Topic - Global Trade Union Strategies (Union Renewal) - News

Regulating civil society, by Mike Waghorne, Assistant General Secretary, Public Services International (Sep 06)

Global Companies - Global Union. Global Research - Global Campaigns
The School of Industrial and Labour Relations at Cornell University is organised a conference on "Global Companies - Global Union. Global Research - Global Campaigns" in New York from February 9-11, 2006.

Unions Continue to Make Wages More Equal
A new, technically sophisticated, study of the economic impact of unions in three broadly comparable labour markets, Canada, the UK and the US, shows that collective bargaining still significantly equalizes wages among men, especially by raising the wages of relatively unskilled workers. The effect is strong and results from the fact that unions significantly compress wage differentials within unionized firms and highly unionized sectors. The "within union sector" effect outweighs any "between union/non union sector" increase in inequality between union and non union workers which might result from collective bargaining . However, the same equalizing impact of unions on wages does not exist among women, largely because unionized women have higher skills than do non union women. (Unions can still, however, narrow wage differences between women and men.)

The authors find that declining unionization has been an important factor behind increasing wage inequality among men in UK and the US since the early 1980s. They note that 20 years ago, Richard Freeman and James Medoff's pioneering study, What Do Unions Do?, warned that the decline of private sector unions deserved serious public attention since it would have socially undesirable consequences. In their contribution to a symposium on this book, David Card and his fellow authors conclude that "the social consequences of the decline in unionism deserve even broader attention than at the time What Do Unions Do? was published." (P.26.)

David Card, Thomas Lemieux and W. Craig Riddell. Unions and Wage Inequality. Journal of Labor Research. 2004

Regardless of the workplace, country or continent, unions are facing the same refrain: globalization, flexiblization, deregulation, liberalization, privatization, individualization and so on. Traditional forms of action are being questioned; past gains have to be renegotiated; it is difficult for workers to make their voices heard.

International Colloquium on union renewal organized by the (CRIMT) Interuniversity Research Centre on Globalization and Work's project on rethinking institutions for work and employment in a global era (Nov. 04)