Two contrasting news stories caught my eye over the past couple of months. The first involved the strike, at least initially unsuccessful, by the mechanics' union at Northwest Airlines in an attempt to avoid pay cuts by, if necessary, shutting down the airline and forcing it into bankruptcy. Other unions at the airline decided not to support the strike in view of past differences they had had with the mechanics. As a result, the airline continued to operate with replacement labor.
It is perhaps one small vignette in a continuing story of fragmentation in the union movement in North America. On a larger scale, sizeable groups of workers primarily in service industries recently disengaged themselves from the AFL-CIO, which they perceived as being dominated by smaller, more traditional, industrial unions. The Northwest Airlines dispute is the latest in a series of labor-manager-owner conflicts—beginning with an air traffic controllers' strike in the United States in the 1980s—in which organized labor has suffered one defeat after another, often losing jobs in the process to more productive processes, technology substitution, or often-unorganized, lower-paid workers in other countries.
The second story, buried on the inside pages of the Wall Street Journal, concerned the announcement by the head of Union Network International, a federation of 900 unions in 150 countries, that UNI would "coordinate organizing efforts" at five multinational companies, including Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., Deutsche Post AG, Walt Disney Co., News Corp., and Ikea. These efforts would include work stoppages in countries where employees in these companies are unionized (in the case of Wal-Mart, Germany) in an effort to foster organization efforts in countries where their employees are not organized. Such organizing efforts were said to be aimed at South Korea, Argentina, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Puerto Rico.
In the past, labor has by organizing gained the power necessary to counteract that of large organizations operating within single, typically developed economies. The question is whether the concept of cooperation and individual sacrifice for the common good will work in a global labor market populated by large multinational employers.
Organized labor has gained a questionable reputation in global competition. Europe, where it is arguably the strongest these days, appears not to be competitive in many global industries in which labor costs are still important. Germany, in particular, where workers and union members routinely occupy seats on boards of the largest companies (through a process called "co-determination"), recently has lagged behind other European countries in its ability to increase its productivity, grow its economy, and compete globally.
Are we about to see the rise of labor organized on a global basis? If so, will such a movement be able to achieve the same purposes that have motivated large unions on a national basis? By what means will this be achieved? Or are these proposed efforts typical of those of a movement in its death throes? If it is the latter, how will labor extract its share of the gains of an expanding global economy in the future? What do you think? 