Global Labor Strategies

How the G-20 Can Pay for a Global Climate Deal

The G-20 summit convening in London on April 2 is preparing to create a quarter trillion dollars of brand new stimulus money to help poor countries battle the global recession.

World leaders plan to use a little-known form of global currency to pay the freight, a currency known technically as "Special Drawing Rights" (SDRs) but often referred to as "paper gold." It’s a currency that can be issued by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Telegraph has reported that the U.S. government is keen on the idea.

Senior figures in the U.S. Treasury have been encouraging the Fund to issue hundreds of billions of dollars worth [of SDRs] to prevent the recession from turning into a global depression.

If leaders at the G-20 summit can create "paper gold" to jump-start the global economy, they can also turn it in a green direction to jump-start protection of the global climate.

They should put much of paper gold stimulus under discussion into an international fund, to help developing countries pay for climate protection. Such an action would remove the greatest stumbling block in the way of international climate action -- the lack of financing to pay for energy conservation, technology transfer, adaptation, forest conservation, clean energy, and research and development. It would allow negotiators to arrive in Copenhagen for climate talks at the end of the year with the finances in place to negotiate and sign a global deal. 

Without the financing, the chances of success in Copenhagen are slim. Yves De Boer, the UN's climate chief, left no doubt about that in comments he made this week criticizing EU finance ministers for putting conditions on financial help for developing countries, contrary to promises made in Bali in 2007:

I think without clarity on finance from industrialized countries there will be no commitment from developing countries.

"Paper gold" offers a way out of this stalemate -- a way to mobilize resources without either taxing or borrowing. That’s why G-20 leaders are proposing to issue a quarter trillion dollars worth of new SDRs – and why paper gold can play a crucial role in protecting the climate, too.

Measures that would fight both global warming and global economic meltdown simultaneously are being called a "Green New Deal." At the climate talks in Poznan last December, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called a "Global Green New Deal" the best chance for securing a climate agreement in Copenhagen in late 2009.  And in a February op-ed in the Financial Times, Ban together with Al Gore wrote,

What we need is both stimulus and long-term investments that accomplish two objectives simultaneously with one global economic policy response -- a policy that addresses our urgent and immediate economic and social needs and that launches a new green global economy.

World leaders convening at the G-20 have the opportunity to do just that.

The SDR Backstory

Countries normally set aside reserves, most often in gold and U.S. Treasury bills, as insurance to protect their currencies against speculation, runs, and other forms of economic adversity. If a country’s currency starts to plummet in value, the government can use the reserves to buy back its own currency and stabilize it.

The G-20 vs. the G-6 Billion

The message from last weekend’s G-20 summit meeting on the global economy must be a parody of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot:  The game can’t go on.  The game must go on.

In the face of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, European leaders had flirted with the idea of actually trying to change something.  French President Nicolas Sarkozy said, "Laissez-faire, it's finished.  The all-powerful market that is always right, it's finished."  As a result, it is necessary to rebuild the entire global financial and monetary system from the bottom up, “the way it was done at Bretton Woods.”

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown pointed out a deep contradiction of capitalist globalization:  “We now have global financial markets, global corporations, global financial flows.  But what we do not have is anything other than national and regional regulation and supervision.”  We need “a global way of supervising our financial system.”  He called for “very large and very radical changes,” including turning the IMF into a “global central bank.”

But the Bush administration soon put an end to such wild talk.  “This meeting is not about discarding market principles or about moving to a single global market regulator,” a White House official said.  “There is very little support for that.” 

Indeed, as the leaders of the G-20 countries were winging their way to Washington, Bush announced, “The crisis was not a failure of the free-market system, and the answer is not to try to reinvent that system.”  It would be a “terrible mistake” to allow “a few months of crisis” to undermine faith in free market capitalism.

Astonishingly, no one seemed to disagree.  In the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the leaders of 20 countries gathered in Washington and produced not an agreement to act, but a declaration of principles.

The declaration itself is extraordinarily vacuous, even by the standards of international summits, given that their system (not to mention the livelihoods of billions of people) are at risk.  Their “common principles for reform” are things like “Strengthening Transparency and Accountability,” “Enhancing Sound Regulation,” and “Promoting Integrity in Financial Markets.”  No corporation or investor need lose much sleep over “commitments” like:  “We pledge to strengthen our regulatory regimes, prudential oversight, and risk management, and ensure that all financial markets, products and participants are regulated or subject to oversight, as appropriate to their circumstances.” 

It was eerily reminiscent of another such international gathering, the London Monetary and Economic Conference of 1933.  Sixty nations sent high-level representatives to London to forge a solution to the Great Depression.  Each came with proposals, some of them potentially effective, for halting the downward spiral in which they were all engulfed.  But each was deeply suspicious of the others’ proposals, seeing them as primarily means to advance their proponents’ national interests at the expense of others.  Finally, US President Franklin Roosevelt rejected the agreement his own representatives had negotiated and the conference broke up in shambles.  Trade wars and competitive devaluations followed apace. 

EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF
The G-20’s failure to accomplish anything is being attributed to the Bush administration’s lame duck status – everything must grind to a halt until Obama’s inauguration ends the “interregnum.”  But the real problem is deeper than that.

In a whirlpool of “deleveraging” and deflation, many fortunes are going to be lost – through bankruptcy, insolvency, plunging stock values, and the like.  Every national and international policy can affect whose capital is to be gored.  If the Big Three US auto companies can persuade the government to give $25 billion from the bank bailout to them, the auto companies will be $25 billion richer -- and the banks $25 billion poorer.

A Letter from Europe: Labor at Malmo

The European Social Forum held in Malmo, Sweden from September 17-21 marked another step in the reappraisal by European trade unions of how to approach the neo-liberal policies of the European Union. The Forum featured a vigorous and productive debate on new directions for labor among traditional unions, the alternative labor movements, and allied social movements.

The debate could not come at a more opportune time. As the impact of the global economic crisis spreads throughout Europe, labor movements can not expect that the so-called European Social Model will protect workers from its consequences. That model, which emerged in the decades following WWII, was characterized—with national differences—by a generous welfare state, collective bargaining, and more or less full employment. It was the result of a tripartite “social partnership” between trade unions, employers, and the state.  But the reality is that, today, even before the crisis fully envelops the continent, you can barely recognize many of the model’s traditional elements. And yet while trade unions increasingly realize that the European Social Model has been undermined, they still tend to look back to the model as strategy for the future.

Neo-liberal Europe

But the good old days are gone. Today, the fundamental goals of the European Union are guided by the principles of neo-liberalism. Collective social programs such as health insurance, pensions, and educational systems have become partially privatized in some countries as politicians seek to open new markets to private capital. “Precarity” of work now extends to the entire life of an increasing number of workers. And collective bargaining is under direct attack by many European institutions. For instance, in the last two years, the European Court of Justice ruled on cases –filed by both corporations and the European Commission itself—which, while acknowledging that fundamental labor rights such as the right to strike and the right to collective bargaining exist in Europe, also ruled that they are less important than the right to freely compete by the employers. And the EU is just about to approve a new Directive (the term for European laws) which not only allows companies to increase working time to more than 60 hours per week, but also introduces individual bargaining in place of collective bargaining on this issue.

On migration there is a dual strategy: on the one hand, with the "Blue Card Directive”  the EU is promoting access to Europe by highly skilled and educated workers. On the other hand, policies toward undocumented workers are becoming increasingly xenophobic, legitimating current laws in some member states by “regulating” detention for up to 18 months as well as allowing repressive “deportation” policies.

Overall, conditions for workers in Europe are worsening. According to official EU statistics—which in many cases are underestimates—around 8% of all employees in the European Union are officially registered as unemployed. More than 16% of the EU population, that is 72 million EU citizens, are currently considered at the risk of poverty (with an income below 60% of the median income in their country). Furthermore, since the 1980s real wage increases are no longer in line with productivity growth and the wage share (the workers income in relation to the overall national income) has declined in almost all European countries. (see European Commission, European Economy, Statistical Annex, 2006. 

A developing discourse

Many trade unions are increasingly becoming open critics of neo-liberal Europe, and the European labor movement is trying to find ways to respond to the attacks that it is now under. This includes the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), which is the formal representative of trade unions within the EU’s tripartite structure and which is deeply enmeshed with the bureaucracy which runs the EU. They formally support both the Lisbon Treaty—the latest attempt to redesign the institutional and political framework of the EU along neo-liberal lines, and the aggressive free-trade agenda of the EU Commission (see Global Europe Competing in the World).

Trouble at Wal-Mart: The Rocky Road to Labor Reform in China

The industrial relations system in China is in play as workers, peasants, corporations, and a variety of civil society, state, and party actors vie to determine its future.  Now the collapse of the global financial system and the likelihood of a deep global recession/depression add a whole new dimension to the struggle of Chinese workers and reformers for a more equitable system. Global markets for goods made in China will shrink. Thousands of foreign companies with operations in China could be swept away or be forced to significantly downsize. Indeed, even global giants like automaker GM, one of China's biggest auto producers, are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. China’s banking system—while somewhat isolated from global pressures—is likely to feel the effects of the financial crisis. No one knows what effect the crisis will have on the value of the vast quantities of the US dollars and debt that China currently holds.

Against this back-drop we take a look at aspects of the Chinese industrial relations system before China is sucked into the vortex of a global recession.

Trouble at Wal-Mart

It has been two years since the ferociously anti-union Wal-Mart recognized the ACFTU in its stores. The event made headlines around the world.

Under Chinese labor law if 25 workers petition for a union, a committee can be elected and the union must be recognized. Normally this is a top-down pro-forma affair in which both management and the official union play a part, but in this case, Wal-Mart’s refusal to play by the normal rules forced the ACFTU to actually recruit workers at the workplace and establish the union without management participation. Once Wal-Mart recognized the first union branch, at its Fujian store, recognition quickly followed at Wal-Mart’s other Chinese facilities. Today, the ACFTU says it represents 50,000 Chinese workers at 108 Wal-Mart locations in China. Many hoped the Wal-Mart experience would be a breakthrough in the development of the Chinese industrial relations system and in the evolution of the ACFTU. Things have not turned that way.

We have a good glimpse into the world of Wal-Mart’s workers through voices of the workers themselves as they discuss and debate--and criticize--the actions of Wal-Mart and the ACFTU in on-line blogs. Some of these discussion threads, as well as relevant articles from the Chinese press, have been translated by the excellent, and increasingly indispensible, China Labor News Translations (CLNT). Read them here.

Wal-Mart has not engaged in serious collective bargaining and the ACFTU has fallen into a typically cozy relationship with Wal-Mart’s management. After Wal-Mart and the ACFTU signed a substandard contract at a store in Liaoning province, the company presented the agreement as a template for contracts at stores throughout China and essentially refused to bargain any further. Among the contracts provisions were a pay increase that did not keep up with inflation and which will not come into effect until mid-2009.  According to CLNT report, “Many individual store unions were not even given a chance to sign the template themselves. Indeed in Shenzhen City, for example, the Buji store has signed a collective contract on behalf of fifteen other outlets in surrounding areas.”

For its part, the ACFTU defends its approach to bargaining with Wal-Mart. According to Zhang Jianguo, the ACFTU’s director of collective bargaining, the new contracts require annual negotiations, wages above the minimum wage, and contain language on working hours, vacations, and social security and training.

But workers at Wal-Mart’s Bayi store wanted to negotiate a better agreement. A grassroots leader, Gao Haitao, who has become a hero to Wal-Mart workers throughout China for his combative defense of Wal-Mart workers’ interests, organized a fight back and made new demands in negotiations with management. Instead of negotiating, “Wal-Mart simply bypassed Gao by convening the staff and workers’ congress and finding a trade union chair from another store to sign the contract in his place!”, according to CLNT.

The ACFTU—which says it supports Gao—stood by while Wal-Mart refused to bargain leading the CLNT to conclude. “….the experience of Gao Haitao and the farcical top-down collective bargaining contract negotiation procedure shows that there is no genuine collective bargaining by workers’ representatives. When a Wal-Mart union did come out to negotiate a good contract, the ACFTU did not tender its support.” As a result of Wal-Mart’s actions Gao resigned from his job in frustration in September in a move that many see as a blow to authentic union development in China.

New GLS "Labor and Global Warming" Discussion Paper

Global warming will have immense consequences for working people – and for the labor movement. Climate change, and the measures that are taken to prevent or mitigate it, will change every aspect of our lives – including every aspect of how we work. Public policy on global warming will affect every issue that unions bargain over with employers and lobby over with government officials. Yet the discussion of how labor should relate to global warming has barely begun. GLS's newly released discussion paper LABOR AND GLOBAL WARMING describes the early stages of that discussion and identifies key issues it needs to address. It concludes with a 13-point “New Global Warming Policy for Labor.”

This discussion paper grows out of a series of articles originally published on the Global Labor Strategies blog (www.globallaborblog.org) to help frame a new debate on labor's role in the climate change debate. It was prepared by Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello, and Brendan Smith for Global Labor Strategies. The Introduction is pasted below; download the entire report here.

Rebirth of Unions in Russia

Boris Kagarlitsky

Boris Kagarlitsky has been an activist, journalist, and scholar of Russian
labor and social movements since the days of the Soviet Union.  He is no
stranger to international solidarity; during the attempted coup of October
3, 1993 he was thrown into a Moscow police lockup, but was released after
phone calls from around the world -- particularly the San Francisco Bay area
in the U.S. -- demanded his release.  In this article he connects the
stirrings of labor in Russia to the development of globalization by
employers -- and by labor.

The Rebirth of the Unions
By Boris Kagarlitsky

Few people in the Soviet era understood the need for trade unions. Sure, the
unions collected membership fees and distributed free trips to sanatoriums
among the workers, but apart from that no one could clearly explain what
function they played. The early 1980s brought sensational news from Poland,
when workers formed Solidarity labor union, not controlled by the Communist
Party, and threw down a challenge to the ruling communist bureaucracy. Yet
this was less a trade-union dispute in the Western sense than a political
one.

Tribunals and International Law from Below

The Vienna Tribunal on Neo-Liberal Policies and European Transnational Corporations in Latin America and the Caribbean held in May was a small but important step in a long process of reining in the tremendous—and largely unregulated—power of transnational corporations.

The Tribunal’s focus on the activity of EU based global corporations highlighted the increasing role that EU companies play in Latin America. The EU is now the biggest source of foreign investment in the region and the biggest trading partner of the countries of the Southern Cone. Many EU-based global corporations were instrumental in promoting the destructive privatization efforts of the 1990s and early 2000’s.

The Tribunal jury—comprised of eminent politicians, activists, and intellectuals—heard evidence on some 3 dozen European based global corporations doing business in Latin America and the Caribbean presented by representatives of about 50 labor and civil society organization from Europe and Latin America.

The cases were clustered in by sector—such as finance, energy, agriculture--and often involved the same companies doing business in several Latin American countries. This clustering of cases allowed for the emergence of a bottom-up critique of the full impact of global corporations on the economies, politics, and environment of Latin America. It became clear that critical issues facing Latin America—access to clean water, the privatization of resources, changes in the banking system, socially and environmentally destructive agribusinesses—were a result of global corporate agendas and not the consequences of “free market” forces.               

The testimony of experts, activists, and ordinary people was often poignant and eloquent. The cases and witnesses heard over two long days may only have scratched the surface of exposing the power global corporations wield but they underlined the need for people-friendly global regulations in the global economy.

Activists are now engaged in follow-up activities: organizing the case materials presented at the Tribunal; solidifying the links between organizations and movements for future cooperation; and making plans for future actions. In the coming weeks and months much of the information presented at the Tribunal will become available on-line. We’ll let you know when it does.

But the Tribunal raises another important question: what use are events like Tribunals? What effect can a body with no legal standing and no power to hold anyone accountable possibly have? Are tribunals just good political theater or can they actually have a real impact? We think they can and here’s why.

Events like the Vienna Tribunal are part of a continuum that leads to international law and rule making. Historically—from the anti-slavery movements of the 19th century to the anti-Apartheid movements of the 20th century—public non-governmental commissions and tribunals have played an important role in shaping discourse and as a result in changing behavior and creating hard law.

“Soft” processes like tribunals and “hard” processes like international laws, rules, and standards are much more related than most people think. In fact, almost all international laws and standards—from the ILO to environmental treaties—are “soft”, since there is no real investigatory or enforcement mechanism except for the power to publicly shame offenders. And the reality is that countries regularly try to ignore international laws and standards when it suits them. But, even so, these laws and standards do have an impact. They define the limits of acceptable behavior and in doing so, hold violators up to international shame in ways that can affect their standing in the world.

Sometimes—as in the recent US Supreme Court decision requiring the Bush administration to adhere to the rules of the Geneva Convention when holding prisoners—international law directly impacts national law. 

Tribunals can play an essential role in interpreting, applying, and broadening the scope of international law and the creating the mechanisms to enforce it. Tribunals can shape public discourse, expose egregious exploitation, and raise issues and gather information for further international law. In fact, the process of creating new International law and regulations always begins in this way.

Unfortunately, as we noted above, the problem with international law is in many ways the same as the problem of Tribunals: most international law lacks any effective investigatory or enforcement power. The ILO, for instance, has been passing rules about labor rights and standards since 1919. But the ILO has no ability to enforce compliance with its conventions. In fact, almost any international treaty and you will find signatories that are in regular violation and few global venues to hold violators accountable. They all depend in large measure on their ability to shame and shun violators.

Even so, the basic labor rights out-lined by the ILO, for instance, have become recognized standards in most countries and the basis of a great deal of enforceable national labor law.

Law and standards serve a second function. People organize their struggles around the fight for “rights” for “fairness” for “justice” and for the rule of law. Those that traveled to Vienna to present their cases did so because they wanted a venue to show the justice of their cause and to issue a denuncia against those that would do them harm. The Tribunal process helped them to develop a narrative of their case that can contribute to their own struggles back home, recruit new allies and to the broader global fight for justice.

Law is meaningless without social movements to enforce it. Tribunals are part of building a social movement and framing a discourse to set regulations in the global economy that are in the people’s interest.

It will take action by labor, civil society organizations, and a mobilized global citizenry to give global public opinion of the kind fomented by the Vienna Tribunal—and international law generally—the clout needed to regulate the behavior of global corporations. Such activity is already reflected in the growing number of global corporate campaigns; the negotiation of framework labor agreements; in global public policy fights like the struggle against the big pharmaceutical companies for AIDS drugs for all; in the fights of countries to maintain control their own natural resources against pressures to privatize; in boycotts and actions against the IMF, the World Bank, and other agencies of international capital; in the increasing demands for action on global warming. Such global action needs to be pursued in both the North and the South. The Vienna Tribunal was itself a good example of North-South cooperation—it provided important information and built transnational linkages needed to construct a new legal and regulatory framework for the global economy.

In the future, there will be a new global legal framework. We can already see it emerging in the International Criminal Court, in the EU, and in various national laws such as those against war crimes in countries like Germany that claim “universal jurisdiction”. As globalization proceeds and as global civil society develops and the environmental, political, military, and economic sources of social power become more entwined globally, new laws will be needed and they will be created. We have a choice: we can leave the development of those laws to decision makers aligned with global elites, or we can use processes like the Vienna Tribunal to create a people’s legal and regulatory agenda for a new global framework.
M.O.

The UAW: Leaving Las Vegas

The UAW convention was held last week in Las Vegas, a city that attracts people from all over the world looking for a second chance in life.  It may have been a fitting venue for a union struggling to pull out of a free-fall in membership, power, and influence. The extensive press coverage generated by the convention showed that the UAW is still considered a force to be reckoned with by those interested in the drift of the US economy. But the reports were mostly about the union’s decline. 

The tone of the convention was set by UAW President  Ron Gettelfinger when he told the delegates that  “…[i]t’s clear today that our challenges are unlike any we’ve faced in the past, largely due to globalization—and severely flawed policies on trade, health care, workers’ rights, taxes, and other crucial issues.”

And what challenges they are:

•    Declining membership: a long term decline has recently accelerated: since 2000, the UAW has lost 140,000 members in the auto industry. Planned plant closings by GM, Ford, and Delphi over the next few years will mean another 80.000 UAW jobs lost.

•    Difficulty maintaining existing wages and benefits. GM and Ford demanded, and got, mid-contract concessions on health care costs. Now, the entire private welfare system that the UAW fought for, and won, over decades is in danger of being shredded.

•    Halting a break down in work rules. A two-tier work force is shaping up in the core auto industry: this week Daimler-Chrysler announced that it would hire hundreds of temporary workers for a planned 1,000 worker third shift at its Belvidere, Illinois plant. The temps would be union members but they would be hired on two year contracts at much lower pay, inferior benefits, and with little job protection.. While temps have long been a problem, this institutionalizes competitive wage competition among different classes of union workers. And Chrysler’s North American division—unlike GM and Ford – is a quite profitable.

•    Declining market share for UAW built products.  Gross mismanagement by the Big Three that employ most UAW members has created a legacy of poor product design and inferior products. Toda 5 of the top 10 cars sold in the US are produced by a non-US based company.

•    An inability to organize the so called transplant companies such as Honda and Toyota.   In a slight twist to the normal pattern of globalization, global auto companies have preferred to produce where they sell. Foreign owned “transplants” have opened plants throughout the Sunbelt. More are planned. They remain non-union despite UAW attempts over the years to organize them.

The convention saw plenty of “pro-US” flag waving, but ironically the chief “competition” UAW workers face is non-union American workers, not low wage workers in the developing world. (Although Ford’s recently revealed plans for major investments in Mexican plants may signal a shift.)

President Ron Gettlefinger further underscored the problem when he said:

“This isn’t a cyclical downturn. The kind of challenges we face can’t be ridden out. They’re structural challenges. And they require new and farsighted solutions.”

Yet despite the frank talk, the solutions offered were—with few exceptions—nothing new. The convention pledged to spend more on organizing and more on getting friendly politicians elected. The union also committed itself to fighting important public policy battles for single payer health insurance and changes in labor and bankruptcy laws. These are all good and worthy objectives but they are part of the standard labor repertoire of the last century.

There was one relatively new initiative that could hold promise: the UAW’s program to promote new product development. Gettlefinger touted a new “Marshal Plan” for the automotive industry which would use government economic incentives to promote the development and production of environmentally friendly cars to be built in the US.  In a different political climate, one could envision a green equivalent of Walter Reuther’s dramatic call to convert the auto industry to airplane production for World War II.   

Stunningly absent from the convention was much talk about the need to build the kinds of global alliances that could successfully confront the global corporations that dominate the auto industry. Because the fact is, that the challenges the UAW faces—and they are monumental—are being faced by auto workers around the world. For instance, just last week, a major German contactor for Daimler-Chrysler announced big lay-offs. In fact,  German auto workers have been facing similar challenges to job security and working conditions for years.

An example of the kind of transnational cooperation the UAW could be undertaking is unfolding right now in Europe. Last week, as the Convention was underway in Las Vegas, GM workers at the Azumbuja assembly plant near Lisbon in Portugal staged a strike and conducted other actions to protest GM’s demand for concessions to the keep the plant open. (It is important to note, that while Portuguese auto worker are relatively low paid compared to US or German workers, GM is still demanding concessions.) The response across Europe by GM workers was immediate: overtime bans and job actions began not only in GM’s other Portuguese plants but – significantly – in plants in Spain and Germany. According to the Financial Times (6/20), widespread shortages of parts forced production slow-downs and also required GM to institute costly airlifts of parts around Europe to keep plants running.

The Financial Times writes:

Workers at most of GM’s European factories have agreed to support the 1,100 who face losing their jobs from the expected closure of the Azumbuja plant. Unions fear the factory will be the first of many to close and accuse the company of planning to shift production to eastern Europe and Asia. The company denies such plans.....

GM said an overtime ban at Kaiserslautern contributed to parts shortages caused by holidays on Thursday and Friday and worker taking time off to attend football World Cup parties.

Karl Franz, who is co-coordinating the action as head of GM’s European Employee Forum, said the knock-on effects of the shortages were a warning to GM of the damage that more serious industrial action could have.

If the UAW is to survive, it must establish mutual aid with auto workers in the rest of the world. A good follow-up to the convention would be to offer help to the Europeans—and not just a letter of support—but active, material support. This could jump start the creation of the kind of strong global alliances with other unions and allies that are necessary to resist the global corporate attack on wages and working conditions by global auto companies.
Such alliances must fight for new international agreements to reduce the kind of corporate mobility that permits the blackmailing workers and communities with the threat of plant closings. And these agreements can only be won be strong alliances that are built into the fabric of the union at all levels. Once in place, global alliances and global agreements could make it possible to develop a labor alternative for the big questions that face the international auto industry and its workers.

For more see our previous blog Big Trouble for Auto Workers by clicking on Organizing on the menu to the right.

M.O.

French Toast

(Fourth in a series)

The French employment law that sparked massive protests by students, workers, and in fact a broad swath of French society is toast. Indeed, given the depth and breadth of the opposition to the law it is a wonder that it took so long for the government to rescind it. But on second thought it’s actually not so difficult understand.

The hope of the French elite which strongly backed the government was that they could use the problem of youth unemployment highlighted by the riots in the immigrant suburbs of Paris last fall to undermine the Code du Travail, the French labor code, that gives workers protections against arbitrary firing.

France’s corporate elite—in fact, European corporate elites—have long looked with envy across the Atlantic to the US where workers can be hired and fired essentially at will.

But it was not to be this time. Students, workers, many in the middle class, and the immigrant youths that the bill was supposed help took to the streets to say no.

But it wasn’t just the desire of the corporate elite for “reforms” that prolonged the crisis. French politics also played a part. The elegant French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin—well known to Americans for his resistance to Bush’s Iraq policy in the run-up to the war—gambled his political future on enacting the new law. He lost the gamble and probably his prospects to a candidate for the Presidency when his patron Jacque Chirac leaves office next year.

Meanwhile in the wings, de Villipin’s rival, the ominous and ambitious Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, waits, baton in hand. Sarkozy managed to keep his distance from widely unpopular law and—just as important for his presidential ambitions—he managed to keep the police under his command from any particularly egregious acts of violence.

Sarkozy’s campaign for the French Presidency includes a pledge to make “a clean break” with the French economic model and to align France’s economy—including its labor markets--with prevailing global standards. Sarkozy claims that the French will accept change if it is “fair”. We will see what the response of French workers and young people will be should he become France’s next president. And if he is successful in enacting significant reforms, there is widespread belief that he will enforce them with the truncheons he now controls as interior minister.

There are a couple of important lessons to be learned from the French events. First, in France at least, there remains a desire to hold onto workplace protections that were won in a century of struggle. The idea that workers deserve legally mandated protections including an expectation of long term employment without fear of arbitrary lay-offs or firing is still a widely held belief in France and most of Europe. And the French unions and the French left can still mobilize the population to defend this right.

Second, while the French unions and the French left are good at resisting attempts to undermine social and legal standards, they—like unions and movements the world over—are less effective at creating viable alternatives to current social and economic problems. Social Democracy and its left-wing cousins have lost their way in the age of globalization. They were developed in a period in which nations and markets largely coincided. As globalization unfolds, national strategies are less viable, global strategies more necessary. Yet the exact nature of these strategies remains elusive.

Third, while American society seems de-mobilized and passive—even in the face of a widely unpopular war—the French protests show that a mass mobilization can happen in a modern industrial society. Passivity may be more a feature of contemporary American society and not some intrinsic part of late modernity. This is good news, since it means that re-energizing US democracy may yet be possible.

As if to prove this point, just as the French protests were successfully winding down, massive demonstrations for immigrant rights were flaring up across the US. While these demonstrations were largely conducted by immigrants, they may still be the harbinger on a new, more active, politics. The immigrants may bring more than their labor to the US. And the huge impact of both the French and immigrant demonstrations may re-teach cynical Americans that mobilized masses really can make a difference.

M.O.

Framework Agreements

Here at GLS we’re always on the search for new global labor strategies.  We encourage our growing readership to write us about of emerging ideas and trends. One new strategy of interest that is widely used and supported in Europe is the “Framework Agreement.”  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.  About two dozen global firms with more than two million workers have signed them. (Click here for Union Network International’s “Global Framework Agreement’s” page.)

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.

N.T.