Over at Shopfloor, they note that the AFL-CIO is proud enough of international cooperation that they’re bragging about it at their website:

Yesterday at the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., union leaders from 45 different countries met with AFL-CIO President John Sweeney and representatives of U.S. union organizations to discuss the union movement in the United States and the need to work together to pass the Employee Free Choice Act. It’s an exciting chance for global cooperation in the fight to preserve workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain for a better life.

Union leaders, representing countries from across the world—Australia, Turkey, Argentina, Italy, Ghana, Sweden and Indonesia, just to name a few—took part in a discussion of the critical issues facing America’s workers.

As Wood notes: “The internal monologue of the foreign delegates: It’s an exciting chance to give our workers an edge by making the U.S. economy less competitive.”

What would the reaction be if representatives of a number of major American companies got together in Brussels with their foreign counterparts to proclaim a united effort to roll back unionization in the U.S.? If that sounds surprisingly specific, it’s exactly what the AFL-CIO is bragging about:

Global union leaders will meet in Brussels, Belgium, in February to develop actions and to support the Employee Free Choice Act, and the effort to support the Employee Free Choice Act will be on the agenda.

Where do those unions get their money? How much will they be spending on the concerted effort to change U.S. labor law? And is the Department of Labor investigating the effort by the AFL-CIO to enlist their foreign counterparts in this effort?