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Workers Uniting: The First Global Union |
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In a global economy where multinational companies operate across borders, unions are developing global strategies to better represent their members and sustain the middle class.
Today, the United Steelworkers (USW) and Unite, Britain’s largest union, took a giant step in that direction by formally joining together to form the world’s first global union.
The new union, dubbed Workers Uniting: The Global Union, will draw on the energies of the two unions’ more than 3 million active and retired workers from the United States, Canada, Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland. The members work in virtually every sector of the global economy, including manufacturing, service, mining and transportation (see video).
USW President Leo Gerard and Unite General Secretary Derek Simpson signed the agreement in a transatlantic ceremony broadcast live at the USW convention in Las Vegas.
“This union is crucial for challenging the growing power of global capital,” says Gerard, adding:
Globalization has given financiers license to exploit workers in developing countries at the expense of our members in the developed world. Only global solidarity among workers can overcome this sort of global exploitation wherever it occurs.
While the two unions will remain largely autonomous, they will have a joint leadership to coordinate common policy and collective bargaining. The two unions represent workers at some of the same companies in both countries and will be able to coordinate bargaining.
Simpson adds:
The political and economic power of multinational companies is formidable. They are able to play one nation’s workers off against another to maximise profits. They do the same with governments, hence the growing gap between the rich and the rest of us. With this agreement, we can finally begin the process of closing that gap.
The genesis of Workers Uniting came in April 2007 when the USW, Amicus, the largest manufacturing union in the United Kingdom, and the U.K.’s Transport and General Workers’ Union (T&G), agreed to set up joint committees to move toward forming a global union. In May 2007, Amicus and T&G merged to form Unite.
At the time, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney hailed the agreement as “a bold and innovative approach to addressing the crushing effect of corporate-driven globalization on workers and their communities.”
Together, these unions have put multinational companies on notice: Pushing down wages and working conditions for your employees by pitting one country’s workforce against another will not work forever. By exploring what it would take to build the world’s first trans-Atlantic union, these unions have proven themselves to be on the cutting edge of not only the global union movement, but the future of the global workforce.
Tony Woodley, Unite’s joint general secretary, summed up the importance of the new union, saying:
This agreement will enable us to use our considerable resources to organize workers from new and growing sectors at home and in developing countries. There will be no more no-go areas for trade unions.
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I hope to see more transatlantic and international unions working together in the near future. There may be hope then to halt the downward spiral for workers.
The first? What about ITUC?
The International Trade Union Confederation represents 168 million workers in 155 countries and territories
and has 311 national affiliates.
The first global union was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). At different times in its history, it had branches in Australia, Britain, Canada, Chile, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway and South Africa. The ITUC is not a global union, nor are the Global Union Federations (GUFs) or any existing international trade union organization. They are federations of national unions. They do refer to themselves on occasion as “global unions”, but that is public relations hype and does not reflect reality. Real global unions is what we need and there is still a long way to go.