ITUC Meeting: A Global Response to Multinationals

At Thursday's ITUC meeting of global unions in Washington, D.C., CWA President Larry Cohen, left, and ver.di National Executive Board member Lothar Schröder discuss efforts to organize T-Mobile workers.

Members of the International Trade Union Confederation and Council of Global Unions are meeting with U.S. union leaders this week in Washington, focusing on ways to support international organizing campaigns and take on multinational companies. Much of their help is directed at the United States, where workers' rights now lag far behind other industrialized nations.

More than 60 global trade union leaders are attending the two-day session organized by the ITUC and the AFL-CIO. They also attended sessions with World Bank and International Monetary Fund senior officials.

The ITUC is headed by General Secretary Sharan Burrow, past president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions. Elected in 2010, Burrow is the first woman to lead the world's largest trade union federation.

This week's meeting featured a presentation on Deutsche Telekom and subsidiary T-Mobile that outlined how T-Mobile workers in the United States and other countries face management campaigns of intimidation and harassment just because they want a union and bargaining rights.

Lothar Schröder, a ver.di National Executive Board member, CWA President Larry Cohen and Philip Jennings, general secretary of UNI, talked about the TU campaign to end the double standard that DT uses to allow T-Mobile's union-busting.

For more on the T-Mobile USA campaign, go to www.loweringthebarforus.org.