[Marxism] Globalism for the Rest of Us

["Austin, Andrew" <austina@xxxxxxxx>]

I apologize for posting something of this length, but the American Prospect is 
a subscriber service and I assume most people here do not subscribe to the 
Prospect.  I personally don't either, but I have a colleague who does and he 
sent me this.  I think this article is quite interesting and worthy of our 
attention.  It's a little inside stuff on the thinking of the bourgeoisie.  See 
in particular the postscript.  Andrew
 
Globalism for the Rest of Us
With the birth of a global union, the world may be flat, but wages don't have 
to be. 

By Harold Meyerson
Web Exclusive: 08.30.05 

A mere 157 years and six months after two European political philosophers 
concluded a pamphlet with the words "Workers of the world, unite," it may 
actually be beginning to happen. 

Last Thursday, August 25, a number of unions from around the world came to 
Chicago to announce that they are forming a new alliance that will fund and 
coordinate the organizing campaigns of janitors and security guards in 
(initially) India, Poland, Holland, Germany, South Africa, and the United 
States. As recently as two years ago, it was unlikely that any labor-force 
futurologist would have predicted that the first de facto global union would 
consist of the people who guard and clean office buildings and factories. But 
in the past couple of years, cleaning and security contractors from all over 
the planet have been purchased by a handful of chiefly European-based 
multinationals. The two largest -- Securitas, based in Sweden, and Group 4 
Securicor, a British-Danish amalgam -- employ 600,000 workers between them and 
are growing rapidly. 

The leading U.S. security companies -- Burns, Wackenhut, and the 
once-legendarily-goonish Pinkertons -- are now owned by the multinationals, 
too, but the experience of the guards, here and abroad, has been anything but 
uniform. Securitas, which owns Burns and Pinkerton, is that rarest of all 
21st-century phenomena: a model employer, offering its workers extensive 
training and benefits. But Group 4 Securicor, alas, is very much an employer 
for our time. Its Wackenhut employees make do without much in the way of 
benefits or training; indeed, Wackenhut has been cited repeatedly for its 
preparation and performance at the nuclear facilities it guards in the United 
States. In Indonesia and Kenya, Group 4 has sought to bust long-established 
unions. In South Africa, says Jackson Simon, leader of the South African 
Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU), airport security guards lost their 
permanent-employee status, and with it access to government benefits, when 
Group 4 made them shift to month-to-month contract work last November. 

But while autoworkers and their union leaders have long been conscious of 
working in a global marketplace for global employers, that realization -- and 
that reality -- is new for janitors and security guards and the unions that 
represent them. "I was guilty of this, of arguing that globalization was a 
distraction for us," says Stephen Lerner, director of the property-services 
division of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and architect of 
that union's Justice for Janitors campaign. "What I've now realized is that 
while the jobs can't move, you need a global labor movement once the companies 
are global. If a company is nonunion everyplace else, you can't keep it union 
here" -- an experience that unions in the increasingly rickety workers' 
paradise of Europe are beginning to realize. 

Lerner's boss, SEIU President Andy Stern, describes the first time he realized 
his union would have to go global. "My dawning realization came in Minnesota a 
couple of years ago, where we had to hold three elections to win the right to 
represent some school-bus drivers. I was wondering, 'Why was this so hard?' 
Normally, our in-state political leverage and the workers' solidarity would 
have been enough to overcome employer resistance. But the company was owned by 
this British employer who was immune to local politics and local conditions." 

But it was the property-service sector that became truly globalized -- and not 
only the employers. In the United States and many European nations, the 
janitorial and security workforces are composed disproportionately of 
immigrants. The workers, the contractors, and the capital are global, says 
Lerner. "Everything travels across the world, except unions." 

Beginning last Thursday, though, the unions are traveling, too. Their current 
odyssey began some years ago, when AFL-CIO President John Sweeney shifted the 
focus of the federation's international department from fighting the Cold War 
-- a difficult chore after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but some 
pre-Sweeney AFL-CIO hands knew no other kind of international work -- to 
winning global support for unions involved in strike actions here, and 
attempting to create a global trade order that didn't function solely for the 
benefit of corporations and investors. At the 1999 anti-World Trade 
Organization (WTO) demonstrations in Seattle, the AFL-CIO sponsored a 
remarkable, if now forgotten, rally of 20,000 workers from around the world 
that featured one South African autoworker who suggested that his employer, 
Ford Motors, should have a global agreement establishing a uniform code of 
conduct and workers rights in every country where it has plants. 

But the Fords of this world are mobile. They close factories in higher-wage 
countries to move the work to lower-wage countries. Workers in the 
manufacturing world are at a profound disadvantage in bargaining with such 
employers. Janitors and guards may work for lower wages than United Auto 
Workers (UAW) members, but experience no such impediment on their bargaining, 
or organizing, ability. "If you stage a job action, a manufacturing company can 
pull up stakes and you lose the jobs," says Lerner. "In property services, a 
job action may cause one company to go and another to come in, but the jobs are 
still there. You can be more daring; you can take greater risks." 

Another U.S.-based union that has pushed the global envelope is the 
Communications Workers of America (CWA). Under the leadership of Larry Cohen, 
who became the CWA's president on Aug. 29 at that union's convention, the CWA 
helped put together a consortium of telecommunications unions from many 
nations, partly to coordinate some bargaining. But telecom is still largely a 
mishmash of nationally based companies; global consolidation has proceeded 
further and faster in property services. The SEIU and a few other 
property-service unions -- most notably, the Swedish Transport Workers -- 
realized that they had an unprecedented opportunity. "By moving to unite 
workers across countries in union alliances at a single company, SEIU is 
enabling workers to communicate and to act inside their companies with the same 
level of efficacy that the companies themselves have," says Ginny Coughlin, the 
international affairs director of UNITE HERE, the hotel and restaurant workers' 
union. 

In a sense, what this effort seeks to do is to take the European model of 
social partnerships -- in which unions recognize their workers' unions and meet 
with them on a continent-wide basis in works councils -- and extend it to a 
global scale. And not a moment too soon: As the economy has gone global, a 
number of European employers who treat their workers fairly in their homeland 
have exhibited no such impulse in their treatment of their workers abroad -- in 
America, characteristically opposing the efforts of their employees to 
unionize. The problem is, many European unions, increasingly on the defensive 
at home, have exhibited no particular interest in the behavior of their 
employers once they've left the Continent. 

But as European companies have gone more and more global, the national or 
continental focus of the European unions has grown less and less adequate. 
"It's much easier to change the behavior of a company that's unionized at an 
80-percent level globally than it is when it's unionized at 10 percent," says 
Stern. 

The SEIU's European counterpart in this consciousness-raising effort is the 
Swedish Transport Workers, whose long-standing relationship with Securitas, 
SEIU officials say, was crucial to that company's decision not to oppose the 
SEIU's unionization campaigns at Pinkerton and Burns. As Lars Lindgren, the 
Transport Workers' international secretary, says, "We talk about standards all 
the time. I know that SEIU has tried to invoke the [Organisation for Economic 
Co-operation and Development, or OECD] guidelines with Group 4 Securicor, but 
it hasn't gotten anywhere. If OECD guidelines fail with Group 4, which has 
violated them repeatedly, what are those guidelines for? When the guidelines 
don't work, we need a global union." 

Fortunately, there's already a global network structure in which the 
property-service initiative has incubated. The Union Network International 
(UNI) includes unions from around the planet in a range of nonmanufacturing 
sectors, of which property services is just one (telecommunications is 
another). It was at a meeting of the UNI's property-services division, chaired 
by the SEIU's Tom Balanoff (who heads the union's Chicago property-services 
local), at UNI headquarters outside Geneva last January, where the topic of the 
property-service unions targeting, funding, and coordinating organizing drives 
first arose. The level of global readiness for the idea was, shall we say, 
uneven -- at which point, the "SEIU -- brilliant and willful as ever," says one 
friendly critic, "went all over the globe persuading unions of the need to form 
a joint organizing effort and deal with companies at a multinational level in a 
way that no one has ever done before." 

The UNI has its own pre-existing organizing fund of $5 million, to which a 
number of property-service unions will contribute an additional $1 million for 
this effort. For its part, besides ponying up the lion's share of the $1 
million, the SEIU will provide, where needed, some staffers to help in 
organizing workers and identifying how best to put financial pressure on 
recalcitrant employers. (Hamburg and Amsterdam are among their first stops.) 

Are there other sectors where the consolidation of employers into a handful of 
global concerns would create the setting for such efforts? "Our sectors are 
dominated by a handful of global companies," said Philip Jennings, the general 
secretary of the UNI, at last week's press conference, singling out retail 
("about 10," he said), media ("about five") and financial services ("about 
20"). But in the United States, these are sectors in which union representation 
is declining or may never have existed at all (there is, after all, no U.S. 
financial-services union), which means there's no SEIU equivalent to help such 
efforts along. 

But the need for workers to play catch-up with their employers in the 
globalization game is both chronic and acute. Wages are flat and benefits are 
being cut in the United States while corporate revenues are soaring and cash on 
hand is at record levels. Wages and benefits in Europe are being scaled back. 
The trade agreements that were supposed to benefit workers in the developing 
world characteristically haven't. We may be moving toward one world, but it is 
divided more starkly by class than the post-World War II economies of the West, 
in which a unionized workforce created the first majority middle-class nations 
in history. Creating widely shared prosperity in a global economy requires 
global unions, just as the widely shared prosperity of Western nations in the 
postwar decades required national unions. 

"We have to recognize that in real, 21st-century terms, 'Workers of the world, 
unite,' can't be just a slogan," said Stern last week. "It's the way of 
succeeding in a global economy." 

POSTSCRIPT
And why is it that it took the world's workers a century and a half to get 
around to that charge given them by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The 
Communist Manifesto (well, chiefly Marx, who was the document's primary 
author)? Because it took the capitalists a century and a half to build the 
world that Marx described. 

In 1998, I reread the Manifesto for the first time since college (we read by 
gaslight in those days) for a review on the occasion of its 150th anniversary. 
I was astonished: Marx wasn't writing about 1848; he was writing about 2000. 

Despite some monumental errors -- assuming that the proletariat was an 
inherently revolutionary class, which time and again it has proven itself not 
to be, and discounting the effect of nationalism on working-class solidarity -- 
the Manifesto remains perhaps the greatest work of social imagination and 
prophecy ever written. It describes a globalization process that has only 
really occurred in our time -- not Marx's. Don't take my word for it. Here's 
Marx: 

"The bourgeoisie, by rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by 
immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most 
barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are 
the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it 
forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. 
It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of 
production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their 
midst ... ." 

And: "The bourgeoisie ... in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered 
freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- free trade ... . It 
has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of 
science, into its paid wage laborers." 

That's our world he's describing. The world of the WTO, of trade laws taking 
precedence over local labor and environmental standards, of Mexican agriculture 
collapsing, of Wal-Mart forcing the production of the cheapest goods from the 
cheapest corners of the globe, even of doctors working for HMOs. It's the world 
in which the schlock of U.S. television pops up on TV screens the world over. 

So no wonder it took 157 years. It took that long for the economy to catch up 
with Marx's vision of its global integration. For what Marx does in the 
Manifesto is look at an acorn and describe an oak -- at a time when oaks didn't 
even exist. 

Harold Meyerson is the Prospect's editor-at-large.


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