International unions

This book offers no one solution to ‘What is to be Done’. Instead it acts rather as a compendium of ideas and examples drawn from across today’s global economy. In his overarching piece on union strategic responses to globalisation, Ronaldo Munck suggest we are in a “complex, shifting and transitional phase” (p19), moving towards a new internationalism where no one approach predominates. There are however two major trends currently evident. One is the emergence of global unions and federations, looking to challenge the power of TNC s and international financial institutions through such means as international framework agreements, establishing core labour standards and new regional structures (within the EU and Latin America’s MERCOSUL). For Munck this is an expanded form of ‘social partnership’ now acting at supra-national level. More promising are those new forms of internationalism resting upon closer links between organised labour and social movements/ global justice organisations, which can at least begin to address today’s complex social relations.

Beyond these generalities the collection takes up a number of specific themes, three of which we can briefly consider here. Economic restructuring in the rapidly expanding communications ands knowledge industries, where powerful trends towards corporate convergence and offshoring are at work, is one of these.

Vincent Mosco considers two distinct labour movement responses to such developments in the North American theatre. Within the mainstream, a parallel convergence of unions representing previously distinct workforces in telecoms, broadcasting, journalism and electronics has placed now expanded organs like the Communications Workers of America (CWA), and their Canadian equivalent (the CEP), in the frontline, attempting to exert their enhanced powers within interconnected labour processes, with some success.

A different response has seen the emergence of new workers associations that have successfully reached out to hitherto unorganised ‘knowledge workers’ – high-tech employees, part-timers, agency staff and freelancers – to secure increased pay and benefits, without however establishing any collective bargaining rights.

Best known of these is Wash Tech, originally an alliance of Seattle high-tech workers, whose story is related by one of its members Michelle Roldino-Colocino. She argues that its emergence reflects the harsh labour conditions found in the IT ‘technomadic’ labour market where overwork and intermittent precarious employment contracts coexist with powerful offshoring tendencies, all designed to drive down labour costs. Wash Tech’s disparate membership of web designers, programmers, system analysts and engineers has grown as it has taken up many issues facing its ‘precarious workforce’, including challenging the offshoring plans of government and employers. Through its links to CWA, Wash Tech has also supported the organisation of IT workers in receiving countries like India, adding a necessary transnational dimension to its approach.

Their efforts are in sharp contrast to those of the European white-collar unions reported on by Ramoul and de Bruyn, who have opted for a more traditional ‘partnership’ approach to offshoring, attempting to make it more ‘sustainable’ at both ends of the chain. As Huws’ introduction points out, union responses to globalisation in general vary significantly between these poles of partnership and opposition.

Trade union relations with external organisations, within and beyond the labour and anti-globalisation movements form a second area of investigation.

Bruce Robinson’s critical survey of the prospects for cybersolidarity and internet campaigning as new forms of labour internationalism looks at the work of Labour Start in depth. Examining its underlying forms of social organisation and information flows he points out the advantages it brings, in terms of ease of action, the rapid and continuous transmission of distant struggles, opening up new horizons of labour solidarity. However the structure of this cyberactivism leaves the subjects of any dispute with little actual involvement in the whole process – it is “action by proxy” (p161) heavily dependent upon individual participation in activist networks. As such, cybernet solidarity can only be a supplement to traditional ‘place based’ labour action.

For Develtere and Huybrechs union participation in ‘transnational network movements’ (TNMs) offer a more promising option. Their case study of the movement to abolish child labour describes how a loose alliance of unions, civil society, governmental and corporate organisations successfully forced this issue onto the international agenda and achieved “the most rapidly ratified ILO convention ever” (p178) in under two decades (the ILO Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention 1999). Through a raft of ad hoc campaigns, consumer boycotts, fairtrade/anti-sweatshop projects and pressure on international forums, unions participated in this TNM alongside other labour and social movement organisations across the globe. The authors believe this form of action is crucial in the new social architecture of the ‘network society’. Without entering that sociological debate, what we can see here is that unions can enhance their power and effectiveness in alliance with other progressive forces. Indeed this was part of the promise of ‘social movement unionism’ as a new alternative future for unions popularised by the likes of Kim Moody – though one definitely not including alliances with corporate bodies!!

Moody and others took their cue in large part from the new forms of union practice developing in the Global South, especially those of Brazil’s CUT and COSATU in South Africa. These federations feature heavily in a third theme of the Huws collection, the response of ‘Third World’ unions to globalisation.

The trajectory of COSATU as relayed by Bassett and Clarke is a dispiriting tale. Its expansive social movement style approach forged in the struggle against apartheid all too rapidly gave way to a familiar tripartitism and support for the ANC’s reconstruction strategy of ‘progressive competitiveness’, the co-management of capitalism.
This in turn underwent further slippage and an accommodation to the neo-liberal global agenda by the late 1990s. COSATU commitments to job creation, social protection – not to mention goals of transformation – were swept away in these shifts. The costs of economic contraction, proliferating insecure and informal forms of employment, and attacks on wages and union rights, were borne by its working class constituency. Partnership and progress did not go together here, note the authors, pinning their hopes on COSATU’s more recent turn back towards its original ideals.

In Brazil financially led globalisation sidelined previous strategies of national development as well as diminishing union powers to shape the national economy. Facing footloose capital, industrial restructuring and the wholesale substitution of informal for formal employment, even the most advanced union, the CUT, has found it difficult to respond. As Marco Aurelio Santana records, there has been some effective union resistance to automobile production relocation on greenfield sites beyond the militant CUT strongholds of Sao Paulo’s industrial belt. The efforts of firms like VW to lower labour costs and isolate its new workforce at Resende from external influence have been effectively countered by the local metalworkers union. Breaking with its conservative federation, this union has established its own factory committees and connections with VW counterparts elsewhere in Brazil and abroad, moving closer to the CUT and delivering gains for its workforce.

Such union global networks operating at company level are one of the two major forms of internationalism Brazilian unions have adopted according top Leonardo Mello e Silva. Their grassroots character and strong support within the CUT are having positive effects in securing core standards within automobile and pharmaceutical sectors. The alternative strategy – participation in the regional bloc of unions in MERCOSUL to socially shape regional economic development – is a turn towards a tripartitism increasingly seen as redundant elsewhere.

Summing up, the pioneers of social movement unionism may have run into difficulties confronting the global dynamics of capital today. However as the contributors to this collection have demonstrated, their original tactics of grassroots mobilisation, across national borders, broad social agendas and alliances with other labour and social movements provide the best prospects for genuine trade union renewal. For an on-going effort to practice these goals, not covered in this volume, the UE –FAT alliance is worth consideration.

Her concern is to show how groups situated outside the AFL-CIO mainstream have struggled and organised themselves to achieve economic justice through the creation of ‘poor workers’ unions’ (PWUs). In so doing these independent organs have shown the wider labour movement a more expansive, democratic option that represents “the best possibility for the future” (229), a ‘social justice’ unionism which has now established a foothold in the mainstream. Within the hidden history she reconstructs Tait also points to the misunderstandings in our views of relations between labour and other social movements.

The birth of this alternative ‘second front’ in US labour lay in the 1960s social movements for civil, women’s’ and welfare rights. Each of these struggles had central economic justice demands that encouraged the subsequent formation of new organisations for those excluded by the narrow agenda of AFL-CIO - its neglect of racial and gender equality, and for brining contingent workers, the unemployed and welfare recipients into its fold. As Tait documents, the civil rights campaign foregrounded issues of fair hiring practices and equal pay in employment, setting up ‘freedom unions’ on a community basis to press its demands. Meanwhile the women’s movement was struggling for recognition for waged and unwaged domestic labour, establishing an array of organisations directly concerned with their marginal position in the workplace. Welfare rights activists similarly set up national bodies to argue for guaranteed minimum incomes for those with caring responsibilities and a just welfare system. These initial efforts are described by Tait as labour organising within the social movements.

From these beginnings Tait tracks the development of PWUs over the next three decades, focusing upon the efforts of those seeking to unite waged and unwaged workers; the community based ‘United Labor Unions’ set up by ACORN; and the wave of independent Worker Centres emerging in immigrant communities.

The overlap between welfare and waged work was a central concern for the PWUs, reflecting the shifting trajectory of low wage workers between these two worlds, and the explosion of mandatory ‘workfare’ programmes. Organisations such as ACORN (the Association of Community Organisations for Reform Now) thus addressed workers rights in both spheres. In the hands of the Rhode Island Unemployed Workers Union (later the Rhode Island Workers Association) this approach involved directly recruiting members from the welfare lines and becoming a bargaining agent with its officials, before moving on to successfully organise low-wage workforces in the healthcare, jewellery and office sectors. So prominent did it become that the SEIU union later offered it affiliation as an autonomous local, which it agreed to.
As workfare programmes took off PWUs undertook many organising projects amongst these captive workforces tens of thousands strong, though here the efforts of the United WREP Workers and ACORN in New York and San Francisco’s POWER were often blocked by mainstream union opposition.

By way of contrast ACORN’s ‘United Labor Unions’ set pout to organise the growing numbers of poor workers across whole industries, utilising social movement style tactics of one-to-one recruitment, often outside the workplace, and building strong links with other community groups. Major advances in the homecare workers sector and their ‘living wage’ campaigns in the 1980s led to their affiliation to SEIU too.

As for the independent Worker Centres, they developed an innovative response to the multi-layered oppression faced by immigrant communities, acting both as labour and community advocates. Relying upon direct action and educational activities to build rank and file participation, centres such as New York’s ‘Workplace Project’ and ‘Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association’ pursued improvements in pay and conditions amongst hitherto unorganised workforces (day labourers, garment workers, restaurant staff). Their ‘Black Workers for Justice’ counterparts in North Carolina used a similar approach to link labour and civil rights struggles of black communities in the South. Strongly rooted in ethnic solidarities, these centres had significant success in building alliances between Asian, Afro-American and Latino workforces. That achievement is vital for building wider solidarities in today’s diverse labour movement.

Tait’s historical narrative reveals PWU relations with mainstream unions to be uneven and at times problematic. Reaching out to previously unorganised workforces through unorthodox tactics, and combining labour with community struggles over social amenities (housing, healthcare, education, transport, sanitation) and social inclusion (discrimination, citizenship status) the PWUs clearly stood at some remove from the AFL-CIO norm. It has only been more recently that their ‘social justice’ campaigning style has been widely recognised and applied by some progressive mainstream unions in the face of a multi-faceted challenge to union power – membership decline, the growth of new low-wage service industries, increasing numbers of migrant workers and of contingent working patterns immune to traditional union approaches. This cross-fertilisation has also been powered through the gradual entry of PWU activists and organisations into the mainstream.

The mid 1990s’ reform movement within AFL-CIO, turning it towards a more expansive organising agenda, furthered the scope for collaboration with the PWUs. But as Tait notes, despite some promising developments (the multi-union backed ‘Jobs with Justice’ campaign for instance) AFL-CIO still resisted the rank and file activism and democratic participation the PWUs embodied.

As a new entity within the US labour movement Tait suggests the fundamental significance of the PWUs lies in their broadening of the institutional forms, participants, tactics and agendas available to it. In place of the well established bureaucracies and routines of business unionism, PWUs deploy direct action tactics, community-based organising and rank and file participation to build vibrant, democratic organs. This organising style and form is one especially well suited to the atypical and contingent working patterns of marginal workforces and the combination of labour and community issues they confront in their daily lives.

The PWUs have dramatically expanded our conception of who can be defined as a ‘worker’ – to cover welfare recipients, workfare participants, unwaged domestic labour, and those performing a proliferating range of service tasks in the informal economy. Their potential participation in expansive organising projects gives a voice and role to hitherto excluded groups.

Simultaneously the PWUs have pursued a much wider agenda of issues, spanning both workplace and community, which these groups of workers are concerned with. This has led them to recognise the centrality of social amenity provision and social inequalities (gender, cultural, racial oppressions; the struggle for citizenship rights) in the struggle for economic justice. Here it is relevant to note that the typical workforce a PWU addresses is composed of peoples of colour, immigrants and women.

Tait argues that such a shift has crucially enabled the PWUs to make the leap from workplace struggles into broader arenas, “moving beyond the bargaining table and into the community and political life of the nation” (229). They have come to appreciate how class conflicts are played out in many aspects of everyday life and are inextricably linked to other forms of inequality and oppression. The historic 2004 Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, a national campaign for immigrant rights and an amnesty for the undocumented, one uniting mainstream unions and PWUs, stands as a classic example of this dynamic.

One point worth taking up here is how the PWU history challenges contemporary views of the relationship between labour and other social movements. Instead of a clear division between the two, and an accompanying shift to ‘identity politics’ beyond class, Tait’s work reveals the centrality of struggles around ethnicity, gender and citizenship to today’s labour movement. It is comprised of diverse cultural communities having to address labour and community concerns and build solidarity with each other, both within and beyond the workplace. PWU tactics, agents and agendas illustrate that given views of social movements as extra-class, and of who belongs in the category of worker, are fundamentally mistaken. That is a crucial insight for us to take on board.

In her concluding chapter Tait argues that although the PWUs hold the key to labour movement renewal, they are not a sufficient condition of this. Small in scale, still marginal to much union activity and financially vulnerable, it is only through a deeper collaboration with the mainstream that the future can be built. To shift US labour in the direction of a more expansive, inclusive and democratic mode of organising will not be easy. There is however no other, or better, road to renewal.