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Date: Thu, 10 Sep 1998 12:15:50 -0700
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From: Sid Shniad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Key Challenges for the Labor Movement
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The Nation September 21, 1998
Key Challenges for the Labor Movement
Elaine Bernard, Executive Director
Harvard Trade Union Program
How must labor change to meet the challenge of a reconfigured and
significantly more powerful corporate ruling class, ask Brecher and
Costello. They supply some answers, but I fear their proposals are not
bold enough. Labor needs to become an aggressive social movement, with the
audacity to lift members' aspirations to an authentic internationalism --
not just by challenging capital, but by providing working people with an
effective vehicle for transforming our world to a more just and humane
society. Here's one example of how this might work.
The reawakened labor movement could become a powerful human rights
movement promoting the full agenda of rights found in the 1948 UN
Declaration of Human Rights. Some 50 years after the adoption of this bold
statement of internationally shared values, few in the US fully appreciate
that human rights encompass not only the often cited political rights such
as freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and free speech, but
additionally economic rights arising out of the logic that human rights
must include those things necessary to sustain human life, such as shelter,
food, and even education and paid employment.
Organized labor has always been at its core a "rights" movement. What is
a collective agreement, labor law, or even labor standards other than the
codification of workers rights? What is a union, other than an
organization built by workers to win rights, and the vehicle necessary for
exercising these rights? Putting the movement back into labor in the next
century will mean constructing a powerful, worldwide human rights movement
of working people.
We could start with every union office prominently displaying the
Declaration of Human Rights. Unions, community groups, and others should
demand that all employers, including public sector employers, sign on to
the Declaration of Human Rights as a minimum standard of acceptable
behavior. In organizing drives and in collective bargaining, the
Declaration should be circulated and promoted. Unions should insist it be
added as a preamble to all collective agreement. Labor should work with
the religious, community and educational organizations to promote human
rights which include, by the way, the crucial right to organize -- a right
Vice President Al Gore recently lamented at an AFL-CIO Executive Council
meeting as the only "right" which American workers fear to exercise.
Actually, if he checked out the many rights included in UN Declaration of
Human Rights he might find that there are many rights which Americans
either fear to exercise or cannot exercise. This could be a very exciting
and educational campaign, indeed.
Labor has a special role to play in such a campaign because it is more
than just a movement for winning rights. It is also the necessary,
collective vehicle for workers to exercise their rights. The difference
between having rights and being able to exercise them is not readily
apparent. But, in the same way that having a drivers licence, doesn't get
you anywhere without the use of a car, it's important to understand that
there is a difference between having rights and having what it takes to
exercise them -- a vehicle.
Organize labor understands that rights are not self actualizing.
Collective agreements don't enforce themselves. Like muscles, if rights
are not exercised, they will atrophy. And like muscles, if you use them,
you can strengthen them. With rights, if you exercise them, you can even
build up an appetite for more rights.
In opposition to the corporate rights global agenda of free trade,
privatization and deregulation, labor must inspire a global human agenda.
Labor needs to become the leader of a national and international human
rights movement for the 21st century -- in the workplace and beyond.
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
