This is an outstanding article, one which takes the labor movement where
it is and, given that, where it might be able to go.
Steve
WORLD LABOR NEEDS INDEPENDENCE AND SOLIDARITY
By David Bacon
March 4, 2000
Within weeks of the Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade
Organization, thousands of workers at India's state power company struck to
prevent the privatization of electricity generation and distribution in
Uttar Pradesh. Despite the jailing of hundreds of their leaders, they
succeeded in halting it, at least for a time. Meanwhile, in ports along
the subcontinent's coast, thousands more longshore workers also stopped
work over the same issue - privatization.
Both battles are part of a class war against pro-capitalist
economic reforms. Not just in India, but around the world, workers have
been fighting for over two decades to keep the social gains they won in the
years following World War Two. These struggles dramatize the new problems
workers face in the global economy, as well as their refusal to passively
accept its new (or not-so-new) priorities.
Turning national enterprises over to private owners is a key
component of these reforms - the hallmark of the neoliberal transformation
of national economies. Privatization is imposed by the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank (and now the World Trade Organization) on
governments around the globe, through loan conditions, structural
adjustment programs, and trade sanctions.
Privatization opens up important sections of the economies of
countries like India to transnational corporate investment. Even more
important, it reduces the ability of states to control their national
economies, and use that control to promote social goals other than
profit-making, whether promoting strategic industries, subsidizing prices
for farmers and workers, or maintaining social benefits, high wages and
unionization.
Privatization, however, has consequences which give unions and
workers a big stake in opposing it. Almost invariably, workers at
privatized enterprises face huge layoffs and wage cuts, as new private
owners seek to cut labor costs.
The transformation of national economies around the world, in which
privatization plays a key role, has forced world labor to debate the
meaning of international working-class solidarity. Part of that argument
surfaced in Seattle, over the issue of international labor standards and
their enforcement. This debate will grow even more heated, as workers
discuss not only ways of fighting growing corporate power, but revisit even
more basic questions. Should encouraging profit-making and productivity be
the overriding criteria in making economic decisions? Do countries have a
right to control their own economic development? And should labor
challenge private ownership itself, or merely argue over the conditions
under which workers sell their labor power to corporate employers?
The cost to workers of privatization and structural adjustment
In 1997, the sale of just one railroad in Mexico, the
6,521-kilometer Pacific North line, to Jorge Larrea's Grupo Mexico,
resulted in the reduction of its 13,000 person workforce by more than half.
The plan was met by months of wildcat strikes which paralyzed operations
for a time, but which were ultimately unable to stop the cuts.
As privatization has moved from industry to industry in Mexico, its
once-powerful official unions have been gutted. Three-quarters of the
country's workforce belonged to unions three decades ago. That percentage
is now less than 30. In the state-owned oil company, PEMEX, union
membership still hovers at 72%. But when the collateral petrochemical
industry was privatized over the last decade-and-a-half, the unionization
rate fell to 7%. New private owners like Larrea reduced the membership of
the railway workers union from 90,000 to 36,000 in the same period.
When governments pursue policies favoring private investment, the
standard of living for workers drops and their social benefits disappear.
During the last two decades of neoliberal economic reforms, the income of
Mexican workers lost 76% of its purchasing power.
A recent government survey of family income discloses that the
average 5-member family has an income equivalent to four times the minimum
wage, or about 5-6000 pesos a month. That income is based on three of the
five family members working full time.
"This means that families aren't making enough to live on,"
explains Alejandro Alvarez Bejar an economist at the National Autonomous
University. "It's normal now that young people, when they get married,
still live with their parents since they can't earn enough to live
independently. "
The government estimates that 40 million people live in poverty,
and 25 million of them in extreme poverty, almost all in the countryside.
Since 1994, the wealth of the top 10 percent of the population has grown,
according to Alvarez, while that of the remaining 90 percent has decreased.
The government crows that liberalization brings investment, which
brings jobs, and estimates unemployment at less than 6%. But Mexico's new
independent union federation, the National Union of Workers (UNT), puts
unemployment at over 9 million people, or a quarter of the workforce.
Alvarez notes that real unemployment is hidden by the informal economy,
which includes streetsellers, day laborers and workers in other marginal
occupations who can't find regular employment.
Almost half of Mexico's workers are not covered by its national
health care system, due to the growth of "illegal" jobs. Companies which,
despite the law, pay less than minimum wage, with no taxes, health
insurance or retirement benefits, are now estimated to employ over half the
country's workers. Meanwhile, government increases in the minimum wage
(14% in 1998) are more than eaten up in inflation (20% in the same year.)
As a result, Mexican labor becomes even cheaper on the world market.
While each country has its own particular set of circumstances, the
impact of economic reforms from country to country is overwhelmingly
similar to that in Mexico. In many cases, it's even more extreme.
The two strikes in India were not a unique response in this global
debate. The indigenous uprising which toppled Ecuador's government in
January also sought to stop privatization, along with the complete
dollarization of the country's economy.
In three weeks in February, 1999, the Mexican Electrical Workers
Union (SME) collected 2,700,000 signatures opposing the privatization of
central Mexico's electrical grid. "It is indisputable that the move to
privatize our electrical system is a condition dictated by the
International Monetary Fund, intended to create opportunities for private
investment, particularly foreign investment," says Ramon Pacheco, the
union's secretary for international relations. By organizing a Front of
National Resistance, the union was able top stop the privatization effort,
but Pacheco believes that the proposal will resurface, since the Mexican
government remains committed to neoliberal reforms. "We will only be able
to stop these proposals when people in Mexico establish a new government,
committed to a different course of economic development," he explains.
Over the last two decades, workers around the world have
demonstrated, struck, and engaged in all kinds of industrial and political
action to confront the same problem. While U.S. labor has also mounted
important struggles against privatization, the state-controlled section of
the U.S. economy has always been very small, even compared to many
capitalist countries. Nevertheless, "the loss of social benefits in the
U.S. is comparable to what's happened to us," says Benedicto Martinez,
general secretary of Mexico's Authentic Labor Front (FAT). "It's all a
product of the same global policy."
In countries like Mexico and India - mixed economies in which
socialism was put forward as an eventual goal of economic development - a
large percentage of workers have been employed by state enterprises. A
majority of Mexican industrial workers worked for the state until economic
reforms began transforming its economy in the 1970s, and its organized
labor movement had its greatest strength in the state sector.
For countries like Russia and China, where the state controlled the
economy completely, and employed virtually everyone, the impact of
privatization has been even more devastating. The governments of both
countries, which formerly guaranteed jobs for life and retirement security,
now disclaim responsibility for both as enterprises are closed and sold.
Workers face a bleak future of unemployment, while retirees go hungry and
sell their possessions when their pensions evaporate.
In the Russian and Chinese industrial heartlands (and in the
formerly socialist countries of eastern Europe), whole cities were built
around huge mills, mines, and factories. Every social benefit, from
subsidized housing and childcare, to schools and hospitals, were financed
by those enterprises whose doors are now being closed, or which are being
sold off to private owners. In Russia, where capitalist transformation is
further advanced, millions of workers have even gone months at a time
without getting paychecks.
What does solidarity mean to workers who face such problems? This
question may seem remote to U.S. workers, whose problems are largely
different. But it is a crucial one for any real international
working-class movement. The workforces of just three countries now facing
this crisis - Russia, China and India - alone constitute perhaps half the
world's workers. Efforts to build international labor relationships which
do not attempt to answer this question risk being irrelevant.
The AFL-CIO moves away from free trade and cold war policies
Since the 1995 AFL-CIO convention, when John Sweeney was elected
president, the U.S. labor federation has moved closer to asking this
question, and away from its old coldwar support for free trade and U.S.
corporate expansion overseas. In the coldwar era, past AFL-CIO presidents
George Meany and Lane Kirkland not only didn't question the basic goal of
U.S. trade policy - they gave U.S. labor a role in defending government
economic and political goals abroad.
In developing countries from Vietnam to Brazil to Chile to El
Salvador, the AFL-CIO subsidized unions which supported U.S. policy, and
attacked ones which didn't. Sometimes, as in Chile and Brazil, it even
helped organize fascist coups which left thousands dead and entire labor
movements in ruins.
Forcing economic reforms and a return to capitalism on formerly
socialist countries was as much a goal of this policy as imposing corporate
investment on countries in the developing world. Kirkland's high point was
Poland. He bragged that the federation had played a key role in toppling
its Communist government through support for Lech Walesa and Solidarnosc.
But Poland was just one of many AFL-CIO projects organized in eastern
Europe. The big prize was Russia - the then Soviet Union.
In the wake of Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika reforms, the
AFL-CIO set up an office in Moscow, funneling money and resources to groups
of workers likely to break away from the old unions affiliated with the
All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions. As Yeltsin implemented economic
reforms, those unions became independent of the government and Communist
Party. They were then pushed by workers, desperate over unemployment and
plummeting incomes, to organize protests over the reforms.
AFL-CIO-sponsored organizations attacked those efforts which criticized
Yeltsin and the reformers.
Meanwhile, Kirkland, and even United Mine Workers President Rich
Trumka, sat on the governing panel for a project intended to privatize
Russia's coal industry, close a majority of its pits, and displace almost
half a million workers. The project was financed by the World Bank.
When the new administration of current President John Sweeney was
elected in 1995, leaders like Trumka said the time had come to find a new
policy for building international relationships. "The cold war has gone,"
he declared at the New York convention. "It's over. We want to be able to
confront multinationals as multinationals ourselves now. If a corporation
does business in 15 countries, we'd like to be able to confront them as
labor in 15 countries. It's not that we need less international
involvement, but it should be focussed towards building solidarity, helping
workers achieve their needs and their goals here at home."
Jack Henning, past executive secretary of the California Labor
Federation, one of the most vocal critics of the old AFL-CIO Department of
International Affairs, noted that "we were associated with some of the very
worst elements...all in the name of anti-communism. But I think there's an
opportunity now to review our foreign activities, to stop the global
competition for jobs among the trade unions of the world."
In the wake of Sweeney's election, the activities of the Moscow
office changed considerably. It no longer sought to build up rival union
federations, and use them as a labor base to defend Yeltsin. Instead it
began providing more concrete help, training unions to set up grievance
procedures and mount legal challenges to employers, working with both new
independent unions and the old ones.
Meanwhile, the situation of Russian workers deteriorated so
drastically that in 1997 as many as 40 million went for months without any
paychecks at all. The International Chemical, Energy and Mining union
secretariat organized a worldwide solidarity campaign to support Russian
miners as they struggled to get paid, and the AFL-CIO participated.
Ending labor intervention defending the worst effects of Russian
economic reforms was an important step away from the cold war. But some
fundamental issues were left unresolved. Are the reforms themselves the
problem - are Russian workers better off as a result of the movement toward
capitalism, especially the destruction of the state sector of the economy?
And if Russian workers and unions choose to resist, and seek a change in
political and economic direction, can they count on U.S. labor support? If
so, what could U.S. unions do that would help?
These questions don't just apply to Russia. They lie at the heart
of solidarity between U.S. unions and those in most other countries of the
world. In the federation's attempt to find a new direction for
international labor solidarity, they must be answered. What they really
ask is whether the AFL-CIO will challenge the structure of the
international free trade system itself, and defend the right of workers to
get their countries to withdraw from it.
The argument over international labor standards
Like previous U.S. administrations going back five decades, the
Clinton administration seeks to manage a world of internationalized
production for rich, first-world markets, governing the system through
trade agreements, forged by developed countries to benefit a corporate
elite.
It became clear in Seattle that the government is willing to
negotiate over certain abuses of this system, and even impose some limits
on the most extreme forms of exploitation. But its purpose is to prevent a
larger and more profound challenge. It seeks to prevent U.S. labor from
questioning or opposing its basic direction and goal - the liberalization
of the world's economies.
Clinton told bankers at the World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland, that free markets continue to be the key to international
prosperity, but warned them that they had to bring unions and
environmentalists to the table. "You have
to decide whether you agree that globalization is about more than markets
alone," he declared.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair was even more blunt. "We have an
enormous job to do to convince the sincere and well-motivated opponents of
the WTO agenda that the WTO can be, indeed is, a friend of development," he
warned.
At Davos, Sweeney responded that "leaders of the corporate
community should join the effort to build enforceable laws that put limits
on cutthroat competition. It is in the self-interest of multinational
corporations and the governments that regulate them to have rules that are
agreed upon by all."
Sweeney acknowledged that developing countries are prisoners to
unpayable debt burdens, but agreed with Clinton that "globalization has
tremendous potential to lift people around the world. It's creating vast
new wealth. But financial crises are growing more frequent and severe, and
inequality is rising, as the United Nations reports, both among and within
nations. This means that the seeds for rejection of globalization are in
every political system, in developed nations as well as developing nations."
In Seattle, Bill Jordan, head of the International Confederation of
Free Trade Unions, told a labor forum that "unless the WTO takes on the
call made by the President of the United States, for a social dimension to
globalization, then globalization will fail.."
The failure of globalization, however, at least in its present
form, is exactly what many progressive unionists would like to see. That
is because the current trade structure, which the WTO has come to
symbolize, enforces conditions on developing countries designed to make
their economies more open and attractive to foreign investors.
Rather than challenge this system headon, the AFL-CIO is proposing
a social clause which would incorporate core labor standards into future
trade agreements. The AFL-CIO believes those agreements can be written in
such a way that they will protect workers rights and the environment, much
as existing agreements protect corporate profits. The federation called on
the WTO to incorporate five international labor conventions into the text
of future treaties. These five agreements, adopted by the International
Labor Organization, guarantee workers the right to organize unions and
bargain collectively with employers, and would restrict child labor,
prohibit forced labor, and outlaw discrimination. They would be enforced
by the WTO, which already uses the threat of vast financial consequences
against governments which violate existing trade rules.
Juan Somavia, the ILO's secretary-general, says his organization
"is putting in place the social ground rules of the global economy." Even
Somavia, however, doesn't believe the conventions are a cure-all. "There's
no vaccination against the ills of work," he admits.
Nevertheless, Barbara Shailor, who heads the AFL-CIO's reorganized
international affairs department, the American Center for International
Labor Solidarity, says that incorporating protections for workers into
trade agreements can protect their rights. She compares it to the effort
at the turn of the century to adopt national laws in the U.S. to enforce
fair labor standards like the minimum wage and 8-hour day.
"We have to create the political will to get them into [trade]
agreements in an enforceable fashion," she asserts. "If we didn't believe
it was possible, I don't know why we'd be doing all this mobilizing. There
are rules for capital that are successfully incorporated into these
agreements, and this is the time and the place to get them for labor."
Putting the WTO in charge of enforcing labor standards is supported
by some unions in the developing world, but opposed by others. "Some of
our colleagues fear linking trade to labor standards, and fear that labor
standards will be used as a tool for protectionism," explains G.
Rajasekaran, secretary-general of the Malaysian Trades Union Congress,
which nevertheless supports the idea.
H. Mahadevan, deputy general secretary of the All India Trade Union
Congress, says his federation has demanded that the Indian government take
two steps to reduce child labor: guaranteeing a living wage to parents,
and making education compulsory. The country's present government,
however, is beholden to rich peasants who don't want agricultural wages to
rise, or any restrictions on children in the fields. "But most important,"
he says, "the Indian government has been fulfilling the dictates of the IMF
for many years, and when have they ever been in favor of higher wages?
Further, the IMF puts pressure on the government to end subsidies, not to
increase incomes, and that becomes an excuse for the government not to pass
any laws like the ones we propose."
Mahadevan says his federation wants core labor standards
implemented in India, but also says that "Clinton has no business
threatening us with economic sanctions." Indian unions would like support
from U.S. labor, he emphasizes, but "what would really be useful is if
American unions would bring pressure on their own government to stop
putting conditions on assistance, like structural adjustment programs,
which create the conditions for child labor to begin with. Our sovereign
rights shouldn't be taken away," he says.
Parents of farmworker families in Mexico as well would prefer that
their kids have the opportunity to go to school rather than work. But
simply prohibiting child labor doesn't provide that opportunity. "We all
know that children have to work for their families to survive," says
Benedicto Martinez of the FAT.
Zwelinzima Vavi, general secretary of the Congress of South African
Trade Unions, recognizes that "there is a controversy in the developing
South about labor standards. Workers are worried about the loss of jobs,
and suspect these proposals are a disguise for protectionism by unions in
developed countries."
But for Vavi, head of one of the world's most progressive labor
federations, the idea is worth a try. "These standards are really nothing
new - they've been around for decades," he points out. "The real reason
for much of the protest is that everyone knows that the ILO has no
enforcement mechanism. The lack of enforcement has itself become a means
of attracting investment."
Vavi admits that "there is an inherent contradiction in giving the
WTO this responsibility. But that doesn't mean that we should drop trade
union rights from the overall trade system. It's a struggle."
Supporters of WTO enforcement point out that the labor
side-agreement to the North American Free Trade Agreement provides a
precedent for using the existing trade structure to enforce workers'
rights. When NAFTA was negotiated, the North American Agreement on Labor
Cooperation was also signed, which provides a mechanism for parties to file
complaints alleging that one of the three signatory countries (Mexico,
Canada and the U.S.) is not enforcing its own laws protecting labor rights
and standards.
Over 15 complaints have been filed under the sideagreement, almost
all against the Mexican government, alleging that workers have been unable
to organize independent unions without retaliation, and that the country's
health and safety laws are not enforced. The complaints have yielded
almost no concrete results - no workers fired for exercising their rights
have been rehired, and the one independent union that finally won
government registration, the October 6 union in Tijuana's Han Young plant,
has been unable to strike legally or win a contract.
Complaints filed in the U.S. over the violation of labor laws, and
the victimization of immigrant workers in particular, have also failed to
achieve concrete results.
The FAT, which has been involved in filing almost all of the
complaints, feels that they have put pressure on the Mexican government to
be more cautious, and have provided an important forum for exposing the
violations of workers' rights. Nevertheless, Martinez says that the
government has actually placed new obstacles in the path of workers seeking
to organize more militant unions, especially at foreign-owned companies.
In order to challenge an existing, pro-company union, workers now have to
file lists of signatures showing their support, along with a statement by
the boss verifying that the signatures are valid. "This process just
exposes workers who want a change," Martinez explains, "and of course the
boss will never sign."
Defenders of the sideagreement say that incorporating its
provisions into the main NAFTA agreement would give it more teeth. This is
similar to the proposal for having the WTO enforce labor standards. The
question remains, however. Can the same body which has as its primary
purpose creating favorable conditions for investment, including low wages,
weak unions, and high unemployment, also defend workers against those very
conditions?
Prior to the Seattle meeting, suspicion of WTO enforcement of
workers rights grew even more intense in developing countries when
President Clinton endorsed the idea. He trumpeted U.S. passage of an ILO
convention on child labor, calling on other governments to do likewise.
Clinton neglected to point out, however, that the convention only banned
child prostitution and the most extreme forms of child exploitation. ILO
Convention 138, which takes a much stronger prohibition against the labor
of children under 14 remains unratified by the U.S.
"One of the main criticisms of the American government is that it
has double standards," Vavi says. "It hasn't ratified most ILO conventions
itself, while shouting about enforcing them everywhere else."
An additional controversy involves which labor standards are to be
considered the most important, or core, standards, and who will participate
in making that decision. There is very little disagreement on protecting
the right to organize, for instance, and more around proposals for
eliminating child labor. But missing are proposals which would treat
protection of the state sector, and social benefits and subsidies, as
international labor standards.
Missing also are proposals protecting the rights of migrant workers
from developing countries, working in developed ones. Over 80 million
people worldwide live outside the countries where they were born, another
product of growing global incquality. Migrants leave their native
countries, fleeing poverty which is in great part also a product of
economic liberalization.
The remittances of migrants are a large source of national income
in their countries of origin, going directly to the families of workers and
farmers rather than trickling through the pockets of government and banks.
The status of that expatriate population and its right to work, is a basic
question of labor rights for developing countries.
ILO Convention 142 would require governments to protect the rights
of migrants and their families, and prohibit the extreme violence suffered
by immigrants in Germany, Spain, France and the U.S. Discriminatory laws
like California's Proposition 187, which sought to prevent undocumented
immigrants from receiving medical care and education, or the 1996
immigration reform bill, which denied Social Security and other benefits to
legal residents, would be illegal.
The AFL-CIO is in the process of developing a much stronger
position in defense of immigrant rights. It might consider mounting a
campaign for ratification of the ILO convention on migrants, and prosposing
that it, too, be considered a core labor standard.
Disagreement among U.S. unions
Inside the AFL-CIO, a number of unions don't think it's possible to
make the WTO enforce workers' rights. "It's like asking the fox to guard
the henhouse," says Brian McWilliams, president of the International
Longshore and Warehouse Union,. "There has to be another mechanism outside
the WTO to police workers' rights worldwide." He points out that the U.S.
government itself has only ratified one of the five ILO conventions, and is
unlikely to push the WTO to enforce international agreements it doesn't
itself recognize.
The dockworkers union owes its existence to international trade,
but also inherits a tradition of working-class internationalism from its
radical past. It left the CIO in the late 1940s at the beginning of the
coldwar, and only rejoined in the late 1980s. Over the decades it's used
its power on the docks to defend unions and workers in Central America,
Chile, Korea and South Africa. During the WTO demonstrations, it shut down
every west coast U.S. port on November 30. While unions which oppose the
WTO process are often called protectionist, McWilliams retorts that "we're
not against fair trade, we're against free trade."
The ILWU president points out that the definition of labor
standards should be broadened to include those which would impact the U.S.,
including the prohibition of strikebreaking, the right to free health care,
living wages, and protections for the rights of immigrants. As long as the
gap in living standards between developed and developing countries exists,
he says, jobs will leave high wage countries, with our without WTO
agreements. Therefore, U.S. unions should "take a critical position toward
U.S. economic and military policy that plays a role in enforcing that
living standards gap," McWilliams emphasizes.
George Becker, president of the steelworkers union, calls the WTO
and the trade structure fundamentally flawed. "There's nothing in it for
working people ... There's no way that you can put a comma here or change a
word there to make it compatible. It's not our law. Scrap it."
In November, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney signed a letter from
the President's Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations,
endorsing administration goals for the WTO talks, including gaining greater
access for U.S. corporations and investors abroad. Sweeney sits on the
committee with heads of major corporations.
Sweeney said he'd gained assurances from the administration that it
would press in return for a working group on labor issues. An AFL-CIO
statement calls the commitment "a sharp departure from the business
community's previous position that workers' rights are in no way the domain
of the WTO," and calls for a hard fight "to make the WTO a more democratic
and accountable institution."
The Canadian Labour Congress was blunt in differing with the
AFL-CIO approach. "The struggle by unions, social justice groups and
environmentalists is about more than just winning a seat at the table, or a
'social clause' or environmental rules," a CLC statement declared. "We're
determined to change the entire trade regime."
Sweeney's move stunned many U.S. union leaders as well. Steven
Yokich, president of the United Auto Workers, resigned as chair of the
AFL-CIO Manufacturing and Industrial Committee in protest. "I'm as cynical
as I can be about putting the WTO in charge of enforcing labor standards,"
he said in Seattle. "It's nonsense."
Yokich noted that his union, together with the ILWU, the Teamsters
and the federal workers union all refused to vote for Al Gore's
presidential endorsement at the AFL-CIO convention in October. Gore's
unwavering support for administration trade policy was the big stumbling
block.
AFL-CIO leaders are obviously concerned over the potential fallout
from a big battle with the Clinton administration over trade policy. While
it went all-out to mobilize union members to Seattle, the federation faces
an uphill battle to get those same members to vote for Gore.
Labor solidarity and national economic development
Labor federations in developing countries propose a large variety
of programs for economic development. The more conservative generally
support foreign investment and the governments which encourage it, even
when those governments keep minimum wages at starvation level, and suppress
the efforts of workers to organize, especially in export industries.
More radical unions support programs of national development which
seek to protect local industries, and keep them in public, rather than
private, hands. They support policies which encourage the formation of an
internal, national market, based on the rising income of workers and
farmers.
According to Mahadevan, Indian labor has proposed such an
alternative development plan to its government. "All government programs
should be employment oriented," he explains. "There should be a break with
the IMF, and the emphasis put on development of local resources. We need
land reform, and technology suited to Indian conditions. We have a very
big internal market here, with a large middle class, and we should produce
for it."
The FAT's Martinez says that to win similar changes in Mexico,
"there has to be a political change here - things can't go on as they are.
There has to be an answer which includes economic development. We're more
indebted than ever, despite the fact that our debt has been paid many times
over. The Mexican government is simply enacting agreements imposed by the
U.S., and as a result, more plants come here because of the advantages they
get. These things affect all of us. We have to have a broader concept of
solidarity."
The difference in standard of living between the U.S. and Mexico,
which was about 3:1 in the 1950s, is about 8:1 today, according to Mexican
senator and economist Rosalbina Garabito. That difference impoverishes
Mexican workers, and is the cause of the loss of U.S. jobs as corporations
relocate production.
National development programs, however, are the antithesis of the
economic framework the WTO enforces. The international institutions
supported by the U.S. government, from the WTO to the IMF, do everything in
their power to keep developing countries from exploring these alternatives.
Those governments which do pursue them become pariahs in the international
trade system, eventually subject to sanctions, and even called "rogue
nations."
"Governments are told that workers' rights and economic development
are a zero sum game, that improving workers' lives slows development," Vavi
says. "In the pursuit of profit, they are told to remove worker
protections, and then use that as an inducement for investment. But
development is a wider concept. It includes social development, and the
living conditions of the people. An approach which seeks to erode workers'
rights and wages undermines it. Development can't exist with mass
unemployment and poverty."
Unless the international trade structure is changed drastically,
these national development alternatives will not be possible. Proposing a
social clause within that trade structure, even one which limits the
prerogatives of foreign investors, does little to support national
development less dependent on transnational capital. At the same time, it
provides political support to the very institutions which seek to stop it.
"Seattle has presented us with new questions about our relationship
with workers and unions in other countries," McWilliams says.
"Globalization doesn't affect us all in the same way. In the U.S., workers
experience runaway shops. In less developed countries, they endure
superexploitation, environmental rape and the destruction of their
traditional way of life. But the most important thing for us is to deal
with the gap in living standards, which is enforced by U.S. political and
military power. As long as that gap exists, jobs will leave and
superexploitation will continue.
"So we have to ask ourselves the question - what strategy will
allow us to unite the world's workers? That strategy isn't new. We need
international workers solidarity. That's the only way we'll be able to
stand up to international capitalism."
International solidarity should not only protect the jobs and
conditions of workers in developed countries, but should also defend the
right of workers in developing countries to pursue economic development in
their own interest. That means opposing U.S. foreign policy in areas
where it has led to a drastic decline in living standards, whether loan
bailouts in Mexico, austerity programs in East Asia, or economic reforms in
Eastern Europe.
This kind of international solidarity is at loggerheads with every
U.S. administration economic, political and trade policy, whether Democrat
or Republican. In the end, it is impossible to pursue a solution to these
problems if the labor movement continues to avoid potential conflicts with
the Democratic Party in the interests of electing its candidate, even when
he's a free trader. The problem is compounded by the subsidy the AFL-CIO
continues to receive for international programs from the U.S. government.
There is a basic conflict of interest. Therefore, political
independence is crucial. The federation has to be unafraid to publicly
criticize imperial policies like the U.S. counterinsurgency program in
Columbia, economic and military sanctions in Iraq and Serbia, or the
economic blockade of Cuba. These aggressions are the iron fist lying
behind the imposition of U.S. economic and trade policy.
The AFL-CIO left Seattle making opposition to China's membership in
the WTO, and new administration trade agreements with China, the
centerpiece of its trade policy. This may be a declaration of political
independence, but it's one which lines up with the old China lobby, instead
of with those calling for a fundamental reordering of the international
economic system.
COSATU's Vavi questions its hypocrisy. He notes that the Chinese
government and labor movement supported the liberation struggle against
apartheid in South Africa. He asks why China's record on human or labor
rights is any worse than many other countries, whose WTO membership and
trade agreements the AFL-CIO has not opposed. "We are disturbed by the
obstacles to workers seeking to organize independent unions, and limits on
the ability to demonstrate freely, and we intend to talk to Chinese unions
about these problems," he says.
In Vietnam, where unions have been more militant in defending
workers' interests, and the government has backed away from an all-out
dismantling of socialism, foreign investment has started to slow. The
AFL-CIO did not oppose Vietnam's WTO membership, or Cuba's. Opposing it
for China is not going to force Chinese unions to oppose government
economic policy. And saying that solidarity with Chinese labor is
impossible because the All China Federation of Trade Unions is not a
legitimate union body smacks of old coldwar, China-lobby prohibitions.
Like the old government-affiliated unions in Mexico, the Chinese
labor movement has been tied to the government and its political party
since 1949. As the government has become committed to economic reforms,
those unions clearly face a choice - between old political relationships
and fighting for the needs of workers under the guns of privatization and
the explosion of sweatshops in the new economic zones.
U.S. unions would obviously like to see the Chinese rely less on
transnational corporations as a source of capital for economic development.
If they have cooperative relationships based on mutual respect and
self-interest, they will have a more receptive audience that they will if
they treat people with whom they disagree as though they had no right to
exist.
The AFL-CIO's campaign on China's WTO membership won't move workers
in either country an inch closer to a common front against transnational
corporations. Instead, U.S. workers need to better understand Chinese
unions and develop relations with them.
Over and over, U.S. workers and unions need to ask ourselves how we
can achieve closer relations with workers in other countries, even if we
don't agree with all the policies of their labor movements. The first step
is opposing the WTO system on principle.
The global trade structure is controlled by developed countries,
and used to impose an unjust international economic order on developing
ones. It is a cruel illusion to expect that same structure to ensure
economic justice.
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david bacon - labornet email david bacon
internet: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 1631 channing way
phone: 510.549.0291 berkeley, ca 94703
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