Global Labor Strategies

Can Green Jobs Be Good Jobs?

[This article first appeared in the TheNation.com, available here.]

At the first Good Jobs, Green Jobs conference, held in Pittsburgh a year ago, advocates of green energy bemoaned their inability to get a modest renewable-energy tax credit through Congress over the opposition of the Bush administration. The idea of addressing the economic, energy and environmental crises through green jobs seemed a distant vision. So did the idea that a labor-environment coalition around green jobs could reach beyond the fringes of the two movements. But this year, things were different. Meeting in Washington, DC, February 4-6, speakers were reporting in from their BlackBerries on Congressional negotiations of the yet-to-be-approved stimulus package estimated by the Center for American Progress to include $80 billion for green jobs.

The Blue-Green Alliance, which sponsored this year's conference, grew out of a coalition formed in 2006 by the Sierra Club and the United Steelworkers Union. A year ago, the Steelworkers stood alone; today the alliance includes the Communications Workers of America (CWA), the Laborers International Union of America (LIUNA), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Teamsters (IBT), all of which have active programs on green jobs.

It's a challenging time for the labor movement. Union leaders appear genuinely thrilled about the election of President Obama; early in the conference Steelworkers' president Leo Girard proudly quoted Obama's statement, "I see labor as the solution," not the problem. The blind, neoliberal faith in markets and globalization has come crashing down along with the global financial system, vindicating the lonely labor voices who have long been calling for government guidance of the economy. But the Great Recession is decimating labor's thinning ranks, and unions face budget cuts and layoffs not only by employers but also within their organizations. Two major unions, SEIU and UNITE HERE, are engaged in very public internecine battles, while representatives of the Obama administration are trying to nudge the two national labor federations to reunite.

In this context, the chance to grow membership through green jobs represents a rare opportunity, one that the labor movement is taking up with alacrity. "Global warming is a working families issue," said AFL-CIO president John Sweeney at a press conference to announce a $1 million Green Jobs Center at the National Labor College.

Part of labor's involvement reflects the concern that has grown among many constituencies as melting ice caps, burgeoning wildfires and devastating floods demonstrate the immediate threat of climate change. At Sweeney's press conference, Mark Ayres, head of the union's building trades department, endorsed green jobs as good policy and good for labor. "But there is a more important reason" to fight global warming, he said, showing the audience a photograph his granddaughters.

Is Another World Possible?

[This article originally appeared in The Nation, available here.]

The recently concluded World Social Forum is a good gauge for assessing the state of the world's alternative social, economic and political movements. Organized in 2001 as a counterpoint to the World Economic Forum, the annual meeting of global and corporate elites held in Davos, Switzerland, the WSF brings social movement organizations and activists from around the world together around the idea that "another world is possible." If Davos represents a failed globalization from above, the WSF represents an emerging globalization from below. It's a massive affair--this year more than 100,000 people gathered here for the five-day event. Part political convention, part carnival, part countercultural happening, the WSF serves as the center of gravity for the global justice movement that emerged in the late 1990s to contest corporate globalization.

The question on the minds of many was how to respond to what some call the "crisis of crises"--the economic, climate, political and cultural catastrophes that have engulfed the planet--and whether social movements can provide a unifying alternative vision for a better world. Economist Walden Bello of Focus on the Global South summed it up: "There is a sense of urgency and seriousness combining both pragmatism and principle. There is much less rhetoric. Things are taking place very fast outstripping what many predicted. There is a clear collapse of neo-liberalism. We have been triumphant over Davos.... Now we need alternatives and must get down to the hard work of creating them."

“GLOBALIZATION FROM BELOW” TACKLES THE “GREAT RECESSION”

At the pit of the Great Depression in 1930, an American country music group named the Carter Family recorded a song called The Worried Man Blues. It began:

“I went down to the river and I lay down to sleep
When I woke up there were shackles on my feet.”

Though many subsequent verses describe the horrific outcome, there is no explanation of what had happened or why – just an awakening to a seemingly endless catastrophe.  The song immediately became an unprecedented national hit.  It’s hard to imagine that its success didn’t have something to do with capturing the sense of being the helpless victim of incomprehensible disaster that so many felt in the face of the Great Depression. 

The seemingly sudden collapse of the global economy in 2008 has similarly left millions, indeed billions of people all over the world a victims of a catastrophe that appears both inexplicable and unending. 

But what’s now being dubbed the “Great Recession” is neither incomprehensible nor irremediable.  On the contrary, it can be understood as an expectable result of a capitalism that has been globalized and at the same time “freed” by neoliberalism of control in the public interest.     

The economic globalization that transformed the world at the turn of the century promised, according to its advocates, a glorious vista of prosperity that would provide unprecedented economic growth and raise billions of people out of poverty.  In practice it generated personal and national insecurity, growing inequality, and a race to the bottom in which every community, nation, and workgroup had to reduce its social, environmental, and labor conditions to that of its most impoverished competitor. 

But economic globalization also gave birth to a new convergence of global social forces that opposed this kind of globalization.  People all over the world fought back against this “globalization from above” with their own “globalization from below.”  They used asymmetrical strategies of linking across the borders of nations and constituencies to become a counter power to the advocates of globalization.  They created a movement – variously known as the global justice movement, the anti-globalization movement, global civil society, or as we call it, “globalization from below” -- that some in the media even characterized as “the world’s other superpower.”

The anti-globalization/global justice/globalization-from-below movement developed in response to the expansive phase of globalization and neoliberalism.  Now the global economy has entered the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression.  The financial crisis has turned out to be the start of a cascade of other economic crises that are reshaping the global economy as definitively as an earthquake reshapes a city.  Current leaders of the world’s nations have utterly failed to develop a solution.   The likely impact of their failure on ordinary people around the world is incalculable. 

The advocates of globalization from above propounded as an article of faith that markets are self-regulating and that all would be for the best in the best of all possible worlds if only governments, labor unions, citizens organizations, and the unruly mob let them alone to do their thing.

The times they are a-changing.  US government officials long known as market fundamentalists seize banks, buy mortgage and insurance companies, and commit $7.7 trillion – half of the US annual product -- to government intervention in financial markets. 

The Clintonite “moderates” who once gutted the social safety net and sacrificed commitments to jobs programs in order to build up budget surpluses now propose vast public works programs financed by budget deficits.  The IMF, scourge of “irresponsible” countries that didn’t balance their budgets, advocates a trillion-plus dollars in global government deficits and claims to have replaced “structural adjustment conditionalities” with condition-free loans.      

These programs may well fail in halting the downward spiral of the global economy.  But they open the door to new forms of more social and public economy.  That’s one reason conservatives normally oppose them – and one indicator of how serious the present crisis really is.  The economic crisis makes it possible to put proposals on the table that have long been ruled inadmissible.   

While economists have asserted with great confidence that one after another trillion dollar “solution” would save the global economy, one after another has failed, raising the specter that it cannot be saved in its present form.  Peter Boon and Simon Johnson of the website baselinescenario.com recently raised that possibility in the Wall Street Journal.   They note that economists generally believe even the Great Depression of the 1930s could have been stopped by proper monetary policy.  But, Boon and Johnson argue, governments may simply not be able to prevent such huge deflationary spirals.  “Perhaps the events of 1929 produced an unstoppable whirlwind of deleveraging which no set of policy measures would truly be able to prevent.”  Their implication seems evident: The same could be true today.

The multi-trillion dollar rescues and bail-outs so far just attempt – possibly futilely -- to save the status quo.  But what can we do if the status quo can’t be saved?  Can globalization from below really provide an alternative solution to the great recession? 

New GLS Discussion Paper: Global Warming and the Great Recession

Today GLS is releasing a new discussion paper Globalization From Below Tackles the Great Recession. 

Its purpose is to stimulate discussion about ways that the global conjunction of forces variously known as the “global justice movement,” the “anti-globalization movement,” and “globalization from below” can respond effectively to the new situation created by today’s historic crisis of the global economy.  That crisis is now widely acknowledged to be more severe than any since the Great Depression of the 1930s.  Indeed, it has now been dubbed, “The Great Recession.” 

As we head off the World Social Forum in Belem, Brazil we're eager for feedback, so post comments or email us directly at [email protected].

Read the full paper here

.

Global Warming and the Great Recession

Global warming directly threatens virtually every individual, group, and nation.  Climate protection represents the great common necessity for humanity.  It is a concern for labor, its allies, and the globalization from below movement.

Paradoxically, the slowing economy is reducing the production of greenhouse gases.  But it is also leading to cuts in already inadequate plans to move the global economy to a sustainable basis.

World leaders are using the “Great Recession” as an excuse to continue business as usual -- the destruction of the earth by global warming.  Corporations and governments are already reneging on already inadequate commitments. Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, says,

“European industry is saying we can’t deal with financial crisis and reduce emissions at the same time.  Heads of government have other things on their minds.”   The December meeting of world leaders in Poznan reveals the quiet retreat from already inadequate plans and standards.

But this retreat may have unintended consequences.  The “Great Recession” has already delegitimated global leadership and neoliberal ideology and policy.  Failure to take effective measures to halt global warming provides a further self-delegitimation of global leadership and neoliberal ideology.

Why establishment remedies aren’t working

The “Great Recession” is part of a cycle that has repeated itself dozens of times in the history of capitalism.  The destruction of the earth’s climate by human activity is so far unique in human history.  Yet both share the same root: the failure to shape human activity to meet human need.  And each can only be solved through a global democratization that places human activity under shared human control.

Establishment remedies for global warming and for the Great Recession are already failing.  The reason, at bottom, is the same.  As the economists say, you can’t push on a string.  When powerful private interests control humanity’s resources and decision making, efforts to entice them to do the right thing are unlikely to override their own calculation of their interests.  As long as production is driven exclusively by the search for profits, not by human need, nobody should be surprised that it doesn’t always assort very well with human need.

In the case of the Great Recession, governments have attempted to give incentives for financial institutions to resume lending and investing by providing them trillions of dollars in investment and cheap and even free credit.  But those institutions have continued refusing to lend and invest because they consider hoarding to be more in their interest. 

In the case of global warming, the Kyoto treaty and the EU have tried to get corporations and other institutions to produce less carbon emissions by a “cap-and-trade” system that essentially charges a fee for a permit to pollute and then allows the permits to be bought and sold.  So far this has completely failed to reduce carbon emissions, which have not decreased even in the countries where the system is most developed. 

Labor Faces Hard Times

Two recent images of the labor movement in this time of crisis stand out for their stark contrast.

One is a photograph of UAW President Ron Gettlefinger sitting at the witness table before a Congressional committee with the heads of the Big 3 auto makers, pleading for help. The other is a photo of jubilant workers celebrating their victory after a six day sit-in at the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago.

It is not stretching things to say that these images crystallize the problems and possibilities of organized labor today.

Missed opportunities

Gettlefinger’s testimony was a sad coda to an era in US industrial relations that actually ended in September 2007 when the UAW reached a concession packed agreement with GM following a two day strike, and  similar agreements later that year with the other auto makers. The agreements froze wages for production workers; reclassified and placed “non-production” workers on a lower wage scale; and set a new hire rate at about $14.00 an hour—about half what incumbent workers earn—with inferior benefits. A buyout program was designed to push as many senior workers out the door as possible to make room for the new hires. The union promoted the contract as a way to buy time for the companies to reorganize and retool.

Nothing much happened. The restructuring took the form of plant closures. The retooling remained a promise by the Big 3 to produce more energy efficient cars. But all the while the companies kept up their incessant advertisements for SUVs, pick-ups, and other gas guzzlers.  And they continued to pursue their lobbying and lawsuits against tougher mileage standards. The spike in gas prices and the credit crunch provided the coup de grace to a dying industry.

In October 2007, we asked on this blog, whether the UAW could turn its collective bargaining defeat into a strategic retreat by regrouping and developing an independent survival plan for the industry? Now we know the answer: they could not. Tragically, the UAW kept marching in lock step with the very companies that were destroying the US industry. The union even supported the companies’ opposition to tougher mileage standards because, they argued, it would unfairly hurt sales of light trucks and SUVs and imperil many jobs.

Had the union taken an independent course things might now be different. They might have been able to mobilize popular opinion behind a plan to produce greener cars and new vehicles for public transportation, preserving the jobs and the economies of the communities that depend on them.  Instead, there is no plan to rally around, only a demoralized plea for a bailout.

Next Steps for Globalization from Below

[Previous posts have described the vision laid out in the "Beijing Declaration" on "The global economic crisis: An historic opportunity for transformation" and the specific proposals that make up its" transitional program" to move toward a "radically different kind of political and economic order." This post looks at next steps toward realizing such a vision and program.]

The convergence of social forces we call "globalization from below" has a lot of experience in how to challenge globalization from above.  Its various overlapping organizations and networks have played critical and globally visible roles in challenging the formation and further empowerment of the WTO; demanding debt relief for poor countries; opposing IMF structural adjustment policies; providing high-quality, high-profile critiques of the World Economic Forum, the G-7, and the international financial institutions;  fighting for affordable AIDS drugs for the world's poor; demanding protection of the world's climate; contesting imperial adventures like the US attack on Iraq; and challenging the myth that "there is no alternative" to neo-liberal capitalism.

Globalization from below has become a kind of global social bloc, drawing together a diversity of forces around common interests and joint action.  It has depended less on formal organizations than on new forms of social networking that have allowed rapid coordination of thinking and campaigns worldwide.  It has utilized asymmetrical methods to counter the centralized power of globalization from above with the linkage of thousands of grassroots movements, constituencies, and organizations around the globe.

The dense set of connections and dialogues that constitutes globalization from below provides a vehicle for responding to the emerging economic crisis.  As the "Beijing Declaration", "The global economic crisis: An historic opportunity for transformation" indicates, the upcoming World Social Forum in Belem, Brazil at the end of January 2009 provides an opportunity to jumpstart the process.  Here are some thoughts about objectives the Forum – and the wider nexus of social networks that interact with it – might pursue.

A Global Program for Hard Times

[This is the second in a series of three posts on the Beijing Declaration’s proposals and next steps in implementing its vision.]

The times they are a-changing.  US government officials long known as market fundamentalists seize banks, buy mortgage and insurance companies, and commit $7.7 trillion – half of the US annual product -- to government intervention in financial markets.  The Clintonite “moderates” who once gutted the social safety net and sacrificed commitments to jobs programs in order to build up budget surpluses now propose vast public works programs financed by budget deficits.  The IMF, scourge of “irresponsible” countries that didn’t balance their budgets, advocates a trillion-plus dollars in global government deficits and claims to have replaced “structural adjustment conditionalities” with condition-free loans.      

These programs may well fail in halting the downward spiral of the global economy.  But they open the door to new forms of more social and public economy.  That’s one reason conservatives normally oppose them – and one indicator of how serious the present crisis really is.  The economic crisis it possible to put proposals on the table that have long been ruled inadmissible.   

While economists have asserted with great confidence that one after another trillion dollar “solution” would save the global economy, one after another has failed, raising the specter that it cannot be saved in its present form.  Peter Boon and Simon Johnson of the website baselinescenario.com recently raised that possibility in the Wall Street Journal.   They note that economists generally believe even the Great Depression of the 1930s could have been stopped by proper monetary policy.  But, Boon and Johnson argue, governments may simply not be able to prevent such huge deflationary spirals.  “Perhaps the events of 1929 produced an unstoppable whirlwind of deleveraging which no set of policy measures would truly be able to prevent.”  Their implication seems evident: The same could be true today.

The multi-trillion dollar rescues and bail-outs so far just attempt – possibly futilely -- to save the status quo.  But what can we do if the status quo can’t be saved?

An excellent starting point for discussion of what to do as present efforts to address the global economic crisis fail is the Beijing Declaration, issued by a group of NGOs and social movements who met in October on the occasion of the Asia-Europe People’s Forum in Beijing.  Many of its proposals would be valid in more normal times – indeed many are already functioning in some parts of the world.  But the present crisis [link to “Present crisis in historical perspective] puts them on the table everywhere. 

Neoliberalism and globalization have been comprehensive in their effect.  They have reshaped the economy at every level from local villages to global markets and institutions.  And they have reshaped every sphere, from private finance to government taxation, from government spending to international trade, from the environment to agriculture and industry.

The Beijing Declaration provides a vision [link to Globalization from below in hard times post] of a similarly comprehensive transformation.  Its proposals would affect local, regional, national, continental, and global economies.  And it makes concrete proposals for finance, taxation, public spending and investment, international trade and finance, environmental protection, agriculture, and industry.

The following account provides a bit of background on the problems in each of the spheres, then summarizes the main elements of the Declaration’s proposals.

FINANCE
With their trillions of dollars of financial bailouts, governments are acquiring new leverage over, and even outright ownership of, banks and other financial institutions.  The conservative officials who are conducting the bailouts hate this and would like to return control to private hands asap.  But once the financial system has proven itself to be so catastrophically dysfunctional, and once such vast sums of public money have gone into rescuing it, the argument for making finance a public utility serving public purposes becomes irrefutable. 

Globalization From Below in Hard Times

The economic globalization that transformed the world at the turn of the century promised, according to its advocates, a glorious vista of prosperity that would provide unprecedented economic growth and raise billions of people out of poverty.  In practice it generated personal and national insecurity, growing inequality, and a race to the bottom in which every community, nation, and workgroup had to reduce its social, environmental, and labor conditions to that of its most impoverished competitor. 

But economic globalization also gave birth to a new convergence of global social forces that opposed this kind of globalization.  People all over the world fought back against this “globalization from above” with their own “globalization from below.”  They used asymmetrical strategies of linking across the borders of nations and constituencies to become a counter power to the advocates of globalization.  They created a movement – variously known as the global justice movement, the anti-globalization movement, global civil society, or as we call it, “globalization from below” -- that some in the media even characterized as “the world’s other superpower.”

The anti-globalization/global justice/globalization-from-below movement developed in response to the expansive phase of globalization and neoliberalism.  Now the global economy has entered the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression.  The financial crisis has turned out to be the start of a cascade of other economic crises that are reshaping the global economy as definitively as an earthquake reshapes a city.  Current leaders of the world’s nations have utterly failed to develop a solution.   The likely impact of their failure on ordinary people around the world will be incalculable. 

A Vision for Hard Times

The crisis of the global economy provides new challenges, opportunities, and responsibilities for the diverse social, labor, environmental, and other movements that have constituted globalization from below.  It also raises the question of what the role of globalization from below should be in the new situation. 

In October, a group of activists, social movements, and NGOs who were in Beijing for the Asia-Europe People’s Forum met nightly to discuss the crisis.  Their “Beijing Declaration”  provides a brilliant first expression of a globalization-from-below alternative to the failures of globalization from above. 

Today’s Economic Crisis in Historical Perspective

The superlatives of the global economic meltdown of 2008 are, well, superlative.  Professor Noriel Roubini of New York University says the current crisis is “the largest leveraged asset bubble and credit bubble in history.”  The International Monetary Fund says, “In advanced economies, output is forecast to contract on a full-year basis in 2009, the first such fall in the post-war period.”  

The crisis of 2008 is frequently compared to past crises, and increasingly to the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s.  Merrill Lynch Chief Executive John Thain recently said he does not expect the global economy to recover quickly from the credit crisis and that the environment more closely resembles the advent of the Great Depression in 1929 than recent slowdowns.  Long-forgotten images of breadlines and homeless families have sprouted in the media.  60 percent of US voters polled in October said another depression is likely within a year.

Such historical comparisons can help provide perspective on contemporary situations, but they can also be misleading if they don’t include the differences as well as the similarities.  For labor and social movements, there is much to learn at this time of crisis from crises past.  But there are also significant differences which we ignore at our peril – and which may allow us opportunities for action that did not exist in the past.   

Character and extent of the current crisis

A few statistics give a flavor of the depth of the current crisis. 

According to Reuters, between January and September, 2008, the stock market index for “emerging markets” lost nearly 55 percent of its value and the index for “developed markets” lost 42 percent.  The S&P 500 of US stocks lost half its value from its October, 2007 peak, marking what the Financial Times calls "without question, the worst bear market since the 1930s."  It adds that "the only historical precident for the kind of deflation predicted by the bond market came in the 1930s."

Ten million Americans are out of work, nearly 3 million more than a year ago.  The official unemployment rate rose to 6.5 percent in October, its highest rate in 14 years.  Goldman Sachs predicts it will reach 9 percent in 2009.

7.3 million American homeowners are expected to default on their mortgages between 2008 and 2010, with 4.3 million of those losing their homes. As of September 30, one-fifth of American homes with mortgages were “underwater” -- worth less than was owed on their mortgages.

National and global efforts to counter the crisis have included cuts in interest rates, support for money markets, and recapitalization of banks.  Their total cost as of mid-November has been estimated at more than $4 trillion.

Economists predictions – for whatever they’re worth – have lost their once-unmitigated optimistic faith in the economic system.  Martin Wolf of the Financial Times says that despite government efforts, “a long and deep global slowdown is still likely.”  James Kwak of Baseline Scenario says “Wealth is likely to decline further.  Under any scenario, we will see many personal, corporate and perhaps even national bankruptcies.”  Kenneth S. Rogoff, a former chief economist at the IMF and now a Harvard professor adds, “We’re entering a really fierce global recession.  . . .  It’s a very dangerous situation.  The danger is that instead of having a few bad years, we’ll have another lost decade.”

What’s precedented

Capitalism has been the most dynamic economic system in history, but it has a peculiarity:  No matter how great the need for houses, clothes, food, or other products, those who control the means of production won’t produce them unless they can make a profit doing so.  As a result, the history of capitalism has been marked by periods of economic crisis and stagnation in which millions of people suffered unemployment and poverty while the resources that they could have used to produce the things they need lay idle. 

These periods can be long or short, modest or severe.  Capitalist economies have a regular business cycle in which every decade or so economic growth is punctuated by recession.  These can be little more than periods of readjustment that allow a return to growth – part of what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called capitalism’s “creative destruction.”  Some other contractions, however, also stabilize – but at levels that result in massive unemployment of material and human resources.  Such a peculiar state of affairs is possible because markets are regulated only by the pursuit of private profit, not by a matching of resources and human needs.  If production isn’t profitable, the wealthy individuals and institutions who own the means of production have no incentive to produce. 

Since 1900, the US experienced depressions and recessions in 1903, 1907, 1911, 1914, 1921, the whole decade of the 1930s, 1949, 1954, 1957, 1961, 1970, 1982, 1990, and 2002. 

The “gold standard” for economic downturns remains the Great Depression of the 1930s.  From 1929 to 1933, manufacturing output in the US dropped 39 percent and unemployment reached 25 percent.  In the 1982 recession, U.S. unemployment reached 10.8%, the highest since World War II.  In the Asian crisis that started in 1998, 20 million people in Indonesia lost their jobs in a year as the unemployment rate rose from less than 5 percent to more than 13 percent, and the population living in absolute poverty quadrupled to a hundred million.