Date: Wed, 15 Aug 2001 15:45:13 -0400
From: Liza Featherstone [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The question is, is it possible for people in rich countries to work in
useful solidarity with workers in the Third World who wish to be paid more,
and to improve their work conditions? ...
Yup, that's the question...
Students investigate worker complaints, and campaign for
remedies. Most of all, they support workers' own organizing efforts.
... and that's the answer.
(A rap on the related issue of Social Clauses from ZCommentary, last
Feb:)
Workers of the world, transcend the wedge!
Southern Africa is also grappling with divisions between
and among union and eco-social movement activists,
writes Patrick Bond from Johannesburg. The only way
forward is to make shutting the WTO, World Bank and IMF
the first strategic priority.
***
Divide-and-conquer is an all too familiar gambit of a
ruling elite under stress. Thus Seattle demonstrators,
together with a growing international movement
struggling in the same spirit in many other sites, have
found themselves subject to both real and invented
splits since stepping up to the world stage last
November 30.
Every frightened establishment commentator now harps
on about the partially-material, partially-mythical
breach between allegedly protectionist French farmers or
molly-coddled US trade unionists, on the one hand, and
on the other, dirt-poor peasants blocked from export
crop production or low-paid Third World workers
suffering prohibitions on unionizing, a paucity of
safety and health laws, competition from child laborers,
toxic environmental conditions.
With pernicious intent, this caricatured division
has been sewn and woven into public debates about post-
Seattle world order reconstruction, in a terribly
confusing way. The most disturbing manifestation may be
the manner in which China-bashing has distracted some of
the Washington, DC consumer, environment and labor
leaders who otherwise last November began making
important steps towards internationalism.
If we take as a first principle that
internationalist solidarity is violated by promoting the
power of an oppressor nation against an oppressed
nation, especially without the consent and indeed
request of the people most affected, then it is easy to
support boycotts against apartheid-era South Africa and
Burma--for whom sanctions called for by popular,
democratic movements translate into a strategic attack
on local oppressors--but impossible to stomach a
moralizing Bill Clinton and those allied labor
aristocrats whose trade interests are imperialist or at
best narrowly protectionist.
But to notice, to grapple with and to transcend the
establishment's wedge issue strategy, is also to also
recognise and squarely confront the grain of truth here.
For radicals will have to adopt an equally potent
strategy to contend with the many free-trade ideologues
and bureaucrats from multinational corporations, media,
academia, the WTO and likeminded states and agencies who
seek to seduce pliable movement bureaucrats from NGOs,
unions and environmental groups with the offer of a
seat at the table.
Precisely this conflict of interests emerged in
Southern Africa late last year. In an eerie parallel to
the Sweeney-Hoffa rerouting of the Seattle labor march
away from the Convention Center and their repeated
denials of intent to shut down the WTO, some leaders
of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu)
are also going corporatist, espousing utopian notions
of social contracts between big global government,
transnational corporations and the leading fractions of
unions.
This is surprising, not only because of SA's recent
history of vibrant shopfloor protest, but also because,
at first glance, it would appear that the interests of
the world's workers lie in a concerted programme to
raise the standard of living (including gender equity
and environmental protections) of those at the bottom.
SA is somewhere in the middle, and Cosatu regularly
expresses concern about the flight of jobs to
Bangladesh, Indonesia, China and other sites of ultra-
cheap labor. The goal for Cosatu, just as much for the
AFL-CIO, is to slow relocation and outsourcing by
supporting struggles to raise wages and working
conditions in maquiladores, export-processing zones and
similar settings.
But to this end, the campaign to include social,
labor, governance and environmental clauses (known
simply as the Social Clause) in trade agreements
became extremely thorny during the 1990s.
For after a second glance, many progressive African
social movements, NGOs, churches and women's groups,
development agencies, technical think-tanks and
intellectuals--some of them gathered in the Ghana-based
Africa Trade Network--began condemning the way in which
international institutions like the WTO, World Bank and
International Monetary Fund, as well as powerful
Northern governments, impose conditions on what they
argue is already a
