TBF
05-06-2010, 07:56 PM
Linking up across borders is the only way to fight transnationals.
Dateline: Tuesday, May 04, 2010
The global financial crisis reminds us, yet again, that ordinary working people need to find new ways to organize to counteract transnational corporate power.
Since the 1980s, corporate elites have used globalization to gain near-total control of the world's economy, media and politics. For working people in North America, this change has led to the exodus of good jobs, a decline in purchasing power, and the need for family members to work extra hours to make ends meet. Huge companies now control every element of mass production around the world, and they call all the shots.
In 2008, the USW formed an alliance with Workers Uniting, to form a new global union entity.
INCO nickel miners in Sudbury, ON, have become a sad example of this new economic reality. They have been on strike for ten months, with no end in sight, against the mine's multinational owner, Vale. The nickel market is soft. Vale owns mines around the world, and Sudbury doesn't seem to matter that much to Vale.
The strikers are hoping their union's recent international alliances may help them. They belong to the United Steelworkers (USW), which has grown to include workers all sorts of workplaces. It formed an alliance in 2008 with Unite — one of the UK's biggest unions and itself a product of many recent amalgamations — to form a new global union entity, Workers Uniting.
Unite's Tony Bourke spoke to the USW-Canada's policy convention, in Toronto last week and led delegates through the evolution of his union's thinking and the alliance with USW.
Since the 1980s, unions in the UK were in steady decline, he said. "Our members' pay was open to attack and we saw more and more of our jobs being exported offshore to the developing world where workers could be exploited in a race to the bottom. Trade unions in the UK were being reduced to spectators. We weren't even on the field of play. Unions were losing membership, and we weren't able to make any breakthroughs into the new industries."
Bourke said that deregulation and "the neoliberal agenda had sidelined trade unions, and therefore we had to put aside the old enmities between skilled and semi-skilled workers, between blue collar and white collar workers, because it became obvious to us that a competition was self-defeating."
While working to get rid of inter-union competition, leaders set their sights on creating a truly international union. "We've recognized that no one union in one country can fight giant organizations that now control the daily lives of working people and their families. The creation of Workers Uniting means we have to set aside any nationalistic approaches... where employers can play one worker off against the other."
"The rich didn't get richer over the past 40 years just by accident," Bourke said. "This was a deliberate policy of the Reagan-Thatcherite era and it's still going on."
Unite and USW organizers are now working internationally in teams, from Colombia, "the most dangerous place in the world to be a trade unionist," to Mexico, to Bangladesh. There they are trying to assist people in the ship-breaking industry.
Unite supports the striking miners in Sudbury too. "We're dealing here with a greedy, avaricious and despicable multinational corporation, Vale Inco," said Bourke. "They want to drive down pay and conditions anywhere in the world, not just in Canada, and they'll do it if they can get away with it."
"These 3,000 striking miners are not only members of the United Steelworkers, they are members of Workers Uniting, and therefore they are our members, and therefore we will stand shoulder to shoulder with them."
USW's international president, Leo Gerard, was a keynote speaker at the convention. Gerard, a Sudbury native who joined the union when he worked at INCO, spoke extensively about the need for workers to organize globally.
"Our fights aren't always local fights," he said. "Our fights now, more than ever, are with global corporations. If we're going to have the capacity to take them on, we've got to have not only the networks, but the solidarity." He pointed to strategic alliances USW has formed with unions in Brazil, Australia and Germany, as well Great Britain.
"That is tremendously important because as we enter into these global struggles, whether it's Unite fighting with a company like British Airlines or us fighting with Vale, we stand together and we pull together."
Long-term labour alliances are necessary, he said. "This is not a slot machine union. You don't put your coins in every month, pull the lever, and watch the coins fall down and say 'That was good.' This union has to be an instrument of social and economic justice, here at home and anywhere in the world."
The struggle of the Inco workers in Sudbury is only one of many in the ongoing war of the corporate and financial elites versus ordinary people of the world. We applaud international efforts and alliances like Workers Uniting. Corporate dominance is threatening to ruin our world, and the world's people need to work together to resist.
http://www.straightgoods.ca/2010/ViewArticle.cfm?Ref=480&Cookies=yes
Dateline: Tuesday, May 04, 2010
The global financial crisis reminds us, yet again, that ordinary working people need to find new ways to organize to counteract transnational corporate power.
Since the 1980s, corporate elites have used globalization to gain near-total control of the world's economy, media and politics. For working people in North America, this change has led to the exodus of good jobs, a decline in purchasing power, and the need for family members to work extra hours to make ends meet. Huge companies now control every element of mass production around the world, and they call all the shots.
In 2008, the USW formed an alliance with Workers Uniting, to form a new global union entity.
INCO nickel miners in Sudbury, ON, have become a sad example of this new economic reality. They have been on strike for ten months, with no end in sight, against the mine's multinational owner, Vale. The nickel market is soft. Vale owns mines around the world, and Sudbury doesn't seem to matter that much to Vale.
The strikers are hoping their union's recent international alliances may help them. They belong to the United Steelworkers (USW), which has grown to include workers all sorts of workplaces. It formed an alliance in 2008 with Unite — one of the UK's biggest unions and itself a product of many recent amalgamations — to form a new global union entity, Workers Uniting.
Unite's Tony Bourke spoke to the USW-Canada's policy convention, in Toronto last week and led delegates through the evolution of his union's thinking and the alliance with USW.
Since the 1980s, unions in the UK were in steady decline, he said. "Our members' pay was open to attack and we saw more and more of our jobs being exported offshore to the developing world where workers could be exploited in a race to the bottom. Trade unions in the UK were being reduced to spectators. We weren't even on the field of play. Unions were losing membership, and we weren't able to make any breakthroughs into the new industries."
Bourke said that deregulation and "the neoliberal agenda had sidelined trade unions, and therefore we had to put aside the old enmities between skilled and semi-skilled workers, between blue collar and white collar workers, because it became obvious to us that a competition was self-defeating."
While working to get rid of inter-union competition, leaders set their sights on creating a truly international union. "We've recognized that no one union in one country can fight giant organizations that now control the daily lives of working people and their families. The creation of Workers Uniting means we have to set aside any nationalistic approaches... where employers can play one worker off against the other."
"The rich didn't get richer over the past 40 years just by accident," Bourke said. "This was a deliberate policy of the Reagan-Thatcherite era and it's still going on."
Unite and USW organizers are now working internationally in teams, from Colombia, "the most dangerous place in the world to be a trade unionist," to Mexico, to Bangladesh. There they are trying to assist people in the ship-breaking industry.
Unite supports the striking miners in Sudbury too. "We're dealing here with a greedy, avaricious and despicable multinational corporation, Vale Inco," said Bourke. "They want to drive down pay and conditions anywhere in the world, not just in Canada, and they'll do it if they can get away with it."
"These 3,000 striking miners are not only members of the United Steelworkers, they are members of Workers Uniting, and therefore they are our members, and therefore we will stand shoulder to shoulder with them."
USW's international president, Leo Gerard, was a keynote speaker at the convention. Gerard, a Sudbury native who joined the union when he worked at INCO, spoke extensively about the need for workers to organize globally.
"Our fights aren't always local fights," he said. "Our fights now, more than ever, are with global corporations. If we're going to have the capacity to take them on, we've got to have not only the networks, but the solidarity." He pointed to strategic alliances USW has formed with unions in Brazil, Australia and Germany, as well Great Britain.
"That is tremendously important because as we enter into these global struggles, whether it's Unite fighting with a company like British Airlines or us fighting with Vale, we stand together and we pull together."
Long-term labour alliances are necessary, he said. "This is not a slot machine union. You don't put your coins in every month, pull the lever, and watch the coins fall down and say 'That was good.' This union has to be an instrument of social and economic justice, here at home and anywhere in the world."
The struggle of the Inco workers in Sudbury is only one of many in the ongoing war of the corporate and financial elites versus ordinary people of the world. We applaud international efforts and alliances like Workers Uniting. Corporate dominance is threatening to ruin our world, and the world's people need to work together to resist.
http://www.straightgoods.ca/2010/ViewArticle.cfm?Ref=480&Cookies=yes