Washington, D.C.
After several decades of accelerated corporate-led global economic liberalization and failed trade policies, the U.S. economy is seriously out of balance, and working families are paying the price. The trade deficit continues to shatter records, and even mainstream economists warn that the United States cannot continue indefinitely to borrow from abroad at the rate of $700 billion a year, with a cumulative debt of more than $3 trillion.
In 2004, our imports exceeded our exports by $617 billion -- well over one million dollars a minute -- and this imbalance is growing rapidly in 2005. U.S. consumption is driving growth in the global economy, but it is consumption based on debt, not growing income and wages. The national savings rate has turned negative, and real wages are falling, even as the economy grows. We have allowed our productive national economy to atrophy, replacing solid middle-class jobs in manufacturing and high-end services with lower-paying jobs in non-tradable services, while we starve the public sector for needed resources (as described in Good Jobs for America’s Workers). Slow growth and growing inequality around the world continue to undermine the prospects for shared global prosperity. Meanwhile, national policymakers have steadfastly refused to acknowledge the existence of a problem, let alone put forward a coherent national economic strategy.
The labor movement is committed to turning around the corporate globalization policies that have failed to generate good jobs at home, or to bring widely shared prosperity to our trading partners in the developing world. We need a combination of policies to address this urgent problem: a coordinated national industrial strategy (as described in An Economic Agenda For Working Families), a turnaround in flawed trade and investment policies, and strengthened international solidarity and cooperation. Stronger and more equitable growth abroad, trade policies that strengthen workers’ rights (thereby building stronger democracies and middle-class economies in developing countries), and a reversal of currency, tax, and trade policies that encourage and reward companies that export American jobs are all key elements of a new strategy.
Global cooperation and cross-border solidarity are critical to holding corporations accountable, building collective power and protecting the lives and rights of workers and trade unionists globally. The AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center, together with our affiliated unions, will continue to work with our allies and trade union partners around the world to address the challenges facing workers worldwide. These challenges are not due to a few rogue corporations, but rather to systemic problems of weak labor laws and unprecedented and widespread anti-union efforts by employers, bolstered by trade rules that are written to protect the rights, profits, mobility, and bargaining power of corporations. Today, it is more urgent than ever that unions and their allies worldwide work together to build a coordinated and effective movement to change the rules and reform the institutions of the global economy.
The Global Economy at Home and Abroad
Every week, we read of another American factory that has closed and moved jobs offshore. Just in the last couple of years, American icons like Huffy bicycles, Zebco fishing rods, Pillowtex linens, and Maytag appliances have all closed productive American facilities to move jobs offshore.
Every day, workers like Jerry get the bad news that their job is being offshored. For 12 years, Jerry, 49, worked as a machinist at Goss Graphics in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Goss continued to downsize its operations until it finally closed all its U.S. plants and moved production to China and England. After being laid off from Goss, Jerry took a job with Square D, another manufacturing plant in the area. After two years there, Jerry was again laid off, because production was outsourced to Mexico. After this layoff, Jerry spent a year getting training in computers, but has not found work in that field either. He has been stocking shelves at a local grocery store at night for half the pay and no benefits, but is now signed up for unemployment benefits.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Chinese workers suffer dangerous and unhealthy working conditions, often working up to sixteen hours a day, sometimes seven days a week. They can be fired or jailed for trying to organize an independent union, and they struggle with employers who flout local labor laws with impunity, and sometimes go months without paying workers what they are owed. Government officials almost invariably side with the employers, and the official “union” acts as another arm of the government.
In one especially horrific incident, a scandal has erupted over allegations that two teenage girls who were working as textile weavers in Xixuying, an industrial suburb 200 miles southwest of Beijing, were sealed alive in their coffins by an unscrupulous factory manager and left to die unspeakable deaths, according to the Washington Post (3/25/05). Officials claimed that the girls, Wang Shimian, 17, and Wang Yajuan, 14, died by inhaling fumes from a makeshift coal stove burning in a closed room at a factory where they worked. But when the girls’ families opened their coffins, there were distinct signs that the girls had in fact been alive when sealed into the coffins.
A lawyer hired by the girls’ families speculated that local authorities, including the factory owner, were concerned about the scandal over the hiring of underage girls. As a result, he said, they may have moved too hastily to have the girls declared dead and taken to a morgue. The girls’ families have filed a suit against the morgue and the factory owner, but only after months of wrangling with local officials who blocked the investigation at every turn.
China’s emergence as a key global player illustrates vividly what is wrong with global economic rules that protect corporations, but not human rights, workers’ rights, democracy, or the environment. China has become a major industrial exporter, and yet Chinese workers cannot exercise their fundamental human rights to form unions of their own choosing, or to organize and bargain collectively. Forced labor and child labor have been reported, and migrant workers face harsh working conditions and even fewer rights.
Yet workers in the United States and around the world are continually confronted by employers who are trying to meet “the China price.” Third world governments try desperately to compete with China, but find that it is hard for a democracy to match the low wages and worker repression in China. A world trading system that does not set any minimally acceptable conditions for workers’ rights will find that it is rewarding the worst, least democratic, and most repressive regimes at the expense of struggling democracies trying to do the right thing.
Meanwhile, multinational corporations mouth the rhetoric of democracy and free trade, while they reap huge profits from the hard work and repression of Chinese workers and others around the world who face similar challenges. Far from reinforcing democracy, current global economic policies reward and enrich authoritarian governments and huge corporations, leaving ordinary workers, communities, and local governments fighting harder than ever to defend their interests.
Cracks in the armor
As we come together to renew our commitment to fight for fair trade policies and global justice, we take note that the so-called “free trade” agenda is in trouble politically and intellectually. The enormous and unsustainable trade deficit, the poor record of past trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the acceleration of the trend toward offshoring white-collar and high-tech jobs, and the mediocre job and wage performance of the economy in recent years have all combined to create an opportunity for real reform in global trade rules and U.S. trade policy.
This can be seen on several fronts. The U.S. Congress has shown a marked reluctance to move forward on new trade deals, largely due to skepticism about the achievements of current trade policy. Many members of Congress, from both sides of the aisle, have expressed frustration with the Bush administration’s ineffective enforcement of trade laws, especially with respect to China.
There is a growing disconnect between what people want and what policymakers are trying to impose in the name of globalization. This democracy deficit is a result of trade policies that are increasingly intrusive into domestic democratic decision-making, limiting the ability of elected officials to protect good jobs in their communities and to protect public health, consumers’ rights, and the environment. Current global policies are designed to undermine workers’ bargaining power and political voice, and this is a key reason why they tend to exacerbate inequality.
Globally, talks toward completing a new round at the World Trade Organization (WTO) have slowed to a glacial pace, while the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) negotiations are at a stalemate. The Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) faces/faced huge opposition [depending on outcome], taking over a year to come to a vote. The French and Dutch votes against the new European Union constitution revealed deep distrust and uneasiness with the social impacts of trade liberalization and European unification.
Paul Samuelson and other economists are increasingly questioning the glib prescriptions of free-trade orthodoxy in the face of a changing world. Two key global developments in recent years raise serious questions about who the winners and losers from accelerated trade liberalization are and who they will be in the future. The challenge to unions is vastly compounded by the historically unprecedented addition of over 1.2 billion workers to the global economy in the past fifteen years: from eastern Europe, after the breakup of the Soviet Union; from China, especially since accession to the WTO in 2001; and from India, since its own economic opening. This dramatic and sudden increase in global labor supply coincides with technological changes that allow more goods and services to be traded, with lower transactions costs, than ever before. What we are seeing is that the number of beneficiaries from unregulated global liberalization is a shrinking elite, while the number of losers is a growing and increasingly diverse group (by income, education, and occupation).
When manufacturing jobs began moving offshore in large numbers in the 1980s, the free-trade proponents scoffed at our warnings, saying that the factory jobs would be replaced by high-tech and services jobs, more fitting to a wealthy country like the United States. Now we see those high-tech jobs shifted offshore as well, with potentially devastating impacts on our middle-class wage structure and our national security. Our trade surplus in advanced technology products has turned into a $37 billion deficit – in just three years – while our trade surplus in services has been cut in half. Workers from both developed and developing countries are feeling the impact of flawed policies and are coming together to resist more of the same.
Our global union solidarity is increasing in scale and scope to meet these challenges. In cooperation with our global union partners, the AFL-CIO and our affiliates are building networks that link workers in a common corporation or supply chain across the globe. These networks are successfully breaking down language and cultural barriers to build a new labor internationalism. These networks combine comprehensive research, creative use of information technology, mutually agreed objectives and internationally coordinated strategies to build power for organizing and bargaining.
Immigrant workers and globalization
Failed global economic policies have had a particularly devastating impact on immigrant workers around the globe, and especially in the U.S. Reports of exploitation and trafficking of immigrants, as well as immigrants dying on the border and on the job make headlines every day.
The ILO estimates that there are 175 million people living outside their country of origin, and 115 million of them are workers. Today, 14.8% of the U.S. population is foreign-born, and experts believe that there are more than 10 million immigrants working in the United States without the authority to do so. Recent anti-immigrant legislation that denies undocumented workers drivers’ licenses, and essentially leaves them without an identity, have only pushed millions of immigrants further underground.
As we craft policy solutions to address the crisis that immigrant workers are facing within our borders, we cannot ignore the root causes that brought these workers to us. Most immigrants come from countries where the international development process has failed, and where International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and trade policies have weakened countries’ economies and labor protections, causing a devastating impact on all workers. In some developing countries, IMF policies have caused public sector workers to lose their jobs and their union protections, forcing them into competition in the private sector, where few, if any jobs were available, driving down wages and working conditions even further. Trade policies like NAFTA destroyed the agricultural economies of developing countries, forcing workers to leave the fields and move North. Without rising living standards abroad for workers and the poor, the pressure for illegal immigration will continue and escalate.
At the same time that global forces are pushing workers to our borders, our courts and public policies toward immigrants have created new so-called “pull factors” for migration into the United States, namely, an incentive for employers to recruit undocumented immigrants for economic exploitation. The U.S. Supreme Court created a powerful new incentive for such exploitation by its decision in Hoffman Plastic Compounds v. NLRB. In that case, the Court determined that an undocumented worker is not entitled to back pay — the only monetary remedy available to workers under the NLRA -- when he or she is illegally fired for trying to organize a union. This has made the cost of exploiting immigrants insignificant to unscrupulous employers. The end result is that industries where jobs cannot be exported—like those in the construction industry, in meatpacking, or in the service industry—have been able to import the labor standards of developing nations into the U.S. The New York Court of Appeals ruled recently that an undocumented Mexican construction worker who was injured on the job because of the employer’s negligence was entitled to collect wages for the time he was unable to work because of his injury, but not at the rate he was earning in New York. Rather, the Court determined that the worker was only entitled to the wages he would have been earning in Mexico.
Our current legal framework also makes it nearly impossible for many immigrant workers—particularly the undocumented—to exercise their legal rights. Fear of deportation and fear of losing their livelihood are enough to silence workers. It is no wonder that unscrupulous employers are recruiting undocumented workers and working them to the limits of human endurance. As a recent Human Rights Watch report concluded, “Federal laws and policies on immigrant workers are a mass of contradictions and incentives to violate their rights.”
Employers have been able to create an underclass of workers, which has effectively reduced working standards for all workers. Immigrant workers are over-represented in the highest-risk, lowest paid jobs, but the exploited immigrants do not work in isolation. U.S.-born workers who work side by side with immigrants suffer the same exploitation. The U.S. Department of Labor, for example, determined that the poultry industry—which is approximately half African American and half immigrant—was 100% out of compliance with federal wage and hour laws. The DOL also estimates that over half of the country’s garment factories violate wage and hour laws, and more than 75% violate health and safety laws. Of course, workplaces that are dangerous for immigrant workers are equally dangerous for their U.S. counterparts.
Building Global Solidarity and Promoting Democracy
Working together with the global trade union movement and our allies at home and abroad, we must intensify our support for the development of strong, stable, democracies that can foster growing domestic economies. This model of economic development is good for workers in the United States and in other developed countries, as well as for workers in developing countries. We will continue to work to foster sustainable, democratic, and equitable development, including through insisting on fundamental reform and democratization of the international financial institutions, deep and effective debt cancellation for poor countries, and generous development aid that prioritizes the Millennium Development Goals. Workers and their unions are key stakeholders in the development process, and must be included in the planning, implementation and monitoring of development policies. The demonstrated success of HIV/AIDS workplace education programs is just one example of the key role that unions can play in achieving development goals.
Workers need stable democracies, good jobs and strong unions. In order to build unions that can challenge corporate-led global economic liberalization and promote democracy, the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center supports workers and unions to build their capacity to protect their right to join a union and to bargain collectively. By facilitating communication on bargaining strategies between workers in the U.S. and their counterparts in other countries who work for a common employer, we strengthen and build unions and raise workers’ rights standards in global markets.
In 2005, the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center facilitated workshops on strategic planning for organizing with printing workers and unions working for a common employer in Recife, Brazil and Santiago, Chile. As part of a global solidarity campaign that included unions from 13 countries, the unions held a "Global Solidarity Day", featuring marches, rallies and the wearing of stickers in many languages by workers in printing factories across the globe. The campaign has resulted in an agreement that guarantees the rights of workers to organize in their factories around the world without employer interference or opposition. By working together to build collective power, workers in the United States, Brazil and Chile protected their right to join a union and strengthened their power against a multinational corporation.
We support strong, effective and politically independent trade unions, with a legitimacy that comes from their members. Unions are important advocates for workers’ rights and human rights as well as the architects of more just and democratic societies. Without freedom of association, there are no strong, free trade unions and without strong free trade unions, democratic processes are weak, threatened, or nonexistent. As demonstrated in the South Africa, Poland, Serbia, and most recently the Ukraine, a strong trade union movement is a necessary precondition to building and maintaining a democracy.
Since the mid-1980s, close to 4,000 Colombian trade unionists have been killed and many more threatened. The AFL-CIO condemns the violence and continued military aid that supports the military and paramilitaries, mostly responsible for the murders of trade unionists. With increasing violence, high unemployment and pro-business labor laws, Colombian workers face huge obstacles to organizing unions. In response, the Solidarity Center supports a program for Colombian trade unionists to live in the US, work with affiliates on local organizing campaigns and educate U.S. trade unionists about the challenges facing Colombian trade unions and workers. This program on global solidarity has supported the trade union’s struggle to promote democracy and greatly strengthened union campaigns in the U.S. and in Colombia.
In South Africa, trade unions have been at the forefront of the democracy movement and the fight to provide treatment for workers and their families living with the devastating effects of HIV/AIDS. The Solidarity Center supports labor-management partnerships that help workers with HIV and AIDS stay on the job, earn a living, and support their families. By providing education on HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, the Solidarity Center supports South African unions so they can play an active role in shaping HIV/AIDS policies that work for workers and their families and continue to strengthen their unions.
In Cambodia, the Solidarity Center provides training to workers who are forming their first unions and winning their first collective bargaining agreements, under a unique labor rights trade agreement, which was negotiated under pressure from the U.S. labor movement. The agreement protects and monitors workers’ rights and working conditions in the garment sector and has strengthened workers’ participation in their country’s transition to democracy.
By supporting workers and unions in the U.S. and globally, the AFL-CIO and the Solidarity Center help strengthen the global labor movement. Globally, we will hold employers and corporations accountable for their responsibilities to workers and society. We will support unions’ efforts to build their capacity for strategic campaigns, collective bargaining and participation in shaping policies that affect working families. We will continue to support global agreements and codes of conduct that guarantee fundamental workers’ rights.
Working Families’ Global Agenda: A Call to Action
Reform of failed trade and globalization policies must be done in conjunction with a coherent national economic strategy, as described in An Economic Agenda for Working Families. This national strategy must include reform of corporate tax policy to eliminate incentives to shift jobs overseas; currency policy that does not disadvantage American producers and workers; renewed investment in education and infrastructure; reform of health care and pension funding to eliminate the competitive disadvantage for companies that provide adequate coverage; and macroeconomic policies that promote, create, and maintain decent jobs.
But at the same time, it is absolutely essential that we fight back against the corporate trade agenda put forward by President Bush. We will work to defeat flawed trade agreements based on the NAFTA model: bilateral agreements, including with Central America, Thailand, the Andean countries, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and others; regional agreements (like the FTAA); and multilateral negotiations that weaken our trade laws and neglect workers’ rights (WTO). We will work with Congress to challenge the Bush administration’s failure to enforce existing trade rules, especially with respect to safeguard provisions, illegal subsidies, and currency manipulation.
We will also work with our global union and civil society allies to coordinate action at the international institutions, including the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, and the International Labor Organization (ILO), as well as to develop joint positions and critiques of bilateral free trade agreements.
We will continue to use creative approaches (like section 301 cases on workers’ rights and currency manipulation) to raise issues, change the public debate, and galvanize legislative action.
We will work with Congress to defend U.S. trade laws, especially as these are under attack at the WTO. Effective and enforceable trade laws are the last line of defense for U.S. industries and workers facing unfair competition, subsidies, and import surges.
We will work to defend and strengthen Buy America provisions at the national, state, and local levels, and ensure that national security is not endangered by excessive reliance on foreign sources for crucial items.
We will continue to work with state and local union activists and other allies to pass and implement state and local legislation to limit offshoring of government jobs, to protect consumer privacy and right-to-know, and to improve the quality of data needed to assess offshoring trends.
We will work to improve and fully fund Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) and other worker training programs, and to ensure that these programs cover service-sector workers as well as production workers, while always recognizing that these programs can never be a substitute for decent trade policies.
We have long called for an end to immigrant worker exploitation and for reform of our nation’s broken immigration system. We renew that call today. Our core principles remain unchanged:
- All workers, regardless of their country of origin or immigration status, must have effective, credible and enforceable labor rights;
- U.S. immigration laws must be reformed in a comprehensive manner that gives undocumented workers a path to citizenship, and which removes the current incentives to exploit the undocumented;
- Labor and business should work together to design mechanisms to meet the legitimate needs for new workers without compromising the rights and opportunities of current workers.
- Temporary worker programs must guarantee that all workers have enforceable labor protections and must not allow employers to use workers’ immigration status to drive down wages and workplace standards
And in our international solidarity work, we will build the capacity of unions and workers to protect their right to join a union and to bargain collectively.
We will promote global solidarity by supporting trade unions and workers struggling to build democracies that protect workers’ rights.
We will advocate for sustainable, equitable and democratic development that includes generous aid, deep and effective debt cancellation and reform of international financial institutions.
We will educate workers on economic and social policies to promote greater worker participation in shaping democratic policies that support working families.
We will develop the capacity of unions that can address gender and racial inequalities and respond to the needs of a diverse group of workers.
We will lead Global Voice at Work delegations that allow U.S. trade unionists to share experiences and organizing strategies with workers and trade union movements in other countries.
We will analyze the situation of workers’ rights in various countries by disseminating key publications.