World Unions Meet to Develop Global Fight for Bargaining Rights

An unprecedented global forum brought 200 union leaders from around the world to Washington, D.C., for strategy sessions on how to strengthen global bargaining and organizing rights. Over the two-day conference, union leaders shared information on the status of labor in their countries and agreed to chart improved and declining collective bargaining density, especially as it is linked to political action.

CWA President Larry Cohen was the driving force behind the forum, stressing the need to focus worldwide attention on the loss of collective bargaining rights in the U.S. Union leaders from 63 countries and 10 international labor federations joined the event.  

The meeting was held to coincide with International Human Rights Day, December 10, when 59 years ago, the United Nations and Eleanor Roosevelt declared that workers' rights to organize and bargain collectively are human rights.

At the news briefing, Cohen pointed out that in 1948, the United States led the world in democratic rights – both political and workplace – and 35 percent of U.S. workers in the private sector were covered by collective bargaining, the highest rate in the world at that time.

"Today, with less than 8 percent of private sector workers organized, the United States is nearly at the bottom of the nations of the world," he said. This drop to the bottom has resulted from "a concentrated and lengthy attack on workers' rights by corporate and political interests that want to consolidate their own power at the expense of U.S. working and middle class families," he said.  See charts at ga.cwa-union.org/source.

The gathering made clear that the rate of collective bargaining coverage in every industrial nation is substantially higher than that in the U.S., from 35 percent in Britain to more than 95 percent in France. But even developing nations are leaving the United States behind, said John Logan, who teaches at the London School of Economics. He cited collective bargaining coverage in such countries as Brazil, with 30 percent, South Africa with 40 percent, and even Indonesia, where 20 percent of workers now have collective bargaining, as evidence that the United States is going in the wrong direction.   

Sharan Burrow, head of the International Trade Union Confederation and president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, said working people can successfully take back their rights and their government, as Australian workers did in the recent national elections there. "Respect, dignity, economic rights, these are the issues that resonate with working people," she said.

John Lindner, a Verizon Business technician in New York, told lawmakers and labor leaders about the on-going struggle of his colleagues to gain their union. "In most other democracies around the world, majority support for the union would be enough. We'd have our union. But not in the United States and not at Verizon," he said. Lindner served two tours of duty -- in Iraq and Afghanistan – answering his country's call to protect our freedom, he said. "But when I returned home, I found that my freedom to join a union is being denied."   

At the forum, CWA announced the formation of the T-Workers Union, a joint organization with Ver.di, which represents workers at Deutsche Telekom, to fight for bargaining and organizing rights for workers at T-Mobile on both sides of the Atlantic.

T-Mobile, a Deutche Telekom subsidiary in the United States, has repeatedly fought workers' efforts to gain a union voice. CWA will help T-Mobile employees join the T-Workers Union; they will become members of both CWA and Ver.di which will bargain on their behalf with the parent company.

On Capitol Hill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; Senators Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.); Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio); Paul Sarbanes (D-Maryland); Representatives George Miller (D-Calif.); Rob Andrews (D-N.J.); Lynn Woolsey, (D-Calif.) and others joined the congressional forum and talked about efforts to make the Employee Free Choice Act the law of the land. The measure passed the House by a strong margin and won majority support in the Senate, though not enough to cut off the debate and move to final passage.