amarican labour movement

The international labour movement is as old as modern domestic labour movements. Since their origins in the late 19th century, trade unions have built international links, which soon became formal institutions. Today, International Labour Movement Organizations (ILMOs) can be classified into two categories: political ILMOs, whose affiliates are national trade union centres, that are mostly involved in political representation, in particular to the UN and its agencies; and sectoral ILMOs, whose affiliates are branch-based or occupation-based unions, that are concerned with industry-specific issues and are vehicles for intervention with Multinational Corporations (MNCs).

Three main political ILMOs have co-existed until recently: the World Confederation of Labour (WCL, Christian-oriented, founded in 1920), the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU, now communist-led, founded in 1945) and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU, social-democrat, founded in 1949 out of a split from the WFTU). During the Cold War, these three organizations were very much involved in an East-West dynamic. The WFTU and the ICFTU, in particular, were considered as puppets of their respective camps in the world of labour (Gordon 2000, Moody 1997). With the fall of the USSR and its allies, the WFTU was considerably weakened and many now consider it a dying organization. The membership of the WCL has also suffered from the rising tendency of secularization among denominational unions. Both phenomena have led to the increase of the ICFTU’s membership and to the foundation, in November 2006, of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), which is actually a merger between the WCL and the ICFTU.

Hence, the dynamic among political ILMOs has entered a new phase with the end of the Cold War. The ICFTU-ITUC has become an almost hegemonic organization (Eder 2002, Gordon 2000) but it is also confronted with the massive arrival of new members, coming from a variety of geopolitical backgrounds.

As for sectoral ILMOs, the situation used to vary depending on the political ILMO they were related to. Both the WCL and the WFTU had their own branch-based federations, while the ICFTU did not. The main reason for this is that it has always maintained a close relationship with the Global Union Federations (GUFs, formerly known as International Trade Secretariats, ITSs). Ten GUFs exist today with a variety of sizes and structures. Like the ITUC, they are now considered as the almost hegemonic sectoral ILMOs and some of them are engaged in a process of mergers with former WCL federations. Although not formally affiliated to the ITUC, they are associated and have signed a cooperation agreement with it. This is the logical continuation of the unofficial ‘division of labour’ maintained between GUFs and the ICFTU since the 1960s and known as the ‘Milan agreement’ (Gordon 2000).