LABOUR: US Workers Welcome South African Solidarity Strike

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jun 27 1999 (IPS) - US labourers striking against a German tire manufacturer have hailed a walk-out by some 800 South African rubber workers as a sign of growing international solidarity among unions.

The South Africans staged a two-hour work stoppage in Port Elizabeth Thursday in sympathy with workers at a Charlotte, USA plant owned by the Continental company of Hannover, Germany.

While unusual, the action was seen as the latest in a series of efforts by national unions to co-ordinate strategies against increasingly powerful multinational corporations.

“We recognise more and more the need to join forces across borders if we’re going to successfully confront these global companies,” said Kenneth Zinn, North American coordinator for the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine, and General Workers’ Unions (ICEM).

The Brussels-based ICEM, which represents 20 million workers in 115 ountries, has been one of the most aggressive of the 12 big international labour federations in organising multi- national strategies to bring pressure on corporations with operations in many countries.

In March, for example, tire and rubber unions from 16 countries in which Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. has operations, met under ICEM’s banner in Cleveland, USA and created a formal coalition “for our mutual defence and advancement” in dealing with th e US-based company.

Later that month, ICEM, at a meeting in Trinidad and Tobago, created a similar network for oil and gas workers from 12 countries in the Americas.

“The globalisation of the new economy requires it,” according to Zinn, a veteran trade unionist. “We can’t fight these fights in one community or one country anymore.”

The trend toward international cooperation among unions has become unmistakable in recent years, although the movement has yet to catch up with changes in the world economy, experts said.

As countries have opened their economies and liberalised their trade and investment regimes over the past 20 years, corporations have spread their production facilities around the world to take advantage of local conditions, including cheap labour and access to raw materials and markets.

This has created what many analysts called a “race to the bottom,” in which workers, particularly in high-wage countries in the industrialised West, generally have been left behind.

“Globalization has had drastic effects on unions and workers,” according to Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello, authors of ‘Global Village or Global Pillage: Economic Reconstruction from the Bottom.’

“It has allowed business to pit workers, communities and whole countries against one another, establishing what has been called a global hiring hall and outflanking labour organizationally,” they wrote in ‘The Nation’ weekly recently.

To address this challenge, national labour unions have been forced to “go global” by devising strategies with their foreign counterparts.

“In the 1970’s, (US) labour unions were remarkably parochial,” according to Kate Bronfenbrenner of the New York School of Industrial and Labour Relations. “But there’s been a major shift. Now they understand that their power and effectiveness in the global economy depends on true international solidarit y.”

In the United States, that shift has become particularly evident since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the United States, Mexico and Canada took effect in 1994.

US and independent Mexican unions have worked together in filing complaints against employers under NAFTA’s labour side agreement, and even in taking action in support of each other’s disputes.

In addition, increasingly frequent exchanges and tours by rank-and-file workers from plants in one NAFTA country to communities dominated by the same industry or even the same employers in the other two have contributed to a sense of solidarity and red uced xenophobia, according to labour activists here.

“What we are seeing are the first signs of a real resurgence of labour unions,” according to Bronfenbrenner. “They are focusing on issues that really resonate around the world.”

These kinds of tactics are similar to ones used in the late 1980s by ICEM and its US affiliates, notably the United Steelworkers and the United Mineworkers, she said.

“The steelworkers probably have more experience in this than anyone,” she told IPS, citing the successful global campaign against Ravenswood in 1990-91 and the 1994-96 Bridgestone/Firestone strike – which featured exchanges of Japanese and US workers and global boycott of the Japanese-owned company’s tire products.

The steelworkers also have been at the heart of the increasingly bitter Continental strike in Charlotte, now nine months old.

Some 1,450 workers struck against the company during negotiations over a new contract. The German company responded by hiring 800 “permanent replacement” workers.

In April, ICEM sponsored a meeting in Charlotte of trade union representatives of Continental plants in six other countries who called on the company to “immediately cease the employment of strikebreakers” and reinstate the striking employees.

It also organised a “global week of action” against Continental. This included protests by unions representing the company’s Belgian and French workers, actions across the United States, a demonstration by the main Australian union federation, and Thursday’s work stoppage that was carried out by the Nation al Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) against General Tyre, a Continental subsidiary.

“NUMSA’s action is a tremendous show of global labour solidarity for the Charlotte strikers,” said ICEM General Secretary Vic Thorpe. “The South African tire workers understand that Continental’s abuse of American workers is also an insult to them, and they have acted accordingly.”

Continental, however, so far has rejected such pressure. “The strike at the Charlotte plant …is a local matter that can be settled only by the American company at that location,” it said recently.

LABOUR: US Workers Welcome South African Solidarity Strike

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jun 25 1999 (IPS) - US labourers striking against a German tire manufacturer have hailed a walk-out by some 800 South African rubber workers as a sign of growing international solidarity among unions.
(more…)