Transnational Labor Cooperation Among Labor Unions (review)

I recently attended a global trade union education conference in Manchester, England hosted by the International Federation of Workers Education Association (IFWEA). After our workshop on global corporate campaigns, Teresa Conrow and I were approached by Aryanya, a young woman who was working for a small trade union-oriented NGO in Thailand. She asked for help in designing an urgent campaign for a union that had been crushed along with 800 workers who had been terminated at a subcontractor for the luggage company, Samsonite. With the help of the labor educators attending the IFWEA conference (mostly from developing countries) a global campaign was formulated and initiated in less than 24 hours.

When I began this book I was hoping to learn about trade unions working beyond their own borders to fight the growing hegemony of global corporations like Samsonite. But Gordon's and Turner's survey is based primarily on contact with the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), the International Trade Secretariats, and other union and worker-oriented international bodies such as the United Nation's International Labor Organization (ILO.) Unfortunately, I must conclude that little has changed but the rhetoric since my extensive work with these groups in the 1990's.

Gordon and Turner do an excellent job of documenting the attempts by these self-proclaimed "Global Unions" (http://www.global-unions.org) to adjust to a role as representatives of a transnational union movement being trampled by globalization. The problem with their approach is that most of the successful fights against global corporations—the international strategic campaigns, anti-sweatshop movement, and fights against privatization—rarely involve the organizations at which Gordon and Turner are looking. Instead, these remarkable efforts are primarily waged through loose and mostly informal networks of national unions, social justice groups, and research-oriented NGOs.

Thus, Gordon and Turner are wrong to focus on the fatigued and overstretched European-based international structures of the labor movement. Some of this is overcome by good case studies in the final section of the book, written by trade unionists actively pressing for more of a campaign orientation in these international labor bodies. But ad hoc war stories a good book do not make. Almost totally lacking is a critical look at international trade union strategies and the structural lag that is plaguing international trade union bodies. (A wonderful exception is Harvie Ramsay's chapter "Know Thine Enemy.")

Also missing is recognition of the often-successful efforts at trade union cooperation driven by unions and their allies in the South. This lack of southern voice, in the end, is the authors' biggest sin of omission, because this is where the most creative and effective experimentation with new transnational structures for labor cooperation is taking place.

I applaud the editors for focusing attention on the crucial role transnational solidarity needs to play in everyday trade union work. What is needed is a comprehensive look at the newly emerging international campaign structures based on international labor cooperation—rather than yet another report on the cosmetic reforms of sincere but stodgy structures born of labor's past efforts to mediate international trade union competition.

The pace of global change and the destruction left by global capital demand that international labor bodies shift resources away from their mostly unproductive dialogue with the UN, World Bank, ILO etc., and instead focus more on concrete campaign support for organizing, bargaining and developing at the base a global countervailing power to capital. We need to explore new decentralized international labor-oriented campaign structures that link workers in one country to those in other countries for strategic purposes and joint action, that can collect and share strategic information on single global corporations with markets and operations in many countries, and that help us to navigate national legal frameworks to facilitate global strategic campaigns.

Now, barely a month after the IFWEA...