CROSS-BORDER SOCIAL DIALOGUE AND AGREEMENTS: An ...

Cross-border social dialogue and agreements
for Ford, one for General Motors (GM), a common council for Chrysler-
Simca-Rootes, and a common council for Volkswagen/Mercedes-Benz.
In March 1971, delegates from seven world auto company councils
met in London and adopted a common declaration that assigned union
coordination and international solidarity to those councils. In the first
part of the declaration, the delegates called for meetings of each council
with the top management of their corporation. Information on production
plans and job security figured among “the priority items” to be discussed.
Common contract expiration dates were also to be sought. In the
second part of the declaration, the delegates appealed to governments and
international organizations to establish enforceable rules of conduct for
MNEs (Metall-Pressedienst, 1971; Gallin, this volume).
In the following years, over 60 councils were established, covering
all sectors (Tudyka, 1986; Rüb, 2002). The figure seems impressive but
is weak relative to the overall number of MNEs. Some of these councils
still exist but others were short-lived. In most cases they consisted in
meeting structures for the union officials of the national federations that
met every two or three years during the world congresses of the ITSs or
the sector international conferences. The councils seldom comprised representatives
elected by different subsidiaries’ employees. A working group
on MNEs, set up by the IMB to assess the world councils’ activities, highlighted
these kinds of internal organizational shortcomings in 1991
(IMB, 1993, pp. 174f).
Furthermore, certain ITSs sometimes used the world councils as a
means of reinforcing their own power within the labour movement in
relation to the affiliated national federations or to the international confederations
that they either worked with (such as the International Confederation
of Free Trade Unions [ICFTU]) or competed with (such as the
World Confederation of Labour and the World Federation of Trade
Unions [WFTU]). Several ITS leaders were openly anticommunist, and
the ideological struggle was detrimental to the unity and efficiency of
international trade union action. Often, as in the French case with the
Confédération générale du travail (CGT) and the Confédération
française démocratique du travail (CFDT), it meant the exclusion of the
most representative unions of the MNE’s headquarters.
The following two examples give an idea of the complexity and difficulties
of transnational union coordination at the time. At Michelin the
CGT, then the majority union in the company, had set up in 1968 within
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