COLUMN LEFT / DENIS MacSHANE : Workers of the World, Unite! : As business goes transnational, so must the labor movement.

Labor Day, 1992, sees American unions under pressure as never before in the 20th Century. For 15 years, labor has faced relentless hostility from government, employers and opinion-shaping forces. No other democratic country in the world has launched such a concerted attack on its trade-union sector.

Even in Thatcherized Britain, the trade unions remain strong, representing around 40% of the work force. (The U.S. figure is 16%.) British unions have been able to benefit from European Community rules to secure benefits or workplace protection for workers. Nissan in England has to recognize the auto workers union. Nissan in the United States is a non-union shop.

In fact, the problems that American unions face are due not only to national legislation and court rulings (and to the pathologically anti-union climate in corporate America) that permit Nissan to run a union-free operation; union problems in the United States also stem from the rapidly increasing internationalization of production, marketing and finance.

U.S. companies like Motorola or Hewlett Packard make world-beating mobile phones and printers, but they do so in Asian countries where independent unions have great difficulty in surviving.

The transfer of U.S. union jobs to Mexico, already under way, will now be accelerated under the North American Free Trade Agreement. The government-linked Mexican labor federation has been pumping out pro-NAFTA propaganda without any reference to protection for workers or the environment, or for the need to make free labor rights part of the trade treaty.

Thus the front line of defense of American workers’ wages and workplace rights is no longer on the border of the Rio Grande and two oceans but has moved to other countries, other continents. In short, U.S. labor will have to go international if it is to celebrate future Labor Days as a growing, not a declining presence.

But the new internationalism of American unions will have to be based on new premises. In the past, the overseas interventions of U.S. labor have been highly political. Much of it was positive, such as support for democratic trade unions in Europe after 1945, or, more recently, for the union-based Polish Solidarity.

Nelson Mandela marched in the big protest rally in South Africa last month wearing a United Auto Workers cap--a tribute to the remarkable ties between that union and anti-apartheid forces.

With Soviet communism buried, the AFL-CIO has identified a new ideological foe in the shape of the state-controlled Chinese labor federation, which is acting to suppress democratic worker rights with all the ferocity of its ex-Soviet forerunner. The official Chinese trade unions are seeking to build new international links and create a union-free environment for Japanese and other Asian multinationals currently racing to build capitalism without human rights in Deng’s China.

However, external political interventions by American unions will not be sufficient to defend American jobs, living standards or democratic rights in the workplace. Instead, American labor should consider creating effective trans-frontier worker solidarity on economic and social issues. A model for this exists in Europe, where an increasing number of European Works Councils have been set up to unite unions and workers from the same company but in different countries.

Volkswagen has signed a recognition agreement for such councils, bringing together unionists from four European countries where Volkswagens are produced. Works councils for Ford, General Motors, Digital and Gillette are being created and, depending on the evolution of European Community politics, these new bodies will have full legal recognition and protection throughout Europe. Already, to its dismay, the British government has had to accept a ruling from EC headquarters in Brussels that will control working time.

With capital and companies going international, unions have to spread their wings across frontiers, not in terms of political support, but in the construction of effective post-national labor linkages.

U.S. unions already play a constructive part in international labor organizations. It was Walter Reuther, the late United Auto Workers leader, who conceived of global company union councils and called for global collective bargaining. The dream was ambitious, but the goal was the right one. With their multiethnic, multilingual membership, and with the challenge of Mexico as the site of low-wage, union-free production on their doorstep, it is time for U.S. unions to develop a new labor internationalism and show the way for the workers of the world finally to unite.