Labor Unions Without Borders
Will workers of the world (finally) unite? Leaders say yes, but barriers loom
When Teamster President James Hoffa visited China in May, it signaled a serious about-face for American industrial labor leaders, who for decades refused to deal with that country's sole union, which represents more than 100 million workers. For Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, though, it was his sixth visit to China in five years.
Even though about 40 percent of SEIU's 1.8 million members are public employees and the rest work as janitors, healthcare workers, and in other jobs not soon to be threatened by outsourcing, Stern has long called for unions to become more international. Now U.S. labor groups, hemorrhaging members amid pressure from multinational companies, are heeding the calls to go global. Only 15.4 million Americans, or 12 percent of paid workers, belonged to a union last year, a precipitous drop from 1983 when 20 percent of workers were unionized, according to the Labor Department.
While the idea that workers of the world should unite is at least as old as Karl Marx, Stern thinks the modern world's fluid boundaries mean that it's an idea whose time has come. Companies "don't see borders as obstacles to their future," Stern says. "Capital and trade and companies have gone global. How come unions shouldn't be global?"
History. Skeptics say that despite Stern's enthusiasm, the idea is a perpetual pipe dream. Companies may be able to go global, they say, but organizing workers in different countries amounts to herding cats. "The history is that it hasn't ever worked," says Kimberly Elliott, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
It has become easier to build worker networks, however, as the Internet and cheap air travel have lowered communication barriers. "Employers are more global, so the opportunities have exploded and the interest is greater," says Christy Hoffman, organizing director at Switzerland's UNI Property Services Global Union.
Last summer the United Food and Commercial Workers Union stepped up ties with its European counterparts after 13 years of failing to unionize the world's largest pork processing facility, a Smithfield plant in Tar Heel, N.C. "It's probably something that should have happened a long time ago," says Gene Bruskin, a UFCW organizer. Smithfield had just bought Sara Lee's European meat business, expanding its presence on the Continent. Bruskin hopes the group can work to unionize North Carolina workers and do the same at a new Romanian plant that he says would underpay workers. "Look, when you're dealing with a plant in northern Poland and ones in North Carolina, the cultural and language differences are huge," he says. "But everyone is a meatpacker. Once you understand that the employer is the same, you see a reason to talk to each other."
It's the same approach that American unions once used when organizing workers who came from different regions, say labor activists. "Why did Manhattan meatpacking workers think they had anything in common with workers in Chicago?" says Greg Denier, communications director at Change to Win, a group of seven unions, including SEIU, that broke off from the AFL-CIO.
But Elliott believes that moving workers in different countries to collective action will be too hard. "If unions are thinking this is mainly a way of putting pressure on companies with joint strikes and actions, it's not going to work," she says. While Elliott says the collective-bargaining model used by old steel- and autoworkers, who were insulated from international competition, is dead, she does think unions can still benefit from sharing information and improving negotiating strategies.
During the union leaders' visit to China, they held seminars on collective bargaining to help workers learn how to handle private employers. In China, even most Wal-Mart employees are unionized. However, the growing ranks of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions won't give workers great muscle. It is controlled by the Communist Party and used as a political tool.
Decline. Country differences might make it hard to repeat labor's few regional successes. Even in Europe, where trade unions have been an entrenched part of the economic fabric, union membership has declined in all but three of the smallest European Union member states between 1995 and 2004, according to the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions.
Some labor leaders say unions should refocus efforts inward and use members' dues to train them to keep their skills current as technology changes their industries. Elliott says unions might be more useful if they provided services like childcare and healthcare to workers, rather than pressuring companies to adhere to an international standard for benefits. Such potential changes may seem radical now, but they might eventually happen if efforts to go global don't work.
Indeed, companies are trying to make sure unions' global thrust doesn't succeed. When the UFCW sent Smithfield's European workers a video alleging worker abuse at the Tar Heel plant, that boosted the company's resolve to tell its side of the story, says Dennis Pittman, Smithfield's director of corporate communications. "We don't anticipate it having any effect," he says of the UFCW's moves. Unions "are desperate, and they have got to get membership somewhere."
This story appears in the July 16, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.