by James Parks, Dec 6, 2007

The fight of workers at Resurrection Health Care for a union illustrates the growing global crisis in workers’ rights.

Anti-worker governments here and around the world, together with U.S.-based multinationals, are assaulting workers’ freedom to form unions and have a voice at work. Starting Monday, union leaders from around the world are coming together here to identify the problems and discuss what we can do, together, to fight back. 

The AFL-CIO will host a historic conference Dec. 10–11 involving more than 200 trade union leaders from the United States and 63 countries at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Md. The delegates will lay the groundwork for and discuss global strategies to help workers join unions. The summit opens on International Human Rights Day (Dec. 10), a time when U.S. unions traditionally mobilize to restore the freedom to join unions.

“Going Global: Organizing, Recognition and Union Rights” is sponsored by the Council of Global Unions (CGU) and represents the first time such a large group of high-level trade union leaders from around the globe have gathered to develop ideas and strategies to combat corporations’ and governments’ efforts to suppress workers’ freedom to join unions, enhance cooperation among trade unions across borders and better represent workers in a global economy. CGU members include the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), the Trade Union Advisory Committee of the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development and a group of 10 union federations around the world. 

Communications Workers of America (CWA) President Larry Cohen, who chairs the AFL-CIO Committee on Organizing, says: 

Today the United States has the lowest collective bargaining coverage of any democratic country by far. [The global unions] are coming here to say that the number one issue in the global labor movement is, in fact, collective bargaining rights and union recognition.  

Following workshops at the National Labor College on Dec. 10, conference participants will travel to Capitol Hill Dec. 11 for a special press briefing and forum, “Restoring Workers’ Rights to Organize: Global Perspectives, Global Action.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) will join with the trade union leaders, workers and academics to discuss why the freedom to form unions and bargain collectively is crucial to the survival of human rights and democracy around the world.  

Cohen says the leaders will testify before the Congress that

the global union movement is very concerned with what has happened in the U.S….and that this Congress or in any other country that the global economy means organizing and collective bargaining rights. It just doesn’t mean capital can flow freely from one country to another. If that’s all it means we’re going to oppose it. That’s a disgrace. And what’s happening in the United States is a global disgrace.

You can watch a live webcast of the form by clicking on rtsp://avs2.senate.gov/help. You will need Real Media to view the webcast.

Global leaders also will urge Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, which they consider vital to their own effort to achieve full organizing and bargaining rights in their own countries and with multinational companies.  

Kelly Beringer, a registered nurse at West Suburban Hospital in Chicago, will speak at the forum about the nearly five-year effort by her and her co-workers at Resurrection Health Care (RHC) to form a union. Some 10,000 workers at RHC facilities have been fighting to win a voice at work with AFSCME Council 31 in the face of intense management opposition. RHC management has threatened, harassed and intimidated employees, including firing eight union supporters.

The ITUC’s annual survey of trade union rights violations cited RHC as one of the worst offenders in the United States. The report also says many employers launch fierce union-busting campaigns to defeat workers’ desire to form a union. It mentions that more than 30 million workers are still denied basic collective bargaining rights by law, including 40 percent of all federal public-sector workers.  

AFL-CIO Organizing Director Stewart Acuff sums up the global summit this way: 

This summit will identify the global economic crisis for workers and declining union density and bargaining coverage caused by the assault on workers, unions, and worker rights by rightwing politics and policies and corrupt corporate employers that put profit ahead of human beings.            

We will begin the work of confronting this crisis and this assault in a comprehensive, collective, global way instead of simply country by country.  And this summit will identify the role of U.S. corporations and policies in driving the assault not just here but all over the world.

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