Quotations

from the book

Workers of the World Undermined

American Labor's role in U.S. foreign policy

by Beth Sims

South End Press, 1992, paper

p1

... Joe Gunn, president of the Texas AFL-CIO, described the dilemma:,

The "big picture" is this: wealthy capitalists are international in scope and run a global system; workers don't have a global system to protect themselves from such exploitation. The labor movement simply hasn't achieved the global | organization necessary to defend workers everywhere.

p1

... the AFL-CIO ... has damaged the capacity of the world's workers to counter effectively the "harmonization downward" that is both hitting workers hard in the United States and sustaining the fierce oppression of workers in underdeveloped and developing countries.

p4

... the philosophy that drives both domestic and foreign policy in the labor federation ... an acceptance of capitalism and the relationships between workers, owners, and government that it produces. Labor and business along with government, are seen not as inevitable opponents, but as potential partners in political and economic development. The prospect of this potential alliance inspires the conservative concept of business unionism. Described by one labor analyst as a "tacit alliance between the captains of industry and their labor lieutenants," it is this concept of unionism that the AFL-CIO exports to its international allies.

p5

Workers compete with other workers to sell their labor, and owners exploit those workers by undervaluing the true worth of their labor in order to make a profit. Business unionism does not recognize the existence of this fundamental exploitatave relationship as the necessary motor of capitalist profit-making. Instead, it treats workers as members of sectoral interest groups ...

p6

... The notion of class struggle is inconsistent with the cooperative labor-business relations advocated by the AFL-CIO. This promotion of a so-called apolitical trade unionism, however, is a political choice with political outcomes. Refusing to question the underlying assumptions and relationships of capitalism, the U.S. federation has demonized radical responses to capitalist exploitation and failed to come to grips with the fact that "misery breeds militancy." In so doing, the AFL-CIO has, intentionally or not, supported the global economic and political status quo.

p6

Organized labor, business, and the governing elite in the United States have traditionally seen the third world as a source of raw materials useful in U.S. enterprises and as a market for goods produced by U.S. workers. Overseas investments were also considered necessary to absorb the excess capital produced by businesses in the United States.

p9

While western transnational corporations (TNCs) have prospered, both U.S. and foreign workers have suffered as capital has become less tied to a given country and more transnational in nature. ( In search of maximum profits, TNCs hop country to country, hoping to lower their wage bill while keeping productivity high. Cash-starved third world governments support this effort. The need for hard currency and jobs has prompted poor governments to compete globally for foreign investment by holding down wage rates and repressing labor. A. Sivanandan, the director of London's Institute of Race Relations eloquently described this process and the damage it does to workers overseas:

"The governments of the [underdeveloped countries] desperate not for development as such but the end to the unemployment that threatens their regimes, enter into a Dutch auction with each other, offering the multinational corporations cheaper and cheaper labour, de-unionized labour, captive labour, female labour and child labour-by removing whatever labour laws, whatever trade union rights have been gained in the past from at least that part of the country, the [export-processing zone], which foreign capital chooses for its own."

p10

As the economy becomes more global, the trend has been toward the equalization of conditions for labor in both developed and underdeveloped countries, but that trend has been downward-toward the levels characteristic in the third world. And the AFL-CIO's traditional support for the U.S. government's foreign policy has only aggravated that trend. Whereas building militant, united, global labor movements is needed to reverse this course of events, the AFL-CIO's overseas programs-as in Poland-have often encouraged workers to abandon militancy and shun radicals in pursuit of narrow, sectoral goals.

p48

Freedom House is one of the most influential " democracy-building" havens for labor activists, particularly those affiliated with Social Democrats USA. Advertised as a documentation center and clearinghouse on human and civil rights, Freedom House is a neoconservative heavyweight in the global war of ideas. During the postwar period, it has provided exhaustive "documentation" of human rights abuses by Soviet and leftist governments, while downplaying and under-reporting abuses in U.S.-allied countries.

From 1984 to 1990, Freedom House funneled some $4.1 million from NED to overseas grant recipients, primarily for "informational" projects. Freedom House grants sometimes overlap with NED's grants to the labor institutes.

p49

Another NED grantee that includes labor leaders on its board is the International Rescue Committee (IRC). A CIA-linked organization, the IRC uses U.S. government funds to channel humanitarian aid to target groups in geopolitical hotspots.

p91

... the contradictions of the AFL-CIO's alliance with government and business are chickens which are coming home to roost in the form of assaults on the material status of workers both in the United States and overseas.

p92

TNCs take advantage of and try to perpetuate low wage levels and labor repression in the third world in order to increase their profits and reduce their social responsibilities to labor.

p93

... privatization of publicly owned enterprises and cutbacks in government-sponsored social services lead to a loss of jobs, declining wages, and reduced or eliminated subsidies on basics like food, medical care, utilities, heating fuel, and transportation.

p100

As the "new world order" falls into place, there is an opportunity for progressive unionists to blow away the AFL-CIO's anticommunist smokescreen and point out the damage done to workers by a global capitalism more interested in the pursuit of profits than in the pursuit of equity.

Workers of the World Undermined

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