AFTER SAM WEINSTEIN LEARNED of a pending merger between New England Electric System in Westborough and a British company, the 51-year-old union representative was eager to meet with his counterparts overseas.

Weinstein, a senior aide at the 50,000-member Utility Workers Union of America, was seeking a three-year contract with NEES that would be binding even after the utility merged with National Grid Inc. of London.

Two other unions had similar concerns.

NEES assured the unions there would be no layoffs, but Weinstein's union wanted to organize all subsidiaries and new acquisitions worldwide, without corporate interference.

The company balked. Why give the union carte blanche?

But with support from four British unions, US utility workers secured a contract with NEES that gave them the right to use card checks to organize customer service, technical, and field workers in the United States. And the company said it would remain neutral.

Welcome to the new world of union muscle.

With the boom in corporate mergers and global operations, US unions - many of them at utility and telecommunications companies - are joining with their counterparts at home and abroad to build the size and strength they need to take on these new, larger corporations.

"Two things are happening," said Nelson Lichtenstein, a professor of history at the University of Virginia and author of "Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit."

"First, the interconnections in telecommunications are so intimate and far-reaching that the utility and telephone unions have had to try and reinvent themselves, because everything is changing so rapidly.

"They are finding that they are going to have to become international, and they must connect with other European unions.

"Secondly," he said, "the labor movement is reaching out to workers and labor groups in underdeveloped countries in new ways, and this - as we saw with the World Trade Organization demonstrations in Seattle - has become a real political issue."

To be sure, European and North American unions are not strangers to one another. In the late 1800s, a coalition of trade unions brought labor leaders on both continents together for the first time. And US steel and auto unions have longstanding relationships with labor abroad.

"There is no question that union cooperation is increasing, and it is increasing out of necessity," said Kenneth Zinn, North American director of the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions, an international coalition of 450 labor groups.

Zinn acknowledged, however, that with a few notable exceptions, labor's desire for more international cooperation has not led to many cross-border agreements. Nevertheless, changes are afoot:

Last week, US workers at Imerys, a multinational ceramics and construction materials corporation headquartered in Paris, joined with Belgian unions and ICEM to launch an international organizing campaign at the company's subsidiaries. In the United States, the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers union is trying to organize Imerys's plants in Georgia and Alabama.

Last May in California, in a move that clearly suggested greater cooperation with foreign unions, the 22,000-member Service Employees International Union, Local 1877, formalized a partnership with Mexico's Telephone Workers Union. Both unions represent janitors and other service employees.

In 1999, the Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers signed a three-year pact with DSM Polymer in Virginia after the company's Netherlands parent, DSM, declined to bargain. DSM changed its mind after the workers contacted the Dutch union, FNV Bondgenoten. Together, the labor groups persuaded the company to negotiate.

Two years ago, the ICEM convened a meeting in Washington, with the leaders of 350,000 utility union workers from Britain and the United States. The goal: to explore new ways to collaborate.

British unionists discussed privatization in the electric utility industry and its impact on job security and future bargaining. During the race to privatize, they said, several British electric companies had been purchased by US firms. For US labor leaders, the central concern was deregulation's impact on union workers and organizing.

The ICEM has since developed a Web site, www.icem.org, which lists a network of unions at multinational corporations and provides union news from around the world.

Weinstein, of the US utility union, believes that securing the help of the British unions helped allay layoff fears among New England Electric System's rank and file.

"The meetings with the British unions were critical," he said. "They took our side, and that had a huge impact. It made it clear that the company would get no agreements from any of its unions [during the merger] unless the unions got something, too."

The story doesn't end there.

"Last September, after British trade union leaders asked NEES and National Grid to consider forming an international joint labor-management council, we met again," said Bill Dowd, chief labor spokesman for NEES. "We rapidly reached agreement on how the council will work."

According to Dowd, National Grid, which had a longstanding relationship with unions, was instrumental in getting the US unions, NEES, and National Grid's executives together.

At Narragansett Electric in Providence, a NEES subsidiary, technician Laurie Stenovitch wasn't sure what to expect.

"When I heard we would be under new, British ownership, I was a little nervous," she said.

"I thought, `What are they going to do with us?' Now I honestly don't think there will be layoffs, because we are too understaffed."

Stenovitch, with the company 13 years, said she was heartened by the fact National Grid regularly negotiates with unions and by the meetings between the British and US utility and electrical unions.

"That will keep us all on the same page," she said.

Even so, future efforts won't mean much unless the US labor movement is able to hammer out cross-border agreements, such as the 1998 pact between ICEM unions and Statoil, a Norwegian corporation. Statoil agreed it and its 22 subsidiaries would respect the rights of workers to organize. The company also said it would maintain occupational safety and environmental standards.

For the most part, however, unions are still struggling to hold the line on declining membership and have been slow to respond to economic shifts. And they have had difficulty overcoming national and geographic barriers - factors that could hurt their attempts to extend and strengthen international ties.

"For a long time, the cold war was being played out among labor unions here and abroad," said Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education and research at Cornell University. "Then, the realization emerged that multinationals could be vulnerable, but only if unions found the right leverage point. Many unions are now beginning to see that that leverage point is collaboration."

Faced with the furious pace of mergers, consolidations, and restructurings in the telecommunications industry, the Communications Workers of America began reaching out to foreign labor leaders in the 1980s. In recent years, it has developed ties with the Mexican Telephone Workers union, the Communications Workers Union in Britain, and with labor groups worldwide with links to such companies as Nortel and Ameritech.

Steve Early, a CWA representative in Boston, said there will be more international union partnerships in the future. But the strength of those collaborations, he said, will depend largely on US labor's ability to organize workers on the grass-roots level in a "worker-to-worker, action-oriented effort.

"Progress is being made, but too often it is too little, too late," he said. "US unions are still taking baby steps, but the consciousness within the labor movement is changing. Labor now understands that nowadays, you cannot win a union battle without international cooperation or cross-border bargaining."

(c)2000 Globe Newspaper Company.