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PRAISE FOR GLOBAL UNIONS, GLOBAL BUSINESS
‘is pathbreaking book provides both an invaluable resource on the history of global
union federations, and new insights on current issues and contestations. It will be of
great interest to all with an interest in the state of unions worldwide, commentators
and critics of globalization, and those concerned with fairness at work in a wide range
of contexts.’
Professor Geoffrey Wood, University of Sheffield
‘Powerfully argued and impressively documented, this stimulating book provides
a readable, insightful introduction to the challenges facing global trade unionism.
It will prove of tremendous value to both union activists and academics teaching
international business, international employment relations and HRM.’
Professor John McIlroy, Keele University
‘is book is an excellent example of public social science. Focused principally on
global union federations it is historically informed, empirically rich and argues
that the key to international union renewal and success is education (informed by
research). I most strongly recommend it.’
Professor Peter Fairbrother, Cardiff University
‘Elizabeth Cotton and Richard Croucher have written the essential guide to
international trade unionism: its actors, its structure, its history, its functions, its
activities. I know of no other recent book that details as clearly what the international
trade union movement actually does and why it is important for workers everywhere.
Its weaknesses are not glossed over but Cotton and Croucher have proposals on how
these can be addressed. A must read for trade unionists and for activists in the global
justice and solidarity movement.’
Dan Gallin, Global Labour Institute
GLOBAL UNIONS,
GLOBAL BUSINESS
GLOBAL UNIONS,
GLOBAL BUSINESS
RICHARD CROUCHER
AND
ELIZABETH COTTON
Global Union Federations and
International Business
First published in 2009 by Middlesex University Press
Copyright © Richard Croucher and Elizabeth Cotton
ISBN 978 1 904750 62 8
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder for
which application should be addressed in the first instance to the publishers. No liability
shall be attached to the author, the copyright holder or the publishers for loss or damage of
any nature suffered as a result of reliance on the reproduction of any of the contents of this
publication or any errors or omissions in its contents.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from e British Library
Cover design by Helen Taylor
Typesetting by Carnegie Publishing Ltd
Printed in the UK by Ashford Colour Press Ltd
Middlesex University Press
Fenella Building
e Burroughs
Hendon
London NW4 4BT
Tel: +44 (0)20 8411 4162: +44 (0)20 8411 4161
Fax: +44 (0)20 8411 4167
www.mupress.co.uk
Contents
Preface viii
List of Tables, Diagrams and Maps ix
List of Initialisations and Acronyms xi
Part 1: Contexts
Chapter One: Introduction 3
Chapter Two: Globalisation and Unions 12
Chapter ree: Past and Present – the History of International
Trade Unionism 23
Part 2: e Work of the Internationals
Chapter Four: e Internationals – Governance and Resources 39
Chapter Five: International Collective Bargaining 57
Chapter Six: Networks 69
Chapter Seven: International Union Education 80
Chapter Eight: Case Study – a GUF’s Relationship with a
Multinational Company 95
Part 3: Conclusion
Chapter Nine: e Political Decision 115
Annex 1 121
Annex 2 126
References 130
Index 144
Th i s book is aimed at all those interested in the experience of working people
in the current phase of globalisation. We have incurred debts to many
such people in writing it. Experts in international business, corporate social
responsibility, international trade unionism and others have generously shared
information and their thoughts with us. We therefore thank Mare Anceva, Ross
Brennan, Samar Badar Al-Husan, Alexandr Ivakhno, Aranya Pakapath, Cristhian
Rivas, Carlos Bustos, Wolfgang Weinz and Fabian Nkomo.
A group of specialists in different aspects of our subject kindly read and
commented on an earlier version, and we are grateful to Paul Gooderham, Rebecca
Gumbrell-McCormick, John McIlroy, Ingo Singe, David Cockroft and Dan Gallin.
We are especially grateful to Ifan Shepherd, who prepared the maps and diagrams
for publication with characteristic good humour and patience, to Jane Tinkler for
her help in navigating the LSE library and John Callaghan who kindly edited a
late version of the manuscript. Any remaining inaccuracies are the authors’ joint
responsibility.
Finally, we thank all those trade unionists who have discussed these subjects with
us over the years. We hope they will find the book a fair and useful account of their
remarkable work.
Richard Croucher
Elizabeth Cotton
Preface
List of Tables
Chapter One
Table 1: List of Global Unions, 2008 7
Chapter Two
Table 2: Key Multinationals Supplying Labour 19
Chapter ree
Table 3: Number of ITF-affiliated Organisations by Region, 1946 and 1964 32
Chapter Four
Table 4: Regional Distribution of Executive Positions in Relation to
Membership in the ICFTU, 1972–2003 42
Table 5: Numbers of Staff Employed by the Internationals, 2004 45
Table 6: ICFTU Declared and Paying Membership by Region, 1998 and 2003 51
Table 7: ICFTU Actual Fees Received per Region, 1998 and 2003 52
Chapter Five
Table 8: International Framework Agreements, Mid-2008 58
Table 9: References to International Framework Agreements in
Selected GUF Publications 63
Chapter Six
Table 10: e Nestlé Network 76
Table 11: Interpretive Summary of Five Networks 78
Chapter Seven
Table 12: Typical Target Groups, Subjects, Aims, Forms and Results of
International Trade Union Education 83
Table 13: Estimated Bilateral/Multilateral Allocation of Trade
Union Development Funds, 2004 87
Chapter Eight
Table 14: Anglo American plc – Business Overview, 2004 97
Table 15: Anglo Coal – Preliminary Cost Benefit Analysis of Providing ART 98
List of Diagrams
Chapter One
Diagram 1: National and International Levels of Trade Unionism 6
Diagram 2: GUF Functions 8
Chapter ree
Diagram 3: Timeline – the History of the International Trade Union
Movement 25
Chapter Eight
Diagram 4: Anglo American and its Relationships to other Main Players 95
List of Maps
Chapter Two
Map 1: Freedom of Association in the World 15
Chapter Four
Map 2: Locations of Internationals’ HQs 40
Map 3: Locations of Internationals’ Offices 40
Map 4: Locations of Project Offices 41
List of Initialisations
and Acronyms
AA Anglo American plc (Company)
ACFTU All-China Federation of Trade Unions
AFL-CIO American Federation of Labour-Congress of Industrial Organizations
AFRO African Regional Organisation (of the ITUC)
AGA Anglo Gold Ashanti (Company)
ART Antiretroviral erapy
ARV Antiretrovirals
BASF Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik (company)
BWI Building and Wood Workers’ International
CGIL Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro
(Italian Confederation of Trade Unions)
CGT Confédération Générale du Travail
(French Confederation of Trade Unions)
CIS Commonwealth of Independent States
CSR Corporate Social Responsibility
CTA Central de Trabajadores Argentinos (Argentinian National Centre)
CUT Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (Colombian National Union Centre)
EI Educational International
EPZ Export Processing Zone
ETUC European Trade Union Confederation
EWC European Works Council
FDI Foreign direct investment
FES Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (German Friedrich Ebert Foundation)
FNPR Federatsiia Nevasymykh Profsoiuzov Rossii
(Federation of Russian Trade Unions)
FNV Federatie Nederlandse Vakbeweging
(Dutch Confederation of Trade Unions)
FOC Flags of Convenience
GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
GBC Global Business Coalition
GFA Global Framework Agreement
GMWU Ghana Mineworkers’ Union
GUF Global Union Federation
GURN Global Unions Research Network
HRM Human resource management
ICEF International Federation of Chemical, Energy and General
Workers’ Unions (1946–1995)
ICEM International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and
General Workers’ Unions (1995–)
ICFTU International Confederation of Free Trade Unions
IFA International Framework Agreement
IFBWW International Federation of Building and Woodworkers
IFCTU International Federation of Christian Trade Unions
IFJ International Federation of Journalists
IFTU International Federation of Trade Unions
ILO International Labour Office/Organization
IMF International Metalworkers’ Federation
ISF International Shipping Federation
ISNTUC International Secretariat of National Trade Union Centres
ITF International Transport Workers’ Federation
ITGLWF International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers’ Federation
ITS International Trade Secretariat
ITUC International Trade Union Confederation
IUF International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant,
Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations
IWMA International Working Men’s Association
LO Norway Landsorganisasjonen i Norge (Norwegian Confederation of
Trade Unions)
LO-FTF Landsorgasitionen I Danmark/Funktionærernes og
Tjenestemændenes Fællesråd, (Danish Confederation of
Trade Unions)
LO-TCO Landsorganisationen i Sverige/ Tjänstemännens Centralorganisation
(Swedish Trade Union Confederation)
MNC Multinational company
NGO Non-governmental organisation
NUM National Union of Mineworkers, South Africa (Union)
OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
OGWU Oil and Gas Workers’ Union, Azerbaijan (Union)
OPZZ Ogolnopolskie Propozumienie Zwiazkow Zawodowych, Poland (All
Poland Alliance of Trade Unions)
PCFT Petrol and Chemical Federation of ailand (Union)
PSI Public Services International
RILU Red International of Labour Unions
ROGWU Russian Oil and Gas Workers’ Union
SASK Suomen Ammattiliittojen Solidaarsuuskeskus
(Finnish Trade Union Foundation)
TUC Trades Union Congress, UK
UNCTAD United Nations Conference on Trade and Development
UNDP United Nations Development Programme
UNI Union Network International
USWA United Steel Workers of America (Union)
VCT Voluntary counselling and testing
VWWC Volkswagen World Works Council
WCL World Confederation of Labour
WFTU World Federation of Trade Unions
GLOBAL UNIONS, GLOBAL BUSINESS 1
I
Contexts
• CHAPTER ONE •
Introduction
We had been approached by phone calls from some crew members of the vessel
Little Kid-II, a Cambodian-flagged ship, saying that they were not being paid. We
spoke several times to the Ship Manager insisting that they pay all the money due
to the seafarers. e company totally ignored its obligations to the crew and did
not pay them when they were due, even though the rate they were paid was below
the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) rate.
On 20th of December 2006 we were informed by the seafarers that the vessel
was calling at Rostov-on-Don (Russia). We asked for the help of the ITF Actions
and Claims Unit in London, and following their detailed advice contacted their
Russian colleagues. We advised the ITF affiliate, the regional organisation of the
Seafarers’ Union of Russia (SUR) of the situation, asking for their assistance. At
the same time we recommended that the seafarers spoke to SUR, and supplied
them with the contact details. We and SUR recommended the crew members
to organize protest actions. To help the seafarers in these actions two SUR
representatives were sent on board (Mr. Zenkovskiy, head, and Mr. Petchenko).
e port authorities, frontier guards and the company itself were alerted to the
coming actions. e guards put obstacles in the union’s way. e vessel’s captain
put pressure on the crew aimed at getting them to abandon their action and
promising to pay out the balance of the wages due later, in Istanbul and trying not
to permit the union’s representatives to come onboard. Later the frontier guards
just took back SUR’s permissions to enter, but they went on contacting the crew
by phone and outside of the port persuading them to go on with the actions.
is, and the knowledge that the ITF was watching the case, inspired the seafarers
to continue their sanctions. It took several days, but finally the company gave in
when they received evidence that they had no choice but to pay out the wages,
and they knew the ITF was involved.
Extract from an interview with Alexandr Ivakhno,
Ukrainian Seafarers’ Union, 20 January 2008
4
is book analyses the work of the Global Union Federations, illustrated in our
opening quotation, and makes suggestions for their re-orientation. We discuss the
current position of the trade union movement’s international institutions, their
internal lives and their relations with companies. e book is therefore a contribution
to a widely overlooked aspect of globalisation.
Unions remain by far the largest membership organisations in the world and
have extensive international coverage, dwarfing non-governmental organisations
(NGOs) also engaged with the impact of globalisation. Although NGOs are often
regarded more positively than unions, they rarely have membership structures and
generally rely on unelected professionals (Edwards, 2001; Batliwala, 2002). In terms of
democratic involvement, unions provide much greater opportunities for members to
determine policy and play a part in organisational governance. Despite some historic
cases internationally of corruption, trade unions have long and proud traditions of
democratic processes. ey provide a substantial proportion of working people with
opportunities for political involvement, and for shifting power relations at work.
is aspect of unionism has taken on renewed importance with the development of
global trade. Nevertheless, we also argue that without change in the ways that the
international institutions of the trade union movement operate, the existing power
dynamics will remain intact and globalisation will continue to operate in negative
ways for many workers.
Our primary focus is on the global union organisations themselves, significant but
little-studied actors in the construction of the beginnings of an international system
of industrial relations. e work of these organisations is important in coordinating
union responses to longstanding distributive and procedural justice issues that
have been exacerbated by globalisation. Real possibilities exist for international
trade unionism to build its position within these discussions. e distribution of
wealth and access to resources such as health and education within countries is
central to current debates around development, and unions are relevant because
of their redistributive capacity. As Elliott and Freeman (2003) argue, the ‘missing
voice’ in these debates is that of workers in developing countries. Unionisation
has a major contribution to make in rectifying that position. Unions have many
positive outcomes for workers, facilitating collective voice mechanisms that help to
increase their earnings and reduce earnings differentials, including gender earnings
differentials (Freeman and Medoff, 1984; Weichselbaumer and Winter-Ebner, 2003).
ey help to enforce the law in workplaces (Harcourt et al., 2004). e benefits
they bring to society more generally are well established. Unions internationally
gave birth to many other cooperative, mutual and adult educational organisations,
building civil society and promoting ‘democratic development’ (Stiglitz, 2000).
Stiglitz linked this to the way that unions have historically played a major role
in providing opportunities for democratic involvement, including by addressing
workers’ needs to improve their wider understandings through education.
CON TE XTS
5
Many international companies are involved in a quest to show that they have
‘fair’ labour practices without recognising unions. ese quests involve increasingly
elaborate and ineffective methods of monitoring themselves and their suppliers, for
example by finding NGOs that will attest to the humanity of their practices through
inspection processes and so on. It then appears to be a matter of surprise to them
that there is a persistent pattern of rediscovery by investigative journalists showing
that in fact these problems have not been resolved. e harsh reality is that for many
of the world’s workers, talk of human rights in the workplace is just that: it is strictly
rhetorical (Douzinas, 2000; Beirnaert, 2008). It is evident that only stable union
organisation within workplaces can begin to deal with both rights and distributive
issues on an ongoing basis; no monitoring or inspection system can hope to match
such organisation.
Our subject is important precisely because of trade unionism’s widespread decline.
e fall in union membership in most countries is caused primarily by objective
circumstances: massive restructuring in global capitalism that has hugely disrupted
well-unionised industries and created weak negotiating positions for workers. Both
have of course been facilitated by the rise and dominance of neoliberal ideas.
Unions’ difficulties are inextricably linked with the problems faced by workers
across the world. Labour’s share of total income has been falling in the developed
countries for some years. In the UK, labour took a rising share of national income for
the century up to 1970, but this trend has now been reversed (Glyn, 2006). is is not
only because of the expanded world labour supply; it is also partly because of relatively
low levels of investment. Further reasons are found in: the new international division
of labour; the ever present threat of relocation; the development of different forms
of human resource management; the widespread adoption of Japanese production
models; lean production; ‘High Performance Work Systems’; and the pursuit of
free trade policies by the international financial institutions (Upchurch, 2008). e
pursuit of flexibility has become a catechism for employers, with a ‘normal’ model
of full-time employed workers employed by one company probably now looking
abnormal from a global perspective. Employees’ grip on their jobs has been loosened:
even in Japan and South Korea, for many workers, lifetime employment has been
eroded and replaced by precarious work forms. e widespread creation of ‘informal’
work has created a large pool of almost exclusively non-union workers. is in turn
threatens unions’ legitimacy in their wider function as representatives of the wide
interests of labour rather than of particular groups of employees.
e veteran trade unionist Hans Gottfurcht, a leader with enormous experience
of international union affairs wrote on our subject in the mid-1960s, and his
accounts exuded optimism (Gottfurcht, 1962; 1966). Trade unions, he proclaimed,
‘stand in the centre of world events’ (1966: 12). ere were objective grounds for his
up-beat statement: trade unionism stood at an historically high level, and between
the publication of his books in 1962 and 1966 an internationally coordinated strike
INTRODUCTION
6
involving the chemical workers’ international occurred. It is hard to see similar
grounds for optimism today. Multinational companies’ growing power and the
reduction in labour’s share of global product both point in a more pessimistic
direction. Despite much discussion of ‘union renewal’, the historic institutions of
the labour market – trade unions and employers’ associations – have been in retreat
in most countries for several decades. ese developments affect unions’ capacity
to act in workers’ interests at all levels, including the international. J.K. Galbraith
(1983) noted that historically, great concentrations of power such as that collectively
wielded by large corporations today tend to produce countervailing forces. Whether
the union internationals can constitute such a force, or even be one element in a
wider coalition, is an open question that is explored below.
e broad family of international trade union institutions consists of the Global
Union Federations (GUFs) and the International Trade Union Confederation
(ITUC).
Diagram 1: National and International Levels of Trade Unionism
GUFs are distinguished by industrial sector, with national unions from over one
hundred and twenty countries affiliating to them. Harold Lewis, ex-general secretary
of the international transport workers has argued that GUFs account for 80 per cent
of the international movement’s activity, and at least 90 per cent of its work directly
affecting workplaces (Lewis, 2003). e sectors covered range from education where
Education International represents teachers, to transport, where the International
Transport Workers’ Federation is active. e GUFs are diverse organisations which
share many characteristics. ey can be grouped into three categories. e first
is those with a private sector membership and an industrial and bargaining focus
(BWI, ICEM, IMF, IUF and UNI). e second category (IFJ and ITGLWF) also
have private sector members, but have less bargaining focus because they have a
CON TE XTS
7
weak and unstable membership base. e third (EI and PSI) encompasses public
sector unions, which relate mainly to international governmental organisations and
national governments and have solid membership bases. In this book, the focus is on
the first two categories because they operate primarily in the private sector.
Table 1: List of Global Unions, 2008
Global
Union
Main Sectors
Covered
Estimated
Total
Membership
(Millions)
Total
Number of
Aliates
Number of
Countries
Covered
Estimated
Number of
Developing
Country
Aliates
Estimated
Percentage of
Developing
Country
Aliates
ITUC Umbrella body 168 311 155 190 61
EI Education 30 394 171 189 48
IMF Metalworking 25 200 100 Unknown Unknown
ICEM Chemicals,
energy, mining,
paper
20 379 117 182 48
PSI Public ser vices 20 650 160 323 50
UNI Telecoms,
graphics, media,
retail, ser vices
15.5 900 140 Unknown Unknown
BWI Construction
and materials
12 318 130 Unknown Unknown
ITGLWF Textiles,
garments,
leather goods
9 238 122 163 68
ITF Transport 4.5 654 148 63 10
IUF Food,
agriculture,
catering,
tourism
2.6 375 127 206 55
IFJ Journalism 0.6 117 100 43 37
Source: Union websites
e book also touches on the work of the ITUC, created by merger in 2006,
which works with the GUFs. e ITUC affiliates national centres, is relatively
well resourced and is the largest umbrella organisation in the world. ese are
the established global organisations representing labour’s interests, which are
collectively referred to as ‘the internationals’. When we refer to GUFs alone, we
mean to exclude the ITUC.
INTRODUCTION
8
GUF functions can be split into three types. First, they defend the existing space
in which unions operate, for example by defending trade unionists’ basic rights
in extremely hostile environments. Second, they work to create further space, for
example by collective bargaining (Wills, 2002). is set of tasks currently looms
large in their own perceptions of their role even though GUFs have influence
rather than power in relation to companies. ird, they help unions to exploit these
spaces, primarily by building their capacities through educational and information
activities. ese functions are shown in Diagram 2.
CON TE XTS
Diagram 2: GUF Functions
e internationals are coordinating bodies that link, or articulate, unions at other
levels to each other and to international institutions and employers (Eder, 2002).
Although the GUFs are formally described as ‘global’, this represents an aspiration
rather than a reality since they are more accurately described as international bodies
with wide coverage that are ‘globalising’. ey have historically built outwards
from their European bases to include unions in other regions and are still engaged
in extending their coverage to every country where unions exist. e GUFs both
co-exist with and transcend the bilateral links that often spring up between
individual unions across the world. Central to our argument is the view that only
the multilateral frameworks provided by these international union institutions can
shift the balances of power that exist both between unions and between unions and
employers. For some, less institutionalised international links between unions are
often felt to be sufficient and even preferable. We argue against this view.
Despite over a century of activity many misunderstandings of the internationals’
roles are evident. Most people engaged in workplace industrial relations have little
knowledge or understanding of these organisations and many trade union members
are not aware that their unions are affiliated to them. e internationals have partly
themselves to blame: they are poor promoters of their own successes, operating
quietly even when real gains are secured for affiliates. However, it is important to
9
understand that, like other trade union bodies, they operate within harsh political
environments, invariably experience a hostile press and are therefore reluctant to
divulge information to the outside world. ey emphasise internal democracy and
accountability rather than external transparency. In the 2006 Global Transparency
Initiative, the ITUC was ranked last of all the non-governmental organisations
surveyed, with a 13 per cent transparency capacity. Data on their activities is
therefore very difficult to come by. ere is a need for greater information on these
bodies, and this is an important aspect of what we set out to achieve in this book.
Existing writing, with a few honourable exceptions, can be broadly divided into
two camps: advocates/advisers and critics. ose falling into the first have a firm
grasp of the realities of life in the internationals, often derived from experience
of working in them (see for example White, 2006). eir strength, an in-depth
knowledge of an organisation, can also be a weakness, however, since they are often
concerned uncritically to defend their institutions past or present. us, for example,
Chip Levinson (1972), ex-general secretary of the then International Chemical and
General Workers’ Federation (ICEF), tended to overstate its international bargaining
successes in the 1960s. In the second camp, some criticism is vehement, and is
marked by questionable argumentation. For example John Logue (1980: 24) referred
to ‘parasitic elite junketing’, which apparently involved ‘taking your pretty secretary
[or, for that matter, your plain wife] on expenses-paid trips’. is is integral to his
view that such junketing is a key reason for the longevity of this level of unionism.
ere is no shortage of writers with criticism and advice for trade unions but
much of it at the international level is of little value because it is founded on weak
empirical bases. In sharp contrast to unions at the national level, academics have
only infrequently enjoyed long-term or close relationships with the international
trade union movement. is is compounded by the lack of publicly available data
about the work of the internationals due in part to the levels of secretiveness which
they practice. In writing this book, for example, the authors often have to use ITUC
data as comparable material is not available (or where available is too imprecise)
for the GUFs – although we do so only when convinced that the two pictures are
similar.
We agree that what Lewis (2003) calls ‘the theoretical wasteland’ of international
trade unionism should be addressed. We make some contribution in this area,
focussing on education and its role, but the wider development of theory is not our
main purpose here. Rather, we try to present a realistic and empirically grounded
picture of the internationals in order to raise the quality of debate about their
future. We present new data on several aspects of the internationals’ internal lives
and external work in the global economy. ese data come from numerous sources.
First, they derive from over fifty formal and informal interviews with officials of
the internationals and union activists from many countries of the world. Second,
they have been drawn from a trawl of the internationals’ official and semi-official
INTRODUCTION
10
working documents. Many of the latter are not routinely available to outsiders, but
nor are they confidential and almost all of those referred to exist in the Library of the
Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Bonn. ese last data have been especially important
to us. ird, we have used the archival resources of the Modern Records Centre
at the University of Warwick, where the records of the International Transport
Workers’ Federation and other relevant organisations are deposited. Finally, we draw
on our own extensive personal records based on immersion in international union
work over a period of fifteen years, some directly for the internationals and some less
directly. We count many of those active in the international trade union movement
as friends, and part of what we analyse is our own activity.
e book is structured and argued as follows. e next two chapters constitute
the first section and provide background to the current situation. In Chapter two,
the context in which unions and the internationals operate is outlined, showing
why national unions are increasingly turning to the GUFs for assistance and
illustrating the considerable extent of the demands on them. In Chapter three, we
explore the internationals’ history, showing the distinctive legacy they draw on to
sustain them, and the significant new opportunities created by the end of political
divisions symbolised by the recent creation of the ITUC.
Our second section is concerned with the current position of the internationals
both internally and in relation to companies. In Chapter four, we analyse the
internationals’ resources and governance, explaining the twin problems of an
internal balance of forces weighted towards developed country unions and major
current financial issues. Chapter five examines their role in international collective
bargaining. We show that the International Framework Agreements that currently
play such a large role in their strategy are useful, but are generated by processes
that reflect the power relationships described in the previous chapter and hamper
their effectiveness. In Chapter six, we examine the company and regional industrial
networks established through the GUFs and we suggest how they may best be
built.
Chapter seven is concerned with education and is central to the book’s argument.
We propose that education is an important, polyvalent area of work that supports
all of the other activities outlined previously. Importantly, it has a democratising
effect by raising levels of participation in union affairs and could usefully be
expanded. We therefore reject the common suggestion within the internationals
that the GUFs’ main task should be international collective bargaining. Chapter
eight is intended both to illustrate and integrate our argument. It is also a
contribution to wider discussions of the dynamics of international business. An
extended case study, it shows how one GUF succeeded in building dialogue with a
major multinational company, combining GUF discussion with senior management
with organisation from below, strongly facilitated by educational work in Africa
and Latin America.
CON TE XTS
11
Our third section consists simply of the conclusion. We accept that developments
in the global political economy offer prospects for the internationals in building
more multifaceted forms of unionism (Fairbrother and Hammer, 2005). We argue
that this is best done using the educational approach we advocate which should be
developed, and partly funded by devolving fundraising to regions. is educational
work can most effectively be carried out by small groups of countries operating
together on a ‘minilateral’ basis within the internationals’ wider multilateral
framework.
Our conclusion is presented as a challenge to the internationals’ membership:
to raise their material contribution to the internationals, despite the current trend
in the opposite direction. e key players are the unions of the developed world,
and the issue is whether they are able to make the political case to their own
membership to intensify their commitment to internationalism.
INTRODUCTION
• C H A P T E R T W O •
Globalisation and Unions
Introduction
Th i s chapter highlights the difficult international environment in which unions
currently operate, without attempting a comprehensive analysis of global
capitalism and its effects on workers and unions such as that by Moody
(1997). It is divided into two sections. In the first, we sketch the consequences of
globalisation’s political dimension for workers and unions, stressing the weakening
of national employment regulation and the lack of any adequate compensatory
measures at global level. In the second, we examine both the problems and
possibilities created for unions by multinational companies’ practices. We conclude
that it is difficult for unions to solve their problems either at national level or through
bilateral links with other individual unions, causing them to increase the demands
they make on the internationals.
Globalisation
e definition and consequences of globalisation are contested (Gills, 2000). e
processes, it has been shown, require precise specification in more than one sense.
Rugman (2001) for example contends that the companies involved should be
conceptualised as ‘regional’, since many operate across only a few, often adjacent,
countries. Others suggest that the current wave of globalisation constitutes less of
a break with the past than is often supposed, since the internationalisation of trade
and multinational companies are long-term phenomena. e history of capitalism
has been characterised over three centuries by constant expansion in a geographical
sense and in terms of its extension to ever-wider areas of social relations (Sewell,
2008). Capitalism has long sought ‘spatial fixes’ to labour problems: where workers
become organised in one location, new locations are identified (Silver, 2003).
Between 1850 and 1914, the movement of capital, trade, immigration and flow
of information were all arguably more developed than today (Hirst and ompson,
2002), and this suggests a need to define the current wave’s specific features. One key
difference is that developing countries’ systems of protection from competition are
13
today weaker than under colonialism. As late as the immediate post-Second World
War years, strong American pressure to end the British system of imperial protection,
in favour of the current General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), was
effectively resisted (Toye, 2003). e current globalisation wave is characterised by
the international financial institutions’ discouragement of protectionist behaviours
by developing countries. Indeed, the financial aspects of globalisation have profound
consequences not only for national regulation, but also for companies and how
they access and manage labour. Opening economies to international trade has had
demonstrably negative effects on trade unions (Mosley and Uno, 2007).
If some have played down the globalisation phenomenon and sought carefully
to delimit its boundaries, another school of thought has emphasised the current
political influence and pervasiveness of neoliberal ideas. us, it has been argued
that the globalisation process should be understood more widely than simply the
unimpeded flow of capital and goods between countries, since it includes a wide
range of other phenomena and, in particular, a major political dimension (Carling,
2006). Globalisation is seen as rooted in liberal economic theory, whereby the
increasing liberalisation of trade is held to enhance wealth and to ‘develop’ those
parts of the world to which it extends. e perspective is especially relevant to
unionisation, whose fortunes have historically been strongly affected by the political
environment (Western, 1997).
In this accommodating climate, ‘free market’ organisations have moved on to
moral high ground previously occupied by others. Organisations like the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation deploy considerable resources to present themselves
as having an increasingly ‘developmental’ role in the world economy (Blowfield
and Frynas, 2005), an agenda previously claimed by nationalism, social democracy
and their historic allies. ey propose a progressive, visionary, reforming agenda.
‘Development’ is seen by them not as the task of a developmental state in alliance
with unions, but of these charitable foundations, markets, multinationals and
increased trade.
From the late 1970s onwards, corporations sought new production locations
where costs could be reduced and products marketed, and the international financial
institutions created space for them by insisting on bi- and multilateral trade
agreements. ey pressured developing countries to reduce tariff barriers and
allow unrestricted flows of capital, products and services. Structural Adjustment
Programmes, repackaged as Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, offered loan finance
from the 1980s onwards, on condition of major reform and, in particular, a reduced
role for the state. e ex-colonial powers are also implicated, as Stone (2004) showed,
by pushing African states towards the IMF when they insist on enforcing harsh
performance criteria as the condition of loans.
Many states shifted towards ‘free market’ politics, and the effects on both
employment and unionisation have been considerable. In Africa, for example,
GLOBALISATION AND UNIONS
14
they included the destruction of large parts of national healthcare and education
systems, weakening workers in the employment relationship by making them more
dependent on the health insurance and treatment that potentially came with formal
employment. Much of manufacturing industry was destroyed, reducing the scope
of and possibilities for unionisation. Unemployment rose dramatically in many
countries as public sector workers were dismissed. Currency devaluations reduced
real wages. Labour law was often revised in ways that were negative for trade unionism,
while formal laws protecting employees were unenforceable by emasculated states
(Wood and Brewster, 2007). Similar effects have occurred more widely. In many
countries, minimum wages have fallen into disrepute, so weakly enforced have they
become (Grindling and Terrell, 2005). Other pro-labour legislation has simply gone
unobserved. e South Korean Equal Employment Act 1987, for example, obliges
employers to provide facilities for childcare at workplaces, yet workplace childcare
constitutes only one per cent of the total number of these facilities (Moon, 2006).
In such cases, governments are clearly more concerned with employers’ reactions to
legal enforcement than with the legitimacy of their own law-making.
Symbolic of the current relationship between governments in the developing
world and multinationals has been the development of Export Processing Zones
(EPZs). ese are areas where foreign companies are encouraged through incentives
to operate and labour laws are either suspended or not enforced. ey have grown
considerably: by 2002 there were 3,000 EPZs employing more than 40 million workers,
the great majority of whom were young women (Abott, 1997; ICFTU, 2003). Attempts
to organise unions in EPZs have been met by violence from local security guards and
police (ICFTU, 2003). Lim (2005) argues that multinationals have not been ‘innocent
bystanders’ in determining the conditions that governments impose within EPZs.
e freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining, both Core
Labour Standards in the International Labour Organisation’s estimation, are under
growing threat at a global level. Many countries, including the USA, India and China
have refused to ratify the ILO conventions (87 and 98) that specify these basic rights.
We show the countries who have signed the conventions in Map 1. Even among the
surprisingly small number of signatory countries, there are several in which there
have been high levels of complaints that they have not been observed. e results for
unions are obvious. For the GUFs, this means an increasing volume and difficulty
of solidarity work, where companies and governments are the object of protest on
behalf of trade unions and their members alleging breach of these rights.
Recent legal changes in many countries have allowed employers to create fuzzy
employment relationships and diffuse and precarious forms of work. ese forms of
employment are strongly associated with the growth of informal work that is a further
distinctive feature of the current wave of globalisation. ‘Informality’ here means
disguised, ambiguous or poorly defined employment relationships where employers are
unclear or entirely absent (Chen, 2007). e phenomenon is very widespread: in Asia,
CON TE XTS
15
Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, informal workers now constitute between 60
and 70 per cent of the total working population. Few of these workers operate in total
isolation from companies; their conditions are generally determined by the lead firm
in the value chain, either a large national or multinational company (Chen, 2007). A
pool of workers has therefore been created who find contract, agency or self-employed
terms relatively attractive. As Lourenço-Lindell (2002) graphically illustrates in her
detailed account of informal workers’ lives in Guinea-Bissau, many of whom also work
in the formal part of the economy when possible, they are ‘walking a tightrope’ where
falling off means being unable to sustain their livelihoods.
Although unions have made efforts to recruit those working informally, these
attempts have brought only very limited success (Verma and Kochan, 2004). e
barriers are formidable: fierce competition between individuals, the heterogeneity of
the workers involved and hard-line patriarchal attitudes are just a few of the problems
(Wood and Frynas, 2006). Anyemedu (2000) identified a central issue of concern to
unions in trying to organise these workers, that of high organising costs in relation to
any possible subscription income. e workers fear harsh retaliation from employers
and state officials if they join unions, threatening their very existence. Even if they
do join, they are unable to pay realistic union subscriptions.
e current wave of globalisation is also characterised by a dramatic increase
in the world labour supply. Vast amounts of extremely cheap labour, notably in
the former Soviet Union, China and India, are now available to companies. ere
has been a tripling of the labour available to multinationals from around one
billion people in 1980 to some three billion post-2000. is resulted not only
from the collapse of Communism, but also from the opening up of economies to
world capital and greater participation of women in waged labour (Munck, 2004).
GLOBALISATION AND UNIONS
Map 1: Freedom of Association in the World
16
Moreover, an increasing proportion of the labour has become mobile. ere are
currently an estimated 86 million migrant workers, who commonly have few legal
employment rights (Lowell, 2007; UNDP, 2008).
No global system of protective worker regulation has emerged to compensate
for the weakening of national systems and shift in power towards employers. While
a wide range of advisory documentation exists, from the long-standing OECD
guidelines for MNCs to the International Labour Organisation’s Core Labour
Standards, these are merely guidelines. As Hyman suggests, they are ‘weak and
largely tokenistic’ (Hyman, 2002: 1).
Multinational Companies
Multinational companies loom large in global union thinking for five sets of reasons.
First, they are engines of globalisation with high political profiles through their
role in linking investment, trade, technology and finance. Second, they are often
unionised in part of their operation and a foothold therefore exists that can be
deepened. ird, there is a demand from companies for GUFs’ work. e companies
themselves are aware of a need both to coordinate their human resource policies
worldwide and of the risks that labour issues pose for them. Extended value chains
with links into the informal economy increase their exposure to this ‘labour risk’.
Fourth, as our case study in Chapter eight illustrates, senior trade unionists and
MNC managers often have mutual long-term professional acquaintance. is may
come from previous industrial relations dealings, or from discussion on a relatively
equal and informal footing at the Davos World Economic Forum. ese contacts have
frequently established mutual knowledge of their organisations as well as personal
lines of communication. In short, they are far more accessible to GUFs than the
informal economy, helping to explain why a high proportion of GUF resources are
spent in targeting them. Fifth, dialogue with central management in international
companies is a significant, identifiable service that GUFs can offer affiliates.
However, just one per cent of the world’s workforce of three billion people is
employed by multinational companies (Köhler, 2003). At present, multinationals
remain a strictly limited phenomenon in geographic and employment if not in
trade terms. ey largely carry out their business in the Triad of North America,
Europe and Japan (Rugman, 2001). In 2005, all but four of the top 50 multinationals
were headquartered in the Triad, although multinationals have begun to emerge
from countries outside of it (UNCTAD, 2008). Many MNCs only expand to nearby
countries; for example, one of the world’s largest multinationals, the anti-union Wal-
Mart, has most of its foreign investments in Canada. Multinational investment in
the developing world is concentrated in Asia and Latin America (UNCTAD, 2008).
MNC incidence is also to some extent sectoral. e Russian food sector is dominated
by them, as are extractive industries in Africa, but their presence remains smaller
CON TE XTS
17
in developing countries’ railways. Multinationals are however growing: 73 million
people worked for them in 2006 compared with 25 million in 1990. e World Bank
projected that MNCs will increase considerably in extent and importance over the
next twenty-five years (World Bank, 2007). For unions, work in them may represent
as much an investment for the future as for the present.
As we noted above, the internationalisation of companies and trade has
been a long-run process spanning several centuries. e trading companies
of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century gave way to multinationals in
manufacturing, utilities, services and extractive industries that expanded greatly
in the inter-war years (Wilkins, 1974). e largest and most rapidly expanding
activity in the 1950s and 1960s was in the colonial world’s extractive industries
(Jones, 1993). However, as Wilkins (1974) shows, these companies were rarely
sufficiently powerful to challenge governments. In fact, governments actively
sought on occasions to restrict strongly their operations and even expropriate
them. In 1938, the Mexican oil industry, previously the preserve of multinationals
was nationalised, providing a niche for Mexican unions, in a successful operation
that provided a model for other countries. Costa Rica operated a system of state
monopoly over the importation and marketing of petrol throughout the 1920s and
1930s (Odell, 1968). From the mid-1950s to the early 1970s many countries such
as Egypt, Algeria and Burma, expanded their state sectors as nationalisations were
carried out in areas considered vital to their national economies. Current ‘resource
nationalism’ is a real force but generally stops short of nationalisation.
In a growth wave from the 1970s onwards, MNCs greatly increased their
economic activity; by the early 1990s their accumulated sales were equivalent to
one-third of the world’s gross product (Buckley, 2000). ese corporations ushered
in the current era, since they were operating in a diversified set of industries, with
an increasingly strong emphasis on services (Rugman, 2001; UNCTAD, 2008). eir
influence on governments now came to be seen in stronger terms than previously;
the end of the Cold War meant that there was no alternative to attempting to
attract their investment. eir control of advanced technology means that their
presence is now seen as a requirement for development; as a result, multinationals
have become ‘rule givers’ in relation to governments (elen, 2006).
Multinationals, and especially US-based companies, argue publicly and privately for
the relaxation of employment law. e changes in labour law recently enacted by the
Chinese government, the Employment Contract Law 2007 and the Labour Disputes
Arbitration Law 2007, which included some clauses providing the state unions with the
opportunity to acquire some representative functions brought vigorous protest from
the American Chamber of Commerce and threats that companies would disinvest.
e equivalent organisation in Germany similarly presses for relaxations in labour
law (Singe and Croucher, 2004). However, as the Chinese example shows, nation
states continue to legislate in employment areas in ways not approved by international
GLOBALISATION AND UNIONS
18
business. e nation state is therefore not always anxious simply to attract foreign
investment at any price and outcomes are negotiated even if the balance in the
negotiation has swung towards foreign companies.
Multinationals are popular employers in host countries. e differential paid by
MNCs over local companies, after controlling for the industry involved, is large,
and largest where average wages in the host countries are lowest. In the lowest
income countries, employees in US-based multinationals earn twice as much as
those in domestic companies (Graham, 2000). Differentials are especially marked
in relatively hi-tech or high value-added sectors (Flanagan, 2006). Shell and BP,
widely criticised for their activities in Nigeria, are nevertheless pay leaders in
that country (Otobo, 2007). ese advantages are often multiplied by access to
company-based or assisted education and healthcare.
MNCs use much more labour than they employ, as capital markets impose
performance regimes that demand cost reductions and push them towards accessing
pools of cheap, ‘informal’ labour (Morgan and Kristensen, 2006). In addition, new
forms of finance seek rates of return higher than those traditionally expected by
investors (as they are often legally obliged to do), and simultaneously to escape
even stock market regulation. An important form of such finance is ‘private equity’,
and it has been estimated that some 20 per cent of the UK’s non-public workforce
is employed by these vehicles (Rossman and Greenfield, 2006). Private equity’s
influence clearly raises investors’ expectations of appropriate rates of return and
erodes commitment to other stakeholders. It has been shown that private equity has
raised rates of redundancy across the world (Hall, 2008).
eron (2005) uses the term ‘externalisation’ to encompass the different ways of
obtaining labour from outside of the corporation’s boundaries. Its extent at global level
has unfortunately not been the subject of any systematic investigation (Mosley and
Uno, 2007). Labour outsourcing is increasingly being required of local management
by multinationals’ central managements (Westney, 2008). Externalisation virtually
removes the direct claims that workers can make of them. Externalised workers are
rarely protected by law in the same ways as ‘standard’ workers, because in almost all
countries the law envisages a ‘standard’ employment relationship. Externalisation
takes many forms, many of which are in reality not discrete, and its incidence and
damaging consequences for workers and unions alike have been widely remarked
on by researchers examining the developing world (Wood and Brewster, 2007; von
Holdt and Webster, 2005; eron, 2005). e creation of ‘value chains’ from the
MNC at the top down to tiny family concerns, sub-contractors or individual ‘own
account’ workers inexorably drives the overall share of labour in company earnings
downwards (Barrientos, 2002). e ends of these chains contain a good deal of
‘labour risk’ for companies. An American researcher linked cars sold in Canada back
through car manufacturing multinationals to the Brazilian steel industry and slavery
in the Brazilian charcoal industry (Bales, 2004).
CON TE XTS
19
us, the multinationals are linked, both directly and indirectly, to the ‘informal’
economy. Intermediaries have oiled the wheels of this process. In many countries
legislation was enacted in the 1980s that facilitated the activities of labour agencies
(Glyn, 2006). us, even in highly regulated Germany, the number of agency workers
has risen from just over 100,000 in 1993 to 630,000 in 2007 (Bundesinstitut fűr
Arbeit, 1993; 2007). Seventy per cent of the workers used by Nestlé to manufacture,
package and distribute products throughout the world are not directly employed by
that company (Rossman and Greenfield, 2006). As we noted above, reliable global
figures on the extent of externalised labour do not exist (ILO, 2007) but their
growth may be simply illustrated by the extent of the multinational companies that
supply it, shown in Table 2 below:
GLOBALISATION AND UNIONS
Table 2: Key Multinationals Supplying Labour
Multinational 200 4 2006/7
Adecco 5,800 oces 7,000 oces 2007
Manpower 4,300 oces 4,400 oces 2007
Vedior * 2,200 oces 2,433 oces 2006
Randstad 1,827 oces 2006
2,670 oces 2007
Note: * Vedior was purchased by Randstad in December 2007
Source: ICEM (2004); company annual rep orts and websites
e labour-supplying multinationals whose empires are indicated in Table 2 are
clearly only the formal, visible part of labour contracting; a wide range of labour
suppliers in the developing world constitute the submerged part of that iceberg.
ese intermediaries form part of a nexus of corruption in obtaining contracts,
criminality and violence in Colombia (Pearce, 2004). Lourenço-Lindell (2002)
describes the extensive activities of agents called ‘headmen’ in Guinea-Bissau, who
first negotiate for work from employers in competition with other headmen, and then
select labour and supervise tasks.
ese work forms condition workers’ and managers’ expectations of acceptable
standards of terms, conditions and treatment. In direct employment terms, MNCs
can thus remain ‘model’ employers, and ‘employers of choice’, while distancing
themselves from their suppliers and indeed the suppliers of suppliers where
conditions are very different. e minority of employees in the company’s direct
employment are well aware of their privileged status. MNCs are able to raise
productivity partly because they tie employees into their ways of working. us,
many MNCs follow a dual policy: ending or avoiding the employment relationship
for the majority of employees, and improving pay to well above local levels for the
20
minority they choose directly to employ. is is a new aspect of the current wave
of globalisation.
ere are however limits to the process. e extent to which it can be required
depends on the extent to which the company’s success is perceived as reliant on
developing the long-term commitment of its labour force. It is only minimally
practised in some high value-added companies such as the German-owned motor
manufacturers. ese operate with a more cooperative labour paradigm which
facilitates union involvement and employee representation at all levels.
Multinationals’ direct policies in relation to unions reflect at least to some
extent their countries of origin. US-based companies favour countries where wages
are lower, where it is easiest to shed labour and the industrial relations environment
is seen as benign (Cooke, 1997; Bognanno et al., 2005). e last characteristic is
measured in terms of the extent of local union influence, though MNCs are more
favourably disposed to company-based forms of representation such as works
councils. As we show in Chapter five, European-based multinationals are relatively
friendly towards unions. is is related to the form of human resource management
(HRM) that they adopt and the extent to which they attempt to dictate the form
from the company’s headquarters. ere are essentially two forms of HRM. One is
‘collaborative’. is has a developmental or humanistic focus, where employees are
seen as partners or collaborators. On the other hand, there is ‘calculative’ HRM in
which employees are treated as a resource. Calculative HRM centres on the accurate
measurement of employee contributions to the firm, and the adoption of individually
based reward systems (Gooderham et al., 1999). It sidelines unions since individual
pay is not conducive to traditional forms of collective bargaining.
In Europe, foreign companies (which are mostly US-based) more commonly
follow ‘calculative’ HRM than domestic companies (Gooderham et al., 1999;
2006). US-based companies in less-skilled sectors tend to follow centralised
union exclusion policies. us, McDonald’s has successfully resisted unionisation
in many national contexts (Royle, 2005; 2006). In the failed attempt to unionise
the McDonald’s greenfield food processing factory in Moscow, the few activists
involved received significant material, publicity and moral support from the global
union, the IUF (Royle, 2005). McDonald’s may constitute an exceptional company,
but similar policies have been applied by other US-based companies with relatively
low-skilled workforces such as Wal-Mart, even in highly regulated Germany
(Köhnen and Glaubitz, 2000). In Ireland, they follow similar policies largely through
setting up on greenfield sites (Turner et al., 2002).
Anti-union policies pushed by central managements may occasionally be resisted
at local level. A recent work suggests that local managers can defend and advance
subsidiaries’ influence in alliance with unions. Kristensen and Zeitlin (2005), in their
study of APV, a manufacturing multinational based in the UK with subsidiaries
in the USA and Denmark, argue that the Danish subsidiary achieved a strategic
CON TE XTS
21
role in the company by using their links to many different local actors. e union
was a key ally for local management, helping improve the company’s access to
skilled labour locally and actively helping management strategise. e prescription
these authors offer, of a MNC involved in facilitating dialogue between itself and
employees through representative institutions is, they admit, an unlikely prospect.
e setting was exceptionally favourable for such an alliance. e Danish model
provides considerable possibilities for union representatives not only through the
1973 law providing for employee representatives’ election to company boards, and
through European Works Councils, but also by well-established, historically deeply
rooted norms.
Outside such exceptional environments, and especially outside of the developed
world, local management pursues less union-friendly models than central
management. Even when written into collective agreements, local managers adopt
‘flexible’ interpretations of relatively clear rights such as those to freedom of
association and collective bargaining. e latter may be formally espoused at
headquarters level, and then, to adopt the terms used by a team of management
scholars, ‘ceremonially’ adopted or ‘lost in translation’ locally (Fenton O’Creevy
et al., 2007). us, for example, managers in countries such as Russia and Mexico,
where company-based unions are widespread, interpret allowing company unions
as complying with central values favouring the freedom of association. ey thereby
marginalise or exclude forms of unionism centred on mobilising workers and
meaningful bargaining. In Russia, this entails, at worst, union forms designed to
discipline workers and, at best, welfare-oriented unions. In this scenario, collective
bargaining consists of essentially administrative discussions about a ‘collective
agreement’ that specifies little and cannot be enforced.
Multinationals pose problems for unions at national level because of many
of these companies’ capacity to threaten to shift location, to play one unit off
against another and to distribute investment according to local performance.
ese possibilities are clearly more available in some sectors than others but
many MNCs, as we saw above, are currently located in services rather than in the
location-bound extractive sector and can therefore threaten this with credibility.
Martinez-Lucio and Weston (2004) have argued that even in the highly regulated
European context, the dynamics set up by this possibility are often very difficult
for unions to overcome.
In general however, and despite these problems, MNCs are relatively well
unionised in the developing world when compared to domestic companies. e
most systematic study of the subject demonstrates that they more readily recognise
unions, and direct investment by them brings better labour relations (Mosley and
Uno, 2007). eir importance also underlines the internationals’ significance to
national unions; the latter draw on the GUFs’ expertise in dealing with them.
e expansion of multinationals’ international reach serves to remind many trade
GLOBALISATION AND UNIONS
22
unionists, particularly in the developing world, of how intimately the fates of their
national unions and the internationals are intertwined.
Conclusion
e consequences for unions of the current wave of globalisation have been
severe. Many of the old certainties and structural supports for trade unionism
have been removed. e predominance of neoliberal economic ideas has reduced
union political influence. MNCs have become more assertive in relation to national
governments than in previous waves of globalisation, while the growth of informal
work has diminished union membership and economic power.
e possibilities of unions dealing with their problems at national level have
clearly decreased. National regulation has far less mileage than hitherto and unions
have therefore turned to the international level for solutions (O’Brien, 2000).
Developing country unions have also continued to develop bilateral links with
other unions, often from the ex-colonial countries. But these links are much less
likely to offer viable solutions since the internationals have greater capacity to
generate comprehensive information about multinationals. Nor do they occur
within the internationals’ democratic framework. Still less can links with a few
developed country unions offer prospects of organising among informal workers,
where these unions have little or no experience. ese resilient problems are better
addressed by the internationals, with their breadth of experience and expertise in
the developing world. Whether they have the resources or governance mechanisms
to address them in optimal ways is a question we discuss in Chapter four.
CON TE XTS
• CHAPTER THREE •
Past and Present – the History of
International Trade Unionism
Introduction
Th i s chapter deals with the history of the international trade union movement’s
institutions, to locate our contemporary analysis in that context. e history
of all these bodies is part of their organisational culture, as their headquarters’
walls covered with posters of twentieth-century campaigns demonstrate. Despite
some useful contributions, no adequate overall history of this level of trade unionism
exists. With a few honourable exceptions (exemplified by the work of Tony Carew
(1987; 2000; 2007) Rebecca Gumbrell-McCormick (2000a; 2000b; 2001; 2004)
and Marcel van der Linden (2000)), previous accounts have occurred in separate
‘historical’ and ‘current’ silos. Yet certain enduring themes are apparent, implying
profound structural issues. On the other hand, the current situation has novel
characteristics, not least because of the relative political unity of the world’s unions
after the collapse of Communism in 1989.
Our arguments in this chapter are as follows: first, history shows a significant
sequence in the formation of different bodies, reflecting their relative weight
in the thinking of national unions. Second, we argue that it is not the case, as
some have suggested, that the structures devised between the late 1890s and
1903 ‘remained largely unchanged’ in the twentieth century (van der Linden,
2000: 528). This refers simply to the dual structure with an international
umbrella organisation and industry-based bodies. It ignores the existence of
rival international structures for much of the twentieth century, which rendered
cooperation across the political divide next to impossible. The inception of
the division constituted a discontinuity of major importance. This political
division in the international union movement that appeared soon after the
Russian Revolution has now disappeared, creating new opportunities. Third, the
internationals have long, rich histories which have stamped their individual and
collective identities and, importantly, underpin a long-term view by unions of
payoffs from membership. Long organisational histories encourage affiliates to
see the benefits of affiliation in the long-term rather than to look for short-term
24
benefits. Finally, we suggest that a certain version of the history, emphasising
the internationals’ collective role in the fights against Fascism and Apartheid
functions as a sustaining resource.
Origins
e first wave of institutional international union cooperation occurred in the third
quarter of the nineteenth century, at the beginnings of an earlier intense phase of
globalisation. National markets had not yet been finally consolidated in Europe and
America and major imperial projects such as the ‘scramble for Africa’ had yet to
begin.
Marx’s international, the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA),
formed in 1864, therefore operated in a context in which the need for such a
body was less self-evident than it was later to become. Marxist language and
ideals live on as a set of shared reference points in international trade union
discourse, including in its symbols such as the singing of the Internationale at
some international union gatherings. The IWMA and its successors provided
intellectually powerful alternatives to the nationalistic, racially based and
imperialist ideas being pursued not only by employers and ruling élites, but
then accepted in wide sections of the trade union movement. These ideas found
expression in many damaging ways, including in racially based unions in many
parts of the world (Kirk, 2003).
Marx’s project attracted some affiliation and support from sections of the
European trade union movement, faced by employers importing cheaper foreign
labour from neighbouring countries. e IWMA also established relations (albeit
fractious) between political internationalists and trade unions, which paved the
way for the Second Social Democratic International. Trade union internationalism,
although not initiated by Marxists, therefore found its first institutional form under
Marxist leadership although, as Marx well knew, the policies of the IWMA were too
advanced and idealistic for the pragmatic British union leaders. is highlighted
what was to be a long-standing tension between the industrial interests and national
orientations of most union leaders on the one hand, and those of the more political
internationalists on the other (Collins and Abramsky, 1965). It already implied the
enduring question of precisely how strong or autonomous an international could
be: how much power would be ceded by national unions, fearful of having policy
determined by those holding an alternative conception? e issue’s significance was
underlined by the interest of rival political streams in international trade unionism
such as the anarchists and Christians.
CON TE XTS
25
Diagram 3: Timeline – the History of the International Trade Union Movement
International union movement World events
1864: International Working Men’s Association formed
1871: Delegates of Austrian, German and Scandinavian
shoemakers sign cooperation agreement
1876: International Working Men’s Association dissolved
1889: International Trade Secretariats of shoemakers,
printers, hat ters, tobacco workers formed
1897: International Transport Workers’ federation formed
1901: First conference of the International Secretariat of
National Trade Union centres held
1913: International Federation of Trade Unions founded
1914: Over one hundred International Trade Secretariats
in existence
1914: 33 ITSs in existence
1918–1920s: Many ITSs merge
1919: IFTU re- constituted
1919: International Federation of Trade Unions founded
1920: International Federation of Christian Trade Unions
(forerunner of WCL) formed
1921: Red International of Labour Unions founded
1937: Red International of Labour Unions formally
dissolved
1945: World Federation of Trade Unions formed
1949: International Confederation of Free Trade Unions
formed
1973: European TUC formed
2006: WCL dissolved to merge with ICFTU and form the
International Trade Union Confederation
1871: German victory in Franco -Prussian
War; Unication of Germany
1881: Second International founded
1914: Outbreak of First World War
1917: Russian Revolution
1918: First World War ends
1933: Nazis accede to power in Germany
1939: Outbreak of Second World War
1945: Second World War ends
1989: Soviet Union collapses
PAST AND PRESENT
26
The Emergence of International Sectoral and Umbrella Bodies
e formation of the Second (Social Democratic) International created the political
cohesion and contacts that precipitated the first international industrial organisations.
In many continental European countries, trade unionism was a project launched
by social democrats rather than, as in Britain, the reverse or, as in the USA, one
that never generated a Labour Party (Robert, Prost and Wrigley, 2004). is is
not to argue that the main concerns of the new international union organisations
were political, since the contrary was the case as they were primarily interested in
industrial matters. It is to suggest that the first viable institutions of internationalism
were formed on a non-Marxist basis that nevertheless inherited some of Marxism’s
internationalist rhetoric.
As we show in the timeline, highly skilled craft trade unionists together with
miners and textile workers were the first to initiate international organisations on
an industrial basis from 1889 onwards. ese were the GUFs’ predecessors, the
International Trade Secretariats (ITSs). e basis of the craft unions’ organisation
was strong occupational identities and capacity to restrict entry to their trades at
local and national level. ey felt a need for international coordination for pragmatic
industrial as well as for political reasons. Huge vertically integrated cartels were
emerging and expanding their international reach. Migrant labour was becoming
increasingly important and threatened to undercut national unions’ efforts, especially
in continental Europe. In Germany, whose expanding economy was sucking in
migrant workers from neighbouring countries, the issue was especially pressing and
the majority of ITSs were based in Germany from their inception up until Hitler’s
accession to power in 1933.
However, the basis for international union organisation was rickety. At the end
of the nineteenth century, national systems of trade unionism were still being
consolidated: in Britain there were still movements for local autonomy in craft
unions at the beginning of the twentieth century. In France, social democrats
‘implanted’ union organisation in rural areas (Robert, Prost and Wrigley, 2004). In
short, strong elements of regionalism within nations remained in the unions seeking
to establish international coordination (Dreyfus, 2000). e incomplete and uneven
internal development of national systems until 1914 therefore formed a basis for ITSs
founded on little more than information exchange and occasional mutual support
of strike action.
e development of ITSs within industry sectors both preceded and precipitated
the formation of an umbrella organisation for national union centres and reflects
their importance to pragmatic unions in dealing with emergent international
companies. e umbrella body began and continued as an organisation for more
directly political purposes than the ITSs. is was the case even if the German
and French unions that played a key role in establishing all of these bodies had
CON TE XTS
27
very different conceptions of the purposes and methods of trade unionism. ese
unions built the next international umbrella venture, the International Secretariat
of National Trade Union Centres (ISNTUC), to be renamed the International
Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) in 1913. e British stood aloof, but by 1913 the
IFTU had grown to include twenty affiliated national centres, mostly in Europe but
including the USA and the Transvaal (Fimmen, 1922).
e IFTU did not go far beyond exchanging information; the French conception
of a more political and internationally solidaristic unionism was sidelined in favour
of the more institutional and information-sharing form advocated by the Germans
(Tudyka, 1983; Dreyfus, 2000). is remained influential in the IFTU even after the
First World War, since it allowed national union centres to learn about each other
and companies without being tied to any specific international policies.
By 1914, the current structure’s broad outlines were visible: a set of industrial
coordinating bodies, and an umbrella organisation bringing national centres together.
So, too, were at least three of the significant abiding issues: unions’ concern not to
cede power; tensions between forms of trade unionism; and real political differences.
e latter were soon to sharpen, generating a major and long-standing split in the
international movement.
Division in the Movement: the RILU
e First World War had been preceded by dramatic strike waves in Europe
that encouraged the development of revolutionary union ideas, or syndicalism.
is in turn encouraged many to imagine that the strike weapon could be used
for internationalist purposes. But the outbreak of war demonstrated the strictly
rhetorical nature of the Social Democratic Second International’s commitment to an
international general strike in the event of war. e First World War brought massive
political rupture. e Russian Revolution solidified the earlier breakaway of the
Communists from the Social Democrats, a division that was to last, with only a brief
interlude, for the next seventy years. is division was to be even more damaging
than the one that had already emerged between the IFTU and the International
Federation of Christian Trade Unions (IFCTU), whose relationship to the IFTU has
been characterised as ‘at times quite competitive and combative’ (Tosstorff, 2005:
401). us, sharp political and religious rivalries were both present in the world’s
trade union movement from an early stage.
e social democratic and business forms of trade unionism took steps to advance
and consolidate their position in response to a huge upturn in union membership
during the First World War. Between April 1919 and August 1921, twenty-nine ITSs
were established (van Goethem, 2000). e umbrella body also became much closer
to a global coordinating body than hitherto. e fourteen countries represented at
the founding congress of the IFTU in 1919 consisted essentially of the Europeans,
PAST AND PRESENT
28
plus the American Federation of Labour, self-appointed guardian of the Latin
American movements that had joined the recently formed Pan American Federation
of Labour (van Goethem, 2000; 2006). e Americans were determined to follow a
resolutely industrial path, but the Europeans defeated them, insisting on the need for
political action. But the IFTU, initially urged by the French CGT, was already taking
this type of action in initiating discussions (from which they were subsequently
excluded) that brought the establishment of the tripartite International Labour
Organization (ILO).
e ILO was an important institution that was to provide a major forum for
international labour issues. e IFTU, though disappointed at the watered-down
form that the ILO assumed, soon set to its enduring task of lobbying it to create
international labour standards (Tosstorff, 2005). e IFTU had thus helped create
much of the water in which it and its descendants the ICFTU and ITUC were to swim.
In 1921, the American Federation of Labour, dismayed at the political turn of events,
notified the IFTU that it had decided not to affiliate (Fimmen, 1922). is marked the
beginning of over two decades of widespread indifference among American unions
towards the international trade union movement that was only to be overcome at the
end of the Second World War. For the Communists, the same developments were
interpreted in quite a different sense: the formation of the ILO was a sign that the
mainstream unions had definitively sold out to the capitalist class.
In many countries, including Britain and the USA, the Communist parties
absorbed many of the pre-war syndicalists, thereby acquiring some of the best
and most active trade unionists. From the 1920s, the international Communist
movement built its separate union institution, the Red International of Labour
Unions (RILU). In 1921, the IFTU decided that any union affiliating to the RILU
could not be admitted to the IFTU (Fimmen, 1922). A minority in the IFTU, led by
its co-secretary and general secretary of the relatively well-developed International
Transport Workers’ Federation, Edo Fimmen, favoured opening a dialogue on the
appropriate structure for the international movement. Fimmen’s political outlook
was on the cusp of social democracy and Communism and coloured by syndicalism
(Buschak, 2002). To the consternation of many, he therefore advocated including the
Soviet unions in the discussion.
Labour’s Alternative
e issue was among those that brought Fimmen’s resignation as IFTU co-secretary;
it was only after resigning that he gained the freedom to write probably the
most important document ever written on the international movement’s structure,
Labour’s Alternative (1924). e majority of the work discusses developments in
international capitalism, which ‘imposed’ and ‘forced’ change on unions. Earlier
moves towards international cartels were now accelerating: ‘Huge, octopus-like
capitalist groups are extending their tentacles to grasp all the treasures of the
world…’ (p.10). Pre-1914, these only sought to dictate prices to consumers, but now
CON TE XTS
29
they sought to dictate the price of labour. He defined the internationals’ task as
bargaining collectively with these groups, a prelude to collectivising the means of
production through revolution.
For Fimmen, the IFTU–RILU division was central because it obstructed
coordinated bargaining; post-1950, this argument was proven highly relevant. Other
significant issues such as increasing the minimal involvement of women and colonial
workers in trade unionism would be assisted by overcoming that key problem.
Removing the division between the IFTU and RILU was, moreover, a condition for
releasing the resources required to bring a more truly international organisation into
being by persuading unions in the rest of the world to affiliate. Fimmen’s emphasis on
resources makes explicit an issue that remains relevant today. A new organisational
basis was needed for this merged IFTU; the ITSs were a key ingredient because they
mirrored capitalist organisation, but national union centres could not be ignored
and he therefore advocated a combination of national centres and ITSs as a basis
(pp.117–23). ere is a notable and probably politic ambiguity here about the precise
form that such an organisation would take, which allowed room for manoeuvre at
a later stage.
Fimmen’s ideas foundered on the very problem they addressed: the political split
between Communists and Social Democrats. He had written the work at a time
when it was still possible to argue as he did, because relations between the two
sides had not degenerated too far. But from the defeat of the British General Strike
in 1926 until the early 1930s, RILU encouraged breakaway unions and launched
savage attacks on the ‘reformist’ and (more commonly) ‘social fascist’ or ‘Amsterdam’
unions. is poisoned relations and ruled RILU out of any constructive dialogue
with either the IFTU or the majority of ITS affiliates. Fimmen, from his position in
the transport workers, was left to continue to try to improve relations between the
two warring sets of unions.
Free Trade Unionism and Communist Aliations:
from Divorce to Global Rivalry
From the mid-1920s, the unions throughout the international patchwork that was the
Soviet Union were decisively stripped of their independence and subordinated to the
Communist Parties. As Carew (1987) pointed out, Western unions were therefore
right to regard them as not being free trade unions, even if Communist-led unions
in the Western world could not be categorised in the same way. e Soviet unions
became ‘a school of Communism’ and a ‘transmission belt’ of Communist policy. In
the workplace, they became the welfare wing of management and exercised harsh
discipline on dissidents. Internationally, these unions became instruments of Soviet
foreign policy, as illustrated by the demise of the RILU itself. After the accession of
Hitler to power in 1933 and the German unions’ destruction, Stalin decided that a
more conciliatory attitude towards the Social Democrats and the mainstream trade
PAST AND PRESENT
30
unions was required. RILU, which had started life as a genuinely independent body,
was run down from 1934 onwards and quietly disbanded in 1937 because Stalin
regarded it as an obstruction to his foreign policy (Tosstorff, 2004).
e Nazi’s rapid demolition of the previously powerful German unions removed
an important element in the international movement and sent tremors through
the remainder. All of the ITSs, who had already been campaigning against Fascism
since 1924, and who supported the Italian resistance, played a significant role in
campaigning against Nazism. e ITF had demanded immediate action in defence of
the German unions in 1933 by the IFTU but were defeated by the opposition of the
German unions themselves (Simon, 1983; Reinalda, 1997). e ITF began publication
of a multilingual publication, Swastika (soon to become Fascism), documenting the
effects of Fascism on workers from 1934 to 1945. e transport workers’ extensive
worldwide networks were later used to good effect by the Allied governments in
espionage during the Second World War (Koch-Baumgarten, 1997). e ITF was also
the driving force in establishing a Joint Council of Propaganda between itself and the
metalworkers’ and miners’ internationals to propagandise for free trade unionism in
the occupied countries, an initiative that soon went beyond its original functions:
by 1944, the Council was sending delegates to liberated France to influence the re-
forming French unions.
e effects of Stalinism on workers were also understood in the international trade
union élite. Meeting in the context of widespread pro-Soviet feeling in Britain after
the invasion of the USSR, the Annual Meeting of the International Metalworkers’
Federation in August 1942 attended by exiled trade unionists from numerous
countries demonstrated their awareness. ey heard and accepted without demur a
speech by Sidney Parlett of the ILO, who argued that:
e Russian representatives at an international gathering would only voice policy
insofar as it found consent and endorsement from the Russian Communist Party.
If, therefore, the workers were going to fight for a Charter of trade union rights for
other countries, how could they rely on the unequivocal support of the Russian
trade unions?
(IMF, 1942)
e defeat of Nazism in 1945 brought a temporary and unstable unity in the
international trade union movement, when for a brief period Social Democratic
and Communist unions came together in the World Federation of Trade Unions
(WFTU). But as the Cold War set in, the split between the Social Democratic and
Communist streams re-established itself amid tumultuous and vituperative scenes
(Hogan, 1989). One of the causes célèbres was the degree of independence to be given
to ITSs; the Soviets argued for (and later adopted when they were left to themselves)
a structure in which the ITSs would be integrated into the world body as ‘trade
departments’. is, of course, would have meant ceding considerable industrial
CON TE XTS
31
influence to the Soviets, and was rejected; the ITSs were strongly opposed to having
their autonomy reduced in this way (Windmuller, 1954; McShane, 1992).
e US government strongly encouraged the American unions to step up their
activities in the international movement, and worked influentially against WFTU
across a broad material and ideological front (Windmuller, 1954; Carew, 1987).
However, as Denis McShane has argued, the European unions’ own experiences had
also been important in their rejection of Soviet influence (McShane, 1992). By 1950
WFTU was unquestionably dominated by the Soviet unions because major Western
unions had left (Koftas, 2002). e International Confederation of Free Trade Unions
(ICFTU) was formed on Anglo-American initiative and it and the WFTU went their
separate ways, beginning an increasingly bitter war for the political affiliation of
unions in the rest of the world. Both of them together with the third, relatively small
but aggressive, International Federation of Christian Trade Unions (later World
Confederation of Labour, WCL) now pursued their own rival agendas, competing for
affiliations and trying to establish their own structures throughout the world.
WFTU was also influential in global terms. In the 1950s, it gave considerable
material assistance to help found and maintain formally independent international
associations, notably the International Confederation of Arab Trade Unions and
the much stronger Congreso Permanente de Unidad Sindical de los Trabajadores
de America Latina. In Africa, WFTU, after initial criticism of the Organisation
of African Trade Union Unity, began to work closely with it (Lieβ, 1983). In India,
the All-India Trade Union Congress was an affiliate. In Europe, the largest union
confederations in France and Italy, the CGT and CGIL, were long-term full affiliates
until the latter moved to associate membership. e CGIL gradually distanced
itself from WFTU as part of a wider disillusionment on the part of Western trade
unionists with the effects of their affiliation. e CGIL moved away because of
declining strength and failure in its persistent efforts to secure unity in action in
relation to employers with the other Italian union organisations who were strongly
opposed to the CGIL’s international affiliation (Rogari, 2000). After 1968, this sort
of distancing became common among national unions.
e unions previously affiliated to IFTU formed a large part of the organisational
basis for the creation of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU)
in 1949. e new title both reaffirmed unions’ historic assertion of their independence
from employers and the state and stressed the difference between themselves and
unions in the Communist world. e ICFTU soon gained primacy within the
international trade union movement in its role as the ‘voice of labour’, because of its
use by governments as such in the restructuring of the post-War years (Gumbrell-
McCormick, 2001). Other parts of the international movement now entered a period
of steady increase in interest and affiliations. us, the Christian IFCTU expanded in
the developing world, establishing a regional organisation in Latin America in the mid-
1950s (Pasture, 1999). So, too did the ITSs, as we show for the ITF in Table 3.
PAST AND PRESENT
32 CONT EX TS
Table 3: Number of ITF-aliated Organisations by Region, 1946 and 1964
ITF region 1946 1964
Europe/Middle East 57 117
Latin America/Caribbean 5 99
Asia-Pacic 9 42
Africa 3 36
North America 3 18
Totals 77 312
Source: Lewis (2003: 360)
Regional organisations grouping countries together developed throughout the
world, first in the ICFTU and later in the ITSs, to reflect the interests of the
developing country membership within the international structures. eir creation
increased the diversity of unions involved in the international movement. ere
was a feeling among some affiliates that the ICFTU as a global organisation was
constantly trying to widen its functions beyond the coordinating role that they
thought it suited to, but that its basis made it difficult for it to help unions locally. In
1966, the British TUC’s international committee minuted:
If the question of starting afresh arose the TUC – taking experience as a
starting point – would perhaps not be in favour of establishing an organisation
such as the ICFTU with its present functions, nor disposed to accept that the
somewhat heterogeneous political attitudes of major ICFTU affiliates provide
a satisfactory basis for common and large-scale operations directed towards
developing countries.
(quoted in Carew, 2007: 163)
e judgement from the TUC’s international committee may have underestimated
the international movement’s work. rough their structures in the world’s regions,
the ICFTU and ITSs built widespread educational activity to develop the skills
and capacities of local unions to deal with their problems. e ICFTU had a long
tradition of such work and soon began to use its Solidarity Fund, first set up in 1957,
for educational purposes (Gottfurcht, 1966; Carew, 2000). A strong example of its
activity was the coordinated efforts by the ICFTU and six GUFs to develop cadres
in Indonesia in the late 1960s (Carew, 2000). Another example from this period
was the substantial educational work of the ICFTU in Africa. e calibre of those
carrying out this work was considerable; it was led by the Nigerian intellectual Wogu
Ananaba, author of an impressive history of the African trade unions (CISL, 1972;
33
Ananaba, 1979). is educational work also importantly allowed the internationals
to acquire detailed understandings of the world’s very different unions.
In Europe, the heartland of the international movement, the growth of structures
designed to coordinate European unions in part reflected an increasing feeling that
the ICFTU was providing too little for the unions of the developed world, one of the
underlying reasons for the Americans leaving it in the late 1960s (Carew, 2007). e
development of the European Union stimulated a proliferation of bodies both outside
and inside the existing organisations. e international movement was faced with
the development of essentially parallel structures in the form of European Industry
Federations and the European TUC. us, for example, between the late 1950s and
1983, nominally separate bodies for food, drink and tobacco workers existed both
inside and outside of the IUF (Buschak, 2003). WFTU hoped that the development
of these European-level bodies would improve relations with ICFTU affiliates, but
these hopes proved groundless (Lieβ, 1983).
For the ICFTU, creation of the ETUC led to the loss of its existing European body
(Gumbrell-McCormick, 2001). is created major tensions within the ICFTU as it
struggled to decide how to deal with the new phenomenon. Ultimately, it decided
not to take a position, which Gumbrell-McCormick (2000a) argues was a wise act of
diplomacy and not simply inertia, since it allowed the ICFTU to maintain the world
organisation’s unity albeit at considerable cost. However, for some national trade
union movements in Europe, the EU’s increasing pull ushered in a period of greater
orientation towards Europe to the exclusion of the rest of the world.
e international trade union movement was expanding beyond its hitherto
narrow geographical base, as each side in the Cold War was trying to recruit
unions. In Africa and Asia, unions often provided the mass base for nationalist
movements to fight for independence from the European imperial powers, and the
Americans and Soviets vied for their loyalty. e unions of Europe, the USA and the
USSR pursued what was at least in part a Cold War political agenda in the rest of
the world. Gary Busch (1983) argued that for the main governments involved, the
importance of international trade unionism was second only to military intelligence.
A consequence was that the ICFTU ruled out contact between itself and WFTU
despite the wishes of some of its affiliates (Lieβ, 1983).
In some parts of the ex-colonial world such as Africa, the Cold War had serious
consequences for trade unionism, weakening it wherever the US distributed economic
or military aid (Koftas, 2002; omson and Larson, 1978). Wedin (1991), in a
sensitive study of foreign union assistance in Latin America, shows how despite good
intentions, foreign interventions at this time had negative effects and even ‘victims’.
Foreign subventions on occasions reduced union democracy to a farce (Croucher,
2003). In Kenya, for example, the nationalist politician and trade union leader Tom
Mboya rapidly marginalised his political opponents with financial backing from the
USA, finally removing them from the Kenya Federation of Trade Unions (Hagglund,
PAST AND PRESENT
34
2007). In Japan, the Cold War also had important negative effects and the ICFTU
affiliates became identified with the occupier. By 1950, the Communist union
centre Sanbeyu was in the forefront of the Japanese trade union movement, but the
American Military Government stimulated a breakaway centre, Sohyo. In the early
1950s, the American Military Government dismissed large numbers of public sector
trade unionists in the name of removing Communist influence, but also included
non-Communist unionists. is initiated a period lasting right up until the collapse
of Communism, in which affiliation to the ICFTU or WFTU constituted a factional
issue within Japanese unions described as ‘damaging’ (Carew, 2000: 218). Despite this
sharp split, the ITSs were nevertheless able to provide a focus for coordinated action
between Japanese enterprise-based unions. In 1964, the International Metalworkers’
Federation established a Japan Council, playing a major part in establishing the
annual ‘spring offensive’ (Park, 1983).
A combination of political and industrial rivalries weakened ITS attempts to
confront the activities of multinationals. These attempts were the first signs that
the international union movement was moving decisively towards attempting
international collective bargaining despite the implied transfer of bargaining
authority from national to international level. Charles ‘Chip’ Levinson, general
secretary of the ICEF, seeking to raise the profile of his previously weak
ITS (Gallin, 1997), confirmed this as the international movement’s main task
(Levinson, 1972). The North American United Auto Workers and the West
German IG Metall pushed this agenda within the International Metalworkers’
Federation while the ICEF and the IUF developed international campaigns
directed at particular multinationals. World Company Councils were developed
in some companies in the 1960s by the IMF and ICEF. Yet significant unions in
France, Italy and India were excluded because they were affiliated to the WFTU
(Leiβ, 1983). By 1988, a new approach emerged that allowed the preservation of
national unions’ bargaining independence and the first International Framework
Agreement (IFA) was concluded by the IUF with BSN Danone in 1988 (Gumbrell-
McCormick, 2000a; 2004; Wills, 2002).
e ITF was meanwhile pursuing international collective bargaining in the
shipping industry with rather more success. e ‘Flags of Convenience’ (FOC)
campaign, initiated in the late 1940s gathered momentum in the 1960s and began to
bite in the 1970s. e campaign had political and industrial thrusts, and succeeded
in enforcing minimum standards of pay in many of the world’s ships. We expand on
the FOC campaign in Chapter five.
Towards a Unied International Movement
e existence of a common enemy helped the ICFTU to mobilise affiliates, but
simultaneously illustrated the significance of the division between itself and the other
confederations. e increasingly anomalous existence of Apartheid in South Africa
CON TE XTS
35
brought the ICFTU to develop a widely supported campaign. e Confederation
undoubtedly made a real contribution here, overcoming the many constraints limiting
its capacity for independent action (Gumbrell-McCormick, 2001). e circumstances
were quite specific, in that there was a considerable consensus among affiliates that
the Confederation should act (Gumbrell-McCormick, 2001). Roger Southall (1995)
has shown however that effective solidarity was still restricted because of Cold War
tensions between the ICFTU, the ITSs and the (non-dues paying) WFTU affiliate,
the South African Congress of Trade Unions.
As the multinationals grew in strength, and pushed at existing trade boundaries,
semi-official meetings were held between officials of the world’s divided trade union
movement (Lieβ, 1983). e extension of Western corporations into the Comecon
countries provided a motive for Western unionists to show increased interest
in Eastern Europe, while the emergence of ‘dissident unionism’ there ironically
provided a motive for official Soviet unions to shore up their role through contact
with their Western counterparts (Busch, 1983).
After 1989 and the collapse of Communism, the way was paved for a more unified
trade union movement at international level and extension of previously limited
attempts to develop international networks and collective bargaining. Huge areas of
the international economy were now opened up to companies and the ICFTU tried
to take the opportunity to expand its influence. A key conclusion of a 1990 ICFTU/
ITS Conference was that the ICFTU should strengthen their ‘coordination of the
work of the ITSs and national centres’ and a new department for multinationals was
established at the Confederation (ICFTU, 1990; Gumbrell-McCormick, 2000a: 514).
As this showed, the ICFTU did not accept a role limited to lobbying but wished to
expand its coordinating, organising and bargaining functions.
Unions in the former Soviet Union were allowed back into the fold of ‘free’ trade
unions, even if their qualifications for entry were highly questionable. In the words
of one commentator, the arrival of the ex-Soviet unions ‘unleashed a tremendous
struggle to remake the geography of workers’ representation in central and Eastern
Europe’ (Herod, 2001: 224). In the 1990s, even before these unions were admitted
to the ICFTU, many affiliated to GUFs. e GUFs were therefore able quickly to
come into direct contact where the ICFTU could not, and this was used to reject the
ICFTU’s hegemonic claims within the international movement. e irony was that
these unions’ ultimate admission to the ICFTU entailed only limited strengthening
of it, because the former Soviet Union affiliates of WFTU had no tradition of
negotiating with management. e main weapon used by the internationals has been
an expansion of the GUF’s educational activities aimed at improving unions’ capacity
to represent members (Sogge, 2004).
e loss of most Russian unions, and that of a significant number of others in
the world who left the WFTU without subsequently joining the ICFTU meant that
WFTU withered, and stopped publishing membership figures in the 1990s although
it continues to play some role in India, Latin America and the Arab countries. is
PAST AND PRESENT
36
left the ICFTU as by far the biggest international player, with the relatively tiny
Christian WCL the only alternative.
In November 2006, the ITUC was formed from the ICFTU, the WCL and a number
of sizeable and influential left-wing unions such as the Polish OPZZ, the Argentinean
CTA, the Colombian CUT and the French CGT. Since the WCL’s strength lay in the
developing and transitional countries, the international trade union movement
achieved better international coverage even though some WCL affiliates refused to
join. At the same time, the ITUC established a Pan-European Council including non-
ETUC unions and notably the Russians, who are not represented in the EU-oriented
ETUC (Traub-Merz and Eckl, 2007).
Politically divisive tendencies persist in some of the world’s unions, and the
largest issue is that of the state controlled unions in the All-China Federation of
Trade Unions (ACFTU), not currently recognised as free unions by the ITUC. e
ACFTU is linking up with African unions through its cooperation with and funding
of the Organisation of African Trade Unions and their financing of the sizeable
Nkrumah Labour College in Accra (Traub-Merz and Eckl, 2007). ere are voices
arguing for engagement with the ACFTU through the latter’s admission to the ITUC,
an issue that threatens to re-divide the international free trade union movement.
Conclusion
e international movement is now closer to being worthy of the global description
than ever before, and previous political and religious obstacles to unity in action that
restricted attempts to deal with multinationals have been removed.
Key structural issues have been evident throughout the movement’s history
and continue to loom large today. Perhaps the most important is the reluctance
of national unions to cede power to international organisations. Another is the
respective roles of the sectoral and umbrella bodies. e importance of educational
work as a central and in many respects unifying activity helping the internationals
establish shared activity of value to affiliates has been evident.
ose active in the international trade union movement continue to find positive
resources in their organisations’ history: its sheer length demonstrates the depth of
their experience. e internationals’ collective record of actively resisting fascism
and opposing Apartheid represent shared touchstones. While political differences
may have been at the centre of the international movement’s history, both sides now
refer to a shared tradition of campaigning against both.
e length of the organisations’ histories goes well beyond being a collective
resource because it encourages affiliates to take a long-term view of their involvement
and of the benefits to be gained from it, an idea we expand on in Chapter four.
CON TE XTS
II
The Work of
the Internationals
• CHAPTER FOUR •
The Internationals –
Governance and Resources
All international trade union organisations face three tasks: organisation, policy,
and democratisation. is means international trade union policy must be
democratised, it must reach deep down among the membership, including them,
involving them.
Dan Gallin, ex-general secretary of the IUF (quoted in Rütters, 2001: 1)
Introduction
Th i s chapter examines the central political dynamics within the internationals.
We begin with an analytical account of how they are governed, showing the
developed country unions’ dominance of the GUFs’ structures, underpinned
by their high financial contributions. We also explain the current resource difficulties
and the consequent political choice that the more financially secure affiliates are now
faced with.
We also argue that the two most commonly discussed strategies of merger and
de-regionalisation are unlikely to deal effectively either with the GUFs’ difficulties
or the underlying problem of national union decline. We therefore advocate two
measures. e first is an increased material contribution from more developed
countries. e second, for which we draw on international relations theories, is
to encourage regions and sub-regions to make a contribution themselves. We
suggest that they pursue a union development agenda organised on a small group
or ‘minilateral’ basis and seek funding to support it. We believe the latter measure
offers real possibilities for accessing funds, for improving the real involvement
of developing country unions in the internationals and for building the affiliated
unions themselves.
We begin with an overview of the internationals’ membership and explain how
they are governed and staffed. Next, the resources problem is examined. Finally, we
expand in detail on the two proposed measures for arresting and reversing recent
trends.
40
Global Governance: Structures and Authority
Shown in Map 2, the GUFs’ headquarters are all in Europe. Most executive and
statutory (i.e. required by rule) international meetings are hosted at headquarters.
Map 2: Locations of Internationals’ HQs
In 2004, the regional offices were distributed as shown in Map 3.
Map 3: Locations of Internationals’ Oces
THE WORK OF THE INTERNATIONALS
41
In addition many internationals have established technical support offices in
sub-regions and specific countries, mainly to manage particular programmes and
projects, shown in Map 4.
Map 4: Locations of Project Oces
e internationals, in common with other union organisations, have well-
developed governance systems and all maintain strict formal decision-making
procedures based on their rules or ‘statutes’. ese formal structures and procedures
constitute a framework providing some constraints on powerful groups. e first
democratising structure, also standard in national unions, is congress. Congress is
the highest decision-making body, and in most cases meets every four years. is
contrasts with almost all national unions where congresses are held more frequently.
Congresses host around two thousand delegates and provide opportunities for
unions to network and lobby for their agendas. Formal congress procedures are
also tightly administered by headquarters officials, restricting the possibility of
unanticipated decisions.
All internationals have dues payment categories reflecting ability to pay, with
most affiliates clustered in the lower paying ones. In an attempt to limit the voting
power of high-paying affiliates, voting rights are in most GUFs determined by
paying membership levels regardless of category of payment. e only exception
is the removal of voting rights from unions who have paid no affiliation fees. is
is a second democratising measure, that seeks to de-couple subscription from
participation but, significantly, voting is restricted to leadership elections and issues
where consensus cannot be reached. Congresses, by virtue of their infrequency and
the lack of decision-taking opportunities, therefore have very restricted possibilities
for determining or affecting strategy.
THE INTERNATIONALS GOVERNANCE AND RESOURCES
42
e internationals’ executives meet more frequently, usually annually, but in
some cases twice a year. Seats are allocated for regional committee members,
regional distribution and women since the internationals have all made concerted
efforts over at least the last decade to ensure statutory representation of women at
all levels. is is a third democratising measure. It has helped to broaden executive
meeting agendas and in some cases how debate is conducted.
Table 4 shows the distribution of executive positions by region in the ICFTU
between 1972 and 2003.
Table 4: Regional Distribution of Executive Positions in Relation to Membership in the ICFTU, 1972–2003
Region 1972 1983 1992 2003
Seats % Mbp % Seats % Mbp % Seats % Mbp % Seats % Mbp %
Africa 3 12 868 2 4 11 546 1 5 11 1,997 2 6 13 10,590 9
Asia 5 20 4295 11 6 17 11,047 14 8 18 19,628 20 11 23 27,282 24
West Asia 1 3 1800 2 1 2 800 1
Middle East 2 8 844 2 2 6 865 1 2 4 882 1 2 4 1,273 1
Latin
America
3 12 1552 4 4 11 12,608 16 5 11 10,812 11 6 13 16,467 15
Caribbean 1 4 122 - 1 3 311 - 1 2 149 - 1 2 382 1
Third World 14
56 7,681 20 18 51 27,177 34 22 50 34,268 35 26 55 55,994 50
Europe 8 32 27,805 72 10 29 35,902 45 14 32 46,872 48 15 32 43,637 39
North
America
2 8 1,300 3 6 17 14,902 19 6 14 14,990 15 6 13 12,362 11
Source: Gumbrell McCormick (2002) and ICFTU Congress Reports
e Table shows that in 2003 the developing country unions had a small majority
of executive seats in the ICFTU. However, this tells us little about their weight in
decision making both there and in GUFs. In reality, a consensus between the main
unions of the developed world, and especially those that contribute high amounts
financially (the Germans, Nordics, North Americans and Japanese) is likely to carry
any vote.
Formal authority runs in clear lines up to the general secretary and president.
General secretaries and presidents are elected officials, as opposed to the vast
THE WORK OF THE INTERNATIONALS
43
majority of those working for the internationals who are appointed functionaries.
General secretaries are currently all European. An increasing number of
presidents are from developing countries. The general secretary carries ultimate
responsibility for their organisations but this is to some extent shared with
presidents particularly at times of political conflict. The great majority of senior
officials are men, with only one female GUF general secretary, Anita Normark
of BWI.
Information is controlled and distributed by the senior officers and this group
therefore has significant power to set agendas (Lukes, 2002). Officers’ power in
this respect probably exceeds that of union officers at national level, because
of the linguistic barriers and wide range of difficult-to-interpret information
involved internationally. As Kratochwil argues, there is a ‘baffling’ array of
information requirements for players in a multilateral setting, and this is apparent
in the case of the internationals. He argues that for international organisations
to be able to achieve consensus and cooperation, ‘of paramount importance is
the interpretation of the “facts” and inferences about motivations’ (Kratochwil,
1993: 448). This complex process of interpretation is inevitably dominated by
permanent officials. They also play a significant role in working groups. Working
groups and non-statutory committees, formed regularly to review and develop
policy are the general secretary’s main partners in policy making.
Executive committees are formally responsible for running the organisation
between congresses. However, Kahler’s (1992) problem of ‘latency’ is evident in
these committees. ‘Latency’ describes the situation whereby members become
passive in large diverse groups. Delegates fall into diplomatic mode and rarely raise
contentious issues publicly, with the breaks and evenings providing important
social and political contact. Few delegates attend executive meetings in order
to help resolve difficult international issues. All delegates’ unions face their own
financial and political problems and delegates are reluctant to tackle the same
problems multiplied at international level. In addition, they are concerned to
maintain unity and there is therefore limited real participation at this level. us,
the financial difficulties that we analyse below are little discussed even within the
internationals’ executives and are certainly not publicised. As a result, a subject of
fundamental importance is not widely understood and is only discussed within a
highly restricted group, often in informal situations. is group largely consists of
officials together with the representatives of influential national unions, which is
largely coterminous with those making large financial contributions.
ere are three types of authority that unions can draw on in their dealings with
each other in these bodies: contribution authority, political authority and moral
authority. e first comes from the amount that a union is seen to contribute to
the collective both in financial and human terms and has primacy over other forms
of authority. Germany, USA, Canada, Japan and the Nordic region collectively
THE INTERNATIONALS GOVERNANCE AND RESOURCES
44
represent on average 80 per cent of the internationals’ dues income. High levels of
affiliation fees and external project funding coming from Western European and
North American unions means that the focus at executive level is on their interests,
and this is well understood by unions from elsewhere. Conversely, where a region has
been consistently unable to deliver appropriate affiliation fee payments, for example
Latin America in recent years, their credibility and influence is much diminished.
Political authority comes from the perceived political importance of an affiliate’s
country and its trade union movement. At the global policy level, this is closely
associated with contribution authority although the political positioning of an
affiliate at important political moments is also significant in the shorter term.
e third, more temporary form of authority is moral. Moral authority is acquired
when a union movement becomes prominent because of its exceptional achievements
or particularly adverse environment; recent examples are Colombia and Iraq. When
representatives from these countries speak they are not contradicted and in general
they are supported. But this does not confer any wider authority on them to influence
global strategy and therefore the authority is limited and transient.
Stang
Some 700 people globally work for GUFs, 380 at headquarters and 297 in regional
offices. is is a small number in comparison both with the ITUC and with major
non-governmental organisations: in 2007, for example, Oxfam had 6,000 employees
worldwide. is small staff must administer organisations which themselves
consume large amounts of time and energy, with high levels of reporting and written
accounting to executive bodies. e workforce’s capacity to meet these demands
seems likely to decline in the near future, as approximately 50 per cent of the
internationals’ existing staff will retire by 2013. Many of these staff have enormous
understanding of particular industry sectors and unmatched in-country experience
acquired over long periods, raising a serious question about the regeneration of
human resources within the internationals.
Archer (2001) suggests that the national composition of staff is an important
dimension for judging an organisation’s degree of internationalisation. In this
sense, different internationals represent variations on a theme. In some cases the
general secretary strongly affects the functionaries’ national make up; in others the
influence of powerful affiliates dominates while in a third group both influences
are combined. ere are therefore high proportions of South African, German,
American, Australian, Japanese and British staff.
Employment in the regions is often more precarious than at the headquarters
secretariats, weakening the formers’ overall position in relation to headquarters. In
some GUFs, a proportion of those working in the regions is employed on temporary
contracts, through externally funded projects. e number of staff employed by the
THE WORK OF THE INTERNATIONALS
45
internationals is provided in Table 5 below, with the minimum numbers employed
on temporary contracts given in brackets.
Table 5: Numbers of Sta Employed by the Internationals, 2004
Global
Union
Total
Number
of Head
Oce
Sta
Regional Sta Total
Number
of
Regional
Sta
Total
Number
of Union
Sta
Percent-
age of
Head
Oce
Sta
Africa Am ericas Asia
Pacic
Europe Mi ddle
East a nd
North
Africa
EI 33 12 8 9 4 33 66 50
ICFTU 84 12 (2) 17 (3) 19 8 (4) 2 58 (9) 142 (9) 59
IFBWW 14 8 (6) 5 (2) 14 (8) 1 (1) 1 (1) 29 (18) 43 (18) 33
ICEM 17 2 4 2 2 10 27 63
IFJ 12 (3) 2 (1) 3 (1) 3 (1) 3 11 (3) 23 (6) 52
IMF 22 3 5 9 (4) 2 19 (4) 41 (4) 54
ITGLWF 7 3 4 4 4 15 22 32
ITF 102 5 7 10 11 1 34 136 75
IUF 19 (2) 2 (1) 7 (2) 12 (8) 12 (2) 33 (13) 52 (15) 37
PSI 28 12 9 15 20 2 (2) 58 (2) 86 (2) 33
UNI 41 8 12 10 16 46 87 47
TUAC 9 (3) 9 (3) 50
Total 388 (8) 69 (10) 81 (8) 107 (21) 83 (7) 6 (3) 346 (49) 734 (57) Average 49
Note 1: The ‘Head Oce sta’ gures include secretariat sta not located in Head Oces. The gures in
brackets refer to the minimum numbers of sta employed on temporary contracts.
Note 2: The ICEM closed its regional oces and relocated the secretariat to Geneva during the period 2007–
2008.
Source: Schwass (2004)
Outside of the developed world, externally funded projects play a considerable
role in providing staff. Not all of the internationals provided current information for
this table, but it gives some indication of how many staff members are partly (more than
50 per cent) or wholly financed by project funds: for example, 8 (6) means that out of 8
staff, 6 are financed by project funds. e number of staff sponsored by project funds
is in reality higher than shown here since some GUFs operate numerous project offices
separate from the regional offices. e proportion of head office to regional staff in
the last column is calculated without taking project staff into consideration; European
THE INTERNATIONALS GOVERNANCE AND RESOURCES
46
regional organisations independent of GUFs have also been omitted (Schwass, 2004).
e governance of the internationals therefore places considerable power in
their European headquarters, whilst influence within them is concentrated in
affiliates with high contribution authority. Most affiliated unions fall outside of this
category.
Membership
e key task in the 1980s and 1990s was seen to be moving away from being based
in the developed world and towards becoming genuinely global organisations. ere
was therefore an intense drive to build affiliation levels in order to permit elections
to regional structures, and this proved highly effective. e internationals recruited
large numbers of unions, many of which became the recipients of resources from the
developed world’s unions. Despite this drive, the internationals’ regions today are
globally incomplete, since at this point few GUFs have established presences in the
Middle East and none have offered formal recognition to the Chinese unions.
Non-OECD unions’ motivations for affiliating have important consequences.
According to Logue (1980), strong national unions will only affiliate to international
bodies if they cannot solve their problems at national level; in the case of non-OECD
unions, the converse applied since many of the unions affiliating were not and had
never been strong. ey affiliated because they were weak. Some sought to substitute
for old alliances that had previously sustained them. African and Asian unions
involved in national liberation movements had seen an erosion of their previously
close relationships with the nationalists in power after independence and started to
experience pressures to subordinate themselves to states (Wood and Brewster, 2007).
Others saw affiliation as a step out of political and industrial isolation. For many
unions, joining the internationals was their first opportunity to build genuinely
global contacts on the basis of relative equality, as previously international contacts
had been with ex-colonising countries’ unions. ey were in addition often controlled
by national political élites. For other unions, such as those from the former Soviet
Union, affiliation was seen as a way of affirming their democratic legitimacy by
gaining admission to the free trade union movement. It also provided them with a
way of looking at other forms of unionism which they had not been able to access
before the 1990s, without committing themselves to adopting any of them.
ese motivations sustained unions through affiliation processes which they
experienced as difficult and involved them in divulging organisational information
that they would have preferred not to submit. In the case of the ITUC, affiliation
was also a protracted process as it maintained a now-abandoned policy of limiting
affiliations to one per country, and in many countries competing union structures
and political affiliations made selection processes lengthy. ese processes raised
expectations of what could be delivered after affiliation, and in many cases the
THE WORK OF THE INTERNATIONALS
47
demands overwhelmed the internationals. e real possibilities of providing help
were dwarfed by the expectations of unions whose only previous experiences of
international organisations were of large bodies such as the United Nations or well-
resourced NGOs.
Some unions, such as those based in South Africa, were relatively self-sufficient,
but these were a small minority. Most new affiliates posed major difficulties, and
foremost among them were those from the former Soviet Union. Since the 1990s,
these unions have put significant pressure on the GUFs to help them become
more effective organisations. Most of these vast unions, with formal memberships
numbering millions, were completely unknown to the internationals, since they had
previously been excluded from the ITUC ‘family’. ey are heterogeneous and virtually
impossible accurately to map (Garver et al., 2007). Whilst making demands on the
internationals, they maintain their old affiliations. e VKP, the CIS regional structure
dating from Soviet times, continues to operate and to provide an alternative locus of
activity, and, along with WFTU, in the 1990s opposed national union affiliation to the
Western ‘anti-communist’ internationals. In 2000 the Russian FNPR affiliated to the
ICFTU. However, its President, Mikhail Shmakov, currently sits as the President of VKP,
highlighting the Russian unions’ decision to