Unions in global fight on Alcoa

By David Uren
The Australian

Union officials from Brazil, the US and Britain met in Melbourne just before Christmas to discuss the campaign with colleagues from the Australian Workers Union and the International Metalworkers Federation.

"Our plan is to start bargaining with Alcoa on a global basis," AWU national vice-president Paul Howes said yesterday.

He said that when the AWU sought to discuss the implementation of a new Alcoa policy on working hours, it was told the policy had been decided at the US head office and could not be negotiated locally.

"One of the largest resource-industry employers in Australia has now started telling us a large part of their employment practice is being dictated to them on a global basis," Mr Howes said.

Global links among the unions are developing to strengthen industrial muscle in facing international companies.

The AWU signed a pact with the United Steelworkers of America in the US two years ago, and is concluding another with the key British steel union, Community, next month.

A pact between the largest British, German and US manufacturing unions is expected to be announced this week.

The secretary of the British union Amicus, Derek Simpson, was quoted in British papers yesterday as saying: "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."

Mr Howes said he doubted the potential of a single union because of the disparity in industrial relations regulation around the world.

He said there had been global co-operation for a long time - the AWU has been a member of the International Metalworkers Federation since 1912. But agreements between individual unions to tackle companies on a global basis were new.

Mr Howes said Australian unions were using global unionism to confront increasingly global bargaining by employers. "The biggest effect will be when they start using their clout in one country to affect an outcome in another."

He said many global companies had different practices in different parts of the world. In Australia, Alcoa's operations were fully unionised, compared with only half its plants in the US. Conditions in Alcoa's Mexican and Guyana plants were way below Australian standards.

"We sent a number of our rank-and-file members over to look at Alcoa operations in Mexico a couple of months ago, and it shocked them," he said.

Alcoa was unavailable for comment.

Article from The Australian.