New Orleans, LA
For the past 30 years, corporations have been waging war against working families, using the emerging global economy as a club to free themselves from regulation and responsibilities to their employees and communities, drive down working standards worldwide and ship American jobs overseas. They marched under the banner of free trade, but their agenda was much broader—bank and currency deregulation, privatization of public services, dismantling of social supports and the destruction of collective bargaining. They attacked unions and public employment and the freedom to organize here at home. They used crushing debt burdens to force Third World countries into a competition for exports that became a race to the bottom. Then they allowed China to lower the bottom through religious and political persecution, worker exploitation, forced labor and the imprisonment of union activists. They expanded their reach with NAFTA.
Today, the global economy is enriching corporate profiteers, wealthy families and dictators, but it isn't working for working families. In the United States, we're losing high-paying, full-benefit manufacturing jobs and more and more family members are having to join the workforce to maintain living standards. Our trade deficit is eating away at economic stability and our basic industries are being hammered by trading partners free to engage in dumping and other unfair trade practices. Around the world, financial crises are growing more frequent and severe, and inequality is rising, both among and within nations. More direct private investment goes to developing nations that are not democratic than to those that are—even when China is not counted in the calculation.
The AFL-CIO and our affiliates believe the ultimate test is whether globalization increases freedom, promotes democracy, and helps to lift the poor from poverty; whether it is empowering the many, not just the few; whether its blessings are widely shared; whether it works for working people. Clearly, the global market that has been forged in the last decades fails that test. Just as clearly, we have to do better. If we do not—if the global system continues to generate growing inequality, environmental destruction and a race to the bottom for working people—then it will trigger an increasingly volatile reaction from workers, farmers, human rights activists and environmentalists.
We have reached an historic turning point. It is time for a Campaign for Global Fairness that writes new rules for the world economy—a campaign not just about trade and the institutions that govern trade, but a campaign for a new internationalism.
The objectives of our campaign are those articulated in New Rules for A Global Economy, the resolution passed by the 1999 AFL-CIO convention:
- We want global growth and development that works for everyone;
- We want enforceable rules to regulate global competition in a way that values people, not just profits; and
- We want to reform the international financial architecture to support progressive growth.
To accomplish these objectives, our campaign for global fairness will include four broad tracks.
We must first undertake a program of broad-based education with our members and our leaders, then extend it to our allies and to the general public.
Second, we must make workers' rights and human rights a mainstay of our trade and investment agreements and international institutions, with the defeat of permanent Normal Trade Relations with China our most immediate goal.
Third, we must undertake major new efforts to build international solidarity with our brothers and sisters in emerging nations as well as in developed nations to create equitable, democratic and sustainable growth. We must escalate our support for their struggles to build strong unions and the other institutions of a democratic society. And we must reform international institutions to support progressive growth.
Finally, we must launch aggressive new initiatives to hold multinational corporations accountable by demanding that the employers with which we bargain adopt the ICFTU code of practice for their global operations and disclose the location of their affiliates, joint venture partners and contractors internationally, most especially in China. And we must work with pension funds worldwide to find the appropriate shareholder voice for our capital in the restructuring of the global economy.
Our Campaign for Global Fairness will be a multilevel, multiyear effort aimed at involving our members even as they struggle personally to make their way in the new global economy.
It will require new strategies for education, increased lobbying drives, mastering of new issues, new research and media outreach, organizing in new and different ways and the creation of new alliances and coalitions.
We can no longer allow multinational corporations to scavenge the world for cheaper and cheaper sources of labor, pitting workers against workers in a cruel contest to increase profits.
We cannot let corporations drive artificial wedges between working families in our country and working families in other countries, especially those whose economic development is just beginning.
We must free up indebted nations so they can grow and provide real markets for our goods, and we must join our voices with those of workers in developing countries who are calling for high-road development strategies.
And we must defeat permanent Normal Trade Relations with China as a first step toward making the global economy work for working families.