"I just read your April 7th. blog entry that discusses Alice Dale accepting a position with UNI, and I wanted to put in my two cents about why UNI is just as dangerous to workers as Stern and SEIU. I have long been concerned with UNI and the role they have (and will) play in the global labor movement, but few labor activists in the USA seem aware of the dangers UNI poses to fighting, democratic labor unions.Alan Benjamin (Executive Board member of the San Francisco Labor Council and Co-coordinator of the Open World Conference Continuations Committee)explains the dangers of UNI much better than I ever could. This interview with him was conducted just after the CTW unions split with the AFL."
Maya Morris
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Interview with Alan Benjamin.
Question: Three weeks after the closing session of the AFL-CIO convention, the Second World Congress of Union Network International (UNI) took place, also in Chicago. This "global union" body, with its 12 sectors, presents itself as an international labor confederation. How do you view this development?
Benjamin: UNI represents a real threat to an organized labor movement that fights for its interests against the bosses and governments in their service. It is a threat spearheaded in the United States by the Change to Win unions. Joe Hansen, secretary treasurer of UFCW -- one of the four unions that split from the AFL-CIO -- is the international president of UNI. The Teamsters' union is centrally involved.
The Second World Congress of UNI took place on an orientation that stated, explicitly, that national trade union federations, such as the AFL-CIO, are a thing of the past. National unions are invited to break with their national federations and affiliate directly with UNI.
Despite appearances, UNI is not an international trade union confederation. Its founding program does not talk about advancing the interests of workers in confrontation with the employers -- as even the ICFTU and, on a national scale, the AFL-CIO do, however much that objective has been compromised by their class-collaborationist policies.
A newsletter published by UNI at the beginning of 2005 and posted on its website talks about the need "to humanize globalization and make it more youthful." Corporations are characterized as "social partners" and "global citizens" that must be summoned to adopt "codes of good conduct" to ensure labor rights. Only then will they become "good corporate citizens."
UNI proposes to establish "partnership agreements" with the corporations to jointly "administer the processes of externalization and offshoring" -- which is what Stern was talking about in his interview on the Lou Dobbs show. The European Branch of UNI has gone so far as to develop a campaign called "MOOS" -- that is, "Making Offshore Outsourcing Sustainable."
Read the rest of the interview...
