Offshoring employee strikes… it is not just a catchy headline
Globalization has surely reached at its zenith. Now, employee unions in developed countries want to globalize in order to make a bigger impact through their protests against the employers — typically the highly globalized corporations.
Traditionally, the same employee unions have held globalization responsible for loss of jobs and loss of pay. In fact, most of the protests in recent times have been against globalization. But now, they seem to have realized that those protests are becoming increasingly ineffective, as global corporations are no longer critically dependent on their services in the U.S or U.K, as they have access to global employee resources.
While the older unions like AFL-CIO keep doing more of the same kind of protest, progressive unions like Service Employees International Union (SEIU), formed by combining a few breakaway groups from AFL-CIO, want to take their protest global, by building a global union.
The seriousness with which they want to go ahead with this plan is evident from the interview with its president, Andy Stern (registration required), carried in the McKinsey Quarterly.
Here is an extract
In a world where companies, not countries, are making the rules, how do we have one relationship with a company? It’s hard, but there is no reason we can’t overcome the same challenges that companies have faced in building global organizations.We are beginning to build a network of different unions around the world, developing a common set of proposals to deal with global employers and a common set of responses if global employers aren’t particularly interested in these proposals. If workers are ready to go on strike in the United States, and we are ready to pay them to strike, it would be very costly. But paying workers in Indonesia or India or other places to go on strike against the same global employer isn’t particularly expensive. How do we take the different assets that different unions bring to the table and use them strategically? American unions, for example, have a disproportionate amount of resources, while other unions have political power, and if we think together we may be able to use the global economy to our advantage.
“Use the global economy to our advantage,” is the catch phrase. Stern’s thoughts look radical alright, but it would be difficult to term them unrealistic.
He explains how it would be executed on ground…
There are places, logistically, where people bring goods to port in very just-in-time arrangements. If you lose your place in the logistical line, all of a sudden you can’t get your goods out on the shipping line, and that creates problems for your customers. So you could imagine a situation in which unions in different countries made sure that uncooperative global employers faced disruptions, so to speak.
Now, the phrase that many Indians and Chinese keep repeating — globalization is not a one-way street — has a whole new meaning.Though it won’t be easy finding common grounds between a set of workers who are losing their jobs and another set who they believe are taking away those jobs, Stern’s ideas are worth giving a serious thought to. Globalization has always been a leveler. The same countries, which saw globalization as Americanization and protested against it loudly not so long back, are now the biggest beneficiaries of it, as the equation has changed.
Will the equation change here too?
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