International union leaders are considering a wide range of ideas on how to help U.S. unions pass the Employee Free Choice Act this year and send it to new Democratic President Barack Obama, a top world unionist says.
Guy Ryder, President of the International Trade Unions Confederation, said 30 leaders of international union federations heard many ideas about what they could do, all raised at a Jan. 13 meeting at the AFL-CIO.
The leaders were in D.C. for once-every-two-years scheduled sessions between the unionists and top executives of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In those meetings, the unionists discussed the impact of the current recession on the world’s workers -- and the need of the two institutions to ensure that workers’ needs and rights are not trampled in drafting recovery measures.
In the AFL-CIO meeting, which included UFCW President Joe Hansen -- representing Change to Win -- and U.S. federation President John J. Sweeney, the group brainstormed about “what we can do internationally to help and support EFCA to pass,” Ryder said. Congress plans to consider it this year and it has drawn intense business and GOP opposition.
The act would help level the playing field between U.S. workers and bosses in organizing and bargaining, and that would help workers worldwide, too, Ryder says.
"This is not something we do every day, launching an international campaign around one country’s piece of legislation. We’ll be doing ourselves a favor” worldwide by campaigning for the law overseas, he adds.
That’s because U.S. businesses often export their anti-worker labor practices and because when ITUC tries to raise workers’ rights in several nations -- notably Japan and South Korea -- the response of officials in those countries is to cite the low level of workers’ rights in the U.S.
But ITUC is also launching the drive to educate its own member unions abroad, and their members, about the connections between U.S. labor rights, or lack of them, and their own working conditions. U.S.-based multi-national corporations often use the threat of moving abroad to drive down working conditions here.
And overseas unions don’t understand how the period before the “secret ballot” National Labor Relations Board-run elections in the U.S. produces flagrant and vicious corporate labor law-breaking, he added.
“And there are a couple of business models” cited worldwide, Ryder said. “in the U.S., even in overseas affiliates of U.S. firms, management’s preference is to avoid dealing with unions. The European practice of consultation and partnership’ between unions and companies “is absent.”
The concrete moves overseas unionists could take to help pass the Employee Free Choice Act may include peaceful demonstrations of solidarity in front of U.S. embassies abroad, timed to coincide with congressional hearings or action on the bill here, Ryder said.
Other concrete moves to help U.S. unionists “from this hopper of free-flowing ideas” floated at the AFL-CIO session will be discussed at a mid-February meeting of the Council of Global Unions hosted at ITUC headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. They could include contacting the approximately 17 major multi-national corporations -- such as Group Dannone in France, parent firm of Dannon yogurt -- that have signed an international code of conduct recognizing workers’ rights.
Some of that code’s provisions, including majority sign-up, are found in the Employee Free Choice Act, Ryder said. The ITUC and its allies want to convince the signatory corporations to endorse the pro-worker law and to explain the benefits they gain from unionization, he added.
Getting such corporate backing would break the solid anti-worker business blockade against the Employee Free Choice Act, Ryder said. But he’s under no illusions that effort would be easy. “We can understand how the Chamber of Commerce is struggling to hold the line,” he said.
The Employee Free Choice Act, and its economic effect in aiding workers, also ties into the unionists’ talks with the World Bank and the IMF, which concluded Jan.16, Ryder said. Another key topic was re-regulation of the financial markets that got the world into this mess -- a warning ITUC has sounded, to deaf ears, for three years.
“The Employee Free Choice Act, progressive taxation and promotion of collective bargaining” could help pull world workers, governments and consumers out of the hole, Ryder said. But some nations are already going the other way, drawing ITUC protests to the IMF about the bank’s support of “socially inequitable elements” of recovery measures. Most notably, Latvia has suspended collective bargaining. As a result of the talks in D.C., the two world financial institutions “are sensitive to the social effects” of recovery measures ”and are willing to give us (unions) a fair hearing,” Ryder said.