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The United Steelworkers has entered into 18 strategic alliances
over the past few years that can be roughly broken down into
three categories: international strategic labor alliances,
North American strategic labor alliances and other strategic
alliances based on critical issues such as promoting good jobs
AND a cleaner environment.
Most recently, USW joined with the Sierra
Club in 2006 to form
the Blue/Green
Alliance to promote the development of good
jobs, a clean environment and a safer world. Sierra Club is
the nation’s largest grassroots environmental organization
with 750,000 members. In this unification, the USW and the
Sierra Club are able to address the great challenges of the
global economy in today’s age. The alliance’s resources
target issues that have the greatest potential to unite the
America people in pursuit of a global economy that is more
just and equitable.
Dave Foster, who retired from being Director
of USW District 11 to head up the Blue/Green Alliance, had
this to say about the founding of this important collaboration, “One
of the imperatives facing the progressive movement in the U.S.
is figuring out how to speak with a strategic voice. A labor
movement that sees itself in opposition to or apathetic toward
the environmental movement has no place in the 21st Century.
Nor does an environmental movement that abandons the goals
of organized labor. Acting together, however, we have possibilities
that will excite the nation.”
The Blue/Green Alliance
was preceded in 2004 by the Apollo
Alliance. The USW joined
a broad-based coalition of unions, business and environmental
organizations as co-founders, uniting nearly 16 million union
members and 11 million environmental organization members across
the country. The alliance is dedicated to creating new jobs
en route to energy independence for America. To achieve energy
independence and create millions of new jobs, the Apollo Alliance
focuses strategic investments into clean energy and sectors
of the economy, including transportation, manufacturing and
construction.
This critical work to build good jobs by
strengthening our commitment to a clean environment is complimented
by USW associations internationally. The international strategic
labor alliances with unions based in Germany, Brazil, Mexico,
United Kingdom and Australia strengthen all of the unions involved
in negotiations with multi-national corporations with operations
around the globe.
The first international labor alliance the
USW formed was in 2004 with IG
Metall (“Industriegewerkschaft
Metall” or
the German Metalworkers' Union), the world’s largest
union based in Germany with about 2.4 million members. This
European connection was broadened in 2005 by USW’s alliance
with Amicus, Europe’s third largest union and the largest
manufacturing union in the United Kingdom with 1.2 million
members representing many sectors such as steel, glass, container,
etc. With the Amicus and IG
Metall alliances combined, the
USW now has strategic alliances in Europe that represent more
than four million workers and all the major transnational corporations
involved in manufacturing.
This was followed up by building
important relationships with Latin American trade union groups;
the first of which was an alliance with CNM-CUT union (“Confederação
Nacional dos Metalúrgicos da CUT,” or the Brazilian
National Federation of Metalworkers), a primarily metal manufacturing
union in Brazil. This 2005 alliance is important because along
with being the world’s eighth largest economy, Brazil
has the richest iron ore resources in the world.
Simply sharing
a border with the United States would be reason enough for
the USW to form an alliance with the National Union of Mining
Steel and Allied Workers of the Republic of Mexico (SNTMMSRM),
but many other factors contributed to the alliance formed in
April 2005. Mexico has one of the largest economies and is
also part of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Ultimately, our members in U.S. and Canada are immensely affected
by what goes on in our neighboring Mexico and having connections
bridges our borders.
Taking a similar approach “down-under,” the
USW also formed alliances with the Australian
Workers’ Union (AWU) and the Construction
Forestry Mining Energy Union (CFMEU)
in 2005. They are the dominant unions in Australia’s
construction, mining, energy, steel and aluminum industries
and most of the corporations they represent are in the same
industrial sectors as the USW. The alliances focus on network
formation, cross-national bargaining and organizing, workplace
safety improvement and communication advancement.
Two important
relationships have been forged by the USW in Canada to address
a range of common issues: A strategic alliance was announced
in 2005 with the Alliance
of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA), to take on the globalization of the
culture industry. In 2006, the United
Transportation Union (UTU) agreed to a strategic alliance to address issues in the
transportation sector in Canada, including the globalization
of the industry.
A third set of strategic labor alliances
is aimed at building a union presence in groups of North American
workers currently lacking on-the-job representation. The Metropolitan
Airport Workers Association (MAWA) was created for any and
all airport personnel, to aid in maintaining an amicable, safe
and professional working environment and demonstrating that
the best Homeland Security program begins with respect at the
workplace.
The Texas
Association of Public Employees (TAPE) is showing that Texas state laws used to limit the rights
of workers to organize for self-improvement are no longer intimidating
public workers. With more than 2,000 dues paying members, the
Union is working on issues that affect thousands of the state’s
public employees.
Officers from the Independent
Oil Workers Union of Aruba (IOWUA)
and the United Steelworkers (USW)
signed a Strategic Alliance in March, 2006, that will encourage
and support the two unions as they begin to work together on
common goals and interests. Within the framework of the Strategic
Alliance, the two unions have agreed to share purposeful information,
coordinate and conduct joint activities, and further explore
the possibility of a future permanent affiliation.
In the meantime, IOWUA, MAWA and TAPE members
will become Associate Members of the USW and will be granted
all the rights and privileges associated with this program.
In recent years, such crucial
strategic alliances have developed in different countries,
sectors and transnational companies and the USW has built many
permanent relationships that have become features of the Union’s
ongoing work. The result has been an extremely fruitful system
of information exchange, bargaining strategy, and health and
safety cooperation.
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