News From USW: Steelworkers Installation of Officers Celebrates Unprecedented Growth and Member Diversity; 60% Growth Strengthens Influence in Wide Range of Industries.

PITTSBURGH -- News From USW: Citing a 60-percent increase in the union's membership during his first full term in office, United Steelworkers President (USW) Leo W. Gerard said today that the union's renewed growth across a wide range of industries means the USW is "stronger at the bargaining table and more powerful politically," despite the general decline in the ranks of organized labor.

"This is not your grandfather's Steelworkers," Gerard quipped. "The organizing and the mergers we've done have increased our ranks by 350,000 workers. We now have 850,000 members working in an unprecedented range of industries."

Gerard also announced that a strategic alliance with the Aruban oil workers was being signed at the installation ceremonies, adding to the union's international ranks, which were recently increased as a result of an alliance with workers in the Dominican Republic Free Trade Zone union.

The renewed growth, he said, "strengthens our hand in bargaining and in combating the anti-worker agendas of Wall Street and Bay Street in their pursuit of globalization."

Gerard added that the increased membership density across a wider range of industries would strengthen the union's push for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, which he said would liberate workers to form a union without fear of intimidation and firing - violations in which employers routinely engage.

The union's membership density in Canada, which he said already makes the Steelworkers the most powerful union there, proved instrumental in a decade-long campaign to win the Westray Bill. That legislation amends the Criminal Code of Canada, making corporations, their directors and executives criminally accountable for knowingly failing to correct health safety hazards that result in the death or serious injury of a worker. It is the only such legislation in North America.

The Steelworkers also led the successful drive to win a Workers First law in Canada, which puts workers at the head of the line in bankruptcy proceedings, significantly different from the U.S. where, Gerard said, "workers are at the bottom of the food chain in bankruptcy court."

Mergers with the American Flint Glass Workers, the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees (Canada), Industrial, Wood and Allied Workers of Canada and, most recently, with the Paper, Allied Industrial, Chemical, and Energy workers union (PACE) have made the USW the dominant private sector union in numerous industries throughout North America.

The USW is now the dominant union in steel, paper and forestry, rubber and tire, aluminum, brick, glass, mining, oil and chemical. In addition, the newly-enlarged USW has 35,000 members in the pharmaceuticals industry and in health care, an industry in which it has represented workers for more than 40 years.

Gerard's comments were made prior to the swearing in of the union's constitutional officers who were elected in a union-wide membership vote last fall. The USW is one of the few unions that elect its leaders, both locally and internationally, by referendum vote of its members.

"But we're not kidding ourselves," Gerard added. "We know that having more members isn't enough to overcome the challenges facing us because of globalization. We have to build our power, both locally and globally, by mobilizing greater activism among our members and greater solidarity among unions across the globe."

The USW, he said, has already taken steps to achieve these objectives by forging strategic global alliances with six other unions in various parts of the world and by launching a Building Power program to educate and mobilize USW members for greater political activism and member organizing.

In recent years the Steelworkers has also entered into strategic alliances with Germany's two-million-member IGMetal, Amicus; Great Britain's largest union; the Australian Workers Union (AWU); the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) of Australia; Sydicato Mineros, a Mexican miners' union; and with CNM-CUT, the Brazilian counterpart of the AFL-CIO and the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC).

Several of these unions have joined with the USW in protesting or striking common transnational employers that have sought drastic cuts in members' pay and benefits, or have locked workers out or forced them out on strike.

Syndicato Mineros, for example, helped the USW prevail in a U.S. negotiation by conducting a protest in Mexico City against Asarco, the Southwestern mining company owned by Grupo Mexico. Asarco had forced a strike by slashing retiree benefits and demanding radical cuts to workers' wages and benefits, but ultimately settled on much more reasonable terms, owing to the cross-border solidarity of the unions representing its workers.

The USW, in turn, recently sent staff to Mexico to assist Sydicato Mineros, which represents some of the 65 miners injured or killed in that country's recent mine disaster.

"We're proud of the growth we've achieved and the alliances we've made," Gerard said. "And we plan to work doubly hard to build on those successes through even more mergers and alliances, but especially by winning Employee Free Choice. That's the crown jewel for us in revitalizing the labor movement."