Global Labor Strategies

GLS: Why We Do What We Do

GLS staff is back from vacation to begin, in effect, a new year. We’ve had an opportunity to reflect and talk with friends and colleagues in the US and abroad without pressure of production or deadlines. Our batteries are recharged and we’re ready to go.

This is the first post of our “new year” so we’re taking the opportunity to restate GLS’s goals and to describe the core projects that we are currently working on. (Of course, over the course of the coming year we expect to take on new projects as the need arises and our interests evolve.) In addition to long term projects, GLS works on specific projects for unions and NGOs conducting corporate or issue research and analysis.

When we launched GLS nearly 3 years ago our goal was to contribute to building global labor solidarity through research, analysis, strategic thinking, and network building around labor and employment issues. It seemed to us then, as it still does today, that labor movements and their allies around the world are at a watershed moment.  Capital mobility and global outsourcing have allowed footloose global corporations—the dominant players in the world’s economy—to effectively outflank national labor movements. Workers and communities around the world are increasingly being pitted against each other to attract or retain decent jobs. Unions, labor laws, and social benefits are under attack in the name of global competitiveness. The choice for unions and worker organizations everywhere is to adapt to global realities and build a global labor movement or decline into irrelevance.

While it would be a stretch to say that great progress has been made toward this end, over the past few years some real progress has been made. There is widespread—if not universal—recognition of the need to go global among labor activists the world over. New institutional links between global labor movements have been forged or strengthened. (Although it should be noted that a significant part of the US labor movement—unions that are now part of CtW—have been barred from joining the new International Trade Union Confederation.)  But formidable obstacles remain to constructing a global labor movement that reaches beyond high level institutional contacts and inspiring rhetoric.

Unions in the Global Economy

Welcome to Global Labor Strategies’ new blog.  Our aim is to present news and comment on how labor unions, worker organizations, and their allies are confronting globalization. We will begin with a few postings a week, then over the next several months we will increase our offerings as we invite others from around the world to submit postings.  GLS is a non-profit resource center whose purpose is to assist social movements and their allies make the connections and develop the strategies needed to function effectively in the global economy..

It is widely acknowledged both inside and outside the labor movement that globalization is undermining the foundation upon which labor movements have been built. Unions are rooted in national laws, national institutional structures, national labor markets, and national customs. But the corporations they confront are global—roaming the world for cheap labor, market access, and fewer environmental and other regulations. And capital moves around the world with the speed of a computer key stroke.

The result: capital has outflanked labor. No matter how strong the national labor movement, no matter how high the union density, a union can be rendered powerless if a company moves abroad, or even threatens to.

The critical question is: how can workers and their organizations address this fundamental mismatch. 

It is tempting to think that the problems facing labor movement (or any other labor movement) are entirely homegrown, but the evidence suggests otherwise: declining union membership and a loss in political power prompted by concerted corporate attacks on labor laws, a shift to new industries, increased global outsourcing and capital mobility, are trends in virtually every advanced industrial country. Indeed, these problems are present despite the great diversity of national union strategies and structures.  A discussion similar to the one in the US is occurring in most countries.

The global economy is continually evolving in ways that affect everyone. In the name of competitiveness there is a global assault on labor and employment laws; public services, public welfare and pension plans; growing transnational ownership of huge service corporations and the consequent loss of bargaining leverage; the increasing ability to outsource service sector and high skilled jobs; and the spread of new remote technologies. More and more jobs that were once thought to be outside of the global labor market are now very much in play.

Increasing global competition pushes companies not just to move jobs to low wage areas but to adopt new staffing strategies that rely heavily on contingent work and on automating, eliminating, and speeding-up the jobs that remain.

But it’s a classic bad news/good news situation. The bad news is that corporate and capital mobility undermines unions around the world. The good news is that creates a common interest among workers and their organizations around the world facing similar problems.  Those common interests are expressed in a wide range of actions and proposals for solidarity and mutual support around the world.    

This blog will explore the problems, the dead-ends, and the promises as workers and their organizations try to develop the strategies needed to cope with the global economy. We will report on events, offer commentary, and invite others to contribute.  While we bring some experience to the discussion, we bring many more questions.  We hope the blog will help promote a global dialogue that in turn will contribute to the emergence of a global labor movement.

STAFF

Tim Costello has over 40 years of work and union experience in the area. He helped organize and served (until July 2005) as Coordinator of the Boston based North American Alliance for Fair Employment a network of 65 unions and community based organizations in the US and Canada. Costello was a truck driver and workplace activist for many years; following that, he worked on the staff of SEIU.  He has extensive collective bargaining experience in a number of industries.

Brendan Smith is a legal expert (J.D. Cornell University Law School) specializing in national and international labor law and policy.  He is currently co-director of the UCLA Law School Globalization and Labor Standards Project.  He has worked previously as a senior legislative aide for Congressman Bernie Sanders and staffed the Subcommittee on Domestic and International Monetary Policy, where he organized a series of hearings and legislative efforts on the Asian and Russian financial crisis.  Smith has also consulted for the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center, International Labor Rights Fund and Service Employees International Union, as well worked extensively throughout Asia, including China.  He has also been a lead organizer on global campaigns targeting NIKE, child labor abuse, and solidarity fights to free imprisoned trade unionists. He has published two books and his commentary has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including the Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, CBS.com, Yahoo.com, New Labor Forum, the Nation and Advertising Age.

Jeremy Brecher is a leading labor historian, writer, and documentary script writer best known for the labor history Strike!.  For more than two decades Brecher and Costello have studied and written about labor and globalization, writing such well-known books as Building Bridges: The emerging Grassroots Coalition of Labor and Community and Global Village or Global Pillage. For the past 8 years they have been joined by Brendan Smith, who collaborated with them on the book Globalization from Below: The Power of Solidarity.  Their Emmy-nominated documentary Global Village or Global Pillage? has been used by unions and other groups in the US and throughout the world to present an international grassroots response to globalization.

Claudia Torrelli lives and works in Montevideo, Uruguay. Torrelli handles GLS’s Latin American networking. She is an activist the in labor—community based Hemispheric Social Alliance, and in other social movement organizations in Latin America. She speaks Spanish, Portuguese, and English.