<a href=””>Unions Gone Global
A new merger proposal marks the latest step in the
adaptation of labor to the globalization of capital.
By Harold Meyerson
Web Exclusive: 04.26.07
The business press has barely noticed and the usual
champions of globalization have been mute, but an
announcement last week in Ottawa signaled a radical new
direction for the globalized economy. The United
Steelworkers — that venerable, Depression-era creation
of John L. Lewis and New Deal labor policy — entered
into merger negotiations with two of Britain’s largest
unions (which are merging with each other next month) to
create not only the first transatlantic but the first
genuinely multinational trade union.
Mergers among unions are nothing new, of course, and as
manufacturing employment in the United States has
declined, some unions — the Steelworkers in particular
— have expanded into other industries and sectors.
Today, just 130,000 of the union’s 850,000 members are
employed in basic steel, with the remainder in paper and
rubber manufacturing and a range of service industries.
British unions have gone down a similar path; of the two
British unions with which the Steelworkers wish to
merge, Amicus is a multi-sectoral outgrowth of that
nation’s autoworkers, while the other, the Transport and
General Workers, has long been what its name suggests.
All three unions are among their nations’ largest; the
combined membership, should the merger go through, will
total roughly 3 million, making it the planet’s largest
union.
The story here, however, isn’t the number of members but
the adaptation of labor to the globalization of capital.
The Ottawa declaration broke new ground, but the
transnational coordination of unions has been building
for more than a decade. The Communications Workers of
America has been meeting with telecommunications unions
in Europe and elsewhere for years to better deal with
common employers. The Service Employees International
Union (SEIU) has for the past two years been working
with, and helping to fund, security guard and janitorial
unions in other nations as ownership of the property
service industry has been consolidated into an ever-
smaller number of multinationals.
Last November, the SEIU organized 5,300 immigrant
workers who clean the office buildings in downtown
Houston — a stunning achievement in the heart of the
anti-union South. Stephen Lerner, chief strategist for
the SEIU’s Justice for Janitors campaign, attributes the
success partly to the same consolidation and
globalization processes that have generally proved so
debilitating to union power. Last year just five
cleaning contractors — all either national or global in
scope — employed the majority of the city’s janitors,
and many of the office buildings were owned by global
investors. The emerging global network of property-
service unions staged demonstrations supporting the
Houston janitors in Mexico, Moscow, London, and Berlin.
The Steelworkers’ network of strategic alliances with
foreign unions dates to the early ’90s. As the
production of steel became a global enterprise, the
union formed alliances with mining and manufacturing
unions in Brazil, South Africa, Australia, Mexico,
Germany, and Britain. In part, the alliances emerged
because these unions shared common employers — Alcoa in
metals, Bridgestone in tires and, now, with the
Steelworkers and Britain’s Amicus having grown to
include paper workers, Georgia Pacific and International
Paper as well. The unions share research, discuss common
bargaining strategies, and support one another during
strikes.
But the purpose of the proposed merger is broader. “We
determined that the best way to fight financial
globalization was to fight it globally,” says Gerald
Fernandez, who heads the Steelworkers’ international
affairs and global bargaining operations. “Exploring a
merger is the necessary first step to building a global
union or federation of metal, mining, and general
workers.”
Whether or not the merger goes through, the Steelworkers
and their British partners have already committed to
fund human rights and union rights operations in
Colombia (which perennially leads the world in murdered
unionists) and parts of Africa. They plan to mount a
global campaign to protect employees’ retirement
benefits, under assault in a growing number of countries
from financiers who view workers’ financial security as
a dispensable commodity.
For years, globalization’s champions have attacked
unions generally and the Steelworkers in particular for
what they claimed were the union’s protectionist,
parochial, and generally retrograde stances. But the
union, it turns out, is every bit as internationalist as
they. And as unions begin their inevitable
transformation into global entities, globalization’s
cheerleaders must define themselves more clearly. Do
they back globalization because it has thus far
advantaged global investors over merely national unions
and governments? Or do they believe that government and
workers should go global, too, creating on an
international scale the kind of mixed economy that
governments and unions created in the decades after
World War II — the only economy in history to produce
broadly shared prosperity? In other words, are they
really for globalization, or just the return to the
laissez-faire, enrich-the-rich world that existed before
the New Deal? The question, now that the Steelworkers
and their British partners have thrown down the
gauntlet, is anything but academic.
Harold Meyerson is acting executive editor of The
American Prospect. A version of this column originally
appeared in The Washington Post.
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