications unions from many nations, partly to coordinate some bargaining. But telecom is still largely a mishmash of nationally based companies; global consolidation has proceeded further and faster in property services. The SEIU and a few other property-service unions -- most notably, the Swedish Transport Workers -- realized that they had an unprecedented opportunity. “By moving to unite workers across countries in union alliances at a single company, SEIU is enabling workers to communicate and to act inside their companies with the same level of efficacy that the companies themselves have,” says Ginny Coughlin, the international affairs director of UNITE HERE, the hotel and restaurant workers' union.
In a sense, what this effort seeks to do is to take the European model of social partnerships -- in which unions recognize their workers' unions and meet with them on a continent-wide basis in works councils -- and extend it to a global scale. And not a moment too soon: As the economy has gone global, a number of European employers who treat their workers fairly in their homeland have exhibited no such impulse in their treatment of their workers abroad -- in America, characteristically opposing the efforts of their employees to unionize. The problem is, many European unions, increasingly on the defensive at home, have exhibited no particular interest in the behavior of their employers once they've left the Continent.
But as European companies have gone more and more global, the national or continental focus of the European unions has grown less and less adequate. “It's much easier to change the behavior of a company that's unionized at an 80-percent level globally than it is when it's unionized at 10 percent,” says Stern.
The SEIU's European counterpart in this consciousness-raising effort is the Swedish Transport Workers, whose long-standing relationship with Securitas, SEIU officials say, was crucial to that company's decision not to oppose the SEIU's unionization campaigns at Pinkerton and Burns. As Lars Lindgren, the Transport Workers' international secretary, says, “We talk about standards all the time. I know that SEIU has tried to invoke the [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD] guidelines with Group 4 Securicor, but it hasn't gotten anywhere. If OECD guidelines fail with Group 4, which has violated them repeatedly, what are those guidelines for? When the guidelines don't work, we need a global union.”
Fortunately, there's already a global network structure in which the property-service initiative has incubated. The Union Network International (UNI) includes unions from around the planet in a range of nonmanufacturing sectors, of which property services is just one (telecommunications is another). It was at a meeting of the UNI's property-services division, chaired by the SEIU's Tom Balanoff (who heads the union's Chicago property-services local), at UNI headquarters outside Geneva last January, where the topic of the property-service unions targeting, funding, and coordinating organizing drives first arose. The level of global readiness for the idea was, shall we say, uneven -- at which point, the “SEIU -- brilliant and willful as ever,” says one friendly critic, “went all over the globe persuading unions of the need to form a joint organizing effort and deal with companies at a multinational level in a way that no one has ever done before.”
The UNI has its own pre-existing organizing fund of $5 million, to which a number of property-service unions will contribute an additional $1 million for this effort. For its part, besides ponying up the lion's share of the $1 million, the SEIU will provide, where needed, some staffers to help in organizing workers and identifying how best to put financial pressure on recalcitrant employers. (Hamburg and Amsterdam are among their first stops.)
Are there other sectors where the consolidation of employers into a handful of global concerns would create the setting for such efforts? “Our sectors are dominated by a handful of global companies,” said Philip Jennings, the general secretary of the UNI, at last week's press conference, singling out retail (“about 10,” he said), media (“about five”) and financial services (“about 20”). But in the United States, these are sectors in which union representation is declining or may never have existed at all (there is, after all, no U.S. financial-services union), which means there's no SEIU equivalent to help such efforts along.
But the need for workers to play catch-up with their employers in the globalization game is both chronic and acute. Wages are flat and benefits are being cut in the United States while corporate revenues are soaring and cash on hand is at record levels. Wages and benefits in Europe are being scaled back. The trade agreements that were supposed to benefit workers in the developing world characteristically haven't. We may be moving toward one world, but it is divided more starkly by class than the post-World War II economies of the West, in which a unionized workforce created the first majority middle-class nations in history. Creating widely shared prosperity in a global economy requires global unions, just as the widely shared prosperity of Western nations in the postwar decades required national unions.
“We have to recognize that in real, 21st-century terms, ‘Workers of the world, unite,' can't be just a slogan,” said Stern last week. “It's the way of succeeding in a global economy.”
POSTSCRIPT
And why is it that it took the world's workers a century and a half to get around to that charge given them by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto (well, chiefly Marx, who was the document's primary author)? Because it took the capitalists a century and a half to build the world that Marx described.
In 1998, I reread the Manifesto for the first time since college (we read by gaslight in those days) for a review on the occasion of its 150th anniversary. I was astonished: Marx wasn't writing about 1848; he was writing about 2000.
Despite some monumental errors -- assuming that the proletariat was an inherently revolutionary class, which time and again it has proven itself not to be, and discounting the effect of nationalism on working-class solidarity -- the Manifesto remains perhaps the greatest work of social imagination and prophecy ever written. It describes a globalization process that has only really occurred in our time -- not Marx's. Don't take my word for it. Here's Marx:
“The bourgeoisie, by rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst … .”
And: “The bourgeoisie … in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- free trade … . It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.”
That's our world he's describing. The world of the WTO, of trade laws taking precedence over local labor and environmental standards, of Mexican agriculture collapsing, of Wal-Mart forcing the production of the cheapest goods from the cheapest corners of the globe, even of doctors working for HMOs. It's the world in which the schlock of U.S. television pops up on TV screens the world over.
So no wonder it took 157 years. It took that long for the economy to catch up with Marx's vision of its global integration. For what Marx does in the Manifesto is look at an acorn and describe an oak -- at a time when oaks didn't even exist.
Harold Meyerson is the Prospect's editor-at-large.
