(The following article by John Cochran was posted on CQ.com on September 18.)
WASHINGTON — India ranks with China and Mexico in the outsourcing nightmares of American workers. It’s the low-wage competition — fueling the global “race to the bottom” in the living standards of the working class.
So what’s an American labor union doing posting a help-wanted ad for a job in India? North America’s fastest-growing union, the Service Employees International, is looking for someone to organize Indian security guards.
It’s one more step in SEIU President Andy Stern’s campaign to meet globalization head on rather than try to hold it back, as Big Labor historically has done. The only way to deal with multinational corporations — and the firms that handle security, such as the British Group 4 Securicor, one of SEIU’s big targets, which are increasingly going global — is to organize workers across national lines, Stern says.
That’s a longstanding goal of organized labor, but globalization has given it unprecedented urgency. The union states its ambitions flatly in the ad for the India campaign director. “SEIU,” it says, “is expanding internationally.”
The union is also looking for an organizer to work on a campaign for “property services workers,” such as janitors and security guards, in Brazil or Argentina.
Stern has also been trying to engage workers in China, the big dog of globalized labor, with an estimated workforce of more than 791 million. Because U.S. unions saw China as a threat to their jobs — and viewed the official Chinese labor federation as an arm of the state — labor leaders here have for years largely refused to reach out to that country.
But Stern just got back from his fifth trip there, where he and others from SEIU participated in a daylong seminar on organizing with the All-China Federation of Trade Unions.
Of course, the SEIU is not the first union to reach across borders. The AFLCIO, among other trade unions, has worked with labor activists in other countries, during bargaining fights or as advisers, and also has been rethinking its relations with China.
But by putting its own workers on the ground in other countries to coordinate a cross-border organizing campaign, SEIU is “taking it up a notch” from past efforts by other unions, says Ken Margolies, an industrial relations professor at Cornell University.
To launch the new initiative, Stern and the SEIU have selected a relatively easy nut to crack: It’s impossible for security guards or janitors to be outsourced to other countries. More difficult will be uniting workers in manufacturing, whose jobs can be shipped elsewhere in search of lower wages.