In My Opinion: Writing Workers’ Rights into the Rules of Globalization

The same week that protests were being mounted in Quebec City surrounding the summit meeting on the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), down in Richmond, Va., Viasystems Group Inc. announced it was closing its circuit board plant there, which employs 900 CWA members, and shifting the work to the People’s Republic of China (see separate stories).

Why am I drawing a connection between trade in the Western Hemisphere and a runaway plant headed for China? It all has to do with workers’ rights standards — or the lack of them — in this era of economic “globalization.”

Viasystems was quite frank about why it was shutting the Richmond plant, where it already has trimmed 900 jobs this year — it can pay Chinese labor $1.66 an hour whereas the U.S. workers earn between $14 and $23.

The reason wages are so astonishingly low in China is due to a system of forced prison labor, Chinese military control of industries, and a policy of outlawing free labor unions. Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch report that union advocates in China continue to be given long prison terms or confined to psychiatric hospitals — sometimes even tortured.

Last year, the Congress gave up almost the only leverage we had for prodding Chinese leaders to end their worker and human rights abuses when it granted China Permanent Normal Trade Relations status. Previously, trade favors for China were subject to congressional approval each year.

The corporate lobby prevailed over organized labor on the China vote, and now the same business forces are intent on completely excluding the subject of labor and environmental standards in negotiations over a “free trade zone” throughout North, Central and South America and the Caribbean.

We already got a preview of a trade pact without labor and environmental standards in the form of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, ratified in 1994. According to a comprehensive study by the Economic Policy Institute of the effects of NAFTA:

• Some 766,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost in the United States and 276,000 more in Canada because of a growing trade deficit with Mexico.
  
• In Mexico since NAFTA took effect, one million more Mexican workers earn less than the minimum wage and 8 million families have slipped from middle class into poverty. Most new jobs appeared in the maquiladora zones near the border where wages, benefits and workers’ rights are deliberately suppressed.
  
• Growing pollution in the Mexican maquiladora zones has increased the rates of birth defects and hepatitis.

Now Big Business wants to extend NAFTA throughout the hemisphere in the form of FTAA. House Republican Leader Dick Armey recently told a business group that he will push for a “clean bill” to give President Bush fast-track authority to negotiate trade agreements without congressional input — by “clean” he meant without any mandate to negotiate labor or environmental protections.

Of course the business lobby and trade ministers give lip service to caring about workers’ rights. At the trade summit in Quebec City, the heads of state and trade ministers issued a statement calling for nations to ratify the eight “fundamental human rights conventions” of the International Labour Organization. These eight ILO conventions guarantee worker organizing and bargaining rights and call for abolishing forced labor, child labor and workplace discrimination.

It was good to hear President Bush and other leaders voice support for these goals, but unfortunately, adoption of the ILO standards is meaningless without some kind of enforcement mechanism.

For example, the nation of Colombia has ratified 7 out of the 8 fundamental ILO conventions — more than the United States, which has adopted only two of them. However, last year 112 Colombian union leaders and organizers were assassinated, and this year another 31 unionists so far have been killed by paramilitary squads. No one has been prosecuted for these murders, and Colombia’s labor federation charges that the government is doing little to stop this concerted terror assault on organized labor.

Resolutions and nice words have no impact when it comes to the worldwide flow of capital and trade. It is at best an amoral system. Companies like Viasystems make a cynical calculation about the cost of labor in one country over another and clearly don’t care about the welfare of workers in either Richmond or China. General Electric and others that invested in the Mexican maquiladora zones in the ’90s will abandon Mexico in a heartbeat if they can find cheaper labor costs somewhere in Central or South America.

We have no world government and probably never will. Therefore, the cycle of worker repression and exploitation, described as a “race to the bottom,” can only be broken through enforceable sanctions to uphold human rights and environmental protections built into trade agreements between countries.

It isn’t a question of being for or against globalization. The world economy is a fact of life. But we insist that the rules of globalization be written not only to protect capital and property rights, but also workers’ rights, human rights, and the essential ingredient of a free labor movement around the world.