Whirlpool Moves to Mexico to Cut Labor Costs;
Unions Are Unable to Stop Exodus of U.S. Jobs

By Harry Kelber

 

Whirlpool, the giant laundry and kitchen appliance company, finally moved its Evansville, Indiana. plant to Mexico, leaving its 1,100  employees (including 45 visually-impaired workers) without a livelihood and depriving a community that had depended on it for jobs since the company was founded in 1956.

Whirlpool workers and their union have known about the company’s plans to move to Mexico for the past 10 months (since August 2009), but were unable to convince the company to remain in Evansville. People have asked: “Did the union and the community try hard enough?”

In recent years, hundreds of U.S.-based multinational corporations have moved their operations to China, India and other low-wage countries, attracted by reduced labor costs, tax subsidies and the absence of “labor trouble.”   This has resulted in the exodus of tens of thousands of good-paying. Jobs that were formerly held, not only by blue-collar manufacturing workers, but also by white-collar professionals in the financial services industries.

In the developing global economy, multinationals are telling American Labor: “If you don’t give us substantial concessions in wages and benefits,  we will drive you out of the global labor marketplace.”  That is a real threat that can’t be  easily ignored.

The AFL-CIO has a poor record of stopping our major corporations from outsourcing our jobs. In fact, union leaders  rarely apply pressure to prevent a major company from moving its operations overseas.  They could---but they don’t--mount campaigns against the domestic operations of  companies that threaten to leave our country.

General Electric, for example,  is said to have factories in over one hundred countries;  yet their products are still bought by consumers in the U.S.. Other worldwide companies like Kraft cheese, Unilever soap, Dole pineapple,  Calvin Klein clothes, and others enjoy favored treatment by Americans.

The AFL-CIO could demand that the Obama administration use its authority to prevent the outsourcing of our jobs,  but that won’t happen because Obama doesn’t want to be accused of “protectionism.”

The Steelworkers Are Organizing a Network of Global Unions
For the past 10 months, AFL-CIO leaders have been occupied almost exclusively with complex domestic problems. They have paid hardly any attention to creating alliances with labor federations around the world, where important policies and actions are taking place. We should  strengthen our ties with foreign workers who share the same employers that we do—for our mutual protection.

The AFL-CIO web site should have a section dealing with news and opinion about global labor developments. We should be publicizing how the United Steelworkers (USW) is building an industrial union of one million members, representing workers across the Western Hemisphere, and describing the close relationship that USW President Leo Gerard has with  union leaders in the U.K., Brazil, Germany, Mexico and other countries.

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AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has made many speeches on labor issues in recent months, but it is hard to find any where he says something memorable about global economic policy. He rarely  attends the many international conferences dealing with unemployment, privatization, discrimination against women, and  the plight of immigrant workers. He is not an influential presence among the world’s labor leaders.

The AFL-CIO NOW web site coverage of international labor news is meager and haphazard, at best. It is not designed to keep union members informed about what’s happening to workers and their unions in other countries, many of whose problems are not too different from our own.

We suggest that the AFL-CIO web site  should  establish a Department of Education  that would include a weekly report on global labor news. We ought to get at least that much for our dues money. Harry Kelber