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14 July, 2008
At the triennial convention of the United Steelworkers (USW) in the US state of Nevada on 2 July, a cross-border merger of two big amalgamated unions took place. The USW and UK’s Unite announced an alliance creating a structure to be called Workers Uniting.
“This union is crucial for challenging the growing power of global capital,” said USW President Leo Gerard. “Globalisation has given financiers license to exploit workers in developing countries at the expense of our members in the developed world.”
USW President Leo Gerard
Added Unite Joint General Secretary Derek Simpson, “In addition to empowering the interests of our unions’ members, our mission is to advance the interests of millions of workers throughout the world who are being shamefully exploited.”
In a video broadcast to the convention, attended by 3,500 USW delegates, as well as 77 international trade unionists from 23 countries, Unite Joint General Secretary Tony Woodley stated: “The creation of our new union is only the beginning. We’re laying the foundations of an even larger and stronger union yet to come.”
Unite Joint General Secretaries Tony Woodley and Derek Simpson
The USW has some one million members in the US, Canada, and the Caribbean. It is the product of previous mergers between steelworkers, oil and chemical workers, paperworkers, rubber workers, glass workers, and the wood-workers union of Canada.
Unite represents some two million workers in the UK and Ireland. It is a product of a recent merger between Amicus and the Transport and General Workers’ Union. Amicus, itself, is an amalgamated union that over the past six years has merged the Graphical, Paper, and Media Union (GPMU) with the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union (AEEU), the Manufacturing, Science, and Finance (MSF) Union, as well as UNIFI, a former financial services union.
The new structure, Workers Uniting, will have a joint steering committee and will be headed by an Executive Director. Staff will include research, international affairs, and communications specialists.
The USW convention also saw the election of its first woman to its Executive Board. Carol Landry, a 16-year union activist from the union’s largest Canadian sector – mining – was elected by unanimous vote of the 27-member Executive Board. She is an 8-year staff member of USW-Canada, and prior to that had been prominently active in a number of positions at her local union, which represents workers at Highland Valley Copper in the province of British Colombia.