Dan Gallin, IFWEA President, recently attended an IFWEA Philippines Symposium on Globalisation. This article is based on his presentation to the Symposium. It aims to generate discussion and debate on how the labour movement globally can respond to globalisation.

Other pictures taken during the Symposium

What is globalisation?

Globalisation means different things to different people, and the word is used to describe different realities. I would say that globalisation is, in the first instance, the process by which a single, integrated world economy is taking shape. This is a process driven by relatively recent but very consequential technological advances, mostly in communications and transport. In this sense, globalisation is unstoppable and irreversible, much like the industrial revolution of the 19^th century. In this context also, the discussion as to whether one is “for” or “against” globalisation is equally meaningless as the same discussion was in the 19^th century about being “for” or “against” the industrial revolution.

An entirely different question is that of understanding who controls this process, who benefits and who loses out. This is a political question, a question about social and political power. It is a question that is decided by the relationship of forces between social actors confronting each other globally, basically capital and labour, a relationship of forces that is constantly changing.

The contest is between the present form of globalisation, controlled by capital in its interests, and a form of globalisation that is politically controlled by the majority of the world’s people and therefore likely to benefit the majority of the world’s people. The issue is not to “oppose” globalisation but to appropriate globalisation. That is what the global struggle of the labour movement is all about.

Challenges for the labour movement

The current form of globalisation, dominated by transnational capital, has challenged the labour movement principally in three ways:

In the first place, by the enormous rise in power of the transnational corporations, which are at the same time the spearheads and the chief beneficiaries of the new technologies. The large ones have a turnover bigger than the GNP of middle-sized countries; they are influential and sometimes dominant in the national politics of most countries, and they control most of the international financial institutions and mechanisms of economic cooperation by proxy, through their influence on governments.

Capital has also become highly mobile, with staggering sums circulating every day through the Internet around the world, outside the control of any national or international governmental institution.

In the second place, labour has been challenged by the decline of the State in its role of administering and arbitrating the social compromise negotiated in the post-WWII period when labour was relatively powerful. Transnational capital no longer needs this social compromise because it now operates at global level, where it can evade the political constraints imposed on it at national level.

The privatisation of public enterprises, the dismantling of essential services provided by the State, such as education, health and water supply, are a part of this attack on the State and, through the State, on social standards which reflect some concern for an equitable distribution of the national product.

Through its global operation, and through its influence on international trade arrangements, such as those negotiated in the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which supersede national laws and policies, transnational capital is also sidestepping national institutions of democratic control, such as parliaments, political parties and also trade union centres.

The third challenge is the emergence of the global labour market where, because of the mobility of capital and the electronic communications, workers of all countries are competing with each other, as governments underbid each other to keep or attract foreign investment. This has set into motion a descending spiral of steadily deteriorating wages, conditions and social services with near-slave labour conditions at the bottom.

What has been the response of the trade union movement?

Initially, the response of the labour movement was weak and confused. That is now changing. The labour movement is beginning to respond at three levels: the trade union agenda, the organising agenda and the political agenda.

The foremost task on the trade union agenda is to organise the transnational corporations. This means organising each of their plants and linking them within an international organisation, so as to create a union counterweight and a measure of union control within the company itself.

In this respect, the IUF has played a pioneering role, through its agreements with transnational corporations in the food and hotel industry. The pattern is now spreading to shipping, the chemical and petroleum industry, and construction.

These are agreements on principles such as the recognition of trade union rights. Some agreements also include other issues, such as programmes to promote the equality between men and women, vocational training, best practice on information at enterprise level, and occupational safety and health.

It is not unrealistic to anticipate the rise of a new system of global industrial relations based on agreements between international trade union organisations and transnational corporations.

The IFWEA is making its own contribution to international organising through its International Study Circle Programme. Local study circles could easily be local unions in different enterprises of the same transnational corporation. They could be discussing the company. At the end of the programme, you would have a network of locals that know each other, know how to communicate with each other, know something about the other enterprises, in other words, a virtual company council. This does not replace meetings, but it helps prepare meetings, it maintains the momentum between meetings, it facilitates follow-up and it certainly facilitates common action.

This is one of the ways in which we can use the new technology to globalise ourselves. The same communication technology, which has enabled capital to globalise, has put us in the position to create what could be the most effective trade union international in history, as long as we have the political will and the determination to do it.

The issue of international trade union rights should be high on the trade union agenda. The right to strike is internationally recognised as a basic human right, as attested by several international instruments. When it comes to solidarity strikes, however, especially in an international context, we suddenly find out that a basic human right is not so basic after all. International solidarity strikes are criminalised in many countries, or surrounded with so many conditions as to make them practically impossible. Yet, it is precisely this variant of the right to strike that we most need in a globalising economy. There are NGOs which have mounted campaigns to recover this right, such as the International Centre for Trade Union Rights (ICTUR) based in London.

The organising agenda means simply that we have to organise workers into unions. At present, only about 13 percent of wageworkers in the world are organised; if one adds the informal sector, the figure drops by more than half, probably around 4 to 5 percent.

We need to deal constructively and effectively with the problem of the informal sector, which now includes the majority of the world’s working class and which is growing, at the same time as the formal sector is shrinking.

Therefore organising workers in informal employment into unions should be a priority of the international trade union movement. This is not the case. Most unions will tell you that with scarce resources, their priority has to remain organising the unorganised in the formal sector.

In many instances workers in informal employment are organising themselves. Unions should be supportive of those who do.

A related issue is that of the feminisation of the trade union movement. If we are serious about organising a majority of workers anywhere, we must realise that the vast majority of workers in informal employment are women. Also a majority of workers in casual, part-time and temporary employment – the area where jobs are growing, particularly in the service trades – also are women.

We therefore need to open up our organisations to women to a fare greater extent. This means not only taking on board the specific demands of women workers, but to facilitate their access to union structures, including at leadership level, and a change in the culture of our movement, which is still far too much attached to the image of the macho industrial proletarian, an image that does not reflect today’s working class.

The political agenda has to do with the relations between the trade union movement and the political parties which are its traditional allies. This relationship has become problematic. In Europe, most social-democratic parties in government have carried out the same neo-liberal policies as their conservative opponents, and there has been growing tension with the unions. The remains of the Communist parties have nothing to say about globalisation except that they are “against” it, which is not very helpful. The important point is that wherever unions have delegated their political thinking to parties, they are left without a workable response to globalisation.

This does not mean that unions do not need a political dimension. We cannot do without politics, and everything we do is political. But it does mean that we need to develop our own political programme independently, on the basis of the needs of our membership and incorporating a social vision that society at large can identify with. This should not be that difficult, since we are not defending any interests that are different from those of the great majority of the population. We are not a “special interest group” but the backbone of organised, democratic civil society.

On the basis of such a programme we should seek alliances with other groups in civil society that have aims converging with ours: the women’s movement, the human rights organisations, the ecology activists. The demonstrations at Seattle and those that followed demonstrated the variety, the depth and the potential strength of mounting popular opposition to the neo-liberal model of globalisation, especially when such popular coalitions include the labour movement.