First Cross-Atlantic Union Formed

This has been all over the news this morning- the American United Steelworkers union is merging with Britain's UNITE (aka Amicus). There are many potential long-term ramifications to transnational and transcontinental trade unions, one of which is the potential change of prices.

Corporations move manufacturing to poor countries in order to take advantage of lower wages, and those lower costs are reflected in the prices we pay today for our favorite gadgets, gizmos and widgets. But what the prices may not reflect is the human and social cost to the workers in these factories, which are often cited as arguments against globalization.

I would argue that these are simply natural occurrences before the process of globalization is complete. The next step is for trade unions to globalize, a process which United Steelworkers and UNITE have started. In fact, they have been quoted as saying that they plan to eventually get Asian unions to merge with them as well. While this is unlikely to occur any time soon (jobs still keep rolling in to Southeast Asia), I have no doubt that it will happen eventually.

What would that world look like? With huge international corporations and labor unions, would nations become obsolete? Would the responsibility of regulating these global entities fall on the UN, or some not-as-yet founded world government?