Prospects for Real Solidarity: Contradictions and Cross-Pressures

excerpted 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

p91
With its global network, its multiple ties to the U.S. government, and the continued dominance of its conservative hierarchy, the AFL-CIO seems well-positioned to continue business as usual in its international operations. Yet the future of the AFL-CIO's foreign policy and its status as the vanguard democracy-intervention organization are uncertain. Contradictory influences are at work which could either shift the federation in more progressive directions or reinforce the status quo.

Both at home and abroad, the federation is operating in a more complex political environment. The internationalization of the economy is laying waste to the notion that U.S. workers necessarily profit from the overseas adventures of U.S. corporations. Likewise, 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. A rank-and-file attack on some aspects of the AFL-CIO's foreign policy, increasingly independent stances taken by some of its overseas affiliates, and the breakup of the Soviet bloc have all undermined the traditional foundations of the AFL-CIO's policies overseas.

In addition to these influences, labor no longer stands alone as the sole vanguard of the "democracy-building" strategy. It now shares the field with a multitude of other players, ranging from business associations to women's organizations. Moreover, fiscal pressures on Washington have clamped off budgetary increases for the labor institutes. Overall AID funding to labor has decreased over the last few years. The National Endowment for Democracy has made up the shortfall, but the institutes are not finding their budgets swollen with massive funding increases, at least for regional core programs. Even so, some of their commitments are expanding-to Eastern Europe and the states of the former Soviet Union, for example-and many of these initiatives are specifically requested by Washington and come with earmarked funding.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government is committing itself ever more completely to the use of private organizations to intervene "overtly" overseas, and labor still has the most far-flung network and time-tested expertise of all the groups now performing government-funded activities abroad. Moreover, its links to the U.S. government and to the increasingly important intervention network are firm. Labor is still a strategic sector for economic and political reasons, if not for Cold War purposes.

All these factors produce cross-pressures on the AFL-CIO whose outcomes are unpredictable. There is, however, a "window of opportunity" through which progressive labor might launch a new foreign policy, working both within and outside of the labor federation. Rising from the grassroots, such a foreign policy would seek international labor unity and social justice-not the expansion of a U.S. sphere of influence which is proving less and less hospitable to workers both in the United States and overseas.

... The decline of the United States as an economic power, coupled with the internationalization of capital and the growing power of transnational corporations (TNCs) have eroded U.S. labor's position in the global economy. 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. The resulting phenomenon of runaway shops has fueled job loss, declining wage levels, employment insecurity, and threats to trade union rights in the developed world. "American workers," according to one analyst, "have been plunged into a cold bath of global competition."

The hemorrhage of well-paid U.S. manufacturing jobs to assembly shops overseas has stripped traditional AFL-CIO foreign policy of two of its major underpinnings. New resources secured by U.S. imperial advances such as the war in the Persian Gulf do not necessarily translate into enhanced productivity, an expanding job market, or job security in the United States. Instead, U.S.-based transnational corporations may utilize such resources to fuel production in their plants overseas. The TNCs reap profits from these resources and productive facilities that do not return to the U.S. worker in the form of increased wages and benefits, but in the form of consumer imports for which they must pay increasingly large portions of their shrinking paychecks. In addition, the continued repression of third world workers, often at starvation wages under intolerable working conditions, impedes the development of markets overseas for goods produced by U.S. labor.

Aside from these problems inherent in the traditional support of the AFL-CIO for U.S. expansionism and global capitalism, there are deep-seated contradictions manifested by labor's support of Washington-backed union programs while other government funding explicitly promotes social sectors and macroeconomic policies that hurt workers. Through the Center for International Private Enterprise, the National Republican Institute for International Affairs, and an assortment of other government and nongovernmental agencies, the National Endowment for Democracy and entities like AID are promoting economic and political forces that favor business interests over those of workers.

In El Salvador, for example, a Salvadoran business group funded by AID ran an advertisement in Bobbin, a clothing industry trade magazine, that showed an attractive young woman working quietly at a sewing machine. The advertisement pulled back the covers on the strange bedfellows of the AFL-CIO in its government-funded overseas activities:

Rosa Martinez produces apparel for U.S. markets on her sewing machine in E1 Salvador. You can hire her for 57 cents an hour.

Rosa is more than just colorful. She and her coworkers are known for their industriousness, reliability and quick learning. They make E1 Salvador one of the best buys in the [Caribbean Basin Initiative].

Most of the organizations funded by agencies like NED and AID advocate free-market, neoliberal economic strategies. Frequently such strategies directly harm workers, especially those in the third world. For instance, 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.

Similarly, when import duties are lowered, domestic economies become vulnerable to increased foreign economic penetration and competition. These influences often lead to weakening or closure of domestic enterprises, with a subsequent reduction in wage levels and benefits, tightened labor restrictions, and even job loss. In like manner, deregulation negatively affects workers in both the developed countries and the third world. It weakens important safeguards such as occupational health and safety provisions and can lead to the reduction or elimination of various social welfare benefits provided by employers.

Such policies are being pressed by Washington and its business allies across the world, and the labor institutes of the AFL-CIO are providing implicit backing to them. In Africa and Eastern Europe, for instance, both of which have been especially hard hit by such policies, the AFL-CIO is promoting job-creation schemes and volunteer efforts to soften the blow. A more effective strategy for labor would require the federation to mount a full-scale analysis and rejection of such policies. Although the AFL-CIO has made some attempts in this direction, particularly in its analysis of the international debt, its efforts have been primarily rhetorical. Most significantly, the federation and its institutes have adopted band-aid solutions such as job-creation schemes but have avoided mobilizing workers for political actions against neoliberal policies and the national and international forces which advance them.

Ironically, this is the case even though the federation recognizes the problems for workers of an increasingly integrated global economy. As observed by AFL-CIO President Kirkland in 1983, American workers have a vested self-interest in the improvement of wages and working conditions in other countries. They cannot compete with workers earning 50 or 75 cents an hour; nor can such wages generate the purchasing power to sustain markets for American exports. And with the proliferation of multinational corporations, organized workers in the United States need counterpart workers' organizations abroad with which they can develop common strategies in response to common problems.

Even with this recognition, however, the AFL-CIO hierarchy has had difficulty jettisoning old ideas about the world in order to keep pace with rapid global economic and political transformations. "The top leadership of the federation is full of bureaucrats," observed one activist on Central America labor issues. "They kill activism even if they're not ideologically committed to killing it." Another activist questioned whether the federation's staff in the international affairs department would be capable of escaping from the Cold War straitjacket that has shaped postwar labor programs. "These guys have become appendages of the U.S. defense system," the unionist declared. "We [in the rank and file] don't like what they're doing in foreign policy."

... Sentiments like these have stimulated increasing opposition to the AFL-CIO hierarchy and its foreign policy both within the federation and among its associates overseas. During the 1980s-spurred by crises in Central America and South Africa-the U.S. rank and file's willingness to accept foreign policy stands enunciated by the AFL-CIO eroded significantly. In a historic shift, conflicts over the AFL-CIO's foreign policy positions in Central America were pushed to the floor of the 1985 convention in Anaheim, California. For the first time ever, disagreements which were normally hashed out behind the scenes exploded in floor debates which directly challenged the AFL-CIO's executive officers over the conduct of the federation and its institutes abroad.

Over the past few years, this increasingly savvy opposition from rank-and-file and mid-level labor officials in the United States has set some limits-moderate and irregular, to be sure, but hard-won and extremely important, nonetheless-on the freedom of movement of the AFL-CIO in some countries overseas.

p97
With the breakup of the Soviet bloc and the consequent unraveling of its international labor arm-the World Federation of Trade Unions-the U.S. labor institutes are facing an evaporating enemy. The concept of promoting "free," (i.e. anticommunist and pro-U.S.) unions is rapidly becoming outdated and irrelevant. As one top union staffer described it, "With the collapse of communism, the AFL's fig leaf is gone. The rationale which they used to justify their activities has been removed." The challenge at this point is to develop worldwide linkages among workers to combat an exploitative international division of labor which keeps workers competing with each other rather than confronting the economic and political structures that produce exploitation. "We all have the same hard life," a foreign unionist explained. "We are bound together by one string.''

Unless there is a major shift at the leadership levels of the AFL-CIO, however, the labor institutes are unlikely to rise to this important task. As it is, they continue to promote U.S. national interests over those of their natural constituencies, while declining to ally themselves with the most progressive and militant sectors of labor. In these ways they perpetuate the expansion of U.S. power and, in the process, debilitate workers around the world.

What is needed therefore is the further development of the rank-and-file foreign policy and accompanying strategies whose broad outlines have been drawn over the last decade. An increasing sense of internationalism has characterized this emerging foreign policy. A 1990 conference of unionists referred to it as a "one-world strategy" which mimics the global corporate strategies of the TNCs. Held in Miami under the auspices of the International Federation of Chemical, Energy and General Workers' Unions-an influential ITS-the meeting involved unionists from chemical, energy, and rubber unions in 30 countries. The "one-world strategy" elaborated at the meeting treats the world as an interconnected and interdependent whole, emphasizing the common needs and shared fates of workers around the world.

Cross-national linkages in pursuit of sharply elevated conditions for workers everywhere, as well as an analysis of the diminished importance for labor of nationalism in an age of TNC dominance are components of this new foreign policy.

Ron Blackwell, an economist with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, has participated in the development of this new vision. "We recognize that international economic integration will continue, and that wages and working conditions will equalize," Blackwell explains. "The task is to build international worker solidarity to assure that wages and working conditions tend to equalize at a higher rather than a lower level.'

This objective requires workers to join hands in efforts to shape the emerging international economy, not just react to it. Joint international actions to promote adoption and enforcement of a single international code of conduct for transnational corporations is one element of this strategy. Such a code, according to the unionists involved in formulating it, would outline corporate responsibilities not only to labor, but also regarding environmental issues and similar concerns for society at large. Joe Uhlein, a representative of the AFL-CIO's Industrial Union Department, described fundamental components of such a code:

The code would be enforceable whenever a corporation, its agents, or its property entered, operated in, or left a country. The code might require corporations to report investment intentions upon entering a country and disclose any hazardous materials imported. It might forbid employment of children or environmental discharge of pollutants. It might require companies closing an operation to provide advance notification and severance pay. The code would include a 'neutrality clause' under which a company would agree as a matter of corporate policy not to oppose union organizing in its plants, branches, or subsidiaries in any country.

Even more important, however, is the long-range objective of such actions: to create a global environment supportive of the individuals whose labor keeps the world's economic wheels in motion and whose lives must be lived out in the surroundings ground down by those wheels. To create such an environment, it is necessary to end the false competition between "privileged" workers in developed countries and impoverished workers in the third world, or between "communist" and "anticommunist" unionists. The current competition-fueled by underdevelopment and labor repression in the third world and a misguided call for labor-business "harmony" in the developed capitalist countries-drags wages down and undermines worker rights everywhere. The new labor foreign policy aims to link workers around the world in a common front to press for their demands against government and business.

These international bonds are made possible in part by the communications revolution." From fax machines to electronic mail and even satellite links, new communications technology has the potential to join otherwise isolated unionists in a web of information and coordinated solidarity actions. It has already facilitated coordinated action for a variety of U.S. unions confronting foreign companies and their anti-union efforts in this country. Because such networks are relatively inexpensive, these communications hook-ups also have the potential to democratize labor's foreign policy by breaking the hold of the AFL-CIO hierarchy on information about foreign affairs.

In addition to a renewed emphasis on internationalism, the foreign policy being constructed by progressive labor over the past decade has attempted to break down divisions among groups within national boundaries. It has been marked by the cooperation of exploited and oppressed groups and their supporters throughout multiple sectors of society. From churches to trade unions, from women's groups to ethnically-based organizations, from homeless advocacy groups to associations promoting an end to the arms race, boundaries have been breaking down and linkages developing among diverse groups with a common desire to increase equity and social justice both nationally and internationally. The 1990 labor strategizing meeting in Miami called for just such a strengthening of the ties between labor unions, the community, and environmental groups.

Utilizing international labor structures such as the ITS and ad hoc cross-union coalitions, unionists have mounted joint efforts to force companies to redress worker grievances in places as far distant as Central America, South Africa, South Korea, and the United States. They have also joined in activities which, on their face, are more explicitly political in objective. In response to the U.S. war in the Persian Gulf, for example, labor councils and unions around the country passed resolutions calling for negotiated solutions. Their participation amplified and refined the protests of other antiwar organizations by articulating the negative effects on labor of war in the Gulf They also spotlighted the self-interest of U.S. transnational corporations as a factor in the country's war fever.

Such international and intersectoral coalitions are antidotes to the divisive approach to labor pursued by the AFL-CIO since the end of World War II. With the demise of the Cold War, red-baiting progressive unionists will be less effective as a strategy to divide and conquer the world's labor movements in the interests of U.S. empire-building. 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. A shrinking world and an increasingly transnational economic system offer the best postwar opportunity ever to set aside the damaging assumptions of the AFL-CIO's foreign policy and get on with the business of building truly global solidarity among the world's workers.

Workers of the World Undermined

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