Workers of the World are Uniting

Via Economist's View,Unions for a Global Economy:

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.

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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.

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

Eu tenho sentimentos difusos fase à internacionalização dos sindicatos - por um lado, acho que a solução para a "globalização", com a tendência para as empresas irem para os sítios aonde os salários e os direitos laborais forem mais baixos, não é o proteccionismo nacional, mas sim, exactamente, a luta conjunta dos trabalhadores de vários países para estabelecer direitos laborais comuns (como escrevi num blog já inactivo, «No dia em que houver uma greve geral europeia ... por uma reivindicação comum, aí poderemos falar de uma verdadeira “União Europeia”»); mas por outro, quanto maior for um sindicato (e um sindicato transnacional será enormíssimo), mais distante a base estará do topo e ainda maior será a tendência para os sindicatos ficarem controlados por burocratas quase-vitalicios em vez de pelos seus filiados.

Não sei bem qual poderá ser o melhor equilíbrio entre estas minhas duas preocupações - talvez um sindicato internacional sem uma direcção internacional (isto é, em que as decisões não sejam tomadas por um orgão especifico própria, mas por reuniões entre as várias direcções nacionais - algo à maneira dos Conselhos de Ministros da UE ou dos ENDAs dos estudantes do Ensino Superior).