May Day Alert: Only Global Unions Can Stop the Race to the Bottom

Editor's note: Stephen Lerner is a veteran union organizer with the Service Employees' International Union (SEIU) who headed the Justice for Janitors campaign. This is adapted from an article that originally appeared in the winter 2007 issue of the New Labor Forum.

At no time in history has there been a greater urgency or opportunity to form real global unions whose goal is to organize tens of millions of workers to win economic and social justice by counterbalancing global corporations on the world stage even as the power of the state declines.

Global labor solidarity, as currently practiced, is failing and will continue to fail in the face of the growing power of global corporations and the declining power of the state. Instead, global unions need to be formed whose purpose is to unite workers to negotiate global agreements with global corporations. The property services sector, which includes janitors and security officers, has many of the critical characteristics and immediate conditions needed to organize a true global union, and provides an important, but not unique, model of how a global union is possible. Globalization is creating change at an even faster pace than during industrialization. We need to understand how it is reshaping workers' lives and power around the globe, so that instead of being swept away by globalization, we can harness it to transform ourselves and the world. To win real power, workers and their unions need to build a movement defined not by what we are against, but by what we are for: a movement inspired by hope for a better world and a plan to achieve it. Anything else puts unions at risk of becoming as irrelevant as those who opposed industrialization in the hope of defending artisans and small craftsman.

Understanding globalization: the world is tilting

The world is tilting away from workers and unions and the traditional ways they've fought for and won justice -- away from the power of national governments, national unions, national solutions and government institutions developed to facilitate and regulate globalization. It is tilting toward global trade, giant global corporations, global solutions, and toward Asia, especially China and India. We can no longer depend on influencing bureaucratic global institutions, like the ILO, or fighting the entities that ultimately are accountable to or controlled by global corporations, like the WTO. Workers and their unions need to use their still-formidable power to counter the power of global corporations before the world tilts so far that unions are washed away, impoverishing workers who currently have unions and trapping workers who don't in ever-deeper poverty. The power equation needs to be balanced before democratic rule and institutions are destroyed.

Tilting toward global corporations

Since the formation of early global companies, like the English East India Co. (1600) and the Dutch East India Co. (1602), multinationals have spread around the world. In 1600 there were 500 global corporations. In 1914, there were 3,000; in 1992, 30,400; and by 2000, the total number of global corporations had ballooned to 63,000. Today, they are bigger and more powerful than ever before and no longer allegiant to the country in which they were born or are now headquartered.

As multinationals have grown, wealth and capital have become increasingly concentrated. Of the 100 largest economies in the world, 52 are not nations -- they are global corporations (see here for data). The problem isn't that corporations operate in more than one country -- it is that multinational corporations are so powerful that they increasingly dominate what happens in whole countries, hemispheres and the entire globe.

Tilting away from the state

For 150 years, trade unionists and progressives have viewed influencing and trying to gain control of the state as central to any strategy of winning a more just society. National governments still have enormous influence, but their power is diminishing every day.