WASHINGTON - Moves to form the first trans-Atlantic workers' union could
supersede the conventional view that while business is global, labor remains
mired in local preoccupations.
The US-based United Steelworkers (USW) and UNITE, Britain's largest union, are
to announce a merger next month, it emerged over the weekend. The tie-up is
aimed at helping workers whose jobs or terms of employment are threatened by
economic globalization. It would bring together some 3 million manufacturing,
transportation, energy and public sector workers in
Britain, Ireland, the United States, Canada and the Caribbean.
Union officials said they see their amalgamation as the beginning of a larger
process of consolidation that eventually will include workers in Latin America,
Eastern Europe and Asia. This could enable them to fight the flight of jobs to
countries with lower wages and worker protections.
"We need a global trade union in order to be able to deal effectively and on a
par with the many global companies that we now have members working for," Derek
Simpson, the UNITE joint general secretary, said in a US radio interview.
Separately, a leader of the Australian Workers Union (AWU), that country's
oldest labor group, was quoted in a news report on Monday as saying it also was
in talks to join up with UNITE, which claims 2 million members, and the nearly
1 million-strong USW. A formal merger could be a decade away, but in the
meantime the AWU would pursue strategic alliances, Paul Howes, the union's
national secretary, told the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper.
Workers have long reached across borders to advance their interests. Since at
least the mid-1990s, union officials from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas
have collaborated to press national governments and international financial
institutions on behalf of workers confronted with job losses during and in the
aftermath of major financial crises and, more broadly, over plans to privatize
public enterprises.
Much of this work has been carried out under the umbrella of the International
Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and its successor, the International
Trade Union Confederation, which was formed in 2006 from the merger of the
ICFTU and the World Confederation of Labor.
The US-based Service Employees International Union, which claims 1.9 million
members, also has sought to build a global membership among healthcare,
security and public sector workers in a bid to thwart companies seeking to move
operations to lower-cost locales overseas.
Additionally, groups as far-flung as the AWU, the USW, Brazil's National
Confederation of Metalworkers, South Africa's United Mineworkers, Russian
aluminum workers and Britain's Amicus, now a component of UNITE, have banded
together to bargain internationally with US-based Alcoa, the world's
third-largest aluminum producer.
Union officials have long said their international efforts would benefit from
the ability to engage multinational firms as equals. In their view, only truly
global unions - armed with the credible threat of global strikes - could hold
in check international firms' ability to move capital and jobs around the
world.
''Multinational companies are pushing down wages and conditions for workers the
world over by playing one national workforce off against another. The only
beneficiaries of globalization are the exploiters of working people and the
only way working people can resist this is to band together," Simpson said last
year, when he was the general secretary of Amicus prior to its merger with
Britain's Transport & General Workers Union (T&GWU) to form UNITE.
"One of the main reasons for the merger between Amicus and the T&GWU was
our desire to create an international trade union that would be able to deal
with multinational companies on an equal footing and organize working people in
even greater numbers," he said.
The push for international partnerships also comes as US and British unions
strive to reverse declining membership. The US union membership rate has fallen
to 12.1% of employed wage and salary workers, from 20.1% in 1983, when the
government's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) began tracking union data.
The number of US workers belonging to a union rose by 311,000 in 2007 to 15.7
million, but this left the national membership rate essentially unchanged from
12.0% in 2006, the BLS said.
Union membership in Britain has fallen from 13 million workers in 1979 to fewer
than 7.5 million, according to official figures.
A formal announcement of the USW-UNITE tie-up is expected in July, when the US
union is scheduled to hold a convention in Las Vegas. At least for the
immediate future, the arrangement is expected to defer a full-fledged legal
merger in favor of a partnership allowing the unions to retain their existing
structures.
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