BUILDING UNION POWER IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY: A CASE STUDY OF THE COORDINATED BARGAINING COMMITTEE OF GENERAL ELECTRIC UNIONS (CBC).

"Ideally, you would have every plant you own on a barge."-- Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric Company

"The globalization of General Electric may be the greatest legacy of Jack Welch's nineteen years as CEO." -- Fortune Magazine, September 27, 1999

Introduction

General Electric (GE) is one of the most profitable and dominant corporations in the global economy. It exercises considerable leverage in both product and financial markets to move capital and jobs around the world. GE Capital Services, for example, is the largest non-bank financial institution in the world. To a large extent, GE determines the competitive conditions within each global market in which it operates, rather than passively responding to external market forces. When GE makes investment and labor-relations decisions, its competitors are forced to follow suit. Chief Executive Officer Jack Welch's legacy will not simply be that under his tenure GE moved thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of investment out of the United States to low-wage, non-union havens around the world. GE under Welch pioneered the continuous process of accelerating the speed of capital and employment mobility. Indeed, the company's strategy is to avoid being tied to any country, workforce, or national trade union movement. Maintaining and strengthening the collective economic and political power of GE workers therefore requires the development and implementation of a comprehensive international union strategy uniting working class interests across national boundaries.

Throughout the first seven decades of GE's existence, the balance of power between capital and labor was generally determined regionally, rather than internationally. The ability of GE workers to advance their common economic and political interests has historically been a function of class solidarity and union density. Following the signing of the first GE national agreement in 1938, for example, the United Electrical and Machine Workers (UE) and other industrial unions managed to organize and bargain effectively on behalf of approximately 75 percent of GE production workers over the next decade. Following the 1949 split between the UE and the newly formed International Union of Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers (IUE), and the associated anti-communist hysteria, GE exploited the ideological and political differences among its unions to its own advantage. GE intensified its anti-union practices and pursued a de-unionization strategy of shifting production and employment away from centers of union strength. These factors contributed to the relative weakness of labor at GE as compared to other large industrial companies in the auto, steel, and rubber industries throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

Ultimately, it was the fractured nature of the labor movement within the electrical machinery industry that led to the formation of the Coordinated Bargaining Committee of GE and Westinghouse Unions (CBC) in the late 1960s. The more than thirty-year history of coordinated bargaining and solidarity among GE unions in the United States provides the foundation for building international union power in today's global economy. Historically, however, collective bargaining has been a local or national process, rather than an international one. Thus, the CBC has had to develop its international campaign in ways that extend beyond the traditional parameters of national bargaining into support for international organizing and other cross-border solidarity actions.

The international growth and evolution of General Electric over the past quarter century has mirrored that of the world economy: "Globalization evolved from a drive to export, to the establishment of global plants for local consumption, and then to global sourcing of products and services" (GE, 1999: 4). The CBC has responded to the company's globalization strategy by initiating efforts to transform its core functions and activities from a domestic or national focus into a comprehensive international campaign. This effort has gone beyond simply establishing bilateral relationships between GE unions from around the world, to involving national union federations such as the AFL-CIO, and International Trade Union Secretariats (ITS) such as the International Metalworkers' Federation.