The productivity dilemma / U.S. unions can have a role in helping prepare and produce workers for a constantly changing workplace By Christopher Briem, post-gazette
Pittsburgh's regional industries once defined the American labor movement. Today the region has a private sector unionization rate of less 10 percent. Is there a role for organized labor in the future? If so, the labor movement itself must become more international. Unions that oppose greater trade integration overlook the irony that the USW elected a Canadian, Lynn Williams, as McBride's successor. Even a quarter century ago, North American heavy industry, and consequently the USW, was integrated past the point where it could ever be decoupled.
That integration has only multiplied since then as input and output networks of goods and services span our northern border. Intermediate products in many heavy industries cross the American-Canadian border multiple times before reaching their final consumer. That integration has forever linked the fate of American and Canadian workers, a linkage that extends farther today than in the past.