First of two parts. A version, with citiations, of this blog by GLS staffers Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello, and Brendan Smith appears in New Labor Forum, Spring 2006: www.newlaborforum.org
Once employers were mostly local; so were unions. When local companies became national corporations, unions too had to go national. Now capital has gone global. Unions have made intermittent efforts at international cooperation, but the obstacles are considerable. To overcome them, bridge-building and information sharing across borders needs to start long before individual campaigns begin, cementing relationships, fostering solidarity, and developing enough strategic knowledge for unions to provide mutual aid in the global arena. For labor to meet the challenge of globalization, the haphazard international labor cooperation of the past must be buttressed by proactive horizontal linkages between unions and workers at all levels.
Why go global?
Unions all over the world are reeling before the historic changes summed up in the word “globalization.” At the core of most national trade union strategies is the elimination of labor costs as a factor in competition. But globalization has undermined that strategy. As Morgan Stanley chief economist Stephen Roach put it,
“Wage rates in China and India range from 10 percent to 25 percent of those for comparable-quality workers in the US and elsewhere in the developed world. Consequently, offshore outsourcing that extracts products from relatively low-wage workers in the developing world has become an increasingly urgent tactic for competitive survival by companies in the developed world.”
Roach compares the movement of jobs to the cheapest labor market to the financial practice of “arbitrage,” in which speculators move from one market to another to take advantage of a cheaper price. He calls the result “global labor arbitrage.” But the labor movement has long had another name for it: “the race to the bottom.”
Global labor arbitrage creates competition not just between first and third world countries and workers, but also among those in the third world. Mexico has lost up to 500,000 jobs and hundreds of firms to China, for example. Wages on jobs outsourced from the US to India are held down by competition from workers in Vietnam and the Philippines.
Some have argued that the labor movement can regenerate itself based on sectors that are immune to globalization. But today, a high proportion of both high- and low-skilled service jobs, whether in the private or the public sector, are as vulnerable to foreign outsourcing as manufacturing jobs. And the job market as a whole is affected by competitive liberalization and the global assault on public services and public pension and welfare programs; transnational ownership of service corporations and the loss of bargaining leverage; the increasing ability to outsource service sector and high skilled jobs; and the spread of new remote technologies. (MacDonald’s now has drive-through service windows where the order is taken by someone far from the restaurant – potentially on the other side of the world.) The result is stagnant or falling wages, cuts in benefits, and increased economic insecurity.
Capital has, in effect, outflanked labor. No matter how strong a national labor movement, no matter how high its union density, it can be rendered powerless if employers can simply move production abroad. That is why unions around the world are looking for new approaches to international labor cooperation.
International labor cooperation can work, and when it does, the payoff for workers can be substantial. Consider, for example, the 735 workers at a nonunion printing plant in Versailles, Kentucky. Their plant is owned by Quebecor World, a global commercial printing company with 35,000 employees in 160 facilities in 17 countries in North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Versailles workers tried to organize in 2001 but lost an NLRB election after Quebecor waged an aggressive anti-union campaign.
Fortunately, workers in unionized Quebecor printing plants around the world recognized that their own wages, working conditions, and union security would be threatened if the corporation could simply block unionization and then shift its work to non-union plants. Working with Union Network International (UNI, the international trade secretariat for service sector workers), they organized a campaign for an agreement guaranteeing all Quebecor printing workers worldwide the right to join a union and bargain collectively. Organized printing workers pressured the company through global days of action. Labor allies pitched in: the National Writers Union, for example, gathered letters of support from prominent writers, many of whose books are printed at Quebecor plants.
After a two and a half year campaign, Quebecor signed an agreement pledging not to oppose or interfere with its employees’ right to union representation and establishing a quicker and fairer alternative to NLRB elections. At the end of August, 2005, Versailles Quebecor workers voted three-to-one to join the Teamster’s Graphics Communications Conference.
Obstacles to globalizing the labor movement
Cooperation can be tough even among unions in the same country. Our discussions with labor activists identified some further obstacles that arise when unions try to cooperate across international borders. For example:
Beggar-your-neighbor
Unions are constantly tempted to pursue an aggressive economic nationalism, demanding that their own countries close their markets to foreign goods and services or that other countries open theirs. But in the era of globalization the global economy is less a collection of nations trading with each other than a single market in which corporations compete to exploit labor anywhere. This often renders economic nationalism counter-productive. Bush’s pre-election tariff on steel imports promoted by steel companies and unions, for example, created few jobs for union steelworkers, but led to widespread job losses for American auto workers dependent on cheap imported steel. Recent European restrictions on textile imports from China led not to jobs in Europe but rather to jobs in Bangladesh and Vietnam.
However ineffective in protecting jobs, such approaches have a devastating effect on international labor cooperation. They replace solidarity against employers with a struggle among workers over which countries can keep or lure corporate investment. Employers don’t have to worry about workers in different countries ganging up on them if those workers are ready to cut each others’ throats to beat each other out for jobs. When one of us recently identified ourselves to a Bangladeshi activist as someone involved with the American labor movement, their immediate response was, “Oh, you’re the people who are trying to keep workers in my country from getting textile jobs.”
Global union diversity
Why not simply extend unions from one country into “global unions” representing workers in other countries? This indeed has happened in the US and Canada, where law, politics, business structures, and labor traditions are similar. But in most cases, differences in the labor movement, industrial relations institutions, and labor law deter such an approach.
In Scandinavia, for example, bargaining tends to be much more centralized than in the US. Unions negotiate broad sectoral agreements with employer associations. As is the case in much of the world, health care, vacations, and aspects of the grievance procedure – subjects for collective bargaining in the US -- are addressed by national legislation. In Japan, in contrast, there are more than 30,000 unions, each representing white and blue collar employees of one employer. Joint bargaining is rare. Any group of workers in a company has the right to organize, demand recognition, and bargain with their employer, leading to forms of minority unionism unknown in the United States. Strategies that are crucial in one country may be worse than useless in another.
Accumulated distrust
Mutual solidarity is grounded in trust. When American unions approach unions abroad, they face important – and in many cases well-grounded –reasons for distrust.
For many decades, US unions worked hand-in-glove with the CIA and other agencies of the US government to overthrow foreign governments, bribe politicians, break strikes, and favor unions that cooperated with US corporations. Even in the Bush era, most of the money for AFL-CIO international operations continues to come from the US government. How could foreign unionists not be suspicious of US labor activities abroad? (The recent action by the AFL-CIO to demand the withdrawal of troops from Iraq as soon as possible may help open the door to greater trust by foreign unionists.)
More surprisingly, we have learned in conversations with ranking trade union officials in the US, Asia, Europe, and Latin America in the service, manufacturing, and telecommunication sectors, that global corporate campaigns can themselves sometimes be a source of distrust. In such campaigns, which have been used during strikes and organizing drives for more than a decade, embattled unions often ask unions in other countries for help pressuring an employer. Sometimes those they ask have good relations with the employer, or are at a sensitive stage in a collective bargaining process, or are reluctant to pressure the employer for other reasons. This can lead to hard feelings rather than long term alliances.
Campaigns initiated and controlled by unions in one country can generate distrust concerning their long-term commitments and agendas. For example, European trade unionists and allied NGOs questioned us sharply about whether US unions would go the distance in a global Wal-Mart campaign. Their big worry was that US unions are so focused on recruiting new members that as soon as they have organized a few US stores, they’ll call Wal-Mart a model employer and call off the campaign—leaving workers in the supplier firms in China and the developing world high and dry.
Similar problems can arise even in campaigns initiated by a global organization. For example, at an August, 2005 meeting in Chicago, UNI launched a campaign to organize Wal-Mart world-wide. Management people from the French-based Carrefour -- the world’s second largest retailer after Wal-Mart -- addressed the meeting and were presented as socially responsible employers. Some activists we talked to questioned whether the labor practices of the suppliers to these companies are any different from Wal-Mart’s. Long-term trust building requires taking the interests of allies into account.
Next: These obstacles and many others must be taken seriously—but they are not insurmountable. In our next blog, From Campaigns to Movement, we will look at a few examples of promising strategies for effective international union cooperation and give some suggestions for next steps.
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