-Caveat Lector-
Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit
The American Prospect, 12:12
July 2, 2001 - July 16, 2001.
The CIO without the CIA
by Simon Rodberg
For four decades, the AFL-CIO's international presence was notable less for
its promotion of labor rights than for its Cold War ferocity. At global
conventions, for instance, the labor federation's protocol required AFL-CIO
representatives to stand up and leave the room whenever members of
insufficiently anti-Communist unions like Italy's CGIL entered. The labor
federation's Latin American arm, the American Institute for Free Labor
Development (AIFLD), was especially notorious for its CIA connections and
for siding with repressive governments, often against progressive unions.
In
the 1980s, during the reign of the death squads in El Salvador, "AIFLD
threw
money at the most conservative and most pro-government union factions,"
says
the Reverend David Dyson, a longtime union activist. When the Reagan
administration was supporting terror throughout Latin America, Dyson says,
"we'd find AIFLD people sitting around the embassy drinking coffee like
they
were part of the team."
In short, while the international operations of the Reagan-era AFL-CIO,
funded in part by the federal government in the form of grants from the
National Endowment for Democracy, did perform admirable international
work--particularly their support for Lech Walesa's Solidarity movement in
Poland--they were better known throughout much of the third world for
undermining active unionism than for supporting it.
The U.S. government still funds an AFL-CIO subsidiary, to the tune of
approximately $15 million per year--but the international activism it
supports is no longer what Ronald Reagan envisioned: The 28 overseas
offices
of the American Center for International Labor Solidarity--the so-called
Solidarity Center--promote worldwide labor freedoms and help third-world
workers and American unions to organize jointly against multinational
corporations. What produced such a transformation of the AFL-CIO's
international role? And what will be its future under the Bush
administration?
The seeds of the Solidarity Center were originally planted during the Cold
War, when John Sweeney, then the president of the Service Employees
International Union (SEIU), joined the National Labor Committee in Support
of Democracy and Human Rights in El Salvador, a group of union presidents
opposed to the AFL-CIO's international policies. The end of the Cold War
and
the 1995 election of John Sweeney's reform slate to lead the AFL-CIO meant
an opportunity to overhaul the federation's international activities. And
if
American unions were in fact to have international cooperation, an overhaul
was necessary--because to that point the focus of the institutes had been
not labor organizing but anticommunism. "In 1996, the AFL-CIO asked me to
go
to Argentina to talk about globalization," recalls Jerome Levinson, a
distinguished international labor lawyer. A union leader there sat him down
at lunch. "If there's one thing you do," said the Argentine, "change the
name of AIFLD. The intervention against the progressive unions created such
a bitter lack of confidence that they will never rehabilitate themselves
otherwise."
After he took over the AFL-CIO in 1995, Sweeney brought in the
International
Association of Machinists' Barbara Shailor to run the federation's
International Affairs Department. As a young staffer, Shailor had helped
set
up the National Labor Committee. In turn, she hired younger unionists with
organizing experience. "Without creating an internal crisis in the place,"
says Levinson, "she has gradually weeded out those people who were
associated with the old crowd and their Cold War line. They have changed
the face of the AFL-CIO."
By 1997, Sweeney had consolidated the AFL-CIO's old international
institutes
into the Solidarity Center. Harry Kamberis, who runs the center, is the
link
between the old guard and the new: He worked from 1986 to 1997 in the
Asian-American Free Labor Institute, one of the Cold War precursors to the
Solidarity Center. Though he spent a year as a union organizer in the
mid-1980s, Kamberis, a former foreign-service officer and international
businessman, doesn't share the liberal-left union background of his
colleagues at the AFL-CIO.
But Kamberis has succeeded in bringing a State Department-like organization
to the Solidarity Center offices, which in effect function as foreign
embassies of the AFL-CIO, directed from Washington, D.C., and run by
American unionists aided by local program officers and office staff. The
countries of operation--from Bangladesh to Bulgaria, Paraguay to the
Philippines--tend to have union representation among 3 percent to 5 percent
of the workforce, with scarce enforcement of labor laws. The Solidarity
Center receives grants from the U.S. government to promote workers' rights
through such activities as teaching organizing and collective-bargaining
skills, providing advice and resources for specific campaigns, and
sponsoring exchanges to bring unionists to the United States.
Even when they were also serving as Cold War tools of the CIA, the
AFL-CIO's
international institutes did do some labor-rights training. But as the
backlash against corporate-style globalization has spread across the world,
the Solidarity Center has become far more active in organizing than the
institutes ever were. The staff on the ground is almost entirely new in the
last five years--and it is entirely new in Latin America. The invigoration
of the center's work is connected, both substantively and symbolically, to
the labor movement's partnership with the student-led movement against
sweatshops and to the strengthening of federal programs to promote workers'
interests and human rights initiated by the Clinton administration. Just
four days before George W. Bush's inauguration in January, for instance,
then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright announced a grant of nearly $1
million to the Solidarity Center for work against sweatshops and child
labor. In the Philippines, Kamberis says, the money is used to test various
industry codes of conduct and help Filipino trade unions use the codes as
organizing instruments. In Central America, the grant goes to expand the
scope of antisweatshop organizing beyond the garment industry to other
sectors, such as agriculture, transportation, and tourism.
The Solidarity Center's activities are varied and far-flung. In Cambodia,
says Kamberis, "we wrote the labor codes" during the transition from
autocracy. In Indonesia, during the height of the antisweatshop protests in
the United States, Reebok sponsored workers'-rights seminars in its
factories that were led by the Solidarity Center. In each country, the
center partners with a local workers' organization--often an incipient
union
at a multinational employer that already might be headquartered, and
unionized, in the United States.
If the solidarity center is promoting an international workers' agenda, why
does the U.S. government cover three-quarters of its budget? The AFL-CIO
itself is struggling with that issue--and the question is sure to occur to
the Bush administration sooner or later. When the federation's
International
Affairs Committee suggested the creation of the Solidarity Center, it also
recommended that the center be weaned off government funding. The panel's
fear was less that the Solidarity Center would be susceptible to use as a
tool of reactionary U.S. policy than that the need to appease government
funders would dull the edge of the union's international agenda. Kamberis
says that the funding hasn't compromised the center's mission; and it is
true that even the federal government's grant materials say that the
center's role is to help build strong unions and win social and economic
justice.
The Solidarity Center's "in-country" staffers, with their backgrounds in
union organizing, act as conduits between American unions and their foreign
counterparts while serving as the AFL-CIO's eyes and ears on the ground in
other nations. "If the World Bank holds a meeting in Brazil," says Ron
Blackwell, the labor federation's director of corporate affairs, "we need
to
have a labor person there. The Solidarity Center will help. If there's an
organizing drive [in the United States] with a multinational with
operations
in Brazil, we need to know what the operation there is like. It helps us
act
as if we were global." Tim Beaty, the AFL-CIO's deputy director of
international affairs, speaks proudly of linking workers at a repressive
Nike contractor in Mexico with the U.S. garment and textile workers' union
UNITE and of helping to bring workers from Korea to visit the Korean-owned
factory in Mexico. When the AFL-CIO confronts the world of multinational
corporations, the Solidarity Center staffers are its front-line troops.
The Bush administration is not likely to take kindly to subsidizing a
global
battle for union power. But a proposed reduction in government funding
could
turn out to be beneficial to the AFL-CIO by forcing it to revise its
overseas structure. The substance of what the Solidarity Center does is
different from the work of the old international institutes, but the form
is
much the same: The U.S. union projects its power through "embassies" around
the world. Unlike the Bush administration, however, the AFL-CIO has neither
the power nor the inclination to act unilaterally. The international
workers' agenda preached at the AFL-CIO requires a global strategy. But
maintaining 28 small outposts of American unionism isn't a particularly
strategic way to globalize.
The good news is that the AFL-CIO leadership realizes that it needs a new
way to operate. "There was a time when people at the union thought of the
work outside of the country as international work, and the work inside as
the AFL-CIO's work," says Barbara Shailor. "We've lost the sense that there
are two different missions." The historically weak International
Confederation of Free Trade Unions instituted a "Millennium Review" last
year to figure out a new structure for an international labor movement,
with
the American Labor Federation's full support. As global coordination
increases, Shailor foresees a reduction in the number of Solidarity Center
offices. Rather than embassies of the AFL-CIO, she says, "we're moving much
more toward a global union model."
Nobody knows how that model will work in practice. But one clue comes from
what may be the AFL-CIO's first truly global campaign. On May 1, the
federation launched a drive to get all U.S. businesses to post the ILO
Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights, which supports the right
to organize and bargain collectively and rejects discrimination, forced
work, and child labor. The choice to inform the traditionally isolationist
American workforce of its international rights wasn't accidental; nor was
the decision to kick off the effort on International Workers Day, which is
usually ignored in the United States. At the same time, the Solidarity
Center and its 28 offices launched their own campaign--to distribute the
same poster around the world. It will be years before a global union can
coordinate this kind of effort or fight for these rights. But the AFL-CIO,
which not so long ago was busy fighting the Cold War, is starting the work
now.
* * *
Copyright (c) 2001 by The American Prospect, Inc. This article may not be
resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without
prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about
permissions
to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
=================================================================
NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems
Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us
339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012
http://www.blythe.org e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
=================================================================
nytlab-06.25.01-18:00:22-682
<A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A>
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html
<A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html";>Archives of
[EMAIL PROTECTED]</A>
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
<A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/";>ctrl</A>
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
