Unions of the World, Unite!

Unions of the World, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your shrinking memberships and declining political significances...The British trade union Amicus announced it has signed solidarity agreements with two unions in the US and one in Germany -- the United Steelworkers, the International Association of Machinists, and IG-Metall. Amicus is already preparing to merge with the British Transport and General Workers Union in May 2007.

The Amicus General Secretary Derek "Blame British Dentistry" Simpson had this to say:
"Our aim is to create a powerful single union that can transcend borders to challenge the global forces of capital and I envisage a functioning, if loosely federal, multinational trade union organisation within the next decade."

I don't care that Simpson is a former Communist and a self-described "lieutenant of the left". But if he wants to do business here, he better start spelling 'organization' properly.

To my knowledge this is the first major step towards a significant multi-national union. It seems only logical that unions would begin to expand globally; they're already pretty far behind the corporations. Are we going to be seeing multi-national strikes in the near future? Probably not, because national economies are still fairly autonomous and so spreading a strike across borders would serve little purpose. But the globalization of unions could affect outsourcing, as unions will be able to apply more pressure on corporations and governments to keep jobs from going overseas.

Interesting to me that this story isn't mentioned in the US media at all. There's a sprinkling of British and Australian stories. And yet at the time of publish there are two hundred and seventy one articles on Google News about Marilyn Manson's divorce. C'mon now, when was the last time he even made a record? Jeez.