Global Labor Strategies

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.

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.

Who’s Revolting in France?

(Second in a series)

What is remarkable about the events in France is the solidarity of the population in opposition to the changes in labor law pushed through parliament by the government. Indeed, the law has provoked a genuine class based upsurge that is drawing in many different parts of the working and middle classes. We will discuss some of the reasons for this in our next blog. But in this blog we take a look at the composition of the opposition—and the proponents of the law.

Poll figures indicate that 66% of all French people oppose the new law.

The mass protests began in the universities, where the law was quickly dubbed the “Kleenex law”, because it made young workers as disposable as tissue. Over the course of the past week more than half of all French universities were shut down, and last Thursday a quarter of a million students participated in demonstrations.

Much has been made of the comparison with 1968 but the differences are profound. In 1968, France and the industrial world generally were still in what the French call the “Glorious Thirty”—the growth decades that followed WWII. With an expanding economy and a large cohort of young people, the prospects and possibilities were quite different than they are today. But what is similar to 1968 is the surprising ability of students to initiate and organize massive protests that draw in many sectors of society and shake the French establishment.

Workers and their unions have joined the protests because they fear the chipping away of labor rights and standards won over a century of struggle. The labor new law would insure the institutionalization of a two-tier workforce by allowing different rights for different workers, and in the end would weaken protections for everyone.

When the unions turned out en masse to join students for last Saturday’s demonstrations, it marked the revival of a powerful alliance that shook France in 1968 and 1994. Now unions and the students are building toward a “day of action” on March 28 which will feature strikes and other protests and take alliance up a notch.

But it is not just students and traditional workers that are opposing the new law, so are the immigrants that the government argued—some would say cynically—would most benefit from the new law. Here is what the Financial Times reports about the immigrant opposition to the new law:

Hostility to the contract from the poor suburbs is a blow to Mr. de Villepin. He had seemed to be telling the student protesters in central Paris not to worry. As graduates of prestigious universities, such as the Sorbonne, they are not the intended recipients of the new contract. Instead, it is meant for the poorly educated immigrant children in les banlieues, who set fire to thousands of cars and buildings across France last year.

But this argument is being undermined by an increasing number in the suburbs repeating the criticisms of the student demonstrators. The important difference is that the poor of the outer-city ghettos have the added worry of racial discrimination.

Edilson Monteiro, an 18-year-old school drop-out from Montfermeil, says: "Before the 'first job contract' there were enough difficulties for people from the banlieues, with the difference in our clothes, our language and our culture, but now they are making things even more insecure.

Young people are very worried about entering the world of work. Now if I make a mistake or upset the boss, he can just get rid of me without any reason," says Edilson, whose mother brought him to the local job centre after he quit as a construction sales agent.

Why, given the overwhelming rejection of the new labor law by the French people is the government still pushing for its implementation? It no mystery: in France and throughout Europe, the big money is out to undermine the European social model of decent benefits and strong labor laws. They have seized on youth unemployment as a way to divide the great majority of people who want to retain the principle of economic security.  On Monday, these erstwhile defenders of the poor met with Villepin and most told him to stand tight. According to the International Herald Tribune:

.... Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin summoned 24 of France's most powerful executives to his office to seek ways of salvaging the new law…

Charles Beigbeder, chief executive of the French power company Poweo, said after attending the meeting that failure to win approval for the legislation could stall efforts to reform the labor market until after the presidential election next spring.

Another executive who attended the meeting and declined to be identified was less optimistic.

"There was a feeling among many of the participants that if the law is withdrawn you can kiss goodbye to reform for the next 10 years," he said, according to his spokesman. "It would send a terrible signal."

But he said that others present had argued that the legislation was "a political disaster" and that Villepin should withdraw it.

The businessmen's comments come against a backdrop of escalating social unrest over the First Employment Contract, an initiative known by its French initials as the CPE and closely associated with the prime minister, who drafted the new law in an effort to ease double-digit youth unemployment…….

Participants said Villepin still had no intention of suspending the legislation despite pressure from the streets, where hundreds of thousands have demonstrated in recent days and more protests are planned this week. A wide strike was scheduled Monday for March 28, student and union leaders said.

Villepin is "not in a spirit of moving back," Bruno van Ryb, the head of Middlenext, was quoted as saying by Reuters.

"The prime minister seems determined with a state of mind that is relatively easy to understand: You launch the CPE and after several months it is relatively easy to analyze whether it is a success or not," he said.

Claude Bébéar, chairman of the insurance giant Axa and one of France's leading entrepreneurs, said: "We're just in one of those psychodramas that the French love but that is not justified."……

The chairwoman of Medef, [the French Employers Association] Laurence Parisot, threw her support behind Villepin last week.

"We hope that finally we will have a debate on reforming the labor market," she said, "which functions badly and is getting worse."

There is a deep uneasiness in France and Europe about the direction of society and the economy so one never knows what could come next.

M.O.

(Next: What’s at stake in France and what can the rest of the world learn from the protests.)