Corporation Nation, page 31
Global business not only supports the worldwide investment rights guaranteed by the WTO and proposed MAI, but is prepared to support certain forms of global labor and environmental rights. Chairman McCormick wrote President Clinton that global business has “a responsibility to our shareholders, our employees and customers and to our communities to be good citizens and to apply high standards of conduct in all our operations. We adhere to voluntary multilateral codes of conduct promulgated by the OECED and the ILO.” But beyond this voluntary commitment, which is the corporations’ preferred route, many corporate leaders also endorse regulation. McCormick asked the president to be “more vigorous in using the ILO to bring international pressure to bear on governments that commit egregious violations of basic workers’ rights” and to “work through the WTO, UN, and World Bank to combat extortion and bribery in international business transactions.” He also wrote that business “has a responsibility to protect the environment and it is in our interest to do so. We expect a regulatory regime” to prevent corporate environmental rogues.19
Now, this hardly suggests a conversion to populism among corporations: They have also asked the president to “Avoid the use of trade measures, investment restrictions, or government mandated codes of conduct on business operations to address social and environmental concerns.”20 Moreover, they militantly oppose public or stakeholder participation in the inner sanctums of the WTO or IMF. Corporations embrace global regulation, but not yet economic democracy.
Nonetheless, the existing transnational bodies that corporations have welcomed and helped create, such as the WTO, could become part of the solution. The WTO has enforcement powers to review and sanction national laws that violate “fair trade,” and this could include unfair labor laws. In 1995, the International Labor Organization initiated work with the WTO to introduce labor standards into WTO’s criteria of fair trade practices. If successful, this would allow the WTO to declare child labor, sweatshops, and bans on unions or other attacks on labor rights as “unfair trade,” and to punish the offending nations. While this provoked a storm of internal controversy, and remained secret to the outside world, Howard Wachtel writes that “labor’s best hope” for dealing with the problem of a global “race to the bottom” now lies with the WTO—and some unions have already mounted global public campaigns to have the WTO and other international bodies treat labor abuses as trade violations and forms of “social dumping.” A populist campaign, led by organized labor in the United States, could succeed in turning the WTO into an unexpected tool for protecting wages and working conditions in both the first and third world, requiring countries around the world to respect and protect labor rights.
Beyond democratization of the shadow government, the ultimate populist aim is to turn globalization into a race to the top. This means preventing corporations from abusing workers or the environment as their ticket to global success. By taking pollution and supercheap labor off the playing field—through regulation and international standards or charters—corporations will be forced to compete by seeing who can motivate and educate their workforce most effectively.
Global corporations will continue to resist most changes of this kind—and further attempts to democratize the new global regime. Nonetheless, stakeholder involvement and public accountability in organizations such as the WTO could serve corporations’ long-term interests, much as it could in the corporation itself. To succeed, positive populists, even as they challenge the corporation, need to show how their solutions will ultimately serve many business interests—from preserving political stability and continued demand for global production, to enhancing productivity as well as social responsibility through a global stakeholder regime.
FIFTEEN
The Four Movements to Join
In 1996, John Sweeney was elected America’s national leader of labor on a fiery populist platform. He called for a shift in the AFL-CIO from a “Washington-based institution concerned primarily with refining policy positions” to a “worker-based movement against greed, multinational corporations, race-baiting and labor-baiting politicians.” He claimed that the labor movement had become “irrelevant to the vast majority of unorganized workers in our country” and feared even that “we are becoming irrelevant to our own members.” He is the first such national leader in a generation to call for labor to become a real social movement again, to challenge the corporate culture of greed and hypermaterialism, organize the unorganized, link up with minorities and women—for it to join with community, church, and grassroots groups all over the country to help revitalize American democracy.1
The rhetoric comes easy, but words like this coming from the head of the AFL-CIO hint at something new and important. As we move into a new Gilded Age, it is inevitable that the populist and labor struggles of the 1890s against the robber barons will resurface in new movements for justice today. While the social landscape seems far more quiescent than in the 1890s, activists such as Noam Chomsky have argued that there is more grassroots activism in America today than in the 1960s.
This may be true, but the movements today are deeply fragmented and lack any unified vision for a national struggle. The populist struggle for democracy depends on their coming together. As both political parties embrace the priorities of business, no populist leadership is likely to emerge from Washington, potentially for many years. Fortunately, there are at least four resurgent popular forces that are already beginning to assert themselves; but each will have to adjust its focus and goals radically in order to become part of a truly populist movement. They will have to learn a new language to help them connect with the American people; find the strength to discipline their own goals in the spirit of coalition politics; build new viable cultures and economic alternatives rather than just criticize the old; and learn to work in support of business as they challenge corporate power. But the larger goal for which they would all be working is necessary to achieve their founding goals: the return of basic rights from corporations to the citizens to whom they rightly belong.
Putting the Movement Back into the Labor Movement
The first and most important of the four populist forces is the new labor movement, which under Sweeney has claimed that “the Federation must be the fulcrum of a vibrant social movement.” Sweeney seems to have recognized that labor is dead if it continues to act as a narrowly oriented lobby for its declining membership. He has traveled the country announcing that labor will now speak for social justice, especially for the poor. Sweeney has begun to articulate a concern for values and human dignity—for people as more important than profits—and he is calling for labor to reach out to all the groups at home and abroad who are suffering from “the over-reaching of profit-hungry corporations.”2
Sweeney has called for a new national and global organizing campaign to reach sweatshop workers, temps, white collars, pink collars, and even managers. Putting his money where his mouth is, he has committed one-third of the AFL-CIO budget to the biggest organizing drive since the Great Depression. He has also called for new “capital strategies” which would involve use of the billions of dollars in union pension funds and strike funds to create worker-owned companies and to create new jobs in depressed urban and rural areas. Labor might now be in a position to offer some real economic alternatives, as did the early populist cooperatives, providing real-world models of business enterprise in the public interest that would give Americans some hope for change. Sweeney seems serious about building a strong movement—and is actively seeking coalitions with other social groups long at odds with labor, including women’s groups, environmentalists, minorities, and religious groups.3
The real constituency of the new labor movement Sweeney envisions is the American public as a whole, as well as workers throughout the world. As the old social contract unravels, the great majority of those in jeopardy are not American union members but unrepresented American workers, as well as workers in the third world. Beyond organizing new members, labor must transform itself into a voice speaking mainly for these expansive constituencies who are not already American union members. Ironically, this will be the most effective way to service its own dues-paying members. In France, for example, less than 10 percent of the workforce is in unions, but the French people as a whole support union work stoppages to protect wages or benefits. In 1997, a majority of the French population virtually closed down the country in support of transportation workers’ efforts to protect retirement and vacation benefits. This reflected public appreciation of French labor’s long political role in fighting for a social contract to protect the entire French public.
Sweeney has sought not only to advance a new national political agenda around such issues as the minimum wage, fair trade, public education, and social equality, but to join forces with third-world unions. Cooperation among Canadian, U.S., and Mexican unions is mushrooming, reflecting the new post-NAFTA reality of the American continent as a single corporate market. It is impossible to defend the corporate high road in any one nation without protecting wages and benefits in all countries simultaneously. As Peter Smith, a Latin American labor specialist, argues, “United States labor has a stake in helping Mexican unions because it leads to protection of their own self interests.” A Mexican independent labor organizer, Benedicto Martinez Orzoco, says that “We’re finding that there’s a new vision among trade unionists in the United States. They’re showing more interest in understanding what we’re up against in Mexico: the control, the manipulation, the gangster tactics.” When Mexican workers organized by Martinez voted to decertify the corrupt government-controlled official union in a Tijuana Hyundai Maquiladora plant, they got financial and political help from Sweeney’s AFL-CIO. Sweeney’s political success in 1997 in defeating the president’s fast-track trade agreement—which explicitly protected financial but not worker and environmental rights—reflects the promise of a new labor strategy oriented toward the public interest.4
As labor activists and writers Tim Costello and Jeremy Brecher have argued, labor will have to make a heroic effort to shed its old skin if it is to live up to its new rhetoric. It will have to clean house completely and internally democratize—a staggering task given the hierarchical bureaucratic structure of existing unions and the corrupt entrenched leadership that dominates many of them. The 1997 corruption-related ousting of Teamsters president Ron Carey, who himself had cleaned up the Hoffa-dominated union, shows how deeply the shadow of corruption continues to haunt labor. The new labor movement will also have to become truly inclusive and create real power for women, minorities, and others who remain deeply underrepresented at all levels of union leadership. It will have to reach out to the poor and unemployed as it has not done since the Great Depression. It will have to sacrifice the cozy political arrangements with the Democratic party that the AFL-CIO has long enjoyed. And it will have to get serious about being a new social movement broadly committed to human rights, as the Sweeney leadership claims to be, rather than just business unionism servicing the special interests of its members. This will require new thinking in every corner of the house of labor, and can probably only be achieved if its members reach out and connect to other movements that have much to teach it.5
Labor is ideally placed to educate the public about the social and human costs of low-road capitalism. In a post-communist world no longer preoccupied with red-baiting, it can offer a more serious systemic critique of the corporate order. Labor is the only major institution in the United States that can sponsor, fund, and disseminate a critical consciousness about low-road capitalism. It is high time to start.
Unions will only be able to recruit American workers if they show that they are willing to contest corporate power and offer credible economic alternatives that will foster real economic security and empowerment. This means working politically for an industrial democracy that gives workers a voice in every business and contributes to the creation of the new publicly chartered corporation. Since unions only represent about 15 percent of the labor force, they will have to seek to represent workers who are not part of unions through various forms of associational membership and services.6 They will also have to support forms of representation, including an American variant of the German works council, that can empower nonunionized workers in new ways that fall outside direct union control.7 Most important, they will have to lead the national struggle for full employment, and against the trends toward disposable work and declining wages that can threaten economic security for so many Americans.
While labor will have to contest corporate power in a more serious way, it will also have to learn to cooperate with business. The labor movement has been deeply conflicted about cooperative partnerships with business and the corporate responsibility movement. As discussed earlier, there are serious dangers lurking in cooperative strategies. But unions will gain public credibility and power only if they are seen as acting not just to help workers but also in the interest of the nation’s greater economic growth. Labor will have to be seen as an ally of business in the struggle to ensure our viable place in the world market—even as it continues to contest corporate power, with redoubled militancy.8
Labor is the only force that can help corporate responsibility become a real movement for democratization. In Germany, strong national unions have played a role on both boards of directors and worker councils that commit workers to cooperation without compromising the independence of the union. The unions act in the works councils and the board to help the enterprise become more cooperative and productive. But they also negotiate in a tough adversarial way to protect the interests of their workers.9
American labor has to find the same delicate balance, moving simultaneously toward greater confrontation and greater cooperation. Only more concerted confrontation will lead to successful organizing and systemic change. At the same time, labor can work closely with corporations to move their social responsibility and empowerment rhetoric toward a meaningful form of economic democracy. It is only where unions have taken an active role in shaping employee participation and “cooperation” programs, as at Saturn, that any real prospect of creating a genuinely democratic and responsible company has emerged.
Cooperation is a bad word in many union circles, but it is going to be a rising tide in most American corporations whether or not unions get on board. Shopfloor participation properly implemented is vitally important for the human development of workers as well as for corporate efficiency. The great limit of the European labor model is that it has failed to devise forms of participation that combat the stifling bureaucratic character of much factory and office work. American unions should seize the initiative and fight for partnership on terms that do not compromise their own independence and ensure that cooperation serves workers’ interests.10
The Third Sector
As labor is being reborn, a new “Third Sector” of grassroots community groups has emerged as a second force that could change America. Called the Third Sector because they are part of neither the public nor the market sectors, these groups are emerging to fight for jobs and living wages, but also for good schools, safe streets, affordable housing, and, most of all, a new sense of civility and community. The marriage of labor with the Third Sector could become the foundation of the new populism.
The leading theorist of the Third Sector has been Jeremy Rifkin, who argues that communities themselves are the prime force that can move America in a new direction. He contends that the Third Sector, which embraces families, churches, schools, foundations, volunteer agencies and other community-based organizations, is the carrier of social morality. Unlike government, it does not represent coercion; unlike business, it does not stand for profit. It breeds the communitarian values of service, responsibility, and love on which the health of civil society, democracy, and the market itself depend.11
Rifkin observes that the Third Sector is vast, with 10 percent of the workforce employed by nonprofits and 90 million Americans volunteering. “If it were an economy, it would be the seventh-largest economy in the world; it’s made up of 1.4 million organizations dealing with community needs.” What all these organizations—which range from the Lions Club to the Girl Scouts to the Catholic Church—have in common is that “they each believe in serving the community.…”12
As government and business abandon the old social compact, Rifkin believes only the Third Sector can step into the breach. Of particular importance, he argues, is the technological revolution that is displacing millions of workers. As corporations downsize, the Third Sector could employ laid-off people to rebuild the schools, educate the young, care for the elderly, and rebuild affordable housing and our decaying neighborhoods. Third Sector enterprise is the route to a full employment that rebuilds both neighborhoods and social responsibility.
Rifkin details the proliferation of grassroots community organizations that are rising to take over as government and business abandon communities. Like the original populists, these are ordinary people who are taking matters into their own hands. “But this sector,” Rifkin acknowledges, “has been marginalized; it has a neocolonial status, relying on government largesse and the goodwill of corporate philanthropy. How does this sector become an equal player with market and government?”13
