Forging A Common Vision

By James B. Parks

Building on their collective strength, manufacturing unions in the USA launched the Industrial Union Council (IUC) to focus on key issues.

The issues were in trade, health care and labour law reform as part of a strategy to revitalise manufacturing industry.

The IUC seeks to build on the political strength of individual industrial unions through joint strategies for creating and retaining manufacturing jobs. The collective voice is needed to make politicians heed what the unions are saying. Individual unions asking for different things fragment the focus and allows politicians to slide by. All the unions acting together are harder to ignore.

AFL-CIO America@work February 2003