Global Labor Strategies

From Campaigns to Movement

Second of two parts. A version, with citiations, of this blog by GLS staffers Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello, and Brendan Smith appears in New Labor Forum, Spring 2006: www.newlaborforum.org

While the obstacles to global labor cooperations must be taken seriously – but they are not insurmountable.  In this blog we give a few examples of promising strategies for effective international union cooperation, and some suggestions for next steps.. 

Horizontal cooperation
Traditionally, unions have relied on Global Union Federations (GUFs – formerly called International Trade Secretariats) to link unions in broad industrial categories like transportation workers and service workers around the globe.  While these organizations have often played an important role in promoting international labor cooperation, they have two problems.  First, they are very small, severely understaffed organizations that are equipped to stimulate but hardly to conduct the vast work of international labor cooperation.  Second, they are largely bound by rules of protocol that require communication between workers in different countries to pass from an affiliated national union or federation in one country through the international organization to the affiliated national union or federation in another country.  This cumbersome procedure can impede as well as promote contact and cooperation among those who work for the same company or in the same industry or occupation in different countries.

More horizontal links are possible.  In 2002, French union representatives on the board of France Telecom noticed that a declaration of insolvency for its recently-acquired German subsidiary MobilCom was on the agenda for the upcoming meeting.  The union representatives interpreted this as part of a “rectification plan” to make employees pay for the huge debts incurred by the company’s global acquisition binge during the high-tech bubble.  The French unionists immediately tried to contact German workers at MobilCom through UNI, but found that its German affiliate had no members at MobilCom.  But some French union activists remembered meeting people from the German metalworkers union IG Metall at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre.  A few emails later they were directly in touch with some IG Metall members at MobilCom.

Soon German and French workers developed an aggressive plan to expose France Telecom’s plans. The energy of the French response helped activate the German workers, who had limited experience with unions.  Rallies were held with both German and French workers participating. Pressure was put on the German government to help the German company, saving it from imminent closure.  An agreement for more orderly cutbacks and a good severance plan were negotiated.

The MobilCom story indicates how horizontal channels of communication can make possible direct cooperation among workers in different countries.  Alain Baron, a union representative for the French union SUD-PTT on the France Telecom Board, observes,

“The cross border unity established in the France Telecom group is indicative of a new social climate. The attacks of the multi-nationals on jobs, their ability to relocate, do not often meet with an adequate response from the unions. Enclosed in their local routine interests, bogged down in inter-apparatus negotiations, the traditional unions often find it hard to establish contacts which can mobilize employees in several countries against the same employer.  The international structures of trade unions, when they exist, are in general too distant from the union activist on the ground.”  He adds that new venues like the World Social Forum are important to establish worker to worker links.  “The easiest way to cross the Rhine was through crossing the ocean.”

Strategic alliances
Often international labor cooperation is a matter of time-limited campaigns that leave little international linkage behind when they are victorious or abandoned.  Unions also need to consider strategic alliances – commitments between unions with strong common interests to work together on common projects on an on-going basis.

The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) has been at the forefront of building bridges with their Mexican counterparts.  In the early 1990s, faced with the passage of NAFTA, the UE entered into what it called a “Strategic Organizing Alliance” with the Mexican Frente del Trabajo (FAT).  Together the two unions instituted regular worker-to-worker exchanges, published a monthly electronic periodical, built worker centers and joint organizing teams, and regularly informed their members about what they were doing and why it mattered to them.

The UE/FAT alliance worked to ensure that workers on both sides of the border benefited from coordinated activities.  FAT members, for example, traveled to Milwaukee to provided support for the UE organizing campaign at a local foundry, where they allayed Mexican immigrant workers’ concerns that the UE might be similar to “company” unions they knew all too well in Mexico.  On behalf of FAT members, the UE filed the first complaint under the Mexico-US labor rights “side agreement” that accompanied NAFTA – charging General Electric and Honeywell with labor rights violations.  It has also built a tri-national alliance between unions in the US, Canada, and Mexico to enforce the organizing rights of Mexican workers at the Echlin auto parts company.

Framework agreements
About two dozen global firms with more than two million workers have signed “framework agreements” that resemble the Quebecor agreement described earlier in this article.  These agreements differ from corporate codes of conduct in that they are negotiated with unions and provide for some kind of union participation in implementation and monitoring.  The “Declaration of Social Rights and Industrial Relations” signed by Volkswagen, the International Metalworkers Federation (IMF) and European Works Council, for example, requires the company to provide its workers worldwide with the right to form unions, protection against discrimination, a safe working environment, and minimum wage standards consistent with local conditions.  Volkswagen was pressured to accept the agreement by Western European workers who already have those rights; as Robert Steiert of the IMF puts it, the agreement is most important for “workers at plants to be built or taken over by Volkswagen, especially in lesser developed countries.”

Such agreements are no panacea.  So far they cover only those workers directly employed by the companies, not the growing number of workers employed by suppliers contracted by the firms. In the VW agreement, the company pledges to “encourage” its suppliers to abide by the agreement, but it does not stop Volkswagen from contracting with labor rights violators.  The auto unions see the need to tighten this language as an important next step. Indeed, if they do not find a way to extend decent wages and standards throughout the supplier chain, they will find that they represent fewer and fewer workers. 

Framework agreements are made between big international bureaucracies on both sides of the labor-management divide. The communication that they foster is more likely to be among high union officials and top company officials than among workers, shop stewards, and local union leaders in different countries. This can limit both the effectiveness of the agreements and their capacity to build a movement.  Implementation and monitoring of framework agreements can be difficult where no union exists in a workplace. 

But, in part because of the limited staff and resources of the federations that sign them, some of the framework agreements have led to the development of global networks of participating unions to directly monitor them.  These networks and the general flow of information which often results from these agreements help workers identify common interests, common problems, and discrepancies in company policies.

Some US trade unionists dismiss framework agreements because they usually have not lead to new members—the primary focus of US trade union strategy. In contrast, many trade union officials and activists we talked with in Europe who have experience with framework agreements see them as a first step in global union coordination at the firm or industry level. 

Some next steps

Here are some concrete steps unions can take to make international labor cooperation less haphazard and more proactive:

Create efficient communication channels at all levels
•    Increase exponentially the amount of information flowing among workers and their organizations at all levels.  This will require significant resources for everything from research to translation services.  Regular information exchanges with unions in other countries can be facilitated by internet-based knowledge networks; a Global Labor Solidarity E-Newsletter presenting experiences and analyzing lessons of cooperative efforts; and periodic conferences.  Communication-- swapping stories and reflecting on issues, strategy and tactics-- should involve local unions, staff at all levels, and the membership.

•    Institute regular work-to-worker exchanges: Traditional labor connections are funneled through national and international federations.  But to build support for the radical shift toward a global labor movement, workers need to be continually “rubbing shoulders” with workers from other countries who work in the same companies, industries, and occupations.  Such exchanges will not only build trust and solidarity, but also position workers to assist and encourage their own unions to go global.

•    Build trust overseas by offering concrete services to workers and unions in other countries: One way to overcome suspicions and cement relationships is to begin offering services to unions and their allies abroad.  At a recent conference on outsourcing, for example, Indian unionists asked US unionists to provide on-demand information about US companies.  Latin American labor networks have similarly requested regular updates on American trade policy and political developments.  Initiating networking overseas by offering such services will begin opening doors and building the trust needed for on-going coordinated action.   

Create global networks and alliances before the battles begin
•    Start reaching out to potential allies. Unions need to connect with national and local unions to build relationships far in advance of asking workers in other countries to commit risky acts of solidarity.  Such pre-battle networking should also include foreign civil society organizations and allied government officials.

•    Develop “intelligence” about countries, unions, and industries around the globe to spot new trends and construct new strategies. As any global corporation knows, going global requires staying abreast of an increasingly complex set of variables, such as national labor laws, political developments, and economic conditions.  Seeking regular “intelligence” about specific countries and global industries can ensure unions that they are not “flying blind” in the global arena.

•    Utilize immigrant members.  15% of the US workforce are immigrants.  They are playing a critical role in the growth of unions in low wage service industries.  They also form a vital resource for forming links to established and nascent labor movements around the world.  Unions should provide resources to help them utilize their ties with their home countries to promote on-going international connections.

Connect the local and the global
•    Build a global strategy at the local level.  Today even local unions must confront global corporations either at the collective bargaining table or in organizing campaigns as multi-national corporations extend their reach in the economy.  Unions should develop a set of practices and protocols at all levels to build global perspectives and global action into local campaigns. This should include creating task forces of workers specializing in bringing international pressure to bear in local campaigns through direct contact with unions and workers in other countries. The Quebecor and FranceTelecom campaigns described above are examples of how global actions can help local campaigns.

•    Establish educational programs about globalization so that workers can participate in an informed way in building a global labor movement. Unions need to begin telling workers the facts demonstrating what they already know viscerally: globalization is affecting their lives and is here to stay.  Such education is politically essential for dialogues about shifting resources into global networking and campaigns.

Take the offensive on global public policy issues
•    Promote alternatives to neoliberal policies at local, state, and national levels.  Globalization has baffled both Democratic and Republican lawmakers.  This is an opportunity for unions to take the lead in defining solutions to outsourcing, contingent work, privatization, and other public policy issues.  By framing public debates, developing expertise, and proposing alternative solutions unions have an opportunity to be perceived as innovative and aggressive in solving workers’ problems.

•    Utilize immigrant members to educate the public, media, and politicians.  Immigrant workers are a rich source of knowledge and experience about the global economy.  They can help labor spearhead a progressive global agenda on migration in the global economy; develop alternatives to destructive trade deals that harm workers in both the North and the South; and launch a new discussion about human, labor, and citizenship rights in the age of globalization.

Unions have tried, with varying success, to utilize international solidarity in particular struggles.  Building a global labor movement next requires something further: proactive approaches designed to make international communication and cooperation part of the daily practice of the labor movement at local, national, and international levels.

Building a Global Labor Movement

First of two parts. A version, with citiations, of this blog by GLS staffers Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello, and Brendan Smith appears in New Labor Forum, Spring 2006: www.newlaborforum.org

Once employers were mostly local; so were unions.  When local companies became national corporations, unions too had to go national.  Now capital has gone global.  Unions have made intermittent efforts at international cooperation, but the obstacles are considerable.  To overcome them, bridge-building and information sharing across borders needs to start long before individual campaigns begin, cementing relationships, fostering solidarity, and developing enough strategic knowledge for unions to provide mutual aid in the global arena.  For labor to meet the challenge of globalization, the haphazard international labor cooperation of the past must be buttressed by proactive horizontal linkages between unions and workers at all levels. 

Why go global?
Unions all over the world are reeling before the historic changes summed up in the word “globalization.”  At the core of most national trade union strategies is the elimination of labor costs as a factor in competition.  But globalization has undermined that strategy.  As Morgan Stanley chief economist Stephen Roach put it,

“Wage rates in China and India range from 10 percent to 25 percent of those for comparable-quality workers in the US and elsewhere in the developed world.  Consequently, offshore outsourcing that extracts products from relatively low-wage workers in the developing world has become an increasingly urgent tactic for competitive survival by companies in the developed world.” 

Roach compares the movement of jobs to the cheapest labor market to the financial practice of “arbitrage,” in which speculators move from one market to another to take advantage of a cheaper price.  He calls the result “global labor arbitrage.”  But the labor movement has long had another name for it: “the race to the bottom.”

Global labor arbitrage creates competition not just between first and third world countries and workers, but also among those in the third world.  Mexico has lost  up to 500,000 jobs and hundreds of firms to China, for example. Wages on jobs outsourced from the US to India are held down by competition from workers in Vietnam and the Philippines. 

Some have argued that the labor movement can regenerate itself based on sectors that are immune to globalization.  But today, a high proportion of both high- and low-skilled service jobs, whether in the private or the public sector, are as vulnerable to foreign outsourcing as manufacturing jobs.  And the job market as a whole is affected by competitive liberalization and the global assault on public services and public pension and welfare programs; transnational ownership of service corporations and the loss of bargaining leverage; the increasing ability to outsource service sector and high skilled jobs; and the spread of  new remote technologies.  (MacDonald’s now has drive-through service windows where the order is taken by someone far from the restaurant – potentially on the other side of the world.)  The result is stagnant or falling wages, cuts in benefits, and increased economic insecurity.

Capital has, in effect, outflanked labor.  No matter how strong a national labor movement, no matter how high its union density, it can be rendered powerless if employers can simply move production abroad.  That is why unions around the world are looking for new approaches to international labor cooperation.

International labor cooperation can work, and when it does, the payoff for workers can be substantial.  Consider, for example, the 735 workers at a nonunion printing plant in Versailles, Kentucky.  Their plant is owned by Quebecor World, a global commercial printing company with 35,000 employees in 160 facilities in 17 countries in North and South America, Europe, and Asia.  Versailles workers tried to organize in 2001 but lost an NLRB election after Quebecor waged an aggressive anti-union campaign.

Fortunately, workers in unionized Quebecor printing plants around the world recognized that their own wages, working conditions, and union security would be threatened if the corporation could simply block unionization and then shift its work to non-union plants.  Working with Union Network International (UNI, the international trade secretariat for service sector workers), they organized a campaign for an agreement guaranteeing all Quebecor printing workers worldwide the right to join a union and bargain collectively.  Organized printing workers pressured the company through global days of action.  Labor allies pitched in: the National Writers Union, for example, gathered letters of support from prominent writers, many of whose books are printed at Quebecor plants. 

After a two and a half year campaign, Quebecor signed an agreement pledging not to oppose or interfere with its employees’ right to union representation and establishing a quicker and fairer alternative to NLRB elections.  At the end of August, 2005, Versailles Quebecor workers voted three-to-one to join the Teamster’s Graphics Communications Conference.

Obstacles to globalizing the labor movement
Cooperation can be tough even among unions in the same country.  Our discussions with labor activists identified some further obstacles that arise when unions try to cooperate across international borders.  For example:

Beggar-your-neighbor
Unions are constantly tempted to pursue an aggressive economic nationalism, demanding that their own countries close their markets to foreign goods and services or that other countries open theirs.  But in the era of globalization the global economy is less a collection of nations trading with each other than a single market in which corporations compete to exploit labor anywhere.  This often renders economic nationalism counter-productive.  Bush’s pre-election tariff on steel imports promoted by steel companies and unions, for example, created few jobs for union steelworkers, but led to widespread job losses for American auto workers dependent on cheap imported steel.  Recent European restrictions on textile imports from China led not to jobs in Europe but rather to jobs in Bangladesh and Vietnam.

However ineffective in protecting jobs, such approaches have a devastating effect on international labor cooperation.  They replace solidarity against employers with a struggle among workers over which countries can keep or lure corporate investment.    Employers don’t have to worry about workers in different countries ganging up on them if those workers are ready to cut each others’ throats to beat each other out for jobs.  When one of us recently identified ourselves to a Bangladeshi activist as someone involved with the American labor movement, their immediate response was, “Oh, you’re the people who are trying to keep workers in my country from getting textile jobs.”

Global union diversity
Why not simply extend unions from one country into “global unions” representing workers in other countries?  This indeed has happened in the US and Canada, where law, politics, business structures, and labor traditions are similar.  But in most cases, differences in the labor movement, industrial relations institutions, and labor law deter such an approach.

In Scandinavia, for example, bargaining tends to be much more centralized than in the US.  Unions negotiate broad sectoral agreements with employer associations.  As is the case in much of the world, health care, vacations, and aspects of the grievance procedure – subjects for collective bargaining in the US -- are addressed by national legislation.  In Japan, in contrast, there are more than 30,000 unions, each representing white and blue collar employees of one employer.  Joint bargaining is rare.  Any group of workers in a company has the right to organize, demand recognition, and bargain with their employer, leading to forms of minority unionism unknown in the United States.  Strategies that are crucial in one country may be worse than useless in another. 

Accumulated distrust
Mutual solidarity is grounded in trust.  When American unions approach unions abroad, they face important – and in many cases well-grounded –reasons for distrust.

For many decades, US unions worked hand-in-glove with the CIA and other agencies of the US government to overthrow foreign governments, bribe politicians, break strikes, and favor unions that cooperated with US corporations.  Even in the Bush era, most of the money for AFL-CIO international operations continues to come from the US government.  How could foreign unionists not be suspicious of US labor activities abroad?  (The recent action by the AFL-CIO to demand the withdrawal of troops from Iraq as soon as possible may help open the door to greater trust by foreign unionists.)

More surprisingly, we have learned in conversations with ranking trade union officials in the US, Asia, Europe, and Latin America in the service, manufacturing, and telecommunication sectors, that global corporate campaigns can themselves sometimes be a source of distrust.  In such campaigns, which have been used during strikes and organizing drives for more than a decade, embattled unions often ask unions in other countries for help pressuring an employer. Sometimes those they ask have good relations with the employer, or are at a sensitive stage in a collective bargaining process, or are reluctant to pressure the employer for other reasons. This can lead to hard feelings rather than long term alliances.

Campaigns initiated and controlled by unions in one country can generate distrust concerning their long-term commitments and agendas.  For example, European trade unionists and allied NGOs questioned us sharply about whether US unions would go the distance in a global Wal-Mart campaign.  Their big worry was that US unions are so focused on recruiting new members that as soon as they have organized a few US stores, they’ll call Wal-Mart a model employer and call off the campaign—leaving workers in the supplier firms in China and the developing world high and dry.

Similar problems can arise even in campaigns initiated by a global organization.  For example, at an August, 2005 meeting in Chicago, UNI launched a campaign to organize Wal-Mart world-wide.  Management people from the French-based Carrefour -- the world’s second largest retailer after Wal-Mart -- addressed the meeting and were presented as socially responsible employers.  Some activists we talked to questioned whether the labor practices of the suppliers to these companies are any different from Wal-Mart’s.  Long-term trust building requires taking the interests of allies into account.

Next: These obstacles and many others must be taken seriously—but they are not insurmountable. In our next blog, From Campaigns to Movement, we will look at a few examples of promising strategies for effective international union cooperation and give some suggestions for next steps.

Build Alliances for Real Immigration Reform

The address by President Bush on May 15 and renewed debate in Congress have kept the issue of immigration reform on the front burner. But the debate is being shaped on the one hand by employers and on the other by right-wing ideologues who claim—falsely—to speak for established US workers. As a result, the debate is full of myths and misconceptions. We offer the following points as themes around which the common interests of immigrants and established workers can coalesce.

The best outcome of the present immigration debate in Congress is no outcome at all. There is virtually no chance that this Congress and this Administration will produce a worker and immigrant friendly immigration bill. In any event, splits in the Republican Party between nativists hoping to stop all immigration and corporate interests seeking greater access to low wage labor make chances of passing anything unlikely. Immigrant advocates should be building momentum for action in the next Congress and beyond. The emphasis on voter registration and getting out the pro-immigrant vote that emerged from the massive immigrant demonstrations could play a decisive role in shaping immigration legislation.

There is no immediate immigration crisis—only a crisis in the election prospects of the Republican Party. Current immigration policies function badly as they have for years. Reform is needed, but the immigration “crisis” is a product of a the Republican right’s attempts to fan the flames of a growing, but still contained, backlash against undocumented immigrants as part of its election year strategy. They may have miscalculated. The real backlash may be among the millions of Hispanic voters, many of whom have voted Republican in past elections.

Increased border security fails to keep undocumented immigrants out, but it does keep them in. The number of border patrol agents increased from around 2,500 in the 1980s to 12,000 today. Over-all spending on border security since the late 1980s has increased 500%. One result is that the cost of making a crossing for an undocumented immigrant today is about  $2,500.  According to Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey in the 1980s about half of all undocumented Mexicans returned home within 12 months, but by 2000 the return rate was only 25%. Thus the net result of increased border security is to actually increase the number of undocumented workers in the US. Immigrant advocates should stop pandering to uninformed or xenophobic voices demanding “border security”.  Effectively sealing the border would require a massive attack on civil liberties and unacceptable economic and political costs in the US and abroad—and its primary effect would be to keep undocumented immigrants from returning home.

Abruptly halting undocumented immigration would have a chaotic effect on the economies of Mexico and Central America.   Remittances from the US account for second largest sources of foreign capital in Mexico after oil. About 18% of Mexican adults—and 29% of Salvadoran adults—receives remittances from someone in the US. Those remittances are essential to support families and build communities. Shutting off the flow would create hardship and instability in Mexico and Central America. Instead ways need to be found to smooth the flow of remittances and make them part of a new economic development strategy that utilizes them to provide socially constructive forms of credit.

Policies supported by the US and institutionalized in treaties like NAFTA are a key factor pushing migrants north. NAFTA helped push around two million peasants off the land in Mexico and forced many Mexican companies out of business because they were unable to compete with cheaper imports. While NAFTA was touted as a way to slow northward migration, it has done the opposite. The giant sucking sound that many thought NAFTA would produce turned out to be less from jobs going south than from workers heading north. In 1995 there were 2.5 million undocumented Mexican workers in the US, ten years later there were more than 10.5 million.  Any solution to the immigration problem must begin with rewriting NAFTA. With massive political change going on in Latin America, it’s time to take a fresh look at ways new hemispheric economic policies can make it possible for people to live decently at home without being dependent on migration or remittances from the US or elsewhere.

In some industries and some localities there is already a hemispheric labor market. In some occupations undocumented immigrants make up a substantial percentage of the workforce. About 24% of all farm workers are undocumented immigrants; 17% of all cleaners; 14% of all construction workers; and 12% of all food preparation workers. Taking a closer look at jobs within these categories 36% of all insulation workers; 29% of all roofers and drywall workers; and 27% of all butchers and food processors are undocumented. It is interesting to note that many of these occupations have had a large immigrant component throughout the 20th century. National laws have not kept pace with the reality of transnational labor markets. What’s needed now are laws and regulations that guarantee immigrant workers the basic human and labor rights needed to let them work and live in dignity.

Any comprehensive immigration program will be the result of a compromise among workers—both immigrant and established—employers, and politicians. The result will not be perfect, but it can be satisfactory. Employers need immigrant workers; workers need jobs. The interests of both are opposed to the right-wing anti-immigrant ideologues.

There is the basis for an alliance between immigrant and established workers. Immigrant rights advocates and progressives should not cede the established working class to the right-wing nativists. US workers—partly because many have immigrant roots—can be an ally in the fight for just reforms as the progressive role of US unions in the current debate shows. But fears that immigrants take jobs and decrease wages need to be taken seriously. Immigration legislation should emphasize the labor rights of immigrant workers both to protect their human dignity and to protect the wages and working conditions of established workers.

Immigration reform must be hemispheric in scope. A step in the direction of recognizing the hemispheric and global nature of the immigration issue has already been taken. The governments of the nations of Latin America that send migrants to the US have banded together to lobby against the most draconian immigration reform bills currently before Congress. This recognition that immigration is no longer a strictly national issue should prompt the labor and social movements in Latin America and the US to convene a hemispheric meeting of unions and social movements to help draft a worker and immigrant friendly immigration program.  Unions and social movements should not leave immigration reform to elite decision makers whether in the US or in the hemisphere.

A program can be developed that represents the interests of established US workers, undocumented immigrants, and Latin Americans. Their interests can be meshed with those of the US employers on this issue. The claims of nativist ideologues to speak for American workers can be discredited. If the groundwork for such a program is laid now, the alliance of immigrant and established workers can seize the initiative in shaping immigration legislation after the 2006 election.

M.O.

Sao Paulo Declaration

Protecting the environment is a fundamental need of working people; after all, workers must breathe the air, drink the water, depend on energy and other resources, and face the hurricanes, floods, and ecological destruction that result from global warming.  But the specific policy objectives of labor movements struggling for jobs and organizational position have often come into conflict with environmental movements an policies.  Now the changing political, economic, and social situation in Latin America and the Caribbean is creating an opening for a new synthesis of labor and environmental concerns.

This April, 60 unionists from 13 countries met in Sao Paulo for the first Union Conference on Labor and Environment in Latin America and the Caribbean.  Brought together by the new International Labour Foundation for Sustainable Development (Sustainlabour) and ICFTU’s Regional Inter-American Organization of Workers (CIOSL-ORIT), they drew up the “Sao Paulo Declaration” designed to express the labor movement’s concern for environmental issues.  As the Declaration states: 

“Decent work is essential for people to enjoy a sustainable livelihood.  However, it is only possible to create decent and secure jobs if environmental sustainability is attained.”

The Conference represents the intersection of two conflicting forces.  On the one hand, since the 1980s and 1990s, “the region has been a privileged testing ground for neoliberal policies that promoted privatization and denationalization of companies, neoliberal restructuring of production, mass unemployment and precarious work situations.”  These policies have followed the “paradigm of structural adjustment favored” by “large transnational corporations.”  Current trade negotiations will have “direct consequences for water, public services, education, health, communications and other sectors.”

But in spite of this, “in recent years, large-scale struggles and social movements have been able to challenge neoliberal policies, transforming Latin America and the Caribbean into a point of reference for resistance to neoliberalism with the participation of unions, the peasand and indigenous movements.” 

The declaration ties these movements directly to environmental issues.  “Not by chance, some of these large struggles have developed around protecting natural resources, against water privatization, and protecting natural gas and other public goods in different countries in the region.” 

Such movements have created the context in which “various governments, committed to popular struggles and social movements, have been elected and are now constructing a new socio-political milieu in the region.”  These include “Alternativa Bolivariana par alas Americas – ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America and the Caribean), the Comunidad Suramericana de Naciones – CSN (South American Community of Nations), and the Tratados de Comercio con los Pueblos – TCP (Trade Agreements with the Peoples).”   

In this context, the Sao Paulo statement brings together a number of proposals to “strengthen the links between the environment, work, and poverty.”  For example:

-- “Mainstreaming and systematically addressing public policies that guarantee access to goods and services, sanitation, health, energy, housing, education, public transportation, social security as an indispensable element in overcoming poverty and protecting access to water as a human right.

-- “To protect the fundamental rights of workers and their unions, such as the right to free association and collective negotiation so that they can participate in strategies in favor of sustainable development, which is understood as development that ensures decent work with clean technology and productive processes that do not harm the environment, workers, their families or society in general.”

-- “To protect gender equity and the inclusion of women workers as a fundamental condition for advancing the realization of an environmentally and socially sustainable region.”

-- “Just transitions” toward sustainable production and consumption, with policies that ensure that “workers who are negatively affected during restructuring processes have decent work alternatives.”

“To reject ‘double standard’ policies used by some multinational companies that ‘export’ to Latin America and the Caribbean production methods that negatively impact the environment and that are not legally or socially acceptable in their countries of origin.”

The Declaration calls for a specific set of convergences and alliances.  For example, labor should “strengthen strategic relationships with other social movements and socio-environmental organizations and networks, particularly with the Alianza Social Continental” – known in the US as the Hemispheric Social Alliance (HSA) – “and its development of ‘Alternatives for the Americas,’ which includes an important section on the environment.”  It should “establish water as a key issue for union work in the region, supporting the position of ISP and other social organizations in the Joint Declarations of Social Movements and Organizations on Water at the Social Forum of the Americas (Caracas, January 2006) and during the round of meetings on cities during the IV World Forum on Water (Mexico, March 2006).”  And labor should “support actions undertaken by REL-UITA, COPROFAM and other organizations” to “combat the expansion of agrotoxins, transgenics and production models of intensive agriculture based on unsustainable production techniques.”

The Declaration also begins to sketch what labor-friendly sustainable development might entail.  It proposes, for example, to “promote an agricultural production model based on principles of agroecology and family agriculture.”  It sees this as “directly linked to the movement for agrarian reform and to demands for food security and sovereignty and justice in agriculture.”

Declarations can be nothing more than just that.  But in this case, the participants in the Sao Paulo conference will return home to a context of broad social ferment, in which the possibilities for “another world” appear as more than a distant dream.  The water, energy, and other struggles in the region have already begun to draw together environmental and social concerns.  As they experiment with new ways to integrate environmental issues with more traditional labor social, those of us in the rest of the world should be watching closely to see what we can learn. 

[Documents from the Conference are available at:  http://www.sustainlabour.org/documents.php]

y.r.

Banana Unionism Goes Transnational

The “race to the bottom” is often thought of in terms of cheaper labor attracting jobs from the first world to the third world.  But in today’s globalized economy the race to the bottom among third world countries is at least as destructive.  A recent book by U.S. labor and women’s historian Dana Frank called Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America (Cambridge: South End Press, 2005) describes a powerful example: the Latin American banana industry.  (For the book’s discussion of women banana workers’ unionism, see the previous blog.)

Four hundred thousand men and women work on the export-sector banana plantations of Latin America.  Three transnational corporations – Chiquita, Dole, and Del Monte – control two-thirds of the sales of Latin American bananas.  The plantations are scattered around Honduras, Guatamala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama Columbia, and Ecuador.  37,000 Latin American banana workers are represented by unions – a union density approaching that of the U.S. private sector.

In the 1970s, the Ecuadorian banana unions were destroyed.  Since then, Ecuador has led the race to the bottom.  It now employs over 250,000 of the region’s 400,000 banana workers – all nonunion.  Workers who try to organize are fired, blacklisted, and threatened with assassination.  Its banana workers make as little as one-fifth the wages and benefits of other Latin American banana workers.  Their work is highly casualized without job security or benefits.  That’s why, according to Dana Frank, “the banana transnationals are gradually pulling out of other parts of Latin America and sourcing from Ecuador, or using Ecuador as a pretext to lower standards elsewhere.” 

Big Banana has used other techniques to weaken labor.  Since the 1950s they have increasingly sold their plantations and bought bananas from subcontractors; Chiquita, for example, sold off its entire operation in Columbia in 2004.  Since the late 1990s, the employers have moved from regular jobs to “flexible” work arrangements that provide no job security or standard working hours.  And of course, they have used political repression and outright violence against workers throughout their history.  (Many will remember the concealed massacre of striking banana workers in Macondo described in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ famous novel One Hundred Years of Solitude; his recent autobiography Living to Tell the Tale reveals that this was based on a real massacre of banana workers that took place in the town where he spent his early childhood and which served as the model for Macondo.)

At the end of the cold war, banana companies bet on a huge expansion of sales in Russia and Eastern Europe – and lost.  Faced with overproduction and plummeting prices, they began squeezing workers and threatening to move to Ecuador.

Any group of workers who threatened to resist were likely to find their employer simply pulling up stakes and moving somewhere with a better “labor climate” – just as the fictional banana company abandoned Macondo after the strike in One Hundred Years of Solitude.  Banana union leader German Zepeda noted,

“Logically, there was a big problem with the banana labor movement in Latin America.  We’d never met.  Even at the level of individual countries, we had so many unions and didn’t even know each other.”

Faced with a regional crisis, leaders from banana unions in Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, and Costa Rica met informally in 1993 to organize support for Costa Rican banana workers’ resistance to intense union busting.  They created a new organization called the Coalition of Latin American Banana Unions (COLSIBA).  According to Dana Frank, “In all of Latin America, COLSIBA is the only organization that joins unions in the same sector across national lines in an autonomous regional coalition.” 

COLSIBA delegates meet several times a year to analyze developments in the global banana industry and organize common responses.  “When crises emerge in a given country – a strike, for example, or the Del Monte kidnappings in Guatemala – COLSIBA leaders are quick to travel to the region, launch international press campaigns, and link up with allies.”

In 2001, COLSIBA coordinated an agreement with Chiquita.  Half of Chiquita’s workers are unionized, and they make up 90 percent of the unionized banana workers in Latin America.  For whatever reasons, since the late ‘90s Chiquita had been positioning itself as the “socially responsible” banana corporation.  Through the good offices of the International Union of Food Workers, the global union federation for the food industry, an agreement was negotiated in which Chiquita pledged to respect worker rights.  The agreement established COLSIBA as the representative of banana workers throughout much of the region.  The agreement applies to anti-union activity by the company at its unionized plantations and protects the right of workers to organize at plantations that Chiquita owns or subcontracts with. 

How much protection the agreement will provide in practice is still being tested.  But it has already established two facts.  Even under extremely adverse conditions, people who work in the same industry or company can create links for cooperation and even joint bargaining across national boundaries.  And when they do so, they are likely to be a lot stronger than if they try to take on powerful global corporations one union or even one country at a time.

y.r.

Bananas

U.S. Companies like United Fruit opened banana plantations in Central America and the Caribbeanin the 1880s.  But it was only in the  1960s, when new varieties of bananas required rapid processing right on the plantation, that they began hiring women workers.  Today about 100,000 of the 400,000 workers on the Latin American export-sector banana plantations are women.

Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America (Cambridge: South End Press, 2005), by the United States historian of labor and women Dana Frank, provides an eye-witness account of those women and the way they are both using and changing what was an all-male labor movement.

The women workers face ten, twelve, and sometimes 14 hour days standing in heat over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, using water laced with fungicides, pesticides, and latex.  The women report repetitive motion injuries, skin diseases, back injuries, and a high rate of miscarriage and cancer.

Union organization in the Honduras banana industry dates to 1954, when 36,000 workers at United Fruit, Standard Fruit, and other banana companies struck, created the new union SITRATERCO, and won recognition.  In the mid-1970s, the union established base committees on the plantations.  Over the course of a decade, women gradually become elected base committee leaders at the plantation level. 

In the mid-1980s, women began strategizing together nationally.  But their proposal to establish a national women’s committee in the union was opposed – and even ridiculed – by the male union leadership.

But when women workers played a critical role in a major strike, their importance to union strength became apparent.  They also cultivated support among the minority of sympathetic male union leaders and threatened to switch political alignments to ensure that a national women’s committee was finally established.  They played a growing and increasingly accepted role in the union over the following decade.

In response to a crisis in the banana industry in the early 1990s, seven Honduras banana unions let by SITRATERCO created the alliance COSIBAH.  But none of the unions except SITRATERCO had a single woman official, even at the plantation level, or any kind of women’s committees or programs.  The SITRATERCO leaders, however believed in the importance of women’s organization, and created the post of secretary of women as the second most important position in the new organization. 

They also built the theme of gender into their core educational activities for men as well as for women.  Dana Frank was impressed that “At every turn, they framed their struggle for women’s equality and empowerment in terms of union power.  SITRATERCO, they argued, could only take on Chiquita if it fully unleashed women’s as well as men’s militance.”  Today, one of the women who attended COSIBAH workshops on leadership development and domestic violence is the first woman president of a banana union in Latin American history.

In the early 1990s, banana worker unions throughout the region also created the Coalition of Latin American Banana Unions (COLSIBA).  Women workers have taken advantage of it to make their own connections throughout the region.  In 2004, for example, 31 women from Columbia, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Guatamala, Panama, Costa Rica, and Honduras met for four days in Honduras.  They started by breaking into groups and comparing clauses in their contracts regarding issues of special concern to women such as maternity leave and pay equality.  Then they planned a campaign to standardize key clauses for all seven countries and three international corporate employers.  They also heard presentations on flexible labor systems and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).

Trade issues have been important to them.  An international “Conference of Banana Women Taking on Trade Liberalization” brought women from six countries whose “pronunciamentos” condemned structural adjustment, free trade agreements, and proposed development policies. They proposed alternative policies, such as respect for ILO labor conventions guaranteeing the right to organize and bargain collectively and an end to privatization of public services.  Their statement closed, “We’re not against regional integration; we’re against its imposition.  Another model for development is possible!!!”

Indeed, the banana women’s activities seem to take fully to heart the idea that the personal is the political – and vice versa.  Dana Frank observes that a Workshop on Strategies and Techniques for Collective Bargaining “moved seamlessly from discussions of how to negotiate with the corporations during collective bargaining over a contract, to how to negotiate with one’s male partner over permission to leave the house, to how to negotiate women’s equality within the unions.” 

A machismo-oriented culture has, indeed, been a powerful barrier to women’s participation.  Husbands and male partners often insist that women ask permission before leaving the house or attending a meeting.  They resist providing childcare.  Men have often ridiculed women’s initiatives and fought efforts to develop women’s leadership and equality within the labor movement.  In this context, women have highly valued as allies those male union leaders who have supported their initiatives.

The small trickle of support and resources from labor movements and foundations outside of Latin America have been critically important.  For example, a 2001 self-study by union women banana unionists in Honduras reported that women had no access to such union resources as “telephones, fax machines, computers, desks, records.”  This made communication among women extremely difficult.  In 2004, COLSIBA’s women leaders received grant money to buy their own computers and take a week-long computer class.

The transnational cooperation of women banana workers is so far unique in among Latin American unions.  Dana Frank attributes this uniqueness to the transnational character of the three big banana companies that almost all the women work for.  “When COLSIBA in 1993 consolidated banana unions from all three transnational corporations, across seven countries, it created the institutional space for regional women’s work.”

Through COLSIBA,Dana Frank indicates, “women banana unionists have constructed a powerful collective identity that crosses lines of plantation, union, nation, and education.”  But she emphasizes that they frame women’s interests as the interests of the entire organization, including both women and men.  This, she maintains, challenges us “to envision international labor solidarity with women’s issues at the top of the agenda – in order to build a more powerful workers’ movement across the globe.”

y.r

Labor and the Environment

On Monday May 8, the Cornell Global Labor Institute is hosting a conference entitled: A Sustainable World is Possible: The Second Annual North American Meeting on Labor, the Environment, and Sustainability. The conference brings together labor officials and activists, environmentalists, and other experts from around the world to discuss critical issues of common concern. 

The labor movement and the environmental movement have had a tempestuous relationship.  At times—such as the fights against NAFTA, CAFTA, and other trade treaties—the relationship has been very close. But at other times a false jobs vs. environment dichotomy has split the movements.

Labor has often joined with employers to fight tougher environmental laws it fears would lead to job loss.  Opposition to the Kyoto treaty by many unions, opposition to mandated increases in gas mileage by the UAW, plus support for drilling in the Alaskan Arctic by the Teamsters and some other unions are a few of the issues that have divided unions and environmental organizations in the past. At the local level the often uncritical support of the building trades for any project that offers work to their members frequently causes hard feelings between labor and environmentalists and other citizen groups. 

But despite the occasional conflicts many in both movements have always looked for ways to work together. After-all, the basis for cooperation is a set of common concerns: we all need to earn a living and we all need clean air to breath, clean water to drink, and a healthy environment to live in.

On the global level the race to the bottom in which corporations pit workers and communities against each other to find the cheapest place to produce their products is not simply a search for low wages, it is also a search for weak environmental laws and lax enforcement.

In the past two decades the idea of sustainable development has embodied the interdependence of economic and environmental concerns. And global warming, diminishing water resources, intolerable air pollution, and a host of other problems remind us daily of the need for sustainable economic growth and development.

Sustainability does not mean that labor needs to abandon its drive for full employment. But it does require alternatives to full employment programs based on conventional economic growth. Instead, the goal of full employment must be met with programs based on an alternative development path: the environmental reconstruction of society.

Some in the labor movement both here and abroad are working to develop these alternatives—through projects like the Apollo Alliance for energy independence and other innovative initiatives. The Cornell conference offers a good chance to hear about these alternatives. 

The conference is a welcome event in a labor movement that has increasingly turned inward to a narrow focus on business unionism and collective bargaining.

Here’s the program.

A Sustainable World is Possible: The Second Annual North American Meeting on Labor, the Environoment, and Sustainability

Monday, May 8, 2006
Cornell ILR Conference Center
16 East 34th St., 6th Floor, NYC

Co-sponsored by:
The Apollo Alliance
Friedrich Ebert Stiftung
NYCOSH
SustainLabour (Madrid)
UNITE HERE
United Steelworkers

Meet and Discuss with Leading Union Environmentalists from:
BOLIVIA, BRAZIL, KENYA, MALAYSIA, NEW ZEALAND, NIGERIA, NORWAY, PHILIPPINES, SOUTH AFRICA, AS WELL AS EUROPE AND NORTH AMERICA 

8:30 - 9:00 REGISTRATION AND BREAKFAST

9:00 - 9:30
Welcome - Goals of the Meeting

Sean Sweeney - Cornell   Global Labor Institute
Jürgen Stetten - Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung - FES 
Laura Martin Murillo - International Labour Foundation for Sustainable Development -Sustainlabour
Ed Ott - New York Central Labor Council -  > AFL-CIO 

9:30 - 10:15
Global Milestones for Labor and the Environment

Hilary French - United Nations Environment Program
Lucien Royer - Trade Unions Advisory Committee
Joel Decaillon - European Trade Union  Confederation 

10:15 - 10:30 BREAK 

10:30 - 12:00 The Coming Transition: Sustainability and the Resurgence of International Labor

Joaquin Nieto - Sainz Confederación Sindical de Comisiones Obreras  Spain
David Foster - United Steelworkers
Bheki Nthsalintshali  Congress of South African Trade Unions - COSATU
Angela Lomosi -   ICFTU-African Regional Organization   

12:00 - 12:45 LUNCH 

12:45 - 2:30 WORKING SESSIONS:

Job Creation and Energy Alternatives

Jerome Ringo - Apollo Alliance
Laura Martin Murillo - SustainLabour
Chemicals and Community
Diane Heminway - United Steelworkers
Nick de Carlo - Canadian Auto Workers  Holding Corporations Accountable
David Boys - Public Services International
Eric Frumin - UNITE HERE 

2:30 - 3:30 Next Steps: Making the Environment a Core Issue for Unions Everywhere

Bernard Saincy - Confédération Générale du Travail/CGT - France
Silvana Cappuccio - International Textile, Garment and Leather  Workers' Federation (ITGLWF)
Monica Onyia - Nigeria Labor Congress   
Eric Frumin - UNITE HERE
Ken Margolies - Cornell Global Labor  Institute 

3:30 - 5:00 WINE AND CHEESE RECEPTION   

To Register: Call 212-340-2840, or email Jill Kubit at  [email protected]
mail to:[email protected]
$25 registration fee

M.O.

May Day: The Past as Prologue

May Day conjures up a host of historical images: European peasant children dancing around a May Pole; working men and women fighting for the 8 hour day in late 19th century Chicago; annual marches for worker justice held in cities and towns throughout the world as an international day of worker solidarity; columns of soldiers and tanks filing past the reviewing stands crowed with the officials and generals of repressive regimes. Take your pick; each is an authentic representation of what May Day has been over the past 116 years since the holiday was declared by the Second International to commemorate the Chicago general strike of 1886 and the fight for the 8 hour day.

Today immigrants and their supporters are re-claiming May Day as a time to protest for basic rights and standards. In actions across the US, some are striking, some are protesting on the job, some staying out of stores, and many are participating in demonstrations to demand a new approach to immigration rights and laws in today’s global economy. In doing so they are enriching US society and civic life that have become all too passive.

Here in Massachusetts, immigrant and labor activists organized by Centro Presente, the American Friends Service Committee, and others have rallied around the following set of demands which we support.

MAY DAY call:
•    Legalization for all undocumented workers
•    Family reunification, and the immediate addressing of backlog petitions
•    Full worker rights, and no guest worker programs 
•    Full civil rights and due process for all immigrants
•    End the raids, round-ups, mass detentions & deportations
•    End the militarization of the border(s)
•    Stop Free Trade Agreements and Structural Readjustment Policies

May Day was the first international working class attempt to establish some basic standards for workers all over the world. It became an international workers holiday at the end of the 19th as part of a global fight for the 8-hour day and minimum labor rights and standards. Its guiding idea was that workers in each country, using the means that they had available, would unite in common struggle for similar basic standards.

It’s still a good model. The 8-hour demand cut across national, economic, and craft boundaries. It demanded this standard as a basic social minimum and as a fundamental human right. Today, a new global standards approach may be essential if labor and its allies are to successfully respond to corporate led globalization and develop worker friendly alternatives.

M.O.

(Cick on migration on the menu to the left for more blogs on immigration.)