Global trade union organizations

There are unions all over the world and it is only natural that these unions would join together to look after the common good. In large part these organizations fill the role of increasing the pressure on governments to make sure that union rights are protected by calling global attention to situations when this is not the case. In large part this has been a successful strategy when it comes to getting unions recognized around the world.

In most cases the role of global trade union organizations is to help its member organizations to carry out their activities. They do this largely by monitoring what is going on and passing information. Most unions are organized with locals as the part of the union that deals with most of the day to day activity in a particular area. These locals are normally part of a national federation which is largely responsible for determining the policy that the locals will follow and they are usually the ones that will become involved in things like collective bargaining and strikes. These national federations are then usually members of an international.

In most cases global trade unions don't really have any power over what happens with its member federations. This is largely because it would be impractical because of the fact that there are different laws and policies regarding unions in each country. As a result the biggest part of the job for global union organizations is to lobby on behalf of their members to get legislation passed that benefits the workers. This is mostly done in Third World countries where there workers tend to have limited rights.

One of the things that most global trade union organizations do is to monitor the situation in the countries where they have members to ensure that workers right s are being protected. Usually they draw worldwide attention to it when there are violations of rights. The larger internationals actually have full time staffs to do this and end up having to issue alerts on an almost daily basis these abuses are so wide spread. The idea is that pressure from outside will help to change the situation particularly amongst developing nations who really don't want to look bad in the eyes of the developed world.

Far and away the largest global trade union organization is the International Trade Union Confederation. With over three hundred million members in more than one hundred fifty countries they have a great deal of influence. The ITUC was formed in 2006 when a number of internationals got together to merge in order to gain more influence. There are other organizations but none of them come anywhere close in terms of size or influence. In order to make it easier to manage the ITUC has created a number of affiliated organizations based on regions.