
Issue No 4		12 March 1999

Unions

Trade Unions Thinking Globally

By Peter Lewis

How do you put people first in a global economy? That's the question for an international trade union conference in Sydney this week.

Union officials representing some 10 million white collar workers from 100 different countries are convening for the FIET world conference.

They represent the faceless victims of globalisation -- the bank workers, the office clerks, the shop assistants whose sorry plight at the hand of international competition has provided the backdrop for the reactionary politics of the late 90s.

They are workers whose core tasks are being contracted out to cheap labour pools in developing nations, or whose jobs are being made redundant by binary codes which can complete routine tasks far quicker than any mere mortal.

They are the face of the late 20th century; workers whose security has been eroded in the face of the collapse of the discrete economy of the nation-state.

The conference is significant because it embraces the issue driving the conservative push to labour market deregulation in Australia: the need to compromise domestic labour standards to better compete on the global stage.

For trade unions in countries like Australia the issue is crucial, for as these workers' jobs disappear, so do the membership bases that give them the legitimacy to be their advocates in the broader debates. Moreover, unions have been largely ineffective in recruiting members in the emerging job markets like IT. This creates a perverse multiplier effect of job insecurity, that leaves the victims on their own.

So how do you put people first in a global world?

The necessary first step is to accept its inevitability. Globalisation manifested in technological developments such as the Internet can not be reversed. It is not a political or economic fad that will run its course and disappear.

But equally, trade unions must accept that the inevitability of technological change does not necessarily lead to pre-ordained effects. By understanding what is happening in the global market unions can pursue strategies that ensure that individual workers are not left out of the equation.

The first step is to do what business has already done and widen the outlook from national borders to international labour pools. Many of the issues to be canvassed at the FIET conference shows how this process of critical engagement with globalisation is beginning.

Proposals for debate include:

* Negotiating global labour standards within multinationals such as company-wide core standards and global company councils in order to prevent "social dumping", the downward drive on wages and conditions.

* Extending the notion of "Fair Wear", already established in the textile and clothing industries, to other areas where low wage ghettoes in subhuman conditions undermine local production. One example FIET raises is the low-cost data entry from free trade zones on the Indian sub-continent used in publishing. Is it any more moral, they ask, to play a computer game devised in a sweatshop, than it is to wear a T-shirt made in one?

* Support for an international tax on foreign exchange transactions, initially proposed by Nobel Prize winner James Tobin but now being openly canvassed by the IMF, as a means of controlling the rampant flow of speculative capital.

* Embracing the emerging technologies, to assist trade unions become better service organisations. Initiatives like on-line organising, recruitment and publishing are still in their infancy for trade unions, but they are establishing important beach-heads.

But more important than the endorsement of any of these specific proposals is the process of evaluating them from a global perspective. As environmentalists learnt a decade ago, the challenge for trade unions is to act locally, while thinking globally.

It is no longer enough to protect a membership base as if were a chattel. Unionists need to look at their members as active participants in a changing a world, where they have the opportunity to channel the changes rather than merely react to them once they have occurred, to ensure that they, as individuals, have a stake in the process.

   Visit FIET

  View entire issue - print all of the articles!

  Issue 4 contents

Interview: Jennie George - Eyeing 2000
The ACTU President looks to the future and erects a few new signposts for her last 12 months in office and beyond.

Unions: Trade Unions Thinking Globally
How do you put people first in a global economy? That's the question for an international trade union conference in Sydney this week.

History: The Pioneers: Trade Unions Before 1850
Labour historian Greg Patmore looks at the early days of unions in Australia

Review: Opening Spaces For a New Labor
A new book by Sydney academic McKenzie Wark looks at how Labor must adapt to the popular culture.

Campaign Diary: On The Bus - A Tale Of Two Campaigns
As the State election campaign moves into full swing, Workers Online looks at how the management of the media by the two main parties is reflecting their strategies.

» How To Foil The Keystroke Cops

» Don't Mention The War: Big Brother Comes To Canberra

» Viva, Lost Wages?

» NSW Holds Line as Gender Pay Gap Widens

» MUA Seeks Greenpeace Support Against Ships Of Shame

» Shaw Promises World Beating Safety Laws

» Union Protest Blocks Hotel Giant

» Current Affair Fires More Blanks at Builders