Now I have :-P

Problem is, I don't know any labour union blogs.

Working Life run by Jonathan Tasini and the Labor Research Association.

There have been preliminary moves in this direction.  The first round involved European and North American unions  Amicus (UK) IG Metall (DE) and Steelworker's and Machinists (US)

The move, to be announced this week, is seen by union leaders as the first step towards creating a single union that can present a united front to multinational companies.

Derek Simpson, general secretary of Amicus, said: 'Our aim is to create a powerful single union that can transcend borders to challenge the global forces of capital. I envisage a functioning, if loosely federal, multinational organisation within the next decade.'

Amicus is itself planning to merge with the Transport & General Workers' Union in May to create a 2 million-strong labour organisation. Between IG-Metall's 2.4 million members, the USW's 1.2 million and 730,000 at the Machinists', a merger would create an organisation with some 6.3 million members.

Up until the 1980's the United AutoWorkers (UAW) represented workers in both the US and Canada, but the Canadians split off wanting to take a harder line.  Because there's government healthcare in Canada, they were able to get new contracts that transferred jobs out of the US because Canadian labor costs (wages + benefits) were lower than in the US.

This has changed with the last contract, so that US labor costs are lower, and will likely result in a long, and pointless strike by the CAW (Canadian Autoworkers) in their 2008 negotiations.  Many plants that are north of the border will likely be transferred back into the US to take advantage of the health care fix negotiated in the contract and the weakening US dollar relative to the looney.

In May of 2007, the UAW hosted autoworker's unions from 7 nations in the first of what will hopefully become a series of international labor strategy meetings.

"My biggest fear is that if we don't do something to develop a global strategy, then workers around the world will become less and less relevant to the process," said UAW Vice President Terry Thurman, who directs the union's National Organizing Department and led the May 22-24 meeting.

"What do we hope to accomplish? It's really quite simple. We must take direct action, finalize a joint strategy and understand that we cannot take care of our workers without bringing up the rest of the world. We have got to do this," Thurman said.

Hosted by the UAW and the AFL-CIO's Solidarity Center, this historic meeting was the first time international trade unions from eight countries, including the United States, had gathered at Solidarity House, the union's headquarters in Detroit, to focus on coordinated organizing strategies.

Unionists from Argentina, Brazil, France, South Korea, Sweden, Thailand and the United Kingdom participated. (Lekubu Herman Ntlatleng, auto coordinator for the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, did not attend due to illness.)

If unions were able to negotiate international contracts, the power of mulitnationals to use profits from one country to tide them over from labor action in another country.  Even a 60% international union density would have a tremendous impact.  Most car companies have 60 days of stock, something like half of which is at parking lots at the plant.  In the 2008 GM strike, the UAW president called called the strike on minutes notice.  GM wasn't expecting it, and hadn't moved cars off the plant lots, so the only stock that they had was what was on dealer lots, which is a fraction of what's on the plant lots.

The Teamster's refused to cross a picket line to move these cars.  The company tried to bring in non-union truckers at night to take the cars out during the strike, strikers were able to block the gates to prevent that from happening.  This is a huge part of why this strike lasted for something over a day instead of going on for a month.  The UAW is currently out at International Harvester, another auto parts plants.  My two cousins there have been out for going on two months.  That could have been the GM strike if not for the snap calling of the strike.

It's a different game in other companies.  For example in Germany, IG Metall has a much better bargaining position because of the peak associational model, where you have the union on one side of the table, and the employer's association representing most of that industrial sector on the other.  They're able to effectively set wages and conditions of work outside the coercion that you have in the market when a companies can play there workers across one another.

Adam Smith's comment about the combinations of masters being no less common than the combinations of servants rings to mind.  Because although the working class is often divided, the corporate management shows strong class solidarity whenever there's a strike.  Even across borders.  The working class needs the same.


And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg