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Date: Sat, 1 Jul 1995 17:13:00 GMT
Reply-To: Rich Winkel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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From: Rich Winkel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Organization: PACH
Subject: World Bank Says Unions Are Monopolists
/** labr.global: 203.0 **/
** Topic: Unions As Monopolists Says WB **
** Written 11:49 PM Jun 29, 1995 by lvpsf in cdp:labr.global **
From: Labor Video Project <lvpsf>
/* ---------- "FINANCE-LABOUR: World Bank slates '" ---------- */
Copyright 1994 InterPress Service, all rights reserved.
Worldwide distribution via the APC networks.
*** 26-Jun-95 ***
Title: FINANCE-LABOUR: World Bank slates 'monopolistic' unions /EMBARGO/
/EDITORS: The following item is under embargo and cannot be
reprinted or used in any way before 2000 GMT, Thursday, Jun. 29/
WASHINGTON, Jun 39 (IPS) - Next month Jean-Paul, a garment worker
in Toulouse, France, will lose his 400-dollar-a-week job and enter
the government welfare rolls. In Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Hoa, a
garment worker, has just been hired at 30 dollars a week by a
French joint venture company.
Though separated by thousands of kilometres, the lives of these
two workers are interlinked. They are two of the key characters
cited in the introduction to the latest World Development Report
(WDR), the World Bank's key annual policy document, which was
released here Thursday.
The 251-page 'Workers in an Integrating World' enters the
debate on the impact on labour of global economic integration with
a rousing endorsement of increased labour market flexibility.
It also comes down in strong support of reduced government
intervention, and market-based, growth-oriented economic policies.
The new report is being published just four months after the
International Labour Organisation (ILO) called attention to what
it termed a ''global unemployment crisis.'' About 30 percent of
the global labour force of 2.5 million people are currently
thought to be unemployed or underemployed.
Much of Europe is facing double-digit unemployment. Higher
jobless figures afflict countries in Africa, Latin America, South
Asia, and the Near East. The result is rising worker unrest in
what the World Bank calls ''revolutionary times in the global
economy.''
The Bank believes that any move to stall or reverse the global
tide towards markets and economic integration risks worsening
economic stagnation and unemployment in some countries and
widening the gap between rich and poor countries.
The new WDR also rejects the notion that greater mobility of
capital and a growing low-wage labour supply in poor countries are
contributing to falling wages and job insecurity in the
industrialised world.
''Fears that emerging economies are siphoning jobs from
industrial countries are largely unfounded,'' according to Michael
Walton, the WDR Team Leader.
''(T)he primary source of the employment crisis in rich
countries lies in domestic factors,'' he said. ''Certainly any
solution should come through action at home and not through
cutting links with poorer economies, that are increasingly a
source of growth for the industrial world.''
Instead, the report insists that unemployment problems in
industrial countries are due far more to ''technological change --
combined with rigid wage and social security systems'' -- than to
competition from cheap labour in emerging economies.
These conclusions will certainly prove controversial. Trade
union groups have long argued that the increasing ability of
multinational corporations to move investments and plants to low-
wage areas exerts a downward pressure on wages everywhere,
especially in wealthy countries.
''The report's authors live in a fantasy world in which free
trade translates into private profits which then translates into
better wages and working conditions,'' says Karen Hansen-Kuhn, of
the Development GAP, a Washington think-tank.
''They do not live in the real world of very unequal power
relationships between local unions and increasingly transnational
capital,'' he said.
Murphy Roberts, a representative of the American Federaltion of
Labour-Congress of Industrial Orgnanisations (AFL/CIO), the
largest confederation of unions in the United States, agrees.
''(The report) ignores issues of economic concentration and
economic control by multinationals,'' he says.
But the WDR argues that domestic policy in the industrialised
world has until now favoured strong, industry-wide trade unions
which have worked to protect the salaries and benefits of workers
like Jean-Paul. But that protection has largely come at the
expense of others, it insists.
''Unions do often act as monopolists, improving wages and
working conditions for their members at the expense of capital
holders, consumers and nonunion labour,'' says the report. Rural
and self-employed workers, who are least organised, have suffered
the most, it adds.
To reduce the power of these monopolist forces -- sometimes
referred to as a ''small but vocal minority,'' the report argues
that unions should act at the local or factory -- rather than the
sectorial -- level.
At the same time, governments should confine their role to
setting basic labour standards, ensuring that vulnerable groups,
like children, are not exploited, and promoting education and
training programmes to enhance the ability of the work force to
move from job to job in response to changing market conditions.
''Too often, government regulations and union action have
helped the few in good jobs; this requires policy reforms to
ensure labour conditions are in tune with market realities,'' the
report says.
The report insists that labour unions are important in ensuring
rising living standards and human conditions of work. ''We come
out in support of freedom of association, collective bargaining as
a better way than government mandates for working conditiions.''
Jerome Levinson of the International Labour Rights Fund, who has
written a critique of the Bank's new report for the coalition,
says: ''The Bank refuses to recognise the connection between the
development model it promotes with its dependence upon attracting
foreign direct investment.''
Levinson, formerly general counsel for the Inter-American
Development (IDB) now works with trade unions along the U.S.-
Mexican border. He says Bank policies favouring the export sector
in poor countries have ''also undermined the small enterprises
that employ most of the work force'' there. (ENDS/IPS/PC-JL/JL/95)
Origin: Amsterdam/FINANCE-LABOUR/
----
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** End of text from cdp:labr.global **
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--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 916-898-5321
E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
