"We haven't been reacting quickly enough," says Guy Ryder, who heads a newly merged global union federation, the International Trade Union Conference. "That's a fair criticism."
What labor hasn't reacted to quickly enough is simply, and hugely, the globalization of the economy. Over the past three decades, virtually every major business has become transnational, and the world labor force has doubled in size, chiefly because of the entry of the Chinese and Indian workforces. The share of the world's workers represented by unions, accordingly, has dramatically declined. So has the bargaining power of national unions with global employers.
Which is why a series of meetings this week at the AFL-CIO's conference center in Silver Spring is, one way or another, historic. In a kind of counter-Davos (the annual gathering of world business elites in Switzerland), union leaders from 64 nations gathered under the umbrella of yet another new group, the Council of Global Unions, to begin what they hope will be the upgrading of distinct national union movements into one, considerably more powerful, global movement. At stake, ultimately, is whether our brave new world affords employees the right to share in global prosperity or whether, as is already the case in the United States, globalization is a tool that businesses use to imperil workers' wages and security.
Some prominent U.S. unions have already begun to go global, partly because doing so is the best way to protect their members' working standards and organize new workers here at home. The United Steelworkers union is in merger negotiations with Britain's largest union, Unite, and has formed a number of global worker councils at some prominent multinational companies. In September, it helped to convene an international meeting of unions that represent workers at Arcelor Mittal, the world's largest steelmaker. It persuaded the company to establish global safety and health standards in conjunction with the unions and to allow workers to form a union at the company's Liberian mining operation. (That union has already played a key role in Liberia's return to democracy.) Setting global standards, says United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard, is as important today as setting national standards was in the early 20th century.
The steelworkers are just one of a number of American unions that are going global, in part to grow locally. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union recently organized 1,000 Manhattan employees of the clothing chain H&M, a Swedish conglomerate, largely because a global union group to which the department store workers belong has negotiated organizing rights for the chain's employees. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has established a worldwide network of security-guard unions intended to spur organizing campaigns here and abroad.
Facing fierce management opposition to employee efforts to unionize at T-Mobile, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) has formed a new kind of alliance with Ver.di, the German telecommunications workers union, to enable the T-Mobile workers to unionize. T-Mobile is owned by Deutsche Telekom, with which Ver.di has deep and long-standing relations in Germany (indeed, under German law, Ver.di's leader sits on Deutsche Telekom's board). This week, the CWA and Ver.di are forming a new group, the T-Workers Union; members will belong to both the CWA and Ver.di. With Ver.di negotiating with Deutsche Telekom and the CWA running the organizing drive here in the United States, this new, binational union has a good chance of succeeding.
Two mega-nations pose mega-problems for the future of global unionism, however. In China, which is increasingly the world's manufacturing belt, workers are represented, in theory, by a giant, government-controlled union whose locals are often headed by plant managers. This week, the unions are debating how to deal with China's not-really-a-union union movement; some kind of wary, conditional proto-recognition may be in the works. The other anti-union mega-nation is our own United States, a fact that increasingly poses a problem for workers everywhere as U.S.-based transnationals try to bring their union-busting practices to their far-flung facilities. At the moment, says Ryder, anti-union U.S. consultants are advising Chinese companies how to get around a mild Chinese labor-rights law that takes effect Jan. 1.
The goal of the unionists at Silver Spring, says AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, is to move beyond their episodic international campaigns, to make labor as global as capital has become. The vision of Karl Marx, shorn of its millennial socialism, is being actualized by the heirs of Samuel Gompers, who aspire to nothing more -- and nothing less -- than decent living standards under global capitalism. " 'Workers of the world, unite!' isn't ideological anymore," says SEIU President Andy Stern. "It's practical."
