The Post-Standard (Syracuse, New York), September 1, 2008, Monday

Copyright 2008 Post-Standard
All Rights Reserved
All Rights Reserved.

The Post-Standard (Syracuse, New York)

September 1, 2008, Monday
FINAL EDITION

SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. B1

HEADLINE: TODAY'S UNIONS GO GLOBAL; TEAMSTERS, NEGOTIATING WITH ANHEUSER-BUSCH, TALK WITH BELGIAN, BRAZILIAN WORKERS.

BYLINE: By Charley Hannagan Staff writer

BODY:
InBev is a Belgian brewer, run by a Brazilian chief executive, that soon will own Anheuser-Busch Cos., an Ameri-can beer icon. That's about as global as a company can get.
So when the Teamsters met in St. Louis before the start of contract talks with Anheuser-Busch, they invited union representatives from InBev plants in Belgium, Brazil and Canada to a summit. The international union representatives also spoke Aug. 16 at a rally in St. Louis to support the Anheuser-Busch workers.

The move signaled a change from the union that had traditionally dealt with an American company.

"We're dealing with a global economy. The unions are going to have to be in the same arena," said Steve Richmond, president of Teamsters Local 1149, which represents 800 workers at the Anheuser-Busch brewery in Lysander. "It's time to go about doing business differently."
Many American labor unions do not truly represent workers around the globe even though they have the word "in-ternational" in their names. For most, the term "international" reflects
their representation of workers in Canada.

Even so, the labor movement has always has an international component to it, said Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of Labor Education Research at Cornell University.

As early as the 1800s, British workers who watched their wages drop because of the influx of cheaper goods from India pushed through legislation to raise labor rates for workers in what was then an English colony, Bronfenbrenner said.

The movement to get companies to shed their investments in apartheid South Africa took hold because of the mu-tual interests of the United Mine Workers in America and miners in South Africa, she said.

In the mid-1980s, the Americans were locked in a 15-month strike against a mining company 50 percent owned by Shell Oil. At the same time, South African workers staged a one-day strike at a mine also half-owned by Shell after a miner there died. The mining company responded with rubber bullets, fired workers and kicked them out of their homes.

Together, the miner unions worked to organize a global campaign to get corporations, countries and universities to divest their South African investments until that country ended apartheid, Bronfenbrenner said.

In July of this year, the United Steel Workers, North America's largest private- sector union, signed an agreement with Unite the Union, the largest labor organization in Britain and Ireland, to create Workers Uniting. The new organi-zation claims it is the world's first global union representing 3 million active and retired workers in Canada, Britain, Ireland and the United States.

"The time has come now for all the organized labor worldwide to start to compare notes in a more formal way," said Denis Hughes, president of the New York State AFL-CIO.
It's often difficult for unions to deal with local companies, when the decisions are made by the corporate parent lo-cated in another country, Bronfenbrenner said.

"You've got to put your leverage with that multinational, and if that multinational is headquartered outside of the country, you're going to have to take your campaign outside of the country you're in," she said.

Earlier this year, the United Steel Workers, which represents rubber workers in America, networked with rubber workers in Latin America, Europe and Asia support to Liberian workers seeking a contract with Firestone, Bronfenbrenner said. The Liberian union, representing 4,000 workers, signed a new contract in early August with the company.

Unions also are taking their messages to the World Wide Web.

During the Writers Guild strike last year, people replaced their photos on Facebook with picket signs for fans of "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" and Stephen Colbert's "Colbert Report," both on Comedy Central, to protest the decision by those shows to broadcast during the strike, Bronfenbrenner said.

Last year, IBM workers in Italy held a virtual strike against the company through the Web site Second Life, an online world where IBM holds business meetings and other activities.
"What the unions did was have everybody make avatars (an electronic image that can be manipulated by computer users) with picket signs and made them say things," Bronfenbrenner said.

"They went into meetings where IBM had scheduled a meeting on Second Life and dropped the avatars into the meetings and filled up the room so that the IBM couldn't have a meeting any more," she said. "It shut Second Life down and the strike was won."

There's no way to stop the globalization of the economy, Bronfenbrenner said. "The fact is your enemy is not the worker in the other country," she said.

You can contact Charley Hannagan at 470-2161 or channagan@syracuse.com

LOAD-DATE: September 2, 2008