The Challenges for Unions Organising in the Context of Global Capital

By Frances O'Grady, TUC Deputy General Secretary

The international trade union movement has never opposed globalisation. But it has demanded that politicians should manage it. That there should be a strong social dimension. And a just transition.

For working people, our members, the implications of global economic change are huge.

Not just the obvious things: the jobs vulnerable to offshoring or low-cost competition, the growth of cheap migrant labour here in the UK.

But also the other things: pensions cut back, share of global wealth to wages squeezed, work intensity ratcheted up. The sense of being on the margins of decisions that effect of our working lives.

In short, globalisation has accentuated inequalities within our labour market.

At the top, we have a new elite for whom the global economy is effectively a theatre of wealth-creating opportunity.

In the middle, we have those struggling to get to grips with this new age of insecurity.

And at the bottom, we have a growing group of vulnerable workers often in competition with one another for low-paid, low skill work.

Across the developed world, the pattern is being repeated, with labour's share of GDP falling at the same time as capital's - in the form of corporate profits - hits record highs.

And in the developing world, it hardly needs repeating, these inequalities are even more pronounced with mass migration into cities and enterprise zones, often scant regard for ILO standards and crude controls imposed over young working women in particular.

None of us should underestimate just how dramatically globalisation is reshaping capitalism, nor the profound implications this must have for how unions must organise.

(Speech at the Union Ideas Network Conference, 17 May, 2007)