Globalising the labour movement

Let' s start with some of the problems. I can think of seven offhand.

1. The high-tech economy is making unions weaker. Workers are moving from sectors which were previously highly organised (such as manufacturing) to sectors which are notoriously difficult to organise (such as software publishing). Those new manufacturing jobs which are being created have moved from regions with traditionally powerful unions (Western Europe, North America) to regions where they are often illegal and suppressed (Latin America, Asia) or in historic decline (Eastern Europe).

Unions persist in efforts to organise both the new high-tech sector (notable examples including the Communication Workers of America' s organising campaigns at Microsoft and IBM as well as MSF' s Information Technology Professionals Association here in the UK). Unions are also putting increasing pressure on governments to create a better climate for independent trade unions in those very same countries to which jobs have fled.

But so far, both the new high-tech sectors and the 'emerging markets' remain largely union-free.

2. The new communications technologies create severe difficulties for unions in the new, wired workplace. For example, the issue that is coming to be know as 'online rights' . As more and more work is done online, the denial of electronic access in the workplace (using corporate intranets) to trade union representatives cuts unions off from the workforce and gives employers means of communicating with workers that unions do not automatically have. Persistent employer monitoring of workers online (including listening in to their phone calls) will have a chilling effect on organising campaigns and on day-to-day trade union issues (such as handling grievances, in particular sensitive ones like bullying and sexual harassment). Unions are bewildered by these new issues and cannot yet even reach agreement on what they aspire to. For instance, do they call for a complete ban on monitoring in the workplace or do they support allowing selective monitoring?

3. The emergence of culture of extreme individualism even among ordinary workers and particularly among those in the high-tech sector is not a culture conducive to the growth of traditional trade unions. Given stock options worth (on paper) millions, they may be reluctant to look at collective action as a source of social mobility. (Though with the recent collapse of new economy share prices on the NASDAQ and elsewhere, workers in the high-tech sector will have to look elsewhere for benefits.) Those workers are also increasingly mobile, moving from company to company, making traditional forms of organising by workplace difficult. Unions need to think creatively, and one solution for some may be the old model of craft unions (or even guilds), which might work among highly-skilled and mobile workers. But this model has not yet been tested successfully and old-style unions based on industrial-era capitalism seem unable to engage in meaningful dialogue with, let alone successfully organise, workers in the new economy.

4. A lot of work has been done on the question of whether being connected to the net isolates people from each other. The evidence is not conclusive. My own experience shows that the net allows me to find those people who share my own peculiar interests, thereby actually increasing the quantity and quality of my friendships - and the scope of my political activity. For small political organisations, this should prove to be hugely advantageous. For unions, proper use of the net might even increase participation in things like branch meetings, though I have seen no evidence of this yet. Still, the threat of social atomisation is a real one.

5. The New Economy is a global one, making the formation of new, global trade unions essential. But these are nearly impossible to organise, and in the 30 years since Charles Levinson of the international chemical workers trade secretariat called for a trade union 'countervailing power' to multinationals, little has changed. Barriers to such global unions have traditionally included travelling costs (now moderated somewhat by the use of the net and generally lower airfares) and language issues, which I will touch on later. But on the whole, we seem no closer now to global unions than we did a generation ago, when transnational capitalism was just beginning to flower.

6. The increasing dominance in the New Economy of a small, well-financed group of mega-corporations is creating a media monopoly that is very difficult to overcome. The fact that every child can create his or her own website doesn' t mean that they are able to create true alternatives to the traditional media monopolies. That concentration of power means that in Europe, for example, the vast majority of the top-drawing websites remain in American corporate hands; indeed all of them, globally, are controlled by corporations and none by non-governmental organisations such as unions. Websites of such institutions as the 125-million member ICFTU or the 7 million-member TUC don' t come anywhere close to the top of the list.

7. Finally, every time it becomes necessary for unions to move forward, change, adopt a new way of doing things, this is going to pose problems. Unions are finding it extremely difficult to adapt to the new economy and are largely clueless about how to use the new technology to their advantage. There are many examples I could offer, some quite humorous, illustrating this point, but one doesn' t wish to embarrass the unions concerned. (Though the story about the trade union general secretary who lifted up his mouse and pointed it at a computer screen as if it were a television remote control remains a classic.)

And yet in spite of all that, there are grounds for optimism. The fact that the new communications technologies are so much cheaper than the old ones is compelling some unions to adopt them when they would not have done so had cost been an issue. The efficiency of the New Economy - the cost of mass emailings for example, or daily publication of news on the web - is spreading even to our movement.

The speed of the net means that we are able to react rapidly to events which previously we found out about only weeks after they took place, if at all. Recent examples of this included the very rapid reaction of unions around the globe, and most notably the highly-wired Australian unions, to events in East Timor and Fiji. The role of LabourStart as a central provider of news to the unions cannot be overstated.

The biggest technical obstacle to international solidarity and the formation of a new International is language. There are literally thousands of languages spoken in the world today and fewer than one in four people understands English. In a global economy, this is not a problem for capitalists, who can simply compel anyone who wants to do business with them to speak whatever is currently the dominant imperialist language (English since 1945). For a long time it seemed as if the only possible solution to the language barrier was the use of an auxiliary language, such as Esperanto. And indeed there was a strong movement which supported Esperanto among both trade unionists and socialists, particularly during the inter-war years. Today, however, thanks to the new communications technologies there is another solution just over the horizon which will allow us to move towards true international communication in our movement: machine translation (MT). There is some very interesting use of MT taking place even now in the unions. These include the International Transport Workers Federation' s use of translation software on a regular basis to cut translation costs, another project to create real-time English/German translation for trade union discussion over the net which is being proposed by postal and telecom unions in the UK and Germany, and even LabourStart' s own efforts in this direction, being the first labour website which can be translated online, instantly, into 24 languages.

The tools created by the new economy allow for the possibility of an intensification of trade union democracy - meaning both online discussion and decision-making (online voting). The latter has already happened in a few unions, most notably in allowing a swift resolution of the recent Boeing strike in the USA, but was also used in an internal battle in a British union by a leadership eager to get around the rebelliousness of elected union bodies. There are many examples of successful online discussions taking place in the labour movement, and one which springs to mind was set up by the New South Wales Teachers Federation on the LabourStart website (which offers free forums to any union which asks). The NSWTF forum has had hundreds of messages posted and involved a very large number of teachers in that Australian state.

Trade union education can also go online, allowing the delivery of courses to far larger numbers of union members via online distance learning. This remains, however, largely a possibility as unions have moved very slowly in this direction.

Organising campaigns are also aided by the new technology - right up to the actual signing up of new members online, which is done by the Communication Workers of America in their campaigns at Microsoft and IBM. The web has been used by organising campaigns to bring pressure on companies which do not respect the rights of workers to union representation, and a very successful example of this is the 'Respect at LAX' campaign which used banner advertising on Yahoo! to bring pressure to bear on employers at Los Angeles International Airport.

I think that communication itself can be a transformative experience. Ask anyone who reads the LabourStart website every day. It changes the way we look at the world when we start our day with trade union news from Germany, Korea and South Africa rather than what the monopolistic media corporations think is news (celebrity gossip, mostly).

This is a period of enormous opportunity for us, comparable to the early days of the Industrial Revolution with the telegraph, railroad and steamship, from which the first unions grew. It is not yet clear whether unions and the left will embrace the new technologies and use the tools provided by the new economy for our ends. Progress has been painfully slow. If we do move forward we should aim to create what Peter Waterman has called a 'global solidarity culture' whose organisational expression will consist of something new and wonderful - global, networked unions.

Eric Lee coordinates www.labourstart.org