Global Unions, Global Justice Conference
Plenary Session, February 11, 2006
Cornell Global Labor Institute, New York
Contribution by Ron Oswald, general secretary, IUF
First let me first both thank and congratulate Kate and all those who put this thing together and made it work for everything they have done. It has been a unique and fascinating experience for many of us and they can be proud of having offered us the opportunity to do what we have done over these past three days.
This afternoon we have been asked to think aloud and talk about where we go from here. I will talk briefly about things that are at the core of this conference’s theme and agenda – global unions, global companies and global campaigns. And I will do so from the perspective of my own organization, the IUF.
Before I do though I want to preface what I say with a general remark.
Much of this conference and much of what I will say clearly relates to the confrontation between global capital often in the form of global companies, or perhaps more accurately today in the financialized form of companies owned by huge and gorged private equity funds. There have been meetings here about campaigning, about negotiating, about rights issues and framework agreements and other related issues. Much of which is either about targeting companies outside or negotiating with them inside across an existing or a future global bargaining table or a combination of both.
An impression can grow from that that we believe that we can somehow gain what we seek – essentially socially and economically just societies in a world where rights stand at its centre – primarily through those kinds of mechanisms and actions.
That is not the case and we need to constantly remind ourselves and others of that fact. If we allow the continued deregulation of the global economy, the relegation of politics to the mere administration of that increasingly deregulated economy, the expansion of the charter of rights for global capital and the global corporations as a result of the policies of the International Financial Institutions, the WTO and regional trade agreements whilst rights for all become increasingly rare or rarely respected then all of the best organizing, campaigning or negotiating in the world will not bring us the just societies we seek.
We must therefore locate everything we are talking about doing with and to global companies this week and beyond in a political context. We must mobilize around a political agenda, no mater how hard that may be, for if we do not then the world will continue to change in ways that will continue to shift power away from us and stifle the space for organizing and everything that follows from it.
As we advance through organizing, campaigning and negotiating with global companies nothing we do can replace a world where rights are guaranteed and regulated by states and by the democratic international institutions we sorely lack today. We must constantly make clear that a world of voluntary initiatives by capital, of corporate social responsibility or any such thing can substitute for a world where the actions and power of capital are regulated and where rights for the many prevail and are enforced is NOT the world we are fighting for.
We obviously do not have that world today and anything we might hope to achieve through our organizing, campaigning or negotiating outside and inside global companies will become increasingly difficult and perhaps impossible if the world continues its slide into the barbarism of de-regulation, neo-liberal politics and the obscenity that is so often lovingly described as the free market.
The fact that I will not speak in detail today of this need for a radical political project for the labour movement and for the need for us to mobilize politically with the vast numbers of potential natural allies out there should not be taken to mean the IUF believes that project is not needed. It is needed more than ever and the deficit our movement currently carries politically at many levels but notably at the global level needs our energy, our minds and our organizing capacity as well. Only if we have such a political programme does the power we will seek to build through the organization of millions of workers make sense. Only then can that power be used not simply to discipline and interfere with global corporations but to control them and to help build societies in which rights prevail and the fullest opportunities for social and economic justice truly exist.
We would be making a fatal mistake if we forget that basic fact and I know that the vast majority of you understand that more than most.
But a political project for the world’s labour movement, sorely needed though it is, is not the theme of my remarks nor of this conference. Our theme relates directly to what we can do in global companies, who we can do it with and how we get it done.
The title of the conference speaks also of global unions. Let me say from the outset that speaking for the IUF and where our jurisdiction lies there is no such thing. There is a global federation of unions called the IUF, there are some global alliances within it and there are some global actual or virtual councils in major companies around it. But there is no global union. For there to be a global union two simple pre-conditions would have to be present in addition to a host of other things. The first of these is that workers would have to feel or even experience directly that there was a global union of which they were a part – and today they do not. And the second is that global corporations would have to feel and to experience that there was a global union confronting them publicly or across the table – and today with perhaps some few emerging exceptions they do not either. I will by the way come to International Framework Agreements and the like later.
Without those two pre-conditions I believe in the case of the IUF that becoming a global union by simply labelling ourselves one would be a mistake. It might be a relatively harmless mistake provided we do not actually start to believe our own branding and PR and as long as it does not leave us confused about what needs to happen for us to build one – and building true global unions I believe to be critical if we are to ever effectively and sustainably challenge global companies. We should also be cautious that we do not send out a signal that so much distance has been travelled along the path to our becoming a global union that we have achieved a state of nirvana when we might in fact be simply comatose.
That said it is certainly time now to engage in a process of debate inside our organizations about what it would take to truly build a global union. What it would mean in terms of thinking, action, aims, structure, accountability, resources and a whole host of other issues. Our opposition has got a lot further than we have. They certainly think and act globally – and they do so quickly and ruthlessly. The have aims and structures which are global and they are accountable in practical terms to virtually nobody. Whilst corporations now work beyond borders unions defend thinking and working within them. We often fight hard to work within spaces even more narrowly defined than national borders as local unions fight for their right to maintain autonomy from even national unions. In doing so we are in fact doggedly clinging to our right to confront global capital by taking it on within a single plant or in a single district or region. And we fight often passionately to maintain structures often decades old and ways of working and thinking that allow us to do so. I can understand why that happens and I can understand concerns about the impact of scale on our critical internal democracy and accountability but that does not make that thinking right. We clearly have a massive deficit to make up and in clinging to all that we have built in the past we are presently moving way too slowly to hope to make it up in the time we have available to us.
Defending our traditional values and our principles is something we have to fight for and will do forever – many workers have in the past, do today and will in the future sacrifice enormously and courageously to do just that. However simply defending our structures and our ways of working is something we should never do as passionately unless we have first thought long, hard and honestly about whether they help us as they stand or whether, as they stand, they hold us back.
To truly build a global union our union structures and our ways of thinking about how we work have to change. Nothing sustainable gets done if that does not happen and at the root of that stands our willingness to cede some of our autonomy to each other in global union organizations just as we have learnt to do imperfectly today in national union organizations. Of course I know that gets harder as organizations get larger and more anonymous. But a global union will demand that we make that step or any talk of taking up a global union challenge in a meaningful way will make absolutely no sense.
If we are honest we would have to say that today we don’t appear ready to do that. A debate conducted with a sense of real urgency as to why that has to change and how must start and grow from here is needed now and this conference may prove to be a critical part of starting just such a debate. We frankly don’t have a hell of a lot of time.
So where do we go from here and how?
The political struggle I mentioned earlier is critical.
In global companies we must move the struggle forward with a true sense of urgency.
We must first organize within them. That means their direct employees but it also can mean workers who are related to them through supply chains, in communities, in labour supplying agencies, in contractors and elsewhere.
Whilst organizing to build strength inside those companies, and when we feel we have the strength to start, we must fight for recognition of unions at every level, and critically at the international level. That is tough as many of you know only too well at any level and it is and will be no less tough at international level. But like union recognition struggles everywhere the struggle internationally is and will be critical. We cannot sustainably and on a permanent basis affect the workings of a company from a trade union perspective until and unless we are organized but also critically unless we are recognized within it.
Once organized and recognized we need to start to bargain and here I want to turn to the issue of international framework agreements for that essentially is where to date global bargaining has focused and will focus for some time to come.
I have to state from the start that the IUF is today holding a very fundamental internal discussion about the path we have taken to such agreements and where we go from where we stand with them. We negotiated the first some 17 years ago – way before people were talking about Corporate Social Responsibility, and before most companies were even thinking about corporate codes of conduct. At that time it was about a simple recognition issue – would that company formally recognize the IUF and our affiliates internationally? They did – and with that we could sit and negotiate about a range of issues thereafter – including now an international agreement putting limits on the company’s capacity to restructure and setting internationally negotiated standards within the company as to how any restructuring gets done.
We were the first but now we are having some serious doubts about where our IFA’s are going.
Our doubts arise in some part in relation to the growth over recent years of the corporate social responsibility business. I say business because it has many of the growth and financial characteristics of a business and has seen the entry of major commercial accounting companies and standards companies as its legitimacy as a business and its scope to bring in significant revenue has increased.
Much of the CSR business is of course phoney and a sham. A good deal of it is designed to be anti-union and is seen by companies as an alternative to facing the real challenge that organized workers inside the company can bring. But leaving all that aside it is important to look at the ambition of even that part of the CRS movement that is well intentioned and credible. On union rights it generally sets its ambition, and this is totally understandable, to assuring that companies agree that their workers have the right to freely join unions. A right which of course is enshrined in international human rights laws but which many companies and a significant number of governments choose to deny. And there’s where we should begin see some daylight between the CSR movement and ourselves. We need to start from the assertion that people of course have those rights but we need to be primarily focused on their exercising of those rights – in other words do workers actually join unions. There is actually a significant difference in those two ambitions though of course the first is a pre-condition for the second. To put it more crudely:
An enlightened CEO’s dream scenario today is I believe that the company get public recognition and potentially even public accolades for being a company in which its workers have the right to be in a union but few or none of them in fact are. That would make a considerable corporate investment in CSR worthwhile in a CEO’s eyes!
But that cannot be our ambition. A company that has the accolade that its workers have the right to join but few or none are unionized is faced with no more serious challenge from its workforce than a company that is simply non-union.
And here lies in large part the IUF’s concern about our IFA’s. If IFA’s are seen as nothing more than another part of the CSR toolbox in a company, as yet another piece of evidence that the company accepts rights that it frankly has to, then those who sign them not only do not serve their members but potentially act against their members’ interests.
And there is at least some circumstantial evidence that they are in danger of being just that. They mainly list ILO Conventions and establish mechanisms for reviewing them. They too rarely provide concrete and even minimally enforceable mechanisms opening the door to how workers will exercise those rights – rights remember which companies have absolutely no right to negotiate about or around. They at most can argue about how workers access those rights but they cannot argue about whether their workers have them.
There are also signs that companies are thinking of seeking us out in search of an IFA or something similar. I do not know of many examples where true progress for the labour movement has come without some kind of fight. I do not know of many situations where we have moved companies without forcing them to do something they essentially did not want to do. So if they come looking for agreements with us then surely every one of our instincts and what we have learnt must tell us that something is not right. If companies see IFA’s merely as one of several CSR options then I am pretty sure that they will come and we should either send them packing or put on the table something concrete that will have them seriously wondering why they came looking in the first place.
That all makes one assessment of the value of IFA’s more critical than any other. That assessment is simple. Have they led and do they today lead to increased union membership inside companies that sign them? If the answer is no or even worse is that we don’t know because we don’t actually think about it or even check, then stopping in our tracks and thinking hard as the IUF has now done internally is absolutely essential.
There may be many reasons why IFA’s may not result in new membership and these of course need to be analyzed. This plenary is not the time to explore those in detail. But whatever the reasons the fact that with few exceptions they too often do not directly lead to more membership and greater union density must force us to re-evaluate what is happening and how they are emerging.
In the IUF we are engaged in a tough internal discussion about how international agreements can be framed in ways that turn them to something closer to recognition agreements with concrete mechanisms within them for recruitment of workers and recognition of unions.
We are looking for a new mandate from our members to go on with such negotiations but one that must recognize a number of basic minimum conditions. Two of which must be:
· That they provide both “in principle” and concrete practical mechanisms which unions can use to defend and increase their membership within the target company – that of course means neutrality in this country;
· that they include an agreement on national or local recognition procedures which are at a minimum based on the most expeditious and straightforward legally permitted steps that lead to the recognition of a union by the company – and that means card checks in this country;
Agreements which have safeguards such as these will almost certainly lead to greater union density and new membership provided of course our affiliates are engaged in the struggle to fight for those agreements and therefore know exactly what to do with them once we have them. These minimum standards will also of course considerably shorten the queue of companies agreeing to or even looking to sign them and we will likely have to campaign hard, tough and long to get them agreed. But little we have had has ever come easy and without struggle and if these international agreements are truly to represent progress for our side of the struggle then none of that should come as any surprise.
So organizing, recognition and negotiating internationally must be our target. The assessment of it all must include a critical measure of its impact on the level of union density in the company. If we claim success in our organizing, in our fight for recognition and in our capacity to successful force companies into agreements – recognition agreements or whatever we call them – that success must translate in permanent growth of union membership inside those companies.
If international union organizations such as mine do not concretely advance this kind of agenda and do not concretely address the principle concerns that our members and workers face – and the continued decline in our membership globally is perhaps the key concern since it affects our power to influence all our other concerns – then our members will rightly question why they should support them – and frankly they would not be wrong in doing so.
I strongly believe that the coming five years or so will be critical and will either be when we shape the kind of global unions we absolutely need to build or will condemn us to possibly never having them. Both options today are in our hands and the hands of our members.
For some this is “work in progress” – for others it’s time to start. None of us will see the end of this struggle but all of us can at least aim to see us on our way. In the best of cases this conference will have proved to have been one of the early stops on that long journey and again I congratulate those who have set this up.
Thank you.