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VIENNA, Austria — Delegates from trade unions worldwide launched a new global labour federation Wednesday aimed at ensuring workers' rights are not forgotten in the rush toward economic globalization.

Organizers said the International Trade Union Confederation — formerly known as the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions — would reinvent and modernize itself to better tackle fresh challenges to the rights of unionized workers and to strengthen its efforts to stamp out forced and child labour.

"The strong tradition of solidarity will continue," said Guy Ryder, appointed Wednesday to head the ITUC after the old union and the World Confederation of Labour were formally dissolved.

"Trade union unity at the international level is now essential to ensuring more effective representation of the rights and interests of workers in the global economy," he said.

Officials said the new umbrella group, touted as the world's largest dedicated to workers' rights, would represent more than 150 million members from 241 affiliated organizations in 156 countries.

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Peter Waterman wrote an interesting critique in the Autumn edition of Labor Rights, expanded and republished on LaborNet:

The International Union Merger of November 2006: Top-Down, Eurocentric and… Invisible?

[ 03 November 2006: Message edited by: robbie_dee ]

Rebecca Gumbrell-McCormick, "From the Old Trade Union Internationals to the New," Labourstart.org

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Why the new international confederation matters

The average trade union activist may well ask ‘why didn’t I hear about this before?’ or ‘why does it matter?’ As to the first question, the founding of the new international – an event I and many other observers never really expected to see – was in general not well promoted or publicized in advance to the broader membership. Some writers, such as Peter Waterman (see Peter Waterman’s “The Invisible International Union Merger 2006”) seem to find this surprising and wonder to what extent it may have been deliberate. I was not surprised for the simple reason that most trade union activists in most countries most of the time are not familiar with international trade unionism and are not particularly interested (or are not perceived to be particularly interested) in it. There are a number of important exceptions: some national centres have traditionally devoted a great deal of attention and resources to internationalism (the Nordic countries, the Netherlands); some national centres or national unions that are not otherwise interested become very much so at the time of an important conflict that requires or receives international support (the Australian dockers, Rio Tinto, and other more recent disputes); some world events are so significant that large numbers of trade unionists who are not otherwise active on international issues become so (apartheid in South Africa, the coup in Chile, oppression and violence against trade unionists in Colombia, China, and elsewhere). On this occasion, there was considerably more press coverage from countries where one or more national centres were playing a particularly important role in the founding of the new confederation (the French CGT, the Belgian CSC/ACV, our hosts the Austrian ÖGB) than from others (the British press seems to have been largely absent).

As to the second question, why does it matter, the answer will perhaps only become clear with time. But it is in itself extraordinary, that after nearly a century of division, two of the three major ideological currents within the world labour movement are uniting in a single international organization. This has been tried, and failed, several times before, as I document in my chapter on the years 1972 to the present in the first and so far only comprehensive history of the movement (“Facing New Challenges: The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions 1972 – 1990s”, in The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, by A Carew, M Dreyfus, G Van Goethem, R Gumbrell-McCormick and M van der Linden (ed.), 2000, Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 341 – 517.) The last time a united world confederation was created, the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), in 1945, it included both communist- and social democratic-leaning unions, but not (or not very many) of the christian unions, who maintained their separate organization, the International Federation of Christian Trade Unions (IFCTU). This united world confederation lasted only until 1949, when major social democratic national centres in Western Europe and the United States broke away to form the ICFTU (thus the significance of the word ‘free’). Much has been written about this split (see the chapter by Tony Carew in the book cited above) but relatively little about the continued division between social democratic and christian unions, which has proved as if not more intractable than the division between social democrats and communists. There are a number of reasons for this: a tradition of animosity at the national level in Europe, where the division between secular and religious parties and unions goes back at least two centuries, and where christian unions, at least in their early days, were perceived as an attempt to woo workers away from militant, independent trade unionism; fierce competition in Asia, Africa and Latin America during the Cold War, in which christian unions maneuvered for a position between the main antagonists, WFTU and ICFTU, thus earning the distrust of both sides, and competition for representation among all three internationals within world bodies such as the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the United Nations.

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Well, a workers' UN with actual power would be nice.

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Hey wouldn't that be sumthin! A shift away from totalitarian rule.

I guess time will tell if this is a successful move. Of course, I think what needs to happen, along with the variety of social justice, union and democracy campaigns, is to get more into practical socialism, as in the democratization of the global economy, capital and accumulated corporate assets, and moving toward a sustainability ecologically friendly and community driven mode, and away from the profit-maximizing/exponential accumulation.