Global Labor Strategies

A Global Labor Charter?

In the future GLS plans to occasionally post interesting and important pieces from commentators from around the world. Our goal is to provide a variety of perspectives—not just our own—on important issues. This—our first posting from outside GLS—is from Peter Waterman. Peter has been, for a very long time, a tireless advocate for labor and social movement internationalism and for using new media of communication to build a global movement. The article also appears in the August edition of the South African Labour Bulletin.--GLS

   

                         
                           A GLOBAL LABOUR CHARTER MOVEMENT?
                                               Peter Waterman
                                           [email protected] 

                                  

The idea of a Global Labour Charter Movement comes out of both desperation and hope. The desperation is due to seeing the labour movement, in North, South, East or West, floundering under the multiple attacks delivered by contemporary capitalism, and by labour’s lack of any such socially unifying and mobilizing vision as inspired it in the past. The hope comes from seeing such energy and vision within the so-called global justice and solidarity movement (GJ&SM).

1.    The idea of a GLC is to develop a charter, declaration or manifesto on labour, relevant to all working people, under the conditions of a radically transformed and highly aggressive capitalism, neo-liberalised and globalised.

2.    The idea of such a charter has been provoked by a couple of recent international labour declarations (Bamako Appeal 2006, Labour Platform for the Americas 2006). A common limitation of these otherwise very different documents is that each was produced and issued for acceptance or endorsement, by union leaderships or intellectual elites, without discussion by union members, shopfloor or community activists themselves. The GLC notion is, however, also inspired by a recent women’s one, the Women’s Global Charter for Humanity (2004), produced after worldwide discussion by a new mobilising social movement.

3.    In so far as this project is addressed to emancipation from work (meaning labour for capital and state, empire and patriarchy), it implies articulating (both joining and expressing) labour struggles with those of other oppressed and exploited social categories, people and peoples – particularly that majority of workers, women. The existence of a growing global justice and solidarity movement (GJ&SM), best known through the World Social Forum (WSF) process, makes such articulation increasingly possible.

4.    Its title could be the ‘Global Labour Charter Movement’ (GLCM21). 'Charter' reminds us of one of the earliest radical-democratic labour-popular movements of industrial capitalism, the British Chartists.  ‘Movement’ reminds us that the development of such a declaration requires a process and the self-mobilisation of workers.

5.    Such a process needs to reveal its origins and debts. These are to the new forms of labour self-organisation (within and beyond unions), to the shopfloor, urban and rural labour networks (local, national, international), to the labour NGOs (labour service organisations), and to a growing wave of labour education, communication and research responding to the crisis of the labour movement.

6.    The novel principle of such a charter should be its conception as a ‘virtuous spiral’ - that it be conceived not as a single, correct, final declaration, which workers, peoples and other people simply endorse (though endorsement could be part of the process), as for its processal, dialogical and developing nature. This notion would allow for it to be begun, paused and joined at any point. Such a process would require at least the following elements: information/communication, education, dialogue, (re-) formulation, action, evaluation, information...

7.    It is the existence of cyberspace (the internet, the web, computerised audio-visuals) that makes such a Global Labour Charter for the first time conceivable. We have here not simply a new communications technology but the possibility for developing non-hierarchical, dialogical, equal relations worldwide. The process will be computer-based because of the web’s built-in characteristics of feedback, its worldwide reach, its low and decreasing cost. An increasing number of workers and activists are in computerized work, are familiar with information and communication technology and have web skills. Given, however, uneven worker computer access, such a process must also be intensely local, imply and empower outreach, using the communication methods appropriate to particular kinds of labour and each specific locale.

8.    Networking can and must ensure that any initiators or coordinators do not become permanent leaders or controllers. There is a growing international body of fulltime organisers and volunteer activists, both within and beyond the traditional inter/national unions, experienced in the GJ&SM, who could provide the initial nodes in such a network.  Networking also, however, allows for there to be various such charters, in dialogue with each other. Such dialogue should be considered a normal and even necessary part of the process and avoid the authority, dependency or passivity associated with traditional manifestos.

9.    If this proposal assumes the crisis of the traditional trade unions, it should be clear that it simultaneously represents an opportunity for them. This is for a reinvention of the form of labour self-articulation (again: organization and expression), as has occurred more than once in the history of capitalism (from guilds to craft unions, from craft to inter/national industrial unions). By abandoning what is an increasingly imaginary power, centrality or privilege, unions could simultaneously reinvent themselves and become a necessary and significant part of a movement for social emancipation worldwide. The form or forms of such a reinvention will emerge precisely out of a continuing dialogue, the dialectic between organizational and networking activities.

10.    Starting with the first edition(s) of any GLC, there could be a list of globally-agreed demands and campaigns, with these having emancipatory (demonstrably socially-transformatory, empowering) implications for those involved. Rather than increasing their dependence on capital, state, patriarchy, empire, any GLC must increase their solidarity with other popular and radically-democratic sectors/movements.

11.    Any such campaigns must, however, be seen as not carved in stone but as collective experiments, to be collectively evaluated. They should therefore be dependent on collective self-activity, implying global solidarity, as with the 200-year-old (but never completed)  campaign for the eight-hour day. There is a wide range of imaginable issues (of which the following are hypothetical examples, in no necessary order of priority):

• A Six Hour Day, A Five Day Week, A 48 Week Year, thus distributing available work more widely, reducing overwork;
• Global Labour Rights, including the right to strike and inter/national solidarity action, but first consulting workers - including migrants, precarious workers, unpaid carers (‘housewives’), the unemployed - on their priorities; and secondly by prioritising collective struggles and creative activity over leadership lobbying;
• A Global Basic Income Grant, in the interests of women, of the unemployed, etc ;
• A Centennial Reinvention of the ILO in 1919, raising labour representation from 25 to 50 percent, and simultaneously sharing the raised percentage with non-unionised workers;
• A  Global Campaign for Useful Work, reaching beyond conditions of, or at work (‘Decent Work’) to deal with useful production, socially-responsible consumption, environmental sustainability;
• All in Common, a campaign for the defence and extension of forms of common ownership and control (thus challenging both the privatisation process and capitalist ownership in general);
• A reinvention of Mayday as a Global Labour and Social Movements Solidarity Day (as being done by precarious workers in Europe and by immigrant labour in the USA);
• Support to the principle of Solidarity Economics and the practice of the Solidarity Economy, i.e. production, distribution, exchange that surpasses the competitive, divisory, hierarchical, growth-fixated, wasteful, polluting, destructive principles of capitalism.
• A Global Labour Forum, as part of, or complementing, the World Social Forum, an assembly organized autonomously from the International Labour Organisation (ILO), and the Global Unions, whilst open to all);

12.    This proposal is clearly marked by its origin, in terms of its author, place and language. It is, however, issued under the principle of CopyLeft. It can therefore be adapted, replaced, challenged, rejected and, obviously, ignored. Its only requirement or hope is that it be discussed.

Resources

Bamako Appeal. 2006. http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/bamako.html

Labour’s Platform for the Americas. 2006. http://www.gpn.org/research/orit2005/index.html.

Waterman, Peter. 2006. Toward a Global Labour Charter for the 21st Century. http://www.choike.org/nuevo_eng/informes/4278.html

Women’s Global Charter for Humanity. 2004. http://www.worldmarchofwomen.org/qui_nous_sommes/charte/en

Peter Waterman (London, 1936), began his working life with international Communist organisations in Prague(1955-8, 1966-9). In the 1980s he published the Newsletter of International Labour Studies. He originated the international debate on ‘Social Movement Unionism’ in the 1980s. He has been a a major contributor to the discussion on a new labour internationalism.

Service Sector Organizing and Globalization

Will organizing in the service sector revive the labor movement? Are service sector jobs somehow immune from the forces of globalization? These ideas are widely held in some corners of the labor movement.

In the wake of the recent UAW convention—which spotlighted the decline of manufacturing unions—New York Times reporter Steven Greenhouse takes up these ideas in an article in the June 16th New York Times. He writes:

[There is a]….little-understood development: the nation's private sector is divided into two very different labor movements. The first comprises manufacturing unions, like the auto workers and machinists, which are on the defensive and on the decline. The second is made up of unions for the expanding service sector, which are upbeat and on the prowl for hundreds of thousands of nursing home aides, janitors, [and] supermarket cashiers….

The manufacturing unions have been devastated by globalization, with many companies insisting that America's unionized factory workers are overpaid and their benefit packages too rich compared with overseas workers Delphi, the beleaguered auto parts company, has repeatedly trumpeted this assertion as it called for cutting its workers' $27-an-hour wages in half.

In contrast, the service-sector unions are largely immune to globalization — just try to outsource the job of a hamburger-flipper, hotel housekeeper or bedpan-emptier to China. Helping to make service-sector unions optimistic about attracting more members is the perception that workers like hotel housekeepers and janitors are underpaid and have skimpy benefits. Moreover, many of these workers are immigrants, who are often more enthusiastic about unions than native-born workers...

Even as manufacturing workers are seeing their wages and benefits slashed or their jobs moved abroad or automated out of existence—precisely because the wages and benefits that made these jobs decent are no longer competitive—many in the service sector still see the manufacturing unions as a model.

In a way, said Bruce Raynor, president of Unite Here, the service-sector unions hope to imitate the manufacturing unions of old.”Our goal is to move service-sector workers into the middle class," he said. "The manufacturing unions did that for factory workers. It took them 20 years to do that, and we hope to do the same thing.

Those who argue that service unions can avoid the effects of globalization might want to take a second look. Indeed, there are at least six dynamics at play in the global economy that they will need to pay attention to as they try to make low wage jobs into “middle class” jobs.

1. The size and vigor of the low wage labor market in the US is due in large measure to the fact that there is an adequate supply of workers to fill those jobs at the low wages on offer. If wages rise, many of those jobs will disappear—either they will be scraped as unnecessary or they will be automated. No one bags groceries in higher wage Europe, parking lot attendants are uncommon. Personal service jobs such as house-cleaning or domestic landscaping—which employ many in the US—are much rarer, as well. If wages rise, expect hotel rooms to be designed to be cleaned quicker and with fewer workers. And in the retail industry, Wal-Mart and other companies are already experimenting with chip technologies that will make many check-out cashiers a thing of the past. Some jobs have already disappeared: today there are few gas station attendants left and live-in household help once common among the well-off went out of fashion after World War II as wages increased.

2. Many more jobs can be outsourced than is apparent at first glance. Greenhouse says “…try to outsource a hamburger flipper..” well MacDonald’s is coming close to doing just that as it experiments with centralizing drive through order takers in sites far from the restaurants where the orders are being placed.  While, it is certainly true that many jobs require face to face contact and can’t be outsourced, all kinds of business processing jobs in the service sector certainly can be and will be if wage and benefit costs climb.

3. While many jobs can’t move, workers can. Globalization is triggering a massive migration of people in search of work. Unions in the service sector have staked much of their plans on organizing immigrant workers. Now we in the US are in the midst of a major debate about immigration, the outcome of which will shape labor markets here in the future. Demagogues are trying to build a backlash against immigrant workers. As we have argued, in several past blogs, these demagogues could succeed in dividing immigrant and non-immigrant union members. To prevent this the labor movement must begin to build a transnational alliance of unions and social movements to create a worker friendly immigration reform program.

4. Wages and working conditions are set by the power of workers as a whole, so that a decrease in wages and bargaining power of manufacturing workers buffeted by global economic forces also affects service workers.  If service sector unions forget this they will repeat the mistake that the US labor movement has historically made by focusing on one sector of the workforce, rather than the workforce as a whole. When manufacturing was the driving force of the economy, manufacturing unions showed little solidarity with workers in the service sector thus allowing the growth of a huge low wage work force and foregoing the possibility of achieving social and political gains on critical social issues such as universal heath care, mandated vacations, or adequate pensions. They also allowed the growth of a large pool of low wage workers available for work in higher paid jobs—inevitably the law of supply and demand helped suppress wages. Service unions will undermine their own power if they make the same mistake and ignore what's happening in the manufacturing sector. 

5. Many firms in the service sector are global corporations with operations and profit centers in many countries. This enables global companies to resist workers demands for better wages and working conditions in any one workplace. In addition, global companies generally develop global supplier chains, complex—often contingent—employment relationships, and the union avoidance strategies that make organizing difficult. And, as a last resort—because of their global reach—these companies can simply close operations in a particular area when necessary—as Wal-Mart did in Quebec when workers managed to organize a union.

6. All over the world, globalization has triggered a process of “competitive liberalization”. Pensions, social welfare and unemployment insurance laws, labor laws, and public services are put into competition in an effort to reduce taxes and regulations to attract mobile capital and jobs. The corporate giants that dominate the global economy in both the service and the manufacturing sectors will continue to invest resources in shaping public and political discourse to further undermine the power of workers. Because of this roll-back in laws and regulations, service sector unions face an even more difficult task than manufacturing unions did when they organized. Reversing this process requires reaching beyond conventional organizing in any one sector and moving to a broad class based approach to unionism.

It is, of course, a good thing that service sector unions have made recruiting new members a high priority. But only through global labor cooperation—and ultimately a global labor movement—can the conditions be created for doing so effectively. Indeed, the executives of global service companies may smile when they read that service sector unions in the US think they are "immune to globalization."   

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.

Labor Internationalism

Tesco, the 3rd largest supermarket chain in the world, has announced that it’s moving into the American market.  Tesco employs over 100,000 union members in the UK and touts its “partnership” with the retail workers union USDAW.  Tesco even encourages workers to join the union when they are hired and gives the union easy access to workers for recruitment purposes.

But according to the Financial Times, things will be different when Tesco opens in the US.  Tesco has placed help wanted ads for HR management personnel that read: “….the incumbent has primary responsibility for management of employee relations; maintaining non-union status and union avoidance activities.”  Tesco’s first stores will be non-union and the chain aims to stay that way. 

What’s more, Tesco’s first stores will open in Los Angeles where the UFCW fought a bitter four month strike only a few years ago.  The issue in that strike was the demand for give backs by unionized supermarket chains in the face of Wal-Mart’s planned entry into the local market.

Tesco is following an established pattern by global corporations of leaving any progressive employment practices back home when they travel. US and European companies with relatively good labor practices and unionized workforces have long set up sweatshops or cut deals with suppliers with terrible labor practices around the world. And when non-US based companies locate in the US, they usually adopt union avoidance practices, after all “when in Rome…”. Just look at the automobile industry, where Asian and European auto companies have successfully resisted unionization in the US regardless of home country practices. 

In the past US unions have sometimes successfully organized non-US based  firms that were initially resistant to unionization. For instance, 3 years ago Swedish retailer H&M, a company that is solidly unionized in Sweden, opened as a non-union firm in the States. UNITE launched an aggressive organizing campaign and with the help of Swedish unions was able to reach an agreement with H&M that led to the unionization of the company’s main warehouse in the New Jersey.

We can expect that the UFCW will launch an organizing drive at Tesco, and that it will reach out to unionized workers in the UK for help. But what would be the basis for cooperation? Why shouldn’t UK workers see the company’s expansion into the profitable US market as an opportunity for them to get a bigger share of the profits? And will the USDAW risk it “partnership” with Tesco on risky solidarity actions?

There are, of course, good reasons why workers in the UK should support their fellow workers in the US.

•    It is essential to stop the non-union juggernaut at work in the global economy promoted by global capital. The HR practices—including union avoidance tactics—that firms like Tesco learn and in the US will likely migrate to the UK in time.

•    The profits that Tesco makes in the US are much more likely to increase the capacity of the firm to resist the demands of its UK workforce than they are to be distributed in the form of higher wages.

•    Finally, there are shared values of solidarity. Trade unionism stands for more than just reciprocity. We don’t cross a picket line even if there is little likelihood of reciprocal behavior in the future because we believe in bonds that go beyond pure self-interest. Pure self-interest is, after-all, one of the dominant values of modern society that we seek to change.  Challenging narrow self-interest as the driving force of society should be a core value of a new global labor movement.

These common interests and values would be far more obvious if workers employed by the same firms and industries had a well developed infrastructure and a dense network of communication. But this is not the case. Instead, relationships usually are built only when unions confront immediate challenges that require international campaigns. This lack of pre-campaign relationships puts labor at a tremendous disadvantage and sometimes allows companies to play workers off against each other.

Labor needs to take a tip from the global corporations it confronts.  Giant firms dominate key industries and do business around the world, while unions are nationally based with little cross-border contact. When a fight breaks out that requires cross-border solidarity, union relationships must be cobbled together on an ad hoc basis, built essentially on blind faith with no legacy of past cooperation. The kind of pre-existing relationships that would make strategic planning and action a natural response to Tesco’s move do yet not exist.

For a global unionism to be capable of taking on the giant corporations, unions must begin with relationship building long before the battles begin.  If we’re going to take on corporations like Tesco, we can’t wait till they attack us to start building trust and sharing information, strategies, tactics -- and our commitment to common values.

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.

A French Lesson

(Third in a series)

French students and unions are set to square off against the French government in a “day of action” tomorrow. “We have not yet reached the peak of the protest movement,” Bernard Thibault, head of the CGT said on Saturday, “This Tuesday could be a turning point. The only solution is the withdrawal of the CPE. We can achieve this.” 

Why the passion over this issue? That can be hard to understand if you have not been following what’s been happening in France and Europe over the past few years or are unfamiliar with the French industrial relations system.

Those of us of a certain age remember a slogan from 1968: the issue is not the issue—which is to say that the specific issue is actually part of a broader problem. In this case, the new law is simply the latest in a series of trends and events—indeed, the very drift of globalization—that worries the French as it does most people in the industrialized world.

In the name of global competition corporations and their political allies across Europe have abandoned the European Social Model and have demanded cut backs social benefits and changes in labor law.

In addition, outsourcing—“de-localization” as it is called in Europe—has hit some labor markets hard, just as it has in the US. French-based companies are moving jobs to the new states of the EU and beyond to South Asia and China raising serious questions in the minds of many about what to do to protect jobs, wages, working conditions, and the social welfare system they have built up over the years. The rejection of the European constitution by French voters last May was a striking indication of this unease.

For US observers, the dispute over the new law puts a spotlight on the differences between the French and US industrial relations systems and trade union structures.

In France, and in much of Europe, workers, unions, and their political allies insisted that basic worker rights and basic social benefits—such as just cause for discharge and vacations and heath insurance—be written into law rather than into collective bargaining agreements. This insured that all workers, whether they belong to a union or not, could enjoy these rights and benefits. In contrast, most workers in the US are “employees at will”.  That means that unless you are part of a narrowly prescribed group of protected workers fired because of race, gender, or age—and you can prove it—or unless you have either an individual contract or a union contract, you can be fired for “good reason, bad reason, or no reason at all.”  Similarly, benefits like vacations, sick leave, and health insurance are tied to a person’s job in the US and not a matter of right.

Unlike the Europeans, the US labor movement generally saw winning just cause rights and other benefits through collective bargaining as a way to recruit new members, and therefore often did not push to push to have them written into law. For brief few decades—when union membership was high—this strategy was able to win protections and benefits for union members, and even some non-members, but it left many out in the cold. As union membership fell the short-sightedness of the approach became evident.

The French dispute also highlights the difference in trade union strategy and structure. French unions are making a very credible threat to call a general strike—and yet union density in France is actually below that of the US. The threat is credible because unions operate within an industrial relations system that includes—by law—elected worker representation at the workplace. This allows unions to be elected to represent workers who are not actually members of the union. Because of this, unions are often able to mobilize workers—members and non-members, alike—around critical issues such as the changes in labor law.

Given the condition of global labor and the relentless attacks on worker rights and standards, you would think that US unions and US labor official would have some comment on such important events. After all here is a potentially successful revolt against the attempt by big business and its political allies to impose a US labor market model on France, to undermine hard won labor standards, to divide young and old, immigrant and native born, and those those in permanent jobs from those in precarious jobs.  And yet I have not seen any comments from US labor leaders in the press on the events. The sad truth is that US labor leaders too rarely speak out on the connections between US workers and those in the rest of the world, other than on trade issues that have an immediate impact on their memberships. If they were more engaged in substantive discussions and action on global issues, perhaps some reporters would have thought to ask them what they thought.

The resistance of the French workers and students to the attack on their hard won rights is a bit of spring sunshine at a bleak moment for the world’s labor movements. People all over the world face similar challenges posed by globalization. But it also points up the difficulties in fashioning a global labor movement: labor movements exist in all countries but they were organized within the legal, political, and cultural frameworks of individual nation-states. As a result it will take effort and creativity to build a global labor movement that can resist corporate led globalization.

But for now let’s hear it for the people the US Right calls the cheese eating surrender monkeys!! They are giving the world a good French lesson.

(More in this series as events unfold.)

M.O.

The Undocumented Workforce

The Republican leadership in the Senate is pushing for action on an immigration bill by the end of March. Hearings are underway in the Senate Judiciary Committee, but the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee says he needs more time if the committee is to report out a bill. If things go the way they are headed nothing will get done before this session ends. And that’s probably the point. The Republicans want to capitalize on voter unease about immigration in some parts of the country in the coming Congressional elections. And yet the Republican Party itself is split on the issue. The business wing of the Party that wants access to immigrant workers through a guest worker program and the hard right and nativist elements wants a wall along the border and draconian repression. .

The best that can be hoped for in this session is a deadlock—since it is almost unimaginable that anything friendly to workers—immigrant or native born can come out of this Congress.

Now, a new report by the Pew Hispanic Center provides facts that can help pierce the fog of misinformation and anxiety the clouds this issue. By providing an accurate snapshot of the migrant workforce and the jobs and industries in which they are employed, the report,
Size and Characteristics of the Unauthorized Migrant Population, can help labor develop a nuanced worker-friendly approach to immigration reform that can allow migrants to find appropriate work; ensure that there are legal protections in place to protect them, including an amnesty for those currently employed in the US; and protect the jobs, wages, and working conditions of US workers.

Latino immigrants continue to come to the United States in increasing numbers.  According the Pew report, between 2000 and 2005, 850,000 undocumented immigrants arrived in the US each year but about 350,000 also left each year, so the net average yearly gain was 500,000 people. Today the total number of undocumented workers in the US is between 11.5 and 12 million people which is about 30% of the 37 million foreign-born population of the US. And undocumented workers represent nearly 5% of the total US workforce of 148 million.

Most undocumented workers are from Mexico and Central America. This includes 6.2 million people, or 56% of the total undocumented population, from Mexico and 2.5 million, or 22% of the total, from Central America.

What stands out in the report is that despite the growing militarization of the border, especially since 9/11, the biggest growth spurt in the number of undocumented people has occurred since 2000. Today 66% of undocumented immigrants have been in the country less than 10 years. But most striking is the fact that 40%, or 4.4 million people, have been in the country 5 years or less.

Men make up only 49% of the total undocumented population. Women make up 35% and children about 16%. There are about 6.6 million “undocumented families” containing 14.6 million people in which either the head of the family or a spouse is undocumented. Fully 66% of all children in these families are US citizens by birth—about 3.1 million in 2005.

Undocumented immigrants are part of a classic push-pull pattern. Poverty, unemployment and underemployment push Latin American immigrants north. Many are drawn from the Mexican country-side where NAFTA based policies forced two million farmers off the land in the decade ending in 2003.  Other workers lost jobs when cheaper foreign goods forced Mexico’s domestic manufacturing industries to close. And in the last few years, Mexico has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs to China displacing even more workers.

The migrants are pulled north toward a US economy that produces large numbers of lower wage, highly precarious, contingent and near contingent jobs. Today, close to 30% of all jobs in the US are contingent—either temporary, part-time, on-call, or independent contracting jobs. Many more jobs are near contingent—jobs with high turnover built into the job structure in industries like retail or fast food restaurants. It is an economy with a low-wage and contingent sector that can absorb many migrant workers.

Undocumented male migrants work at a greater rate than either legal immigrants or native born people: about 94% of undocumented males work compared to 85% of legal immigrants and 83% of native born workers. The reasons are fairly obvious: migrants made the arduous trip North to find work, and they are almost all are in the working age population.

By occupation about 19% undocumented workers are employed in construction; 31% work in service jobs of one sort or another; 15% work in production jobs; 12% in sales jobs; 10% in business professional jobs; 8% in transportation; and 4% in agriculture.

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. What’s changed is the legal status of the workers and their countries of origin.

While immigrants continue to come to the US in large, even increasing numbers, there are some real trouble spots a head for the migrant workforce.

First, a report issued in 2005 by the Pew Hispanic Center indicates that as the economy picked up in 2004, new immigrants were finding jobs—in fact, one-third of all new jobs in the economy were filled by undocumented Latino immigrants who arrived after 2000. But like the wages of virtually all workers, the wages of the undocumented are falling, indeed for Latino immigrants wages are falling faster than those of non-immigrant workers. The report suggests that the large in-flux of migrants into the limited sectors of the labor market where they are employed may be increasing competition and driving down wages in these sectors.

Second, the occupational clusters that immigrants work in—construction and certain services—may be headed for a downturn. That’s because a lot of these jobs are dependent on the housing boom—both new construction and rehab work. If the housing boom slows or crashes—and the recent interest rate increases by the Federal Reserve Board make one of those scenarios a distinct possibility—residential housing construction jobs will likely be hard hit, putting many immigrants out of work and depressing wages for the those that do find work. The end of the housing boom may also affect employment in services such as landscaping and house cleaning—both major employers of undocumented workers—as middle class homeowners dependent on the “wealth effect” of their homes cut back on the services they purchase.

Third, the hardship generated by a shrinking number of jobs on offer will ripple through the entire hemisphere. Around $30 billion gets pumped into the economy of Latin America and the Caribbean each year from remittances sent by workers in the US. In Mexico 18% of all adults receive remittances, in El Salvador 28% do. This flow of money is growing—in all countries except El Salvador more than half of those receiving remittances from relatives have been receiving them for less than 3 years. The effect of a major slowdown in remittances will have a major impact on the region.

The time bought by the deadlock in Congress could give labor time to re-frame the debate and come up with a worker friendly immigration reform bill. To do that it would have to put the issue in the context of globalization and work with unions and social movements in the rest of the hemisphere to draft a comprehensive approach that would protect the rights of all migrant and non-migrant workers and contain development policies that would allow workers to remain in their home countries.

A step in the direction of recognizing the hemispheric and global nature of the issue has already been taken. As we reported in a previous blog, 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 US labor movement to convene a hemispheric meeting of unions and social movements to help draft a worker-friendly immigration bill.  Labor should not leave immigration reform to elite decision makers whether in the US or in the hemisphere.

M.O.

Global Labor and China's Rural Crisis

Hundreds of millions of peasants have left rural China seeking work in the cities and industrial zones of coastal China. Millions more are poised to leave in the coming decades. The migration—probably the biggest of it’s kind in human history—has helped increase the global workforce by 50%, according to some economists, as China has entered the global economy. Since the global job pool did not increase in step, there are now more workers chasing the available jobs, putting downward pressure on wages everywhere. Changes on Chinese country-side are likely to intensify this problem and have have profound implications for workers around the world.

First, some historical context. The mass migration of people from the country-side to the city that is playing itself out in China today is part of the history of virtually all industrial societies. Sometimes the migrations have been the result of direct force, such as the enclosures of 18th and 19th century Europe, when peasants were forcibly driven off their land by big landowners. Sometimes the migrations have been the result of a shift to large scale capitalist agriculture and/or the introduction of new technologies. What ever the cause, changes on the land have meant a steady march to the city for generations of peasants and rural workers the world over for the past 200 hundred years. These migrations created the urban working classes which powered the industrial revolutions and the subsequent industrialization that transformed and revolutionized human society.  US industry was built on the backs of migrants from the fields of the US, Europe and the world.

About 800 million people—two-thirds of China’s 1.3 billion population—still live in rural areas where living conditions are harsh.

Here is what the official People’s Daily On-line reports on the urban, rural gap:

The following are statistics about the gap between China's urban and rural areas.

Income: The average income of urban residents was 2.57 times that of rural residents in 1978, but the gap expanded to 3.22 times in 2005. In particular, the gap has widened markedly since 1997.

Education: The ratio of lecturer-level teachers in rural primary schools was 35.9 percent in 2004, 8.9 percentage points lower than that in urban primary schools.

Medical care: Eighty percent of medical resources are concentrated in cities. Only 22.5 percent of rural people are covered by rural cooperative medical care system.

Infrastructure: Half of villages do not have access to tap water. More than 60 percent of rural households do not have access to flush toilets. The houses of nearly 70 million rural residents need to be improved. Some 150 million rural households face problems in fuel supply. Six percent of villages are still beyond the reach of highways. Two percent of villages have no electricity supply. Six percent of villages do not have telephones.

Unemployment in the country-side is in double digits. 

While hard living and a lack of jobs has pushed many off the land and into the cities, force has also been a factor. Corrupt local officials frequently conspire to cheat peasants out of their land. Under Chinese law peasants cannot own land, but they can hold long-term leases. Corrupt local officials are able to void leases and compensate peasants for the land at its value as agricultural land. These officials then lease the land based on its much higher commercial value, often making windfall profits in the transaction.

The land seizures have not just led to migration, they have also led to social unrest. Last year 87,000 protests—about 200 major events each day— many the result of land seizures, were reported by the government.

The crisis has focused the attention of the central government which is obviously nervous about the wide-spread unrest. Its legitimacy at stake, Beijing has launched a campaign to curb corrupt land seizures engineered by local officials. The Financial Times reports:

Wen Jiabao, China's premier has directly blamed local governments for a rise in "mass incidents" in the countryside, saying officials had provoked unrest through illegal land grabs and unfair compensation.

"On land issues, we must not make historic errors," said Mr. Wen, using an old-style political language which underlines the ruling communist party's concern about losing the political battle in the countryside.

Mr. Wen's comments were contained in a speech to a meeting of the party's central committee on December 29, but only released on Friday.

"Some local governments have taken over farmland illegally without giving reasonable compensation, and this has sparked 'mass incidents' in rural areas," he said.

Mr. Wen also expressed concern about the impact of the increasing loss of rural land to industry on China's grain production, an issue which is central to Beijing's policy of "food security.

In the seven years to 2004, China has said it lost 5 per cent of its arable land to industry, a loss which coincided with the country becoming a net food importer for the first time in decades….I

"In the long run, the contradiction between population growth and shrinking farmland, as well a shortage of water resources, will assert itself, and raising food production will become more and more difficult," he said.

Mr. Wen also acknowledged the problem of rural migrant workers who leave their villages to work in cities and large towns, and send their money home to their families.

As well as having to toil in poor conditions and without access to basic social services, many workers complain they are not paid the wages owing to them....

Another Financial Times report describes how the campaign is working in one village:

Wagging his finger like a stern headmaster, Zhang Dejiang glares at passers-by from posters plastered along the alleyways of Nanting village, warning local party bosses not to cross "three red lines" in handling land disputes.

Mr. Zhang, the party secretary of Guangdong, issued his province-wide "red lines" directive after a series of violent disputes pitting villagers against local governments, including one in which paramilitary units shot protesters.

But the residents of Nanting, who are refusing to vacate their village to make way for a new university complex without more compensation, take little encouragement from Mr. Zhang's order, issued in late December.

"Whatever Zhang Dejiang says, the local officials will not listen to him," said Guan Wolun, one of the protest leaders in the village that is nestled next to the bustling Pearl River, a few hours by boat from Hong Kong.”….

If Nanting is a microcosm of Mr. Zhang's challenges, he faces an uphill battle. Residents of villages nearby, already razed to make way for the university, have established a squatter's camp by the river, festooned with big-character posters attacking corrupt local officials.

And in Nanting itself, cynical villagers fret they will be left with neither a home nor a job once they are shifted for the university project. A woman pointed to the fate of an adjoining community. "Out of 100 people there, only 10 got jobs as security guards and gardeners at the university," she said. "Why should it be any different for us?"

Imagine the Nanting situation repeated thousands of time. That’s what China is facing. In early March the Chinese government announced plans for a major initiative to narrow the urban rural gap. It remains to be seen whether it is more rhetoric than reality, according some.

China says it plans to use revenues generated by its fast-growing economy to launch a series of initiatives to overcome the "deep-seated problem" of the gaping rich-poor divide between wealthy cities and rural areas….

However, the initial figures provided….’and a separate report by the finance ministry record relatively modest spending commitments for rural areas, home to about two-thirds of China's 1.3bn people….an increase of about 14 per cent from last year, equal to the percentage increase in the military budget.”

The rural crisis is receiving a great deal of attention in Chinese political discourse, it has provoked a major ideological debate within the Chinese elites, and it has prompted some ameliorative actions. But there seems to be little indication that the strategic drift of China’s rulers is changing. They appear to be sticking to their policy of opening up vast areas of the Chinese economy to global corporations and their suppliers looking for cheap labor, and lax regulations. This policy requires a steady flow of workers from the country-side and continued repression of workers' fight to improve their lot. But make no mistake: the “China problem” is in large measure the problem of global corporations exploiting Chinese workers. And issues like the US trade deficit with China are really about US based global corporations producing goods in China and “trading” them back to the US.

China is now almost fully integrated into the global economy. Workers all over the world have a stake in what happens in rural China. In fact, the crisis demonstrates that the world's workers and the global labor movement need to be concerned about what happens to the all of the world's farmers/peasants/rural people.  The policy of global capital and the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO is to drive them off the land and into the cities to staff the factories of global corporations and their suppliers. But this is not an inevitability.  If economic development is geared toward encouraging, rather than destroying, small farmers, there can be viable, prosperous rural society.  But it requires 1) protection against rampaging global food corporations that demand markets for cheap food whatever the social and environmental costs, and 2) direction of credit and resources to help small farmers get the inputs they need to be productive.

The brilliant dissident Chinese intellectual Wang Hui has written that:

“The logic of transnational capitalism demands the globalization of labor movements, but the reality we are facing is this: a global labor movement has yet to take shape, while the evidence of cooperation and collusion between transnational capital and the nation-state is visible everywhere.” [China’s New Order, Harvard University Press, 2003—a must read.]

Wang Hui is right: a transnational labor movement capable of confronting transnational capital and its political allies does not yet exist. Building such a labor movement is very much a work in progress.  In fact, confronting China’s role in the global economy is itself an important step in the creation of a global labor movement since what happens in China affects workers all over the world—north, south, east, and west.

Wang Hui argues that in the absence of a fully developed global labor movement, the role of the Chinese state will be crucial to the future of China and the global economy. Will it be an agency for raising standards and creating the conditions of freedom for Chinese workers, or will it continue to be primarily an agent of repression? That question may well be even more important for workers in the rest of the world than the more limited question of labor organization—which forms only one, though an important, part of the question of democratization for China.

The crisis in China reminds us that the global labor movement—today still in its formative stages—needs to pay attention, not only to traditional trade union issues such as collective bargaining strategies but also to the broader issues of socially just development programs, the role of global institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO, and the fight for democracy and human rights everywhere..

[For more recent posts exploring many of the themes in this post,  click on "China" under Categores in the box to the right.]

New Labor Standards Adopted by World Bank

Back in 1997, during the Asian financial crisis, one of us at GLS who was working on the staff of the House Banking Committee drafted federal legislation to force the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to make respect for the core ILO labor standards a condition of all future loans.  At the time, under intense pressure from the Clinton Administration, the AFL-CIO public policy department actually lobbied against the legislation.  Almost a decade later much has changed, with the US labor movement now in wide agreement with the rest of the working world that IMF and WB policies hurt workers and grease the wheels for the race to the bottom.

There are signs that that the global labor movement's new ability to speak with one voice on international funding and reform is having an effect. A few weeks ago, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) announced that the World Bank directors had agreed  that all private sector, International Funding Corporation (IFC), loans must pass a core labor rights screening.  After the new standard is implemented in April, all companies that borrow from the IFC will be required to abide by the core labor standards (CLS) as defined by the International Labor Organization (ILO). This commitment stands to affect a wide range of private investment in the developing world since during its 2004-2005 fiscal year the IFC initiated 236 new projects in 67 countries totaling $6.45 billion.

The new policy represents two major advances. First, it applies to private corporations—not just governments—and is thus a good precedent for creating labor rights rules that target global corporations. Second, it contradicts the general neoliberal/WTO principle that the processes and working conditions under which products are produced cannot be regarded as a factor in allowing them "free trade".  (This is an extension of the "free trade" principle that it is each individual government, not the corporation/vendor, that is responsible for setting and enforcing standards.)

But take it from few wounded warriors who have battled the international funding institutions for many years: The World Bank has a long history of talking social movements to death while in practice they continue to foster a race to the bottom. Only time will tell if the Bank has had a change of heart.  But don't hold your breath.

Below is a copy of the ICTFU press release announcing the deal. Once the new standard is implemented, ICTFU's  Washington office (Contact: Peter Bakvis, [email protected] ) will send periodic reports advising the relevant Global Union Federations and national organizations of upcoming IFC investments in their sectors or country. 

ICFTU Communiqué, 22 February 2006
Action by World Bank's IFC on Workers' Rights a Major Step Forward

The ICFTU has applauded yesterday's adoption by the International Finance Corporation (the private sector lending arm of the World Bank) of a new loan performance standard on labour rights and working conditions.  After the new standard is implemented in the coming weeks, all companies that borrow from the IFC will be required to abide by the core labour standards (CLS) as defined by the International Labour Organization (ILO).  The CLS prohibit the use of forced labour, child labour and discriminatory practices, and require recognition of freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining.  The new standard also obliges IFC clients to observe some other basic conditions, including health and safety standards, protection for contract workers, and a policy for managing reductions in employment.

'"Thousands of workers in IFC-financed projects stand to benefit from this decision, which we believe should be a precedent for international lending in both the private and public sectors", said ICFTU General Secretary Guy Ryder.  "The World Bank funds billions of dollars of development projects each year, and we will be working to ensure that this landmark decision is extended across the entire scope of its activities.  In the meantime, we have offered to work with the IFC to implement this new standard", he added.

The IFC decision demonstrates what can be achieved when the World Bank engages in serious consultation with trade unions.  "In the two years during which the standard has been developed, the IFC sought input from trade unions and the ILO as well as IFC's traditional partners, governments and business.  As a result, the IFC corrected several problems and weaknesses in earlier drafts that we helped them identify," said Ryder.

At the ICFTU's suggestion the IFC accepted two years ago, on a pilot basis, to include a CLS condition in a loan to a clothing manufacturer, Grupo M, which opened new production facilities in Haiti.  The firm initially dismissed hundreds of workers when they attempted to create a union, and it took several months of pressure by the Haitian union, along with international support from trade unions and other organizations, before the workers were rehired and the company recognized the union.  In December 2005 Grupo M and the Haitian union signed the first collective agreement aimed at improving wages and working conditions.

The Haitian example demonstrates both the challenges and opportunities created by the new IFC standard, especially the need for an effective implementation mechanism.  An effective mechanism, coupled with the CLS standard, can have a tremendous positive impact on workers' living standards and working conditions. This is particularly significant in a country such as Haiti, where workers' rights have been ignored and the poor disenfranchised for so long.

Ryder believes that the onus is now on the other branches of the World Bank, namely those that lend to the public sector, to follow the positive step taken by the IFC: "This is not a matter of asking the Bank to do the job of the ILO, governments or anyone else.  It is a matter of asking the Bank to ensure that all of the its operations abide by internationally-recognized workers' rights' standards."

In 2004, a coalition of Indonesian trade unions and researchers published a report showing that child labour, discrimination against women workers and denial of freedom of association were taking place in public infrastructure projects financed by the World Bank.  The Bank's spokesperson in Indonesia acknowledged at the time that the practices were inconsistent with Bank policy and promised corrective action.  However, except for this IFC standard, the Bank has not taken measures to ensure respect for CLS in its projects.