JOINT BARGAINING, ORGANIZING TOP GOALS OF STEEL WORKERS-BRITISH UNION PACT

Thursday, July 3, 2008

(PAI)JOINT BARGAINING, ORGANIZING TOP GOALS OF STEEL WORKERS-BRITISH UNION PACT

LAS VEGAS (PAI)--Joint bargaining and organizing across the Atlantic Ocean, presenting multi-national corporations with a multi-national union arrayed to battle for its workers, are the top goals of the new pact signed July 1 between the Steel Workers and Britain’s largest union, Unite, unifying themselves into a global union.

The pact, inked by Unite General Secretary Derek Simpson and Steel Workers President Leo Gerard during USWA’s convention in Las Vegas, creates a 3.2-million-member union, Workers Uniting. It will have workers in four countries: The U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Irish Republic.

The new union will engage its multi-national employers, including ArcelorMittal--now the world’s largest steel firm--Shell, British Petroleum and Alcoa. USW includes not just Steel Workers, but former Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers who toil at BP and Shell, among others. Unite includes the famed Transport & General Workers Union of Great Britain. Approximately 1 million of the new union’s members are retirees.

Gerard and Simpson made it clear the new union would be aggressive against multi-national firms that try to cut workers’ wages and conditions. “Globalization is a man-made disaster,” Simpson told the 3,200 delegates and 1,200 guests.

"This union is crucial for challenging the growing power of global capital," Gerard said. "Globalization has given financiers license to exploit workers in developing countries at the expense of our members in the developed world. Only global solidarity among workers can overcome this sort of global exploitation wherever it occurs."

"In addition to empowering the interests of our unions' members, our mission is to advance the interests of millions of workers throughout the world who are being shamefully exploited," Simpson added.

That means the combined union will not only represent its own workers but also continue campaigns of solidarity with Colombian workers who face Right-Wing paramilitary death squads, with oppressed steel workers and mine workers in Mexico, with Liberian rubber workers, and with imported Indian H2-B visa holders forced to strike a shipyard in Mississippi, among others.

Under terms of the agreement, USWA and Unite--not to be confused with the U.S. union UNITE HERE--will keep their separate headquarters in Pittsburgh and in

London, respectively. Gerard and Simpson will continue to hold their positions. So will

Tony Woodley, General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers, who are still

in the process of merging with another big British union, Amicus, to form Unite.

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Press Associates, Inc. (PAI) -- 7/4/2008

(USWA, cont. -2)

Much of the new union’s business will be carried out by teleconferencing across the Atlantic, USWA spokesman Gary Hubbard said.

And the actual merger will not be fully consummated until union attorneys on both sides of the Atlantic pore over the agreement and adjust provisions to conform to the labor laws of the four nations involved.

That didn’t stop Gerard from laying out an aggressive agenda. Nor did it stop the convention delegates from agreeing to it, including a 3-cents-pr-hous increase in dues in order to add millions of dollars to the USW Strike Fund. The raise, which takes effect immediately, will let USW increase weekly strike payments to workers from their present $115 to $150, and to $200 per worker per week next July.

Gerard said the international merger is even more necessary to combat globalization of finance and capital, which he declared now rules world economies--to workers’ detriment.

“It’s well past time to challenge the power of today’s global capital – before it

does any more damage to the lives of working people (and) before it succeeds completely in putting a 21st century face on the Robber Baron values of yesteryear.

Globalization is the driving force behind this New Age of Robber Barons,” he stated.

“It revolutionized the way business is done--and the way workers’ aspirations are dealt with--if dealt with at all. The growing power of global corporations is all around us.

We see it in the way employers try to use globalization to whipsaw us in bargaining. We see it in the way multinationals dominate Congress and Parliament. We see it in the glut of corporate buyouts in every industry from aluminum to mining, from paper to steel.

“But there’s a revolution happening right under our noses that’s not so easy to

see: The growth of finance as the dominant economic force in industrial societies,” he added. As long as manufacturing dominated economies and unions could organize factories, the middle class rose, Gerard said. Not now.

“Today, finance rules the world. As a result, today’s Robber Barons of Bay Street” in Toronto “and Wall Street” in Manhattan “are reaping billions through reckless financing schemes…While working people keep getting pushed farther and farther down the economic food chain,” he declared.

Gerard pledged the combined union will combat those financiers and “their deregulation of “everything from finance to labor law and creating one Ponzi Scheme after another,” along with those financiers’ helpmates: “Right-Wing politicians who view working people as suckers, and unions as dinosaurs that need to be exterminated.”

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