Labor Research Review, Volume 1, Number 23 (1995)

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https://hdl.handle.net/1813/72862

Confronting Global Power: Union Strategies for the World Economy

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Privatization Bites
Banks, Andy (1995-04-01)
[Excerpt]Many have perceived privatization as a local phenomenon, but in fact it is not local. It is an international granite column upon which the so-called "New World Order" stands. Within weeks after the election of Ronald Reagan to the U.S. presidency, two right-wing think tanks, the Heritage Foundation in this country and England's Adam Smith Foundation, produced a thousand-page document showing that the worldwide economic strategy of both the United States government and the British government would be a privatization strategy. Powerful international financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, have made public sector "reform" the center-piece of their dogmatic four-pronged program of privatization, deregulation, free trade, and currency devaluation.
Buying Time or Building a Future: Labor Strategies for a Global Economy
Harvey, Pharvis (1995-04-01)
[Excerpt] A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to the global economy. Mexico, the bright, new star in the investors' heaven, crashed as spectacularly as a meteor in December last year. By June, two million jobs had been lost, wages had declined bv 50-60 percent in dollar value, and 83 banks and some 80 percent of small businesses were headed for bankruptcy[...] The crash serves as a case study in the workings - and failings - of the world economic system. It also needs to serve as a wake-up call to labor. Armed with an understanding of the world economic scene, labor needs to develop adequate responses to capital's efforts to maximize profits by moving investment capital from one country to another in the blink of an eye - or more accurately, at the touch of a finger on a keyboard.
Exposing The Myths: Organizing Women Around the World
Gilbert, Helen (1995-04-01)
[Excerpt] Myths about organizing women, and women of color in particular, prevent the labor movement from hearing and acting on the real opportunities to work together on issues that affect everyone. This article contributes to the burgeoning effort to listen to what women around the world are saying about their role in the labor movement. The article includes stories of women from the African country of Uganda and the Asian countries of Sri Lanka, South Korea, and Nepal. These stories are not isolated incidents; they represent the growing participation of women in labor movements around the world. Gaining an appreciation for this growing participation will help lay to rest some of the widelyheld myths about organizing women - myths that still persist after years of effort to combat them.
...And the Twain Shall Meet? A North-South Controversy Over Labor Rights and Trade
Compa, Lance (1995-04-01)
[Excerpt] No country or company should gain a commercial edge in international trade by jailing or killing union organizers, crushing independent union movements, or banning strikes. Gaining an advantage in labor costs should not depend on exploiting child labor or forced labor, or discriminating against women or oppressed ethnic groups. Deliberately exposing workers to life-threatening safety and health hazards, or holding wages and benefits below livable levels should not be permissible corporate strategies. But these are exactly the abuses that happen all too often in a rapidly globalized world trading system based on "free trade."
LRR Focus: Global Solidarity Trips Sprint
(1995-04-01)
[Excerpt] Leaders of CWA, working with and through the Postal, Telegraph, and Telephone International (PTTI), have denounced the La Conexion firings at international conferences, raised the alarm on the information superhighway, and pushed the story in the world's media outlets. The result? From the top brass to the rank and file, union members all over the world have heard about the firings at La Conexion.
LRR Focus: Solidarity NOT Charity
Sanchez, D. Catherine (1995-04-01)
[Excerpt] Can global solidarity really help unions with their organizing efforts? Only if we stop thinking about international solidarity as "charity" work for the "developing" world. Only if we recognize the limitations of isolated local union struggles against international corporations and financial institutions. Only if we build international union structures to support efforts in organizing more workers and bargaining collective agreements.
Don't Waste Time With Politicians-Organize!
Velasquez, Baldemar (1995-04-01)
[Excerpt] From the beginning of our nation's history, we have witnessed economic expansion unfettered by any moral standards. The right to exploit resources and people has gone relatively unchallenged, from the Southern states' reliance on slave labor to the stealing of land and the public policy of genocide against the indigenous people, known as Manifest Destiny. This process of predatory capitalism has continued throughout this century. The foreign policy surrounding the Cold War had as much to do with economic dominance and making areas safe for U.S. investments as it did with containing communism. American workers and organized labor were often complicit in this policy, even though it ran contrary to workers' own interests.
LRR Focus: NAFTA Monitoring
Anderson, Sarah (1995-04-01)
[Excerpt] A year and a half after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect, the rosy picture painted by NAFTA supporters has turned grey. A growing number of labor activists, researchers, and academics are developing a more accurate picture of how NAFTA is affecting our lives.
Sprint and the Shutdown of La Conexion Familiar: A Union-Hating Multinational Finds Nowhere to Run
Pattee, Jon (1995-04-01)
[Excerpt] Sprint chairman William T. Esrey has a dream: a long-distance phone company whose fiber-optic tentacles snake across the globe to embrace European and Asian partners, snaring a chunk of the projected $30 billion market for such global corporate networks. The workers fired en masse from Sprint's San Francisco-based La Conexion Familiar subsidiary, thwarted in their attempt to unionize, have their own dreams: among them, receiving reparations for the wrongs dealt to them by Sprint, and keeping their families out of homeless shelters. The chasm between these dreams illustrates the bitter truth about the global economy: while the heads of executives spin with plans for ever-larger money-making enterprises, the workers on whose backs these schemes are erected face a harsh reality: increased union-busting, job losses, lower wages, and worsening working conditions.
LRR Focus: Privatizing Lithuania's Water
Carbonneau, Marc (1995-04-01)
[Excerpt] Perhaps nothing is more critical to the maintenance of public health than the supply of clean water. All of the lives saved through modern medicine account for no more than a drop in the bucket when compared to the number of lives saved through improved sanitation and the presence of a steady supply of clean water. So when commercial values begin to be applied to water treatment and distribution, as they were in Lithuania in the past few years, the implications are potentially deadly.
LRR Focus: Work Unpaid, Voices Unheard
(1995-04-01)
[Excerpt] There are countless ways that prevailing economic theory dismisses and ignores the economic contributions of women. The labor movement's focus on paid work as the main arena for union struggle often makes "women's work" marginal. There is a connection between the lower wages received for "women's jobs" and the fact that women often do similar work at home for no wages. Any strategy for the labor movement to tackle organizing women workers in the global economy needs to recognize the multiple economic positions that we, as women, hold at work and at home.
Labor Solidarity In the New World Order: The UMWA Program in Colombia
Zinn, Kenneth S. (1995-04-01)
[Excerpt] Globalization of capital is not a new problem, but it is a persistent and growing one. Capital's ability to search the world over for the cheapest labor enables corporations to maintain oppressive working conditions and leads to downward pressures on living and working standards throughout the world. U.S. coal miners and their union, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), realized many years ago that waging struggles in this country was not enough to successfully deal with the reality of job and capital flight to repressive, low-wage countries. Just using the old methods won't work anymore. We must also join forces across industry lines and national boundaries if we want to be successful. And we must come up with new and creative means to confront corporate power. But it often takes years of developing relationships and working together to develop the close bonds and trust that are necessary for effective solidarity. The UMWA has been forging these bonds with the Colombian mine workers' union, Sindicato de los Trabajadores del Intercor (SlNTERCOR), since 1988. Forging alliances is only half the work of effective international solidarity. Unions also need comprehensive strategies that attack corporations from every possible angle. Only by employing an arsenal of different approaches can we ever hope to confront a multinational corporation as huge and powerful as Exxon.
LRR Focus: U.S./GLEP
Hahn, Erich (1995-04-01)
[Excerpt] A group of U.S. trade unionists visited with striking workers at a thread plant in Guatemala in 1987, and came away committed to building solidarity between workers in the two countries, as well as promoting U.S. awareness of the repression faced by Guatemalan trade unionists. These activists formed the U.S./Guatemala Labor Education Project (U.S./GLEP) to pursue both these goals.
Cross Border Organizing Comes Home: UE & FAT in Mexico & Milwaukee
Davis, Terry (1995-04-01)
[Excerpt] When Manuel Ortega was sixteen, in 1993, the time arrived that his family had long been dreading. The pesticide-ridden land from which they eked out a living in Mexico could no longer maintain them all, and some of them had to leave. Manuel, his father, and two of his brothers headed north across the border to find a living in the United States. Manuel (not his real name) and his father went to Milwaukee, while his two brothers went to California. They found sporadic employment as farm workers, dishwashers and busboys, sending home as much money as they could to Manuel's mother and brother, who had stayed on the land. Later, one of his brothers joined them in Milwaukee. Early in 1994, Manuel got hired at a Milwaukee factory, Aluminum Casting & Engineering Company. His brother Jose soon followed. Like many Mexicans, the Ortegas suffered a personal crisis parallel to the general economic crisis gripping Mexico in the '90s. Even before the devaluation of the peso, even at the height of Mexico's "economic miracle," campesinos (small-farmers) were forced northward by economic necessity to seek work in the States. And like the Ortegas, they face a new set of problems here: separation from their families, a cold climate, the Immigration Service, unfamiliar language and customs, racism, violence, poverty-stricken urban neighborhoods, and degrading and exploitative work. Relying at first on guidance from friends and relatives who arrived before them, sometimes living two and three to a room to make ends meet they cautiously feel their way in the new environment. Many, like Manuel Ortega, miss their life back home and wish it were possible to find work there, but nonetheless face life up north with cheer and humor.
LRR Focus: More NAFTA Complaints, More Labor Leverage
(1995-04-01)
[Excerpt] To respond to complaints about worker's rights, the labor side agreement to NAFTA established National Administrative Offices (NAO's) in Mexico, the U.S., and Canada. While the U.S. NAO recently rebuffed the complaints against GE and Honeywell, the side agreement is a toolbox for labor whose potential is still unexplored. While Mexico's telecommunications workers are pursuing a complaint against Sprint and U.S. labor law, four U.S. and Mexican organizations are challenging Mexico to enforce its labor laws.
LRR Focus: Worker Exchanges-A Powerful Way To Build Solidarity Across Borders
(1995-04-01)
[Excerpt] A worker exchange - workers meeting with one another in each other's communities - challenges both liberal "guilt" and self-centered nationalism as motivations for local organizing around trade issues. Instead, an exchange identifies what the workers have in common: problems with employers, worries about trade's social impact, and a desire to make mutual and sustainable economic development the foundation for a fair trade program.

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