Despite the end of the Cold War, United States military, economic and political intervention around the world continues to increase, while at home the military budget consumes the hopes for a radical reordering of economic priorities. The idea of a peace dividend has been all but forgotten as peace itself recedes further than ever.
US unions and workers increasingly challenge globalised production and "free" trade. At the same time, however, most continue to accept the idea that a common national interest unites all segments of society, including labour and capital.
National security, we are told, is an overarching common bond. But in a world divided between rich and poor, in which the security of the few is obtained and assured at the expense of the many, the real question is: security for who?
The transformation of national economies around the world is forcing unions and workers everywhere to debate the meaning of international working-class solidarity, to ask who has the right to economic security.
NAFTA
In US labour, although this debate simmered through the Reagan administration's interventions in Central America, it broke out into the open in the wake of the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Since the treaty went into effect in January 1995, the Department of Labor has certified more than 200,000 US workers for extended unemployment and training benefits because the agreement cost them their jobs. According to Cornell professor Kate Bronfenbrenner, the number of times has more than doubled in which US employers have told unions across the bargaining table that if they didn't agree to concessions the companies would move production out of the country.
Insecurity for US workers hasn't led to more jobs and greater security for Mexicans, however, although both their government and the US government told them it would. More than 1 million Mexican jobs were eliminated in 1995 alone, by the government's own count. State-owned enterprises were privatised and bought by wealthy investors, who laid off workers to increase productivity and profits. Many other workers lost their jobs when small Mexican producers couldn't compete with the flood of cheap imports coming from the US and went bankrupt.
In Tijuana, the maquiladora daily wage averages 50 pesos (a little over $5). A gallon of milk in the supermarket, which sold for 7.5 pesos when NAFTA passed, today costs about 20.
Well before NAFTA's passage, the disparity between US and Mexican wages was growing. Mexican salaries were a third of those in the US up to the 1970s. They are now less than an eighth. Since the 1981 debt crisis, they've dropped to even a 12th or 15th, depending on the industry; this during a period in which US wages have declined in buying power.
During the last two decades, the income of Mexican workers has lost 76% of its purchasing power. Under pressure from foreign lenders, the Mexican government has ended subsidies on the prices of basic necessities, including gasoline, electricity, bus fares, tortillas and milk.
The government estimates that 40 million people live in poverty and 25 million in extreme poverty. And while it says unemployment is less than 6%, the country's new independent union federation, the National Union of Workers, puts the number at more than 9 million people, or a quarter of the work force.
IMF 'reforms'
These results are largely the product of the imposition of economic reforms on Mexico by the International Monetary Fund, backed up by conditions on US bank loans and bailouts. The most fundamental of those conditions, beyond even ending subsidies and opening the Mexican economy to imports, has been privatisation and the encouragement of foreign investment.
In February 1999, one of the most important Mexican labour struggles was fought to prevent the sale of the electricity grid in central Mexico. In three weeks, the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) collected 2,700,000 signatures in opposition. "It is indisputable that the move to privatize our electrical system is a condition dictated by the International Monetary Fund, intended to create opportunities for private investment, particularly foreign investment", says Ramon Pacheco, the union's secretary for international relations.
By organising a Front of National Resistance the union was able to stop the privatisation effort, but Pacheco believes that the proposal will resurface, since the new Mexican government of Vicente Fox has announced that electricity privatisation is high on its agenda.
If the SME campaign had failed, thousands would have lost their jobs, their union contract would have been torn apart, and the union itself would have nearly disappeared. This is what has happened to workers at Mexico's airlines, railroads, telephone system and in many other industries.
In February last year, this disaster befell the copper miners in Cananea, one of Mexico's oldest mines and site of the historic battle which initiated the Mexican Revolution in 1906. Hundreds of miners lost their jobs after the mine was privatised. Their union was virtually destroyed when the threat of military occupation was used to end their strike.
Until the economic "reforms" in the 1970s, a large percentage of Mexican workers have been employed by state enterprises and a majority of Mexican industrial workers worked for the state. The labour movement had its greatest strength in the state sector.
While three-quarters of the work force belonged to unions three decades ago, less than 30% do so today. When the petrochemical industry was privatised over the last decade and a half, the unionisation rate fell to 7%. New private owners reduced the membership of the railway workers union from 90,000 workers to 36,000 in the same period.
Mexico is just one country where the same economic war is being fought.
In Honduras, the US government used its political and military influence to gain permits for the construction of "export processing zones", providing garment companies with a new area for factory construction. That influence didn't support just the physical infrastructure; the US Agency for International Development hired Price Waterhouse to study labour supply problems in the San Pedro Sula Valley, to avoid a labour shortage which might drive wages up.
Price Waterhouse documented labour participation by girls as young as 14. This was normal, the firm's report said. "The legal minimum working age in Honduras is 15, but in the rural economy it is normal to work from ten onwards", it stated. And to keep it normal, USAID funded programs by the Honduran Family Planning Association to distribute birth control pills inside the plants on a mandatory basis.
One of the plants was OshKosh. This company makes children's clothing for US families, but forbade its workers from having families of their own. OshKosh, like the other manufacturers, wanted to avoid having to pay legally mandated maternity benefits. But more important, USAID and the companies it supported wanted to keep these young women from getting pregnant and dropping out of the work force.
The end goal was an ample and dependable supply of workers at low wages. Price Waterhouse noted with disapproval, "The pregnancy rate among women of childbearing age was 4% in June 1992, up from 2.5% six months earlier. This is regarded as too high (3% would be the maximum acceptable)."
Free trade
Loan conditions enforced by the IMF and World Bank reflect US economic policies, which encourage high unemployment to keep pressure on wages. The loans are not available for social benefits (in fact, their conditions require ending subsidies on things like transport and food), but are made for infrastructure improvements to assist foreign investors.
They require governments to cut off rural credit, driving people into the cities, while opening up the market for imports of food. At the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome, US agriculture secretary Dan Glickman boasted that the US "is the leading supplier of food to the world", where farmers "plant for world demand instead of for government programs". For the US, "The private sector is the great untapped frontier in the world war on hunger".
The US position at the summit declared, "The United States believes that the attainment of any 'right to adequate food' or 'fundamental right to be free from hunger' is a goal or aspiration to be realized progressively that does not give rise to any international obligations nor diminish the responsibilities of national governments toward their citizens." Translation: if you don't have money to buy our food, we're not obligated to give you a thing.
As a result of US insistence, point four of the summit's plan of action was dedicated to the pursuit of "a fair and market-oriented world trade system", which, it admitted, may cause "short term negative effects" on the world's poorest countries. The "free" market is the goal, not feeding the hungry.
Privatisation opens up important sections of the economies of developing countries to transnational corporate investment. Even more important, it reduces the ability of states to control their national economies, and use that control to promote social goals other than profit making.
And while economic reform has its price, not everyone pays. Almost invariably, workers at privatised enterprises face huge layoffs and wage cuts as new private owners seek to cut labour costs.
But, as in Mexico, free market policies are often bitterly resisted.Around the world, workers have been fighting for more than two decades to keep the social gains they won in the years following World War Two. They ask over and over again, in a globalised world, who has the right to security?
Resistance
Within weeks of last November's Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade Organisation, thousands of workers at India's state power company struck to prevent the privatisation of electricity generation and distribution in Uttar Pradesh. Despite the jailing of hundreds of their leaders, they succeeded in halting it, at least for a time. Meanwhile, in ports along the subcontinent's coast, thousands more longshore workers also stopped work over the same issue.
In countries like Russia and China, where the state controlled the economy completely and employed virtually everyone, the impact of privatisation has been even more devastating. The governments of both countries, which formerly guaranteed jobs for life and retirement security, now disclaim responsibility for both as enterprises are closed and sold. Workers face a bleak future of unemployment, while retirees go hungry and sell their possessions when their pensions evaporate.
In Russia and China's industrial heartlands (and in the formerly socialist countries of eastern Europe), whole cities were built around huge mills, mines and factories. Every social benefit, from subsidised housing and child-care, to schools and hospitals, was financed by those enterprises whose doors are now being closed, or which are being sold off to private owners. In Russia, where economic reforms are further advanced, millions of workers have gone for months without pay.
These free-market reforms are imposed everywhere US influence is extended. The US secretary of defence, William Cohen, described NATO's mandate to the Boston Chamber of Commerce in 1998 in terms of the creation of investment opportunities for multinational corporations. Expanding into eastern Europe spreads political stability, "and with that spread of stability there is a prospect to attract investment", he said. Instability, on the other hand, he cautioned, "destroys lives and markets".
This is the iron fist, the ultimate threat for countries which reject the loan conditions and their attendant economic reforms. US foreign policy is based on supporting governments, like those of El Salvador, Honduras and increasingly Mexico, which implement policies attractive to foreign investment. Countries which don't go along risk being declared rogue states, subject to economic sanctions and military intervention.
Social clauses
Workers in underdeveloped countries, however, have the right to pursue economic development in their own interest. And for economic development which benefits all people, there must be an alternative to becoming low-wage export platforms, with increasing social and economic inequality enforced at the point of a gun.
Unless the international trade structure is changed drastically, national development alternatives, based on rising wages and production for a domestic market, will not be possible.
Proposing a social clause within that trade structure, even one which limits the prerogatives of foreign investors, does little to support national development less dependent on transnational capital. At the same time, it provides political support to the very institutions which seek to stop it. "The struggle by unions, social justice groups and environmentalists is about more than just winning a seat at the table, or a 'social clause' or environmental rules", a Canadian Labor Congress statement declares.
For copper miners in Cananea, security disappeared after their mine's privatisation. And since there's almost no other work in Cananea, the jobless miners had to leave. Many of them crossed the border to find work and a new economic future in the US.
Economic refugees
They're not alone. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that more than 80 million people today live outside of the countries in which they were born.
What do they find when they arrive in the US with dreams of a better life? They become part of a migrant work force with conditions and wages at the bottom and they're denied the most basic rights, even the right to be a resident of a stable community, to live here at all. The irony is that they often wind up working for the same corporations whose operations in their countries of origin are part of the reason they're in the US.
Those corporations have used US immigration law to increase insecurity even further, by recruiting contract workers from underdeveloped countries. Visas for these workers are dependent on their job status; not only can they be fired if they protest bad conditions or low wages, they then get deported when they lose their jobs.
No matter how many walls are built on the border, no matter how many troops or National Guards or helicopters patrol it, workers will still cross it looking for a future. There's no more eloquent testimony to this than the fact that 400 women and men — workers and farmers — died in the desert in the last three years, trying to make the journey from northern Mexico into the US. Or that 57 Chinese immigrants died in a truck trailer bringing them across the English Channel into Britain.
Workers in the US become victims of the same free-trade economy, losing their jobs when their plants close, or when the shrinking tax base which pays for social services leads to job cuts. And when this happens, they are told to find someone to blame: workers in Mexico or China, or immigrant workers in the US. As a result, anti-immigrant hysteria has become an extremely serious problem in all developed countries, as immigrants have become an integral part of the work force.
Internationalism
This system creates severe economic insecurity on all sides of all borders. The Federal Reserve Bank reports that the median income for Californian families went from $26,800 a year in 1997 to $26,700 in 1998. When the median drops, it means that the number of poor families, earning less, is growing.
And to earn this income requires more hours of work. The average work week is now 43 hours, and rising. Latino workers work an additional five hours a week, and African-American workers an additional nine hours. According to a study by two researchers at the University of California in San Francisco released in August, employed Latinos were 11 times more likely than whites to live in poverty, and African-Americans five times more likely.
One reason for both growing poverty and the increasing racial gap is the abandonment by large corporations of permanent jobs: only one-third of white workers and 25% of Latino and African-American workers now work in permanent, full-time jobs with a company rather than a contractor.
Globalisation doesn't affect all people in the same way. In the US, workers experience speedup, runaway shops and declining income. In less developed countries, they endure super-exploitation, environmental degradation and the destruction of their traditional way of life.
But the gap in living standards, enforced by US political and military power, affects all workers, across all borders. As long as that gap exists, jobs will leave developed countries, and super-exploitation in the underdeveloped world will increase. US labour has an objective interest, therefore, in opposing US foreign policy which leads to a drastic decline in living standards, whether through loan bailouts in Mexico, austerity programs in East Asia, or economic reforms in Eastern Europe.
When the new administration of AFL-CIO president John Sweeney was elected in 1995, leaders like secretary-treasurer Richard Trumka said the time had come to find a new policy for building international relationships. "The Cold War has gone", he declared at the New York convention. "We want to be able to confront multinationals as multinationals ourselves now.
"If a corporation does business in 15 countries, we'd like to be able to confront them as labour in 15 countries. It's not that we need less international involvement, but it should be focussed towards building solidarity, helping workers achieve their needs and their goals here at home."
Jack Henning, past executive secretary of the California Labor Federation, one of the most vocal critics of the old AFL-CIO department of international affairs, noted, "We were associated with some of the very worst elements ... all in the name of anti-communism. But I think there's an opportunity now to review our foreign activities, to stop the global competition for jobs among the trade unions of the world."
These statements move towards a position that would put the labour federation at loggerheads with the economic, political and military policy of every US administration, Democratic or Republican. Yet many AFL-CIO international programs continue to receive subsidies from USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy. There is a basic conflict of interest.
Recognising this, the South Bay Labor Council in Silicon Valley passed a resolution in September calling on the AFL-CIO to "describe, country by country, exactly what activities it may still be engaged in abroad with funds paid by government agencies and renounce any such ties that could compromise our authentic credibility and trust of workers here and abroad, and that would make us paid agents of government or of the forces of corporate economic globalization". The resolution also called on the federation to account for its past Cold War activities in Chile and elsewhere, to renounce the policies that led to them and invite discussion of both past and present international activities.
Real solidarity requires political independence, that unions pursue a political agenda that focuses on guaranteeing rights and security, not on maintaining loyalty to a particular party machine. Mexican workers and voters made that historic decision just this year, casting aside the party that had governed them for 71 years for its failure to follow an agenda which protected their interests. The new government of the conservative National Action Party may also betray those hopes, but no party in Mexico can count any longer on the automatic support of workers and unions.
US labour needs a similar independence. It needs to fight for equal rights for all people, especially the migrants who are the refugees of globalisation and have the least security of anyone. The right of all workers to fight for greater security and a higher standard of living must be protected.
But those who the system currently protects are not going to concede greater security to those who lack it, in the interests of an overarching classless national security. Security may be a right, but it is one that has to be fought for. To win it, workers need class solidarity, not the national security promoted by their employers.
BY DAVID BACON
[Abridged.]