| A fundamental challenge facing policymakers and
activists is how to set and enforce rules to protect workers from repression,
exploitation, and danger. Today, most labor occurs within the evolving context of a
globalized economy in which countries and communities increasingly compete for scarce
investment by lowering or repressing working conditions and wages. In this global
workplace, transnational corporations (TNCS) exercise more power than many sovereign
nations. Global institutions such as the International Labor Organization (ILO) lack the
power to enforce standards. Meanwhile, U.S. policy makers have responded inadequately to
the need to establish and enforce international regulations. The crisis facing the world's workers is intensifying:
 | At least one billion adults, more than 30 percent of the global work
force, are unemployed or seriously underemployed. Wages and working conditions are
declining--in the U.S. by one percent annually for the past 20 years, in poor countries at
a much faster pace. |
| Throughout the global North the number of "3-D"
jobs--dangerous, dirty, and difficult work--done for extremely low pay by illegal or
unprotected immigrant workers is rapidly rising. |
| Child labor is used increasingly for production of exports in
countries with massive adult unemployment. |
| In China, imprisoned workers produce goods entering international
commerce in competition with the work of wage labor, even in such complex industries as
aerospace. Prison labor in the U.S. forms a growing part of the manufacturing work force. |
New technologies enable corporations to diversify production to take
advantage of comparative vulnerabilities of countries across the globe. Under such
conditions, the ability of even the strongest national governments to reverse these trends
through progressive national labor laws or policies is clearly inadequate. Establishing
effective international labor policies is not a new problem--just the urgency is new.
Attempts to condition trade with protective labor standards date back nearly a century. In
1905 the Berne Convention outlawed the production or sale of matches made with white
phosphorus because of its horrible crippling effects.
In 1919, following World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, the
western capitalist nations formed the International Labor Organization to regulate the
conditions of work internationally--under the clear threat that the failure to do so could
lead to a further spread of radical worker unrest. Since then, 178 international
conventions, regulating everything from freedom of association to the rights of indigenous
and migrant workers, have been established. The U.S. has ratified only 11.
After World War II an effort was made to establish the International
Trade Organization (ITO), whose "members recognize that unfair labor conditions,
particularly in production or export, create difficulties in international trade."
This effort failed largely because of U.S. Senate resistance. In its place world leaders
established the Generalized Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which, according to
economist Robert Gilpin, operates on the assumption "that a liberal world of
self-adjusting free trade, freedom of capital movements, and an efficient division of
labor provides the natural and best economic order." This perspective has dominated
international trade policy throughout the past half century. The principles of free trade
are codified in successive GATT agreements, most recently the Uruguay Round in 1994, which
established the World Trade Organization (WTO). Since the end of the cold war, extreme
ideological support for this "free market" approach has resurfaced.
Workers in both wealthy industrial and low-income countries are
experiencing an unprecedented assault against their rights, safety, and livelihood.
Increasing international trade, an instrument of accumulation for some, has for many
others resulted in deepening impoverishment and oppression.
Source: Tom Barry & Martha Honey, eds. Global Focus: A New
Foreign Policy Agenda 1997-1998. Interhemispheric Resource Center, Box 2178, Silver
City, NM 88062-2178, 1997. |