This week the labor community is buzzing over a possible merger agreement between the United Steelworkers and Mexico’s Los Mineros union that would create in the first NAFTA-wide labor organization capable of coordinated job actions across both the Canadian and Mexican borders. The combined union will have over one million members and a unification agreement between the two unions could go into effect as early as this August. Meanwhile, the CWA has filed international labor rights violation charges with the UN Global Union against Deutsche Telekom, the German parent company of T-Mobile. The complaint alleges the company is engaging in anti-union activity in the United States. AFL-CIO leader Rich Trumka has appealed to the U.S. State Department to stand behind the complaint while German unions are pressuring the German government to act. (The German government owns a third of Deutsche Telekom.) Of course, the entire T-Mobile problem will go away for everyone here and abroad as soon as U.S. regulators approve the AT&T acquisition of T-Mobile. AT&T has already declared it will push 40,000 hourly T-Mobile workers into the existing CWA bargaining unit (whether they like it or not) in return for Big Labor’s squelching of progressive objections to the merger.
