world labor needs independence and solidarity
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 perce
World labor needs independence and solidarity
Conclusion to a longer piece by David Bacon posted to PEN-L by Stephen Philion: 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. === My Comment: Stephen, you prefaced Bacon's article with the following words: "This is an outstanding article, one which takes the labor movement where it is and, given that, where it might be able to go." Doesn't Bacon's call for the need to relate to official Chinese trade unions as they *are* make Henry Liu's remonstrations more understandable? Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
Re: World labor needs independence and solidarity
On Sat, 4 Mar 2000, Louis Proyect wrote: Conclusion to a longer piece by David Bacon posted to PEN-L by Stephen Philion: 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. 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. === My Comment: Stephen, you prefaced Bacon's article with the following words: "This is an outstanding article, one which takes the labor movement where it is and, given that, where it might be able to go." Doesn't Bacon's call for the need to relate to official Chinese trade unions as they *are* make Henry Liu's remonstrations more understandable? Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/ Certainly, yet what have I written that would diverge from such a position ? I would argue that Bacon has made the argument in a fashion that speaks to those who might not be very knowledgeable about China, which is far preferable to trashing fellow comrades as dupes of the AFL-CIO every time they say anything critical about the workers' situation in China. Nota bene, for all the trashing of people like Doug Henwood by Henry, I would note that many of Doug's positions on the direction the US labor movment should take have dovetailed rather neatly with what Bacon writes above. It is also a position that many trade union activists in 'developing' countries would be supportive of I believe. On the one hand if western union activists put forth such a position in China, it would be welcomed. At the same time, there's a considerable portion of cadres who would not be happy with such a position. It puts aside the myth that there are only two positions, a "chinese" one and an "american" one...That is not necesarily welcome by those who wish to brush aside the need for serious class analysis of Chinese political economy. Ultimately, we need to turn to people like Raymond Lau for such work... Steve
