World Labor Will Discuss New Strategies
To Protect Workers in a Global Economy

Leaders of trade unions from all over the world will be gathering Dec. 10-11 at the National Labor College outside of Washington D.C. to participate in a conference billed as “the first ever global organizing summit.” The conference, which is being hosted by the AFL-CIO, is being organized by the Council of Global Unions, a group of 10 labor federations.

In Nov. 2006, a new world labor organization, the International Confederation of Trade Unions (ICTU), was created. It represents an impressive 304 affiliated union federations in 153 countries and territories with a total population of 168 million. But it is not at all clear how the new giant organization will challenge multinational corporations that force workers to compete against each other in a “race to the bottom.”

Gus Ryder, ICTU’s general secretary, said the conference will look at strategies for organizing and union recognition on a global basis by bringing pressure on multinationals to sign “code of conduct” agreements. The ICTU can provide a clearing house for information about workers’ struggles in each country and promote actions of solidarity in behalf of striking unions. It can also expose governments that violate basic worker rights, as proclaimed in statutes of the International Labor Organization.

AFL-CIO Organizing Director Stewart Acuff said the summit will attempt to reach a consensus among attendees on the “crisis” workers all over the world are experiencing because of declining union densities. He attributed the decline to a “deliberate strategic assault” on workers’ rights by both businesses and “right-wing and center-right governments.”

Some Daunting Problems That Face Global Labor Movement

Establishing a cohesive world labor organization can be extremely difficult. There are hundreds of cultural and language problems that are often impediments to international labor cooperation and solidarity. How, for example, do American union leaders and members communicate with their counterparts in South Korea, Germany, Brazil or Russia? What do we know of their history and culture to help our unions establish cordial relations with theirs?

There are differences on international trade. American workers strongly protest when companies move their plants to low-wage regions; yet workers in Guatemala, Egypt, Bangladesh and Indonesia are happy to get those contracts to provide jobs for their impoverished people.

There have been recurring cases where a striking union in one country asks for help from a labor federation in another country that has a working relationship with the struck company and therefore resists cooperating with the strikers. What then?

Perhaps the most serious problem is that in most countries, only a small, elite group of international labor “experts” will conduct a global organizing campaign, with workers kept in the dark about what is really going on.

Take the American labor movement. How many members know that the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center gets better than 80 percent of its funds from the U.S. State Department and other federal agencies, or what the Solidarity Center has to do to earn those millions in government handouts? Should we know what the Center is actually saying and privately doing in our name?

Whatever strategies are approved by the Dec. 10 international labor summit, will workers in Pakistan, Honduras, South Africa or Poland find them significant or even hear about them? As in past conferences, a limited number of international labor officials will play their own game in seeking a viable, top-down partnership with multinational corporations.

Perhaps the only way to build an effective world labor movement is to start locally in each country, with a struggle against its home-grown multinationals.

Our weekly column, “The World of Labor,” reports the struggles and victories of unions in countries around the globe. Check our web site: www.LaborEducator.org.