[Mb-civic] Workers Of the World Uniting

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Workers Of the World Uniting

By Harold Meyerson

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2005/08/26/AR2005082601480.html

Saturday, August 27, 2005; Page A17

CHICAGO -- Thebusiness at hand was furthering globalization, but the 
usual suspects were nowhere to be seen. No U.S. trade 
representatives set the agenda. No corporate executives stalked the 
hall.

But then, the meeting this week in Chicago of roughly 1,500 labor 
leaders from around the world had a rather novel agenda. They 
convened on Monday under a banner that read "Imagine a Global 
Union." When they adjourned on Thursday, they had begun to build 
one.
	

The world's first global proto-union, surprisingly enough, comprises 
workers in the property services industry -- that is, janitors and security 
guards. Over the past half-decade, companies all over the world that 
have long provided the employees who guard and clean offices and 
factories -- including such venerable U.S.-based security companies 
as Pinkerton, Burns and Wackenhut -- have been bought by a handful 
of largely European-based multinationals.

The consequences, for both the employees and their home nations, 
have varied considerably. The guards at Pinkerton and Burns, for 
instance, are now employees of Securitas, a Swedish-based 
multinational known for providing extensive training and having good 
labor relations. But the employees of Group 4 Securicor, a British-
Danish conglomerate, haven't been so fortunate. In South Africa, 
guards at the airports have been reduced to working on month-to-
month contracts with no benefits. In Indonesia and Kenya, Group 4 
has refused to deal with its workers' long-established unions. And in 
the United States, guards at Group 4's subsidiary Wackenhut work 
with skimpy health insurance for a company that has been fined 
repeatedly for labor law violations.

Not surprisingly, it's the union that's been organizing security guards 
and janitors in the United States -- the Service Employees International 
Union (SEIU) -- that has taken the lead in getting this global effort off 
the ground.

Not only do property service workers increasingly share common 
employers but guards and janitors hold jobs that cannot be relocated. 
There are also so many immigrants in this workforce that the global 
nature of the industry is apparent at thousands of work sites. At 
London's Canary Wharf, where janitors are endeavoring to organize, 
says SEIU's Stephen Lerner, architect of that union's Justice for 
Janitors campaign, the contractor is ISS, which employs thousands of 
U.S.-based janitors. "The building owner is Morgan Stanley," he adds, 
"and the workers come from Africa and Latin America. The workers, 
the companies, the capital is global. Everything travels across the 
world -- except unions."

Now unions will be traveling, too. On Thursday the property services 
section of Union Network International, a Geneva-based amalgam of 
unions not involved in manufacturing, announced the creation of a new 
alliance, with a fund that will initially help organizing efforts in South 
Africa, India, Poland, the Netherlands, Germany and the United States. 
The SEIU will provide money and its expertise in organizing workers, 
shareholders and lenders to employers such as Group 4. The Swedish 
Transport Workers have already been working to convince their fellow 
European unions that without global organizing, the embattled 
paradise of Western European workers could quickly become a 
memory at best.

These far-flung unions envision a day when unions from every 
continent can sit across the table from a global employer and negotiate 
a common code of conduct and worker rights. Absent that kind of 
union pressure, a model employer in Europe that abuses its workers in 
the United States is more likely to bring its European standards down 
than its U.S. standards up. "It's much easier to change the behavior of 
a company that's unionized at an 80 percent level globally than it is 
when it's unionized at 10 percent," says SEIU President Andy Stern.

In a sense, I suppose, we've seen this once before. At the conclusion 
of the Civil War, the United States began to evolve from a nation of 
locally based economies to a country with a national economy. The 
first entities to go national were corporations, in railroads, 
meatpacking, oil and steel. At the beginning of the 20th century, 
professionals developed such national protective organizations as the 
American Medical Association and the American Bar Association. It 
took until the 1930s, though, for workers to build effective national 
organizations, with the coming of industrial unions that won national 
contracts with companies such as General Motors.

Now that process looks to be repeating itself on a global scale. 
Corporations have been going global for several decades, and global 
intellectual-property rights have been a chief focus of trade 
agreements for the past 15 years or so. But not until this week have 
we seen workers effectively lay claim to their place in the global 
economy. In a world where globalization has been designed and 
practiced almost solely for the benefit of corporations and their 
shareholders, the formation in Chicago has come not a moment too 
soon.

meyersonh at washpost.com


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