IUF
Uniting Food, Farm and Hotel Workers World-Wide
Four More Years: Why Solidarity With US Labour Matters More Than Ever
Posted to the IUF website 08-Nov-2004Share this article.
The global implications of four more years with George W. Bush in the White House are clear. We can anticipate, at a minimum, a militarized US foreign policy, new assaults on international human rights instruments and aggressive use of the WTO and bilateral/regional trade agreements to lower international social and environmental standards.
In the United States, the "war on terror" has given cover to a war against working people and their unions. That war too can be expected to escalate. In August 2002, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld personally telephoned the head of the Pacific coast dockworkers union to tell him that industrial action in response to an employer lockout would be treated as a threat to national security. The Homeland Security Act later that year restricted basic civil liberties and was also the vehicle for stripping over 230,000 government employees of collective bargaining rights. In a recent Supreme Court brief, the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers argued that ILO Conventions represented a national security threat by restricting US "sovereignty".
The government of the United States has always refused to adhere to international labour standards, particularly the right of workers to join a union. An estimated twenty thousand workers are sacked every year for joining a union or simply expressing support for the idea. Union busting is a high-tech, high profit growth industry. Faced with a union organizing drive, over three-quarters of all employers will call in the "human resource" experts. A recent study showed that over 90% of employers will force workers who are trying to organize to submit to closed meetings - often one-on-one - with supervisors. In over half the cases, employers responded to the possibility of unionization by threatening to close down and relocate.
American unions work in a political and legal environment which would tax the stamina of organizations with many times their membership density and resources. Over the last four years, that environment has become even more hostile. Gaps and loopholes in national labour legislation make it an easy task for employers to evade union recognition and collective bargaining. There is no system of sectoral or national bargaining: unions must organize each farm, plant, supplier, hotel and restaurant one at a time, after which the work of retaining that organization has only begun. Even when legal recognition has been won, employers can simply stall the negotiations for a collective agreement for one year, after which they can challenge the union's representative status and the entire process begins again.
Because workers are routinely subject to employer coercion and manipulation in the union election process, unions have had some success in winning recognition through so-called card-check neutrality agreements, essentially a mechanism for gaining recognition when a majority of workers sign cards indicating their willingness to become union members. Card-checks will therefore be the subject of a scheduled ruling by the Republican-dominated National Labor Relations Board, which could declare the procedure illegal under US labour law. If that fails, the strengthened Republican majority in the US Congress has comprehensive anti-union legislation in reserve.
US labour's record-breaking voter mobilization on November 2 will strengthen the administration's resolve to permanently cripple union strength in order to cement the rightward realignment of American politics. New federal rules to abolish mandatory overtime pay for over 6 million US workers are a taste of things to come.
It is a testimony to the commitment and combativity of American workers that they have managed to build and hold on to what they have today. But US labour continues to lose ground, particularly in the private sector. Stemming that decline and rebuilding American trade union power is therefore critical for unions internationally if the US industrial relations model is not to become the global norm.
Globalized financial markets globalize shareholder demands for increased profits. Recent developments in the European metal industry - previously a bastion of "social dialogue" - show the extent to which the traditional framework of collective bargaining in Europe has already been eroded. Vast reserves of non-union labour in Russia and the new EU states of Central and Eastern Europe are available for exploitation, and China has been effectively integrated into global production circuits. All of this is fertile ground for aggressive attacks on union power in countries where labour thought itself immune.
International labour will have to mobilize all its political resources to halt a further slide into global barbarism, and that is an enormous task because resistance must be organized at both national and global level. An essential part of this agenda must be forcing US-based companies to the bargaining table and constraining corporate appetites through collective action and negotiation. Unions internationally will have to give sustained industrial and organizational support to the American unions' efforts to bring the corporations to that table. Declining US union strength weakens workers everywhere; reversing that decline is fundamental if we are to broaden international respect for trade union rights.