The business press has barely noticed and the usual champions of globalization have been mute, but an announcement last week in Ottawa signaled a radical new direction for the globalized economy. The United Steelworkers — that venerable, Depression-era creation of John L. Lewis and New Deal labor policy — entered into merger negotiations with two of Britain’s largest unions (which are merging with each other next month) to create not only the first transatlantic but the first genuinely multinational trade union.

Mergers among unions are nothing new, of course, and as manufacturing employment in the United States has declined, some unions — the Steelworkers in particular — have expanded into other industries and sectors. Today, just 130,000 of the union’s 850,000 members are employed in basic steel, with the remainder in paper and rubber manufacturing and a range of service industries. British unions have gone down a similar path; of the two British unions with which the Steelworkers wish to merge, Amicus is a multi-sectoral outgrowth of that nation’s autoworkers, while the other, the Transport and General Workers, has long been what its name suggests. All three unions are among their nations’ largest; the combined membership, should the merger go through, will total roughly 3 million, making it the planet’s largest union.

The story here, however, isn’t the number of members but the adaptation of labor to the globalization of capital. The Ottawa declaration broke new ground, but the transnational coordination of unions has been building for more than a decade. The Communications Workers of America has been meeting with telecommunications unions in Europe and elsewhere for years to better deal with common employers. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has for the past two years been working with, and helping to fund, security guard and janitorial unions in other nations as ownership of the property service industry has been consolidated into an ever-smaller number of multinationals.

Last November, the SEIU organized 5,300 immigrant workers who clean the office buildings in downtown Houston — a stunning achievement in the heart of the anti-union South. Stephen Lerner, chief strategist for the SEIU’s Justice for Janitors campaign, attributes the success partly to the same consolidation and globalization processes that have generally proved so debilitating to union power. Last year just five cleaning contractors — all either national or global in scope — employed the majority of the city’s janitors, and many of the office buildings were owned by global investors. The emerging global network of property-service unions staged demonstrations supporting the Houston janitors in Mexico, Moscow, London and Berlin.

The Steelworkers’ network of strategic alliances with foreign unions dates to the early ’90s. As the production of steel became a global enterprise, the union formed alliances with mining and manufacturing unions in Brazil, South Africa, Australia, Mexico, Germany and Britain. In part, the alliances emerged because these unions shared common employers — Alcoa in metals, Bridgestone in tires and, now, with the Steelworkers and Britain’s Amicus having grown to include paper workers, Georgia Pacific and International Paper as well. The unions share research, discuss common bargaining strategies and support one another during strikes.

But the purpose of the proposed merger is broader. “We determined that the best way to fight financial globalization was to fight it globally,” says Gerald Fernandez, who heads the Steelworkers’ international affairs and global bargaining operations. “Exploring a merger is the necessary first step to building a global union or federation of metal, mining and general workers.”

Whether or not the merger goes through, the Steelworkers and their British partners have already committed to fund human rights and union rights operations in Colombia (which perennially leads the world in murdered unionists) and parts of Africa. They plan to mount a global campaign to protect employees’ retirement benefits, under assault in a growing number of countries from financiers who view workers’ financial security as a dispensable commodity.

For years, globalization’s champions have attacked unions generally and the Steelworkers in particular for what they claimed were the union’s protectionist, parochial and generally retrograde stances. But the union, it turns out, is every bit as internationalist as they. And as unions begin their inevitable transformation into global entities, globalization’s cheerleaders must define themselves more clearly. Do they back globalization because it has thus far advantaged global investors over merely national unions and governments? Or do they believe that government and workers should go global, too, creating on an international scale the kind of mixed economy that governments and unions created in the decades after World War II — the only economy in history to produce broadly shared prosperity? In other words, are they really for globalization, or just the return to the laissez-faire, enrich-the-rich world that existed before the New Deal? The question, now that the Steelworkers and their British partners have thrown down the gauntlet, is anything but academic.

Duncan lives in New York is Author of the book-in-progress, “DNA Birthright Says Nobles, Slaves, Rebels & Roots.” You can visit her website at: http://www.pearlduncan.com/

My ancestors had a folk saying, “One hand don’t clap.” In that respect, words without actions do not uplift the boats, the little people who’ve been left behind.
On March 12, 2000, Pope John Paul II said a Day of Pardon Mass, and asked forgiveness from the descendants of the oppressed people of the world, for the atrocities committed against their ancestors by the Church. These were very moving words, but no actions by the Church followed his words.
On Wednesday, February 8, 2006, the Church of England, leaders of Anglicans and Episcopalians, apologized for its role in the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, and for slavery on American soil. This time, with this apology, if enough of us speak up, we will find enough voices and hands to help lift the boats, the little people, who were sunk or left behind.
How many people have we heard say, especially on T.V.’s talking head shows, “I bear no responsibility for slavery – moral, historic, economic, or otherwise, for my ancestors were not in America when the business of slavery happened”? But today, the consciousness has been raised, and we know now that the slavery that plagued America was a worldwide war.
So, unless some of us have ancestors who came from Mars or Venus, they participated in churches, synagogues, mosques, businesses, families, colleges, and other institutions that were involved in trading, owning, profiteering from slaves, and whose people were having children with the slaves who were brought to America.
I found records of my own ancestors, both African slaves from Ghana and other places in Africa, and burgesses, noble merchants and traders, from Glasgow, Scotland. The records I found in the Archives of the Church of England. The ministers who kept these records were threatened and called, “ministers to the slaves.” My African American ancestors were slaves and free people who rebelled and escaped the institution of slavery and lived in the wilderness. The rectors and curates traveled under threats against their lives to assist these Maroons.
A few years ago, during Princess Diana’s funeral ceremony, I remember calling my father, a Baptist minister, and asking him, “Why are they singing the same hymns we sing in our church and Sunday School?” Even though I’d uncovered records of my ancestors from the Church of England files, I did not make a connection between the living history of my family and the religious groups that led slavery.
My African ancestors’ records from 1655 to 1838, prior to the years when they were emancipated from slavery in the Jamaican Colony, I found in the Church of England Archives under the heading, “Dissenters Births” “Dissenter Baptisms, ” “Dissenter Marriages,” “Dissenter Deaths.” Prior to Emancipation, these ancestors and others were banned from registering their children’s births or their marriages and deaths in the government’s civil records.
Church leaders sanctioned the trade of African slaves by royals, nobles and merchants until the legal slave trade was suspended in 1807. (The illegal slave trade continued.) Church of England leaders owned thousands of slaves on vast plantations in Barbados until the 1834 Emancipation, and with other leaders of churches and colonial governors, set the tone for how slaves should be treated in the Colonies. The Church of England’s slave-owning leaders, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, which thought it was mandated by God to own slaves, branded each of its slaves’ flesh with fire-red-hot-irons, so that others would know that humans with the letters, S O C I E T Y, were theirs.
Now, as in Colonial times, actions not words, of people, brought about change, even on a tiny scale.
A few Anglicans shared the Church of England book of hymns in 1707 with Africans, who were not allowed in the church, but who worshipped outdoors. Quakers and Moravians were the first to build schools to teach African settlers to read and write, and record the documents of their lives. The Catholic Church, in 1667, gave permission to the Danish government in the Virgin Islands to minister to African slaves. Ursuline nuns from 1720 to 1834 organized a Catholic mission, school and hospital for African Americans in New Orleans. The Lutherans ministered to slaves in 1757; the Methodists, nonconformists to the Church of England banned slaveholding in 1780 and 1784 and formed a mission for slaves in the South in 1820. The Baptists ordained a Virginia freed slave and minister, Rev. George Leile, who built and led the first African church in America, in 1775.
And earlier, Puritans defied the penalty of the Colonial regime and, some, like Cotton Mather, published an article in 1706 saying Africans were full human beings. The Quakers, Society of Friends, protested slavery in Pennsylvania in 1688; and the Huguenots protested in New England in 1641. Presbyterians helped shelter and defend Maroons and the children of escaped slaves such as my Scotts Hall Maroon ancestors in Jamaica in the 1600s and early 1700s. But it was the charismatic styles of the Baptists and Methodists Great Awakening in Massachusetts in 1734 that blended with the Africans’ spiritual styles, and assisted those who built a free life on the run, in hiding, and with seared flesh on the plantations.
The Church of England of Anglicans was established at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, but the Archbishop of Canterbury had no representatives in the Colonies, so ministers of various denominations did the moral thing, among the human devastation. After the American Revolutionary War in 1776, both the Church of England’s missionary arms, the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, were established, but they too owned slaves and plantations.
The ministers who registered my African slave’s and free people’s records in the 1700s in the West Indian Colonies did not have to get the permission of the Archbishop of Canterbury. There were no bishops in the Colonies, not until a Scottish bishop set down in Connecticut in 1783, then two more in New York and Philadelphia in 1787. They were consecrated by the Archbishops of Canterbury in 1792, and one more in 1824 in the West Indies Colonies. Episcopalians organized in Philadelphia in 1789. The people who did the moral thing did not need leaders to do so.
So the vote by the Church of England’s General Synod, its national assembly, apologizing for the Church’s role in slavery, in anticipation of the 200th celebration of the legal end of the slave trade, should serve as a wake-up call to all of us to get involved in the solutions. The Church’s leaders voted 238 to 0.
But legal, moral and historical actions must follow an apology. In 2005, after I applied to Scotland’s Court of the Lord Lyon, a Parliamentary group formed in the 13th-century to review and verify the ancestry of the kings, queens and nobles of Scotland, and presented civil certificates of my post-Emancipation ancestors, and the will, property lists and Church of England records of my pre-Emancipation ancestors, Scottish burgesses, nobles, merchants, who had children with my African ancestors from Ghana and other places, the Court granted me a coat of arms. I like to think that my requests for national, church, archival, and ancestral families’ records motivated some of these leaders to apologize. That’s the first step.
The second step to airing the history and researching-telling-and-acting on what happened requires searching the records. The next step is granting these ancestors what they lost, that they are due.