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The Future of Global Unions - Alan Howard |
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Written by peter waterman
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Saturday, 16 August 2008 |
Peter Waterman says: An important piece in so far as it comes from the unions and is addressed to the unions - and because it takes up many of the issues on 'social movement unionism' I and others pioneered in the later-1980s. I myself feel that for the effective defence of workers under contemporary conditions, one has to write, as it were, from the position of that overwhelming majority of workers Alan Howard writes about, and to go beyond the union in seeking relevant forms of organisation and action. But now read on...
The Future of Global Unions: Is Solidarity Still Forever?
By Alan Howard
Dissent Magazine, Fall 2007
Last November in Vienna, fifteen years after the demise of the Soviet Union
and well into the third decade of corporate-driven globalization, the
international trade union movement was reorganized to eliminate its
debilitating cold war political divisions and to enhance coordination across
industrial lines made obsolete by globalization. The founding of this new
organization, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), which
represents 168 million workers in 153 countries, was hailed as historic by
the few dozen people who follow these things, which it may well be, though
you probably missed the coverage in your local newspaper.
Earlier this year AFL-CIO president John Sweeney met with Iraqi trade
unionists in Jordan (there being no place secure enough in Iraq to hold such
a meeting) to support Iraqi union resistance to an array of Bush
administration policies, particularly on the privatization and
denationalization of the oil industry; Teamster president James Hoffa and
Service Employees International Union president Andy Stern were in China
with a delegation of Change to Win (CTW) unions, the group that split from
the AFL-CIO, meeting with communists and capitalists to exchange views on
worker rights in the global economy. In Ottawa, Steelworker president Leo
Gerard announced a merger that would bring together nearly three million
American, Canadian, British and Irish workers in one union, and
Communication Workers president Larry Cohen was in Athens to raise the
visibility of an organizing campaign aimed at the world's largest cell phone
service company, which operates in twenty-five countries on four continents.
These events reflect the realization at the highest levels of organized
labor that unions have no future if they do not become truly global
institutions. What is not said publicly, but known only too well, is that
unions may have lost so much ground on the international playing field and
have been so weakened over the past half century that they will no longer be
able to provide an effective counterweight to the inequities of capitalism.
'This is a race against time, and the stakes are very high. As weak as it
is, organized labor, with its global reach, its billions in assets, tens of
millions of members, thousands of employees, and historic vocation for
uplifting the downtrodden, is the largest social movement on the planet and
perhaps the last, best hope we have for averting the rendezvous with
disaster that our profit-crazed economic system seems determined to keep.
Union structures look much as they did a hundred years ago, rigid but not
necessarily coherent hierarchies, from the broad, sprawling base of
increasingly diverse workplaces to local union hall to national headquarters
reaching a pinnacle in the recently formed ITUC. Alongside the ITUC are ten
global union federations, previously known as international trade
secretariats, entities formed by the last wave of globalization a century
ago. With headquarters located in the grand capitals of Europe and full-time
staffs that in some cases do not exceed a dozen people, these global union
federations have to organize and promote the rights of the tens of millions
of workers in their various overlapping and conflicting jurisdictions around
the world.
These are structures, one also has to say, in which all too often the energy
and creativity of many talented and selfless people are smothered by a
lethal bureaucratic mentality and more than a few leaders whose first
priority is to defend their own feudal powers, no matter how stagnant or
rapidly shrinking their fiefdoms may be. It would be difficult to design an
apparatus more dysfunctional for the purpose of organizing workers in the
global economy-including the 200 million of them who have done their own
globalizing by crossing borders to work in other countries-than what we now
have. But structure flows from function and function from conceptions about
the purpose of an institution. This is not a problem with a simple solution.
How has organized labor dug itself into this hole and how will it dig itself
out?
UNIONS TEND TO be conservative institutions. Historically, as they have
evolved with the development of capitalism, they have passed through
episodes of militant and even insurrectionary activity followed by longer
periods of consolidation and recuperation-periods that can last decades
marked by caution and defensive strategies. Cycles of expansion and
contraction have also been international in character, such as the growth of
unions during the wave of globalization that crested in the last decades of
the nineteenth century and crashed with the outbreak of the First World War.
We are just now emerging from one of those long periods during which the
behavior of unions has been characterized by caution and narrow focus. Like
any bureaucracy in a defensive posture, the force of inertia usually defeats
all but the most marginal-or determined-changes in behavior. You could fill
volumes with stories about the enormous difficulty that unions in this
country and others have had in adjusting to new realities, especially when
dealing with the world beyond their national borders, but one from my own
experience will illustrate the point.
During the 1990s, when I worked for the garment workers' union, UNITE, it
had been hemorrhaging members for fifteen years. Some UNITE leaders were
taking grim satisfaction from their repeated warnings to other unions that
their industry was the canary in the coal mine of American manufacturing-the
demise of clothing to be followed by auto, steel, and all manner of goods in
the relentless logic of capital seeking ever lower wages, and now with the
technological capability to produce anywhere in the world.
For years the strategy of the union was aimed at restricting imports, in
alliance with manufacturers who would be inconvenienced by moving production
offshore. The strategy was spectacularly unsuccessful. Then the union tried
something new, based on its own history of "following the work." Early in
the last century, as manufacturers moved production from the original
centers of the industry in New York City, first to the outer boroughs and
then across the Hudson River to what was referred to as "The Foreign Zones"
of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and beyond, the union followed them and
eventually organized well over half of all the clothing and apparel workers
in the United States.
So why couldn't we follow the work to Mexico, Central America, and the
Caribbean, where over a million unorganized workers were producing clothing
for U.S. manufacturers sold by U.S. retailers to U.S. consumers? The plan
was not unanimously endorsed. "How many members do we get out of this?" the
famously no-nonsense Bruce Raynor, now president of UNITE HERE, wanted to
know (disclosure: Raynor fired me in 2001, in what was probably his first
official act as president of UNITE). It was a very pertinent question,
insisting in its raw way that we think about solidarity in practical terms.
Unions are not-for-profit organizations, but they are not charities.
>From 1994 through 1997, at a fraction of the cost it took to organize
apparel workers in the United States and Canada, UNITE helped unions in the
Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Honduras organize nearly 10,000 workers
who gained union recognition and signed contracts in a dozen plants in Free
Trade Zones where unions had been prohibited for decades. The numbers were
relatively small, but a few of us believed they reflected a strategic
breakthrough, proving it was possible to organize some of the most exploited
workers in the Global South-workers that global capital assumed would not
and could not be organized.
There was another ingredient in the high hopes of this period-because
organizing workers ultimately requires a supportive political environment.
An awareness of global sweatshops had burst into the national consciousness,
as nongovernmental organizations and activists exposed Nike factories in
Asia and produced the priceless spectacle of Kathie Lee Gifford weeping on
national television about her-and Wal-Mart's-sweatshops in Honduras. When
President Bill Clinton convened a task force on what to do about global
sweatshops, it seemed like one of those moments when an issue reaches a
political ripeness and the problem will get fixed. But like other big and
complicated problems, this one will take longer to solve.
At one point in 1997, I was dispatched to Guatemala to investigate three
factories working for a Philadelphia clothing manufacturer with whom the
union had a nasty contract dispute. Conditions in Guatemala were predictably
terrible, including dozens of underage workers, which I duly reported. Our
campaign people in Philadelphia were delighted to have such damaging
information to use against the employer, who would eventually sign a new
contract. Meanwhile, the underage workers in Guatemala were fired, and our
union allies began to organize workers in the three factories. It was an
opportunity to build on an organizing campaign that only a month earlier had
won the first contract in the Guatemala maquila industry, which then had
80,000 unorganized workers.
When I reported the firings of the underage workers and the other
developments, the union couldn't digest the news. Our people in Philadelphia
were in campaign mode and didn't want to deal with anything that could
possibly make the company look good, such as not using child labor anymore.
Furthermore, the situation in Guatemala was getting even more complicated.
The underage workers were legally permitted to work limited hours if they
also attended school, so we were talking with a local NGO about monitoring
the situation with the underage workers while the union went about its
organizing tasks. However, to organize the three plants would require UNITE
to put pressure on some other manufacturers and retailers in the United
States; and anyway, more than a few UNITE officers and organizers wanted to
know, how could we honestly fight for the rights of Guatemalan workers when
their employment took jobs away from our own members? And the Guatemalan
minister of labor had gotten into the act, indicating she could be helpful
in this situation if UNITE would speak with the U.S. Department of Labor
about some problem with an unrelated grant. It was around this time that the
union began to withdraw from its international organizing projects.
That we were not prepared to deal with such complications was emphatically
confirmed that same year when the Guess apparel company moved its production
from Los Angeles to Mexico to avoid an organizing drive. Although the union
had developed contacts inside Guess's Mexican factories, a strategy of
following Guess across the border was never really considered. This was seen
as different from our organizing project in Central America and the
Caribbean. It wasn't just about extending the hand of solidarity to our
exploited sisters and brothers to the South. It was also about helping
ourselves in a major organizing drive, serious stuff that was hard enough to
do without the cultural, legal, and political complications of figuring out
how to organize apparel workers on Mexican soil. It was a slippery slope.
Once you crossed the Rio Grande, where did you stop?
It is a prudent and responsible question, variations of which absorb a good
deal of time and energy in the institutions of our global political economy.
Because whether you are a corporation, a union, a person looking for work-or
an imperial army-crossing any national border means a new and often
unpredictable complexity in your life for which it is difficult to prepare
but fatal to ignore.
ALTHOUGH UNITE'S CANARY in the coal mine is not dead yet, most American
unions have gone through a similar evolution over the past thirty years:
initially not realizing how serious the problem was; allying with "their"
employers to restrict imports; agreeing to all kinds of concessions to save
jobs that eventually were not saved; reaching out to unions or friendly NGOs
in other countries-and discovering how complicated the world is.
"The challenge is to make these relations ongoing and not merely
incidental," says one veteran of international labor work. "Right at the
moment you need help you can't just turn on the solidarity spigot. What a
lot of this is about is just developing contacts and mutual understanding.
It takes time. We're not good at that."
European unions have had a much steeper learning curve. For years they didn't
understand the Americans' alarm about the oxygen running out. Now that
transnational capital has become so completely integrated and seeks to apply
in Europe the labor discipline methods it gets away with in the United
States, European unions understand all too well what is at stake, a
realization that has spurred the greater degree of cooperation evident among
unions in the Global North, which includes Japan and other industrialized
countries.
DIFFERENT UNIONS TODAY are at different stages of this process and have
responded in different ways to those complications. UNITE had the bad luck
to be hit first and to be organized in the most labor-intensive of
industries, where "following the work" in the twenty-first century means
locating and organizing hundreds of companies and thousands of work sites,
not the four or five or even forty or fifty that other unions face, and
where tangible victories for one's own members could be years in the making.
So it is not surprising that what appeared to be insoluble dilemmas to my
colleagues at UNITE ten years ago have proven to be difficult but manageable
challenges for other unions in other industries.
No union has forged a more effective program of international work than the
Teamsters. They have been doing it for a while, most dramatically in the
1997 United Parcel Service strike, when solidarity actions by an
international network of UPS workers were a critical factor in winning that
high-stakes strike. The Teamsters international affairs department-now
called Global Strategies-has been integrated into its organizing and
bargaining operations. A few other unions have been restructured this way,
reflecting both the resolution of a major strategic question for American
unions as well as an ongoing tension. The question that has been resolved is
the priority of organizing, which is given lip service by unions that still
don't do much of it. The tension lies in the problem that UNITE faced
between its members in Philadelphia and those workers in Guatemala. Critics
accuse some American unions of thinking only about their own immediate
campaigns, seeking help from unions in other countries without paying
attention to what those unions need. This happens less than it used to for a
simple reason. It doesn't work. Word gets around that this or that union
sees the relationship as a one-way street, and nobody wants that kind of
relationship.
The Teamsters have a method for addressing this challenge. What the union
did in 1997 and has since refined is to bring all the unions involved with a
targeted company around the table for an honest discussion about what each
union is looking for from the company and how they can work together to get
it. What that discussion aims at producing is a flexible network with common
strategic objectives, not only for the immediate campaign but longer range.
On a wall of the "war room" at Teamsters headquarters in Washington you can
see the diagrams of these networks marking work sites in a dozen companies
as diverse as Coca-Cola and UPS, these lines and organizing nodes virtually
humming with the energy of workers on the march across five continents.
SEIU, the 800-pound gorilla of American unions, doesn't like to be told
there's something it can't do, so nobody was surprised a couple of years ago
when it pursued some multinational companies resisting an organizing drive
in the United States to their United Kingdom base of operations, and then
upped the ante dramatically by launching a high-profile campaign to organize
property service workers in dozens of cities around the world-a kind of
"Justice for Janitors" goes global. There are three remarkable aspects to
these campaigns: (1) This is about service industries, supposedly a sector
of the economy that, unlike manufacturing, was not threatened by
globalization; (2) SEIU has poured millions of dollars from its own treasury
into this international work; and (3) in typical fashion it is accompanied
by a controversial strategy paper.
"At no time in history has there been a greater urgency or opportunity to
form real global unions whose goal is to organize tens of millions of
workers to win economic and social justice by counterbalancing global
corporations on the world stage even as the power of the state declines,"
writes Stephen Lerner, an SEIU vice president who has played a key role in
the inspirational "Justice for Janitors" campaign in cities across the
United States.
What SEIU discovered as it organized these property service companies in Los
Angeles, Chicago, and other American cities is that the union was dealing
with a handful of increasingly global firms in an increasingly concentrated
industry. Lerner identifies forty to fifty "global cities" that function as
the "engine rooms" of multinational capital and envisions this new
SEIU-initiated global union of the poorest and least skilled workers
challenging corporate dominance of the world.
Although there is plenty to argue with in Lerner's thesis, like its
distorted emphasis on the decline of state power and its sweeping dismissal
of other global organizing experiences, even critics acknowledge that SEIU's
efforts are a valuable contribution to the project of developing global
unions. And SEIU itself is discovering how complicated this work can be as
it becomes increasingly engaged in the dynamics and crosscurrents of labor
movements in other countries. "We need to create relationships where
everyone grows," says Tom Woodruff, SEIU executive vice president. "We're
not there yet. We're learning as we go."
A Steelworkers union official made a similar observation in describing the
seventeen-year process leading up to the announcement this spring of the
unprecedented merger with the U.K.-based Amicus and Transport & General
Workers Unions, which is now running on a twelve-month clock. Whatever the
outcome of this particular initiative, how the unions got to this point is
instructive.
It goes back to the 1990 Ravenswood Aluminum strike, when the Steelworkers
realized that they could not win that battle without launching an
international campaign, demonstrating it was necessary-and possible-to
confront employers with a variety of tactics beyond the borders of a single
country. By the mid-1990s, the Steelworkers had begun to build a series of
strategic alliances with unions in different countries around common
industrial sectors and employers that involved exchanges of personnel,
sharing of research and bargaining data, and limited forms of joint
bargaining with major employers. As this process matured, the Steelworkers
and many of their allies saw the need for an intermediate structure between
the still useful but cumbersome global union federations and the bilateral
relationships between individual unions from different countries. These
alliances were the first step. The next, if they can bring it off, will be
the aforementioned transatlantic merger.
These alliances are geared to campaigning but are also multilevel and
wide-ranging, particularly in regard to political and policy questions. A
critical moment that reinforced the merger process with the U.K. unions, for
example, came when union analysts took a careful look at certain policies of
the U.K.'s Labour Party and the U.S.-based Democratic Leadership Council-and
saw they were confronting the same sophisticated ideological assault on both
sides of the Atlantic.
At one point in the mid-1990s I was surprised to see the Steelworkers throw
themselves into a sweatshop struggle in Central America. But the
Steelworkers do this sort of thing consistently, for what the union's
international affairs director Jerry Fernandez calls "philosophical reasons:
we can't just be concerned with ourselves." He does not use the word
"solidarity," though, of course, that is what he is describing.
CURIOUSLY, THERE IS some ambiguity in unions these days about the idea of
solidarity. It goes back to the bruising debate within the AFL-CIO a decade
ago about organizing, when any activity associated with international
solidarity was characterized by some partisans of organizing as little more
than "labor tourism" and a waste of money. Now that almost everyone
understands the connection between organizing and international
relationships, we do not hear much about labor tourism, but a lingering
confusion about solidarity remains.
Sometimes it is still juxtaposed to organizing, as in generosity versus
self-interest, idealism versus practicality. If American unions were not so
ideologically exhausted, it would be more apparent that these are not
mutually exclusive terms. In this context, the vitality of each depends
precisely on the synergy of their relationship. Strategy and structure are
sterile without the fervor and moral force of solidarity. And of what use is
solidarity without the strategies and structures and commitment of resources
to organize tens of millions of workers around the world?
Questions about strategy related to the international work mirror the
stunted debate prior to the 2005 split in the AFL-CIO. On the one hand, you
hear the mantra of growth and greater density and how until that is achieved
there's little point in engaging, from our current position of weakness,
institutions like the World Trade Organization, World Bank, or state power
in any but its most vulnerable forms. On the other, is the view that unions
have to walk and chew gum at the same time and that you won't get the growth
without the political engagement. This debate generates more heat than
light, because in practice the best "organizing" unions do plenty of
politics and the best "political" unions do plenty of organizing. The
question is whether they will do both seriously or just go through the
motions.
There has also been some progress on the question of solidarity and
self-interest, at least conceptually and to a degree in practice. Whether we
are talking about what the Teamsters call "simultaneous solidarity" or the
Steelworkers' "not being concerned just about ourselves" or what the
Communications Workers refer to as "the inner life of unions," it is the
recognition that to go forward unions must also go back. To navigate the new
global economy and move masses of people, they must reexamine the
inspirational ideas that gave birth to the labor movement, reexamine them in
the light of new circumstances, ideas that have sustained the working class
of many nations through its darkest hours and most enduring victories. No
idea in human history is more powerful-or more useful in the ideological
warfare of this ominous first decade of the twenty-first century-than the
idea of solidarity: that across the divides of nation and language, of
regions, races, and religions, ordinary working people are responsible for
each other. It is the oxygen of any organizing campaign that truly lives and
breathes, whether that campaign takes place in Dhaka or Detroit.
We see this beginning to happen, not only in the large-scale mergers and
campaigns but also in more modest efforts, like the decade-long alliance
between the United Electrical workers union and Mexico's independent FAT
federation that has produced solid organizing gains for both; even the
AFL-CIO's Solidarity Center, often depicted as remote from organizing, has
created a unit that does work very similar to the various organizing
alliances I have been describing.
There is something else that all of these activities have in common. The
structures created to carry them out do not resemble traditional union
structures. They are fluid networks in which the agenda is set by
participants directly linked to the shop floor. Sometimes they include
organizations that are not unions but are integral to the process. They can
turn on a dime and discuss anything they think is relevant to their mission.
What their relationship will be to the existing global union federations or
even their own national centers remains to be seen, but these organizing
networks are the seeds of the global unions of the future.
AS THIS PROCESS unfolds, however, American unions have to deal with their
own particular political problem of being based in the world's only (for
now) superpower, with the advantage of their unique access to that power and
the disadvantage of being held responsible for all the policies imposed by
that power on the world.
For more than a century, unions in this country have cooperated, reluctantly
or enthusiastically, with the U.S. government's foreign policy. During the
cold war they did this more or less on automatic pilot, except for the
turbulence caused by the Reuther brothers' opposition to the Vietnam War and
a decade later the revolt within the AFL-CIO against Ronald Reagan's Central
American policy. The 1995 election of John Sweeney to the AFL-CIO presidency
marked a turn toward a more open and pragmatic international policy. Then
came the 1999 "Battle in Seattle" and its glimpse of a new political
alliance-the labor, environmental, and global justice movements-with a
staggering potential for making this world a better place.
September 11, 2001, set back this process, but the war in Iraq has
accelerated it. Just how much could be seen earlier this year when
Republican and Democratic presidential candidates spoke at a forum attended
by 3,000 building trades officials in Washington. The one pro-war candidate
was booed off the stage and the more outspoken antiwar candidates got a
standing ovation. For those of us old enough to remember building trades
guys busting the heads of antiwar demonstrators during the Vietnam War, it
was an iconic moment. American unions today are opposed to the war in Iraq,
not opposed enough for some activists and officials, but clearly,
institutionally and viscerally opposed.
Having broken, at least momentarily, the powerful ideological link between
patriotism and war, unions are struggling to work their way out of the
conceptual confines that have so inhibited them from understanding the way
the world is changing around them. If, for example, they mobilize members to
write letters, march, leaflet, and even on occasion sit in or go out on
strike to organize new members here or win a contract there or lobby for a
piece of legislation, by what logic do they not mobilize with equal or
greater intensity to end a war that grows like a cancer on the democratic
life of our country? This political timidity is a legacy of the cold war,
which still casts its shadow over the new global politics.
WHEN HUGO Chávez was briefly ousted from power in Venezuela by a military
coup in 2002, the AFL-CIO was accused by some of being up to its old tricks
because of its support for the principal Venezuelan union federation (CTV),
which was and still is a major Chávez foe. The AFL-CIO adamantly denied that
it was conspiring with the Bush administration to overthrow Chávez, but
suspicions persisted.
The image of American unions as junior partners of the American government
is harmful for American unions trying to forge new relationships and
alliances with unions around the world. "This is not a good time for any
U.S. institution taking the lead because the U.S. is more unpopular than
anytime in the last century," says Neil Kearney, the longtime secretary
general of the Brussels-based textile global union federation, which has
tried without much success to organize what Kearney estimates to be at least
thirty million apparel workers toiling in sweatshops around the world. "The
depth of hostility to the U.S. is like nothing I've ever seen," Kearney
says. "Nobody wants to cooperate with U.S. unions."
This image of U.S. unions subservient to the foreign policy of the U.S.
government is also unfortunate because it is no longer true, as the scene at
the building trades convention suggests. You could also ask the Iraqi oil
workers union. In early June its members went on strike with one of their
key demands being opposition to the proposed petroleum law, which would open
up 70 percent of Iraqi oil to foreign oil companies. With arrest orders
issued for its leaders and U.S. fighter planes buzzing its picket lines, the
Iraqi union reached out for support from unions around the world-including
the Americans-and got it. Political affinity between the AFL-CIO and the
Bush administration is nil; they can't agree on underwear imports from
China, let alone on governments to overthrow.
But the Venezuela contretemps reminds us of the need to look at the world as
it is, with all of its inconvenient complications. There is no question that
Hugo Chávez has done some very good things for the Venezuelan working class
and has challenged neoliberal policies throughout Latin America. There is
also no question that he has steadily consolidated his power at the expense
of democratic rights normally associated with an open political process and
has made quite clear his intention to destroy the CTV, the union federation
that represents over 80 percent of Venezuela's organized workers-"reduce it
to cosmic dust" in Chávez's colorful locution. The CTV has lots of problems
that can not be blamed on Hugo Chávez. But does that mean that the
Venezuelan government has the right to replace it with a federation that
supports the government?
There is a problem with the AFL-CIO's overreliance on U.S. government
funding for international work, but this could be readily resolved if its
affiliates recognized just how valuable the soft power of the AFL-CIO's
Solidarity Center operations are for global organizing, paid a share of the
center's expenses, and took ownership of its work. There's no reason why
this shouldn't happen across the AFL-CIO/CTW fault line, either, just as the
two federations have developed working relationships on central labor
councils and on some national political issues. There's not much point to
every union trying to maintain its own miniature-and necessarily
inadequate-State Department.
AS AMERICAN UNIONS become more involved in China, as they inevitably must,
they are faced with questions similar to those that arose in Venezuela-on a
much larger scale-about their relationship to official government unions and
to dissidents, about the relationship between development and democracy,
about the meaning of solidarity in the post-cold war world.
It used to be that when a factory closed in the United States and moved to
China, it was the end of the discussion-except possibly for some racially
tinged grumbling about foreigners stealing American jobs. But this past
April a meeting took place in New York City that suggests something
fundamental has begun to change in this picture. Union officials and
activists had come to the meeting to hear an adviser to China's official All
China Federation of Trade Unions ask for their support on labor law reform.
No, not the "card check" bill in Washington that unions were lobbying
furiously for, but legislation proposed by the Chinese government that would
make some modest improvements in protecting Chinese workers against
arbitrary and detrimental policies of employers.
The reason that Liu Chen, director of the Social Law Institute at Shanghai
Normal University, was in the United States is that the American Chamber of
Commerce in Shanghai was waging a high-powered campaign to kill or
neutralize the proposed reform measure. Liu thought that American unions (he
had also notified European unions about European Union multinationals doing
the same as their American counterparts) should know about this and would
want to weigh in when they did. He had just come from a meeting in
Washington with AFL-CIO and other union leaders and was gratified to report
that he had indeed gotten their support-so that American unions were now
fighting transnational capital on labor law reform simultaneously in
Washington and Beijing. Labor ended up batting .500 on this one. Within a
week of each other, the U.S. Senate shot down card check and the National
People's Congress approved China's new Labor Contract Law.
In describing and analyzing the dire condition of the Chinese working class,
which now provides one out of every five industrial workers to the world
economy, Liu spoke of the need for "moral solidarity in our global village"
and urged his audience to remember the words of Martin Luther King. "The arc
of history is long," he said, "but bends toward justice."
Throughout this article I have not used the terms "organized labor" and
"labor movement" interchangeably. Workers organized in unions constitute
organized labor, which means that 87 percent of the work force in the United
States and probably even a greater proportion in the world at large, fall
outside of that category. The labor movement exists wherever workers are in
motion and advocates have taken up their cause. There are hundreds of worker
centers, NGOs, women's, immigrant, community, and research organizations in
this country and around the world that defend the rights of workers and
function as their advocates before governments and the general public.
Unions need a more sophisticated approach to working with these allies,
particularly around issues dealing with the Global South. Union strength is
concentrated in the developed economies of the Global North, and the
alliances described in this article tend to be concentrated in that
geographical area. There are exceptions, and the resource-starved global
union federations do what they can to bridge the North-South gap. But
organized labor does not have a coherent strategy or the semblance of a
practical program for organizing and raising the living standards of the
additional 1.5 billion workers, mostly in the Global South, who have entered
the global economy over the past two decades. Until this reality is
addressed, unions will face a constant and powerful pressure on the wages
and living standards of their members-not to mention the inhumanity of a
system that keeps more than half the population of the world living on less
than two dollars a day.
Whether we are talking about formal and official mergers of entire
institutions or the global networks growing organically with specific
campaigns, unions have begun a process of global integration that could
indeed prove to be historic. Even Bruce Raynor and my former colleagues at
UNITE have, by a somewhat circuitous route, become converts to global
unionism. With the dramatic decline in U.S. apparel and textile production,
the union shifted its organizing focus to targets it believed could not run
away, like retail distribution centers and industrial laundry services, a
shift reinforced by its merger with the hotel and restaurant workers union.
But a funny thing happened on the way to growth and greater density. Like
SEIU discovering that property service firms were global, like public
employee unions learning that municipal and state governments were using
call centers in India and Kenya, UNITE found that the warehouse it was
organizing in Indiana was owned by a French company and that big casinos can
expand their operations in Macao if Las Vegas gets too expensive.
"My thinking on this has changed," Raynor told me recently. "For many years
I didn't see the point of international affairs, but we've learned a lot in
the past few years. What's happening to unions in this country can't be
separated from what's happening to unions everywhere else. We're going to
rise or fall together." UNITE HERE has begun to build organizing alliances
with unions in a half-dozen countries, a process it expects to expand. "We
will continue to put resources into this," Raynor says. "This is the
future."
It is even possible that the next time the union thinks seriously about
organizing the apparel industry and the question is inevitably asked, "How
many members do we get out of this?"-the answer from some intrepid soul will
be, "At least thirty million."
Alan Howard is a writer and an adviser to international labor rights
campaigns. He was assistant to the president of UNITE from 1992 to 2001. He
has written for the New York Times Magazine, the Nation, and public
television.
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