BY DICK NICHOLS
Every time the death knell tolls for some factory or industry in the old industrial towns of the advanced industrial world, the workers involved are torn between three basically irreconcilable reactions. The first is to fight for what they've got, the second is to find ways to protect themselves from the competition and the third is to resign themselves to the "inevitable".
All three reactions are natural, but each gets reinforced and theorised by the different social forces involved in any factory closure. Each has its economists on hand or on the payroll to explain why one or other of the three responses helps or hinders the defence of existing jobs and the creation of new ones.
Those with an interest in having the workers resign themselves to the fate that big business and governments bestow on them say that resistance is useless in the face of global technological and economic change. It's not worth trying to preserve textile and simple manufacturing industries, they say, because these industries are based on yesterday's technologies and competitiveness in them comes basically from low wages. These industries are in that part of their product cycle which means they will "naturally" migrate to the Third World.
Any attempt to prevent that migration (other than through reducing wages and conditions to globally competitive standards) will mean higher production costs, they say. And if these costs are subsidised by government, there will be less income for expenditure in other areas. So, as far as employment is concerned, resistance is not only futile, it's positively harmful.
The efficient and realistic solution, this argument goes, is to prepare workers for the inevitability of closures through retraining for new industries or, in borderline cases, to accept restructuring (flexibility, profit-based wages, speed-ups).
Hence the commandment is to do everything to boost the international competitiveness of firms, industries, regions and the national economy. The recipe is the standard neo-liberal one: labour market deregulation, privatisation, lower company tax rates, balanced budgets and real wage growth only in line with productivity growth.
Through providing an environment in which capital can make profits faster, investment, growth and job creation will also have the best chance of expanding more quickly, they say. This is all the more so because the accelerated internationalisation of the economy — globalisation — has increased capital mobility. Transnational corporations will simply decamp if conditions don't suit them.
Whatever their disagreements, this outlook is shared by the governmental parties of all advanced industrial countries. Quite a few trade union officials will say the same; it's considered "commonsense".
Old protectionism in new clothes
There's one group of people who remain pretty unconvinced of this line of argument: its victims, the workers who are about to lose their jobs. And where they have unions, they demand that these do something to protect them, placing their officials in a bind.
In the old days of the Keynesian consensus, the answer was obvious enough: fight to maintain or increase tariff and non-tariff protection for our industries and so strengthen the alliance with national capital against foreign competition. However, with the deregulation of foreign exchange markets and with industry after industry having to measure its competitiveness internationally, this approach is now more futile than ever.
This is especially the case in those industries that are structured internationally, such as vehicle production. Here the national components of the internationally organised production chain have to show that they are up to speed or they get restructured, as Mitsubishi is threatening with its South Australian plants.
So the old protectionism needs new clothes. These come in the form of demands that imports that don't meet certain minimum social and environmental standards should be prohibited from entry.
This line, championed most loudly in this country by the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union national secretary Doug Cameron, can be likened to an attempt to establish global award standards as national award conditions become increasingly difficult to enforce.
The nicest sounding slogan of this approach — "Fair trade, not free trade" — certainly has its strong side. It points to a reality that the neo-liberals prefer to sweep under the carpet: that the world market is not a level playing field where development will, in time, come to all the countries of the Third World if only they apply the neo-liberal recipes and specialise in their areas of comparative advantage. Rather, the world market is a jungle where a small number of transnational firms dominate all major branches of industry. They compete, collude, keep out new entrants and ruthlessly exploit the resources, human and natural, of the exploited economies.
However, the question is: how to make trade fair?
Keeping what we've got
The third reaction to job loss is to fight it.
This is the class response. It says that everything working people have ever won has come through struggle and must be defended in the same way. It knows that the honeyed phrases of employers and governments should be treated with the greatest contempt; employer wealth has been drawn from the exploitation of working people's labour (not to mention the destruction of the environment).
Over the years, the militant defence of jobs has produced magnificent battles by working people, from the 1980-81 campaign for the shorter working week through to the 1998 fight to prevent the destruction of the Maritime Union of Australia. However, it has to be admitted that militant struggle to maintain existing jobs has been more often lost than won, even when national economies were less exposed to global competition. So, is struggle at the point of production now out of date?
The answer, for a number of reasons, is no. First, the results of accepting the neo-liberal recipe of surrender are there for all to see. Newer jobs are more casualised, the workload is more intense (witness those electronic battery farms called call centres), wage inequality keeps increasing and jobs keep being lost. Those who make it in the booming areas of global economy (computing, information, financial services) operate under rising stress and those who don't can simply fall into a growing underclass.
Despite the jobs growth in a few economies (chiefly the United States), the neo-liberal recipe has failed to reproduce anything like the full employment of the 1960s. The fundamental reason for this has not been that wages are too high, but that investment is too low. Even the partial restoration of profit rates achieved in the advanced industrial countries through the last 15-20 years of austerity policies has not translated into a generalised increase in investment capable of sparking a sustained growth in employment.
The main reason is that all the major branches of world industry are burdened by excess capacity. For example, a car company needs a very good reason to boost investment when it can produce 50-70 million extra cars a year simply by putting on an extra shift!
Next, a large part of the growth that has taken place in the 1990s, especially in the US, has been due to consumption based on borrowing against the expanded value of people's assets. This trend will inevitably go into reverse, which will have a severe impact on growth and employment.
In such a context, acceptance of the neo-liberal recipe for jobs growth means simply praying for investment or doing everything possible to win the race to the bottom to attract whatever investment is on the horizon. And while investment stagnates, the global army of unemployed must continue to expand, most of all in the Third World countries where unemployment rates of 40-50% plague the most stagnant economies.
Truly it is a case of if you don't fight you lose.
Social clauses?
Are the social clauses loved by the US trade union leadership and many ALP unionists the alternative?
If social clauses meant international worker collaboration and solidarity to lift the wages and working conditions of the most exploited in the Third World, no-one with an international working-class outlook would oppose them. Such an approach would, if it could possibly be implemented, even boost growth and reduce world unemployment.
However, union officials who bandy this term around are rarely thinking of asking the working people and organisations of South Korea or Mexico whether they would support such standards (and associated penalties). Their goal is to find an acceptable way of imposing non-tariff barriers on unfair imports, regardless of whether their producers have asked for such prohibitions.
This stance violates international working-class solidarity. It also does nothing to reduce the grossly discriminatory situation facing the exports of the Third World to the First. These have to surmount barriers four to five times as high as those prevailing within the advanced industrial economies.
This new protectionism simply doesn't help job growth. For while a non-tariff barrier may save some jobs in the short run in a given industry in the advanced capitalist world, every such move not only shrinks the market for exports from the Third World, it also invites retaliation by the country against whom the barrier has been raised. The generalisation of such beggar-thy-neighbour protectionism acts to slow trade, growth and job creation. At its worst, as in the 1930s, it will prolong and deepen recession.
Protectionism is also an ideological virus because it instils in workers the idea that the defence and creation of jobs can come only through maintaining their employers' profitability (and trampling on the rights of workers in other countries). Thus the new protectionist line, offered as an alternative to outright neo-liberalism, inevitably ends up having to play neo-liberalism's game of auctioning favours to the big capitalist enterprises.
The alternative
The alternative is not to immediately eliminate existing tariffs, but to realise that a full employment policy for working people cannot be established by trying to work out who is right in capitalism's debate between free traders and protectionists. This debate will never go away because it reflects the opposing interests of different capitalist groupings: leading edge producers who fear no competition want access to all markets while the less efficient are either defending their existing patch or trying to establish the conditions for greater expansion in future.
From a working-class point of view, each side can be right about the weaknesses of the other, but both sides are wrong. When the free traders point to the destructive impact of protectionism in the 1930s they are right; when the protectionists talk of the impossibility of industrialising new economies without some form of protection or of the proven failure of neo-liberal trade doctrine, they too are right. But neither side is interested in a model of development that puts people before profits.
Working-class organisations in the advanced capitalist countries therefore have to refuse to play on this turf and look instead to a policy that neither the free trade nor social clause doctrines can provide. It must combine defence of existing jobs, increased job growth in the national economy and reduced barriers to the production of the workers in the Third World.
Struggle at the point of production remains an essential starting point. Through such battles we first of all test if the boss is bluffing about bankruptcy or decamping overseas, or about the threat to his profits from cheap imports.
When conducted with determination, such fights can succeed by building solidarity. They can also make the employer less arrogant and more inclined to cooperate.
They can also lead, albeit rarely, to workers' control of production, as in the case of the 1970s Nymboida Colliery occupation and work-in in NSW, which exposed the incompetence of management and laid to rest the fiction that workers can't manage.
However, as important as they are for the fighting spirit of all workers, such victories have little impact on the overall rate of job creation because they still leave the vital investment decision in the hands of people whose first concern is not jobs but their own profits.
So what else is needed to produce a full employment policy? Such a policy today must rest on three concepts: (i) that a trade union policy that concentrates on defending existing jobs, no matter how militantly, is insufficient; (ii) that since investment is the core of growth it's too important to be left to the capitalists; and (iii) that the only alliance that can feasibley sustain such a politics is that of working people everywhere against exploiters everywhere.
Concretely, what does this mean?
It means it's time to get serious about a shorter working week campaign, and about the defence and reconstruction (re-nationalisation) of the public sector, with the emphasis on those projects that are crying out for urgent investment, such as the desalination of the Murray-Darling basin and other areas of environmental devastation;
It means giving concrete support to the unions and working-class movements of the Third World, particularly our region, in the global fight for jobs. We have to go beyond resolution passing to serious material aid.
It means that, despite the emergence of neo-liberal globalisation, the main struggle for us in Australia remains that against our own capitalist governments. Therefore, unions that are serious about fighting for jobs have to get involved in the struggle to build a working-class political alternative to the instruments of neo-liberalism in this country: Labor, Liberal and the Democrats. That is the most pressing task of all.
Dick Nichols is a member of the national executive of the Democratic Socialist Party of Australia. This is an edited version of a talk he gave to the July 10 Politics in the Pub in Geelong.]