Labor Fights Corporate Globalization
Mark Levinson Talks to Joe Schwartz

Perhaps more than any other union in the United States and Canada, UNITE (Union of Needle Trades, Industrial, and Textile Employees) is involved in the struggle against exploitative, low-wage production both at home and abroad. They have played a leading role in building international solidarity among unions internationally and building coalitions between trade unionists, environmentalists, students, women’s and indigenous people’s groups fighting low-wage industrial production around the globe.

Just after the Spring protests in Washington, D.C., against the IMF and World Bank, and in the midst of the fight against granting China permanent normal trade relations, DSA National Political Committee and DL editorial committee member Joseph Schwartz sat down with Mark Levinson, long-time DSAer and senior economist for UNITE, to discuss the politics and strategy of the emerging international movement for global justice.

DL: Tens of thousands of student, environmental, and labor activists protested the policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank in Washington, D.C. How are the policies of these institutions detrimental to the interests of both people in the developing world and advanced industrial societies?

ML: Both the IMF and World Bank demand “structural adjustments” as a condition of their loans. These policies promote privatization, cuts in corporate taxes, balanced budget austerity, and gutting of the social safety net, cripple economic growth, hinder economic development, and increase misery and poverty in the developing world. Labor and others affected by these policies have had no say in their implementation.

DL: Last November, both you and your union joined over fifty thousand people protesting the current structure of the World Trade Organization (WTO). How do you see the struggle against the WTO, relating to the fight to create democratic alternatives to the IMF and World Bank?

ML: The struggle against the practices of the IMF and World Bank, on the one hand, and the WTO on the other, are linked in that these institutions all set the rules for the economy., For example, the WTO protects intellectual property rights and patent rights, yet is completely silent on labor rights and environmental standards. These international economic institutions are all involved in setting the rules for the global economy. Currently these rules protect corporate interests and ignore the interests of labor and the environment. This is as true of the WTO as it is of the World Bank and IMF.

After the WTO Seattle protests, there was an attempt by conservative commentators to drive a wedge between workers in the industrialized countries and workers in the developing world. For example, Paul Krugman, in the New York Times, wrote, “it is a sad irony that the cause that has finally awakened the long dormant American left is that of — yes! — denying opportunity to Third World workers.” For anyone who is serious about developing an alternative to the WTO, this is a serious challenge. The danger here is that the two major constituencies who are critics of the existing global system — the trade union movement of the advanced industrial democracies and the Non-Governmental Organizations and the workers of the South — will be pitted against one another. If we allow this to happen, it will disenfranchise both groups. It is extremely important that critics of the WTO in industrial nations build alliances and find common ground with unions and human rights activists in the developing countries to make the WTO more accountable, transparent, and supportive of worker rights and environmental protections.

DL: How do you respond to “leaders” of developing countries who in Seattle opposed inclusion of worker rights in the WTO framework?

ML: We have to realize that in developing countries there are different political interests, just as there are in the United States and other industrial nations. Those leaders were not speaking for the interests of workers in their nations. At the labor rally in Seattle, worker representatives from Mexico, the Caribbean, Malaysia, Africa, and China all spoke in support of including labor rights in the WTO and were enthusiastically received. It is hard to find other examples of this type of international solidarity. But I think it grows directly from the realities of the global economy, in which working people in all parts of the world are put into competition with each other in a race-to-the-bottom.

The countries losing out from increasingly bitter competition for a share of the global marketplace are the developing countries which are striving to improve living and working conditions. Thus, the workers who are most affected by India’s failure to address child labor in its carpet sector are the exporters in Nepal who are striving to make carpets under good working conditions. Those most affected by the suppression of trade union rights in Indonesia’s coal mines are the coal miners in India whose strong trade unions obtain decent wages for them which are then undercut by imports of Indonesian coal. The entire developing world suffers from China’s violation of all the core labor standards, enabling it to act as a magnet for transnational corporations to uproot their production from other developing countries in order to produce at low cost in China’s export-oriented “special economic zones.” Tackling these problems, which result so demonstrably from globalization, requires action at the global level by the WTO. What about those who simply want to abolish the WTO and other global regulatory institutions?

The problem with this strategy is that I don’t see how global capital can be regulated by national institutions alone. We want to preserve a role for national sovereignty and relatively autonomous national economic policy, but we need international institutions, supported by democratic sovereign governments, to regulate international capital.

DL: What else is needed in a democratic international regulatory system?

ML: We need a global financial architecture which supports growth in the global economy. Labor rights is one important component of that. We also need an institutional structure which would support “global Keynesianism,” an economic strategy which sees that supporting economic improvement for the world’s poor and working classes would in fact be extremely beneficial for the entire global economy, and promote equitable increases in living standards both North and South. This means is that the IMF and World Bank would have to be democratized and fundamentally change their response to economic crises. Currently, it is the most vulnerable who bare the burden of “adjustment” to current global economic imbalances. That must change. Right now, to rectify trade deficits in the developing world, the IMF and World Bank require massive cuts in social welfare expenditure, exports at all costs, and serious curtailment of domestic consumption. These “adjustments” all come at the expense of the most vulnerable in the developing world. A truly democratic international economic order would require countries in the developed world to import more and bare the adjustment costs. This would not only be more equitable but would help alleviate the massive excess capacity in the global production system which directly contributed to the East Asian economic crisis.

DL: On campuses around the nation, students, including many Young Democratic Socialists — the youth section of the DSA, are involved in fighting against college-logo goods being made in sweatshops. What connections might these students make between the structure of global regulatory institutions and the persistence of sweatshop industries, both abroad and, increasingly, at home?

ML: The rules of the global economy do little or nothing to protect labor rights and raise labor standards. But because the freedom of capital to move is protected, such protections perpetuate the sweatshop system, in which capital is free to search the globe for the lowest wages, most vulnerable workers, and fewest environmental regulations. Let’s be clear about one thing: there is nothing wrong with a country attracting investment because it is poor and its wages are low. That country and those workers need jobs. What is not acceptable is for a government in complicity with transnational corporations to artificially suppress wages by denying workers internationally-recognized rights — by which I mean the right to free association, the right to collective bargaining, the abolition of forced and child labor.

DL: Some might say that the fight for “labor rights” is too narrowly focused on the interests of the already organized, those current members of trade unions. In what way are such issues in the interest of the vast majority?

ML: Labor rights are not the solution to all of our global economic problems, but are a necessary precondition to end the brutal race-to-the-bottom of the global economy. There is considerable evidence that where labor rights exist they are a powerful tool to raise living standards and promote more equitable development. Economist Danny Roderick has made the crucial point that countries with democratic institutions, particularly independent trade unions, pay higher wages. In four instances, where military dictatorships replaced democratically elected governments, labor’s share of economic output fell dramatically, while in eight other instances where governments moved from authoritarianism to democracy, labor’s share increased. For example, Roderick estimates that all else being equal, Mexican workers would receive thirty percent higher wages if they had democratic institutions and truly independent unions.

DL: The entire AFL-CIO, and your union in particular, made a major push against Congress establishing permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) with China? Why is preventing “normalized” trade with China of interest to working people worldwide?

ML: The fight against PNTR for China is the fight for worker rights in the global economy. It’s not just about China, it’s about the WTO and the rules for the global economy. China is among the worst violators of labor rights, and advancing the pro-corporate globalization agenda hinges on getting China into the WTO. Not only will that insure that the WTO never makes progress on labor rights, it will also guarantee that transnational corporate investment in China will be protected by WTO rules. And, of course, as of now, there are no labor rights components in the WTO.

Putting pressure on China to support labor rights is crucial to support workers in China, hundreds of millions of whom are terribly exploited — and thousands of whom have been imprisoned for trying to form independent unions. This struggle is also crucial to the fate of millions of workers around the world who must compete with workers in China who are denied the most basic human and labor rights. There has been a tremendous amount of spontaneous labor unrest in China, in response to the inegalitarian economic reforms. The Chinese government has zero tolerance for independent trade union organization or activity; even attempting to organize a union will land one with a lengthy prison term and put one’s life in danger. The world trading system simply can’t tolerate these kinds of abuses.

DL: What does this mean for the corporate global agenda?

ML: This is exactly what they want: a huge labor force with no rights, the existence of which will be used to undercut labor standards around the world. Remember, this is a country of 1.2 billion people, whose future will significantly influence the fate of workers in the entire developing world.
We all have an interest in Chinese workers raising their living standards, given the weight of China in the world economy and its role in export production. External pressure on China to end the brutal denial of even the most minimal workers’ rights is a crucial tool for influencing a regime which if left to its own devices will continue to be one of the most anti-labor regimes in the world.

DL: Some on the left worry that the struggle against PNTR for China may degenerate into xenophobic appeals to keep out goods made by “cheap Asian labor?” What effort is the labor movement making to prevent such fears from becoming a reality?

ML: We’ve been clear from the beginning that the issue in this campaign is support of economic globalization which benefits workers or operates for the benefit of corporations and narrow elites. I think the trade union movement, with few exceptions, understands that we need to make common cause with workers around the world. If we don’t do that there will never be an alternative to the corporate global agenda. That means that the US trade union movement should support increased market access for countries that do respect worker rights.

DL: A standard criticism of the left is that we know what we oppose, but we fail to offer feasible alternatives. Could you sketch out what a democratic alternative regulatory mechanism for governing the international economy would look like?

ML: First of all, we need a global trading system in which representatives of workers have an influential seat at the table and in which labor rights are as important as property and investment rights. More than that, we need to construct new democratic international economic regulatory institutions which would fulfill Keynes’ original vision for the global economy after World War II. This might mean a radical reform or reconstitution of such institutions as the IMF and World Bank. Keynes’ original vision involved a leveling-up of global living standards in which more prosperous, surplus-producing nations’ policies facilitated, rather than denied, an enhancement of living standards and labor rights in developing nations.

We also need mechanisms to regulate the enormous international capital flows, and structures that don’t put the burden of adjustment to imbalances in the global economy upon poorer nations. The surplus countries — those with trade and capital surpluses — should be importing more and expanding their levels of public provision and investment rather than demanding that developing nations gut their levels of public provision, privatize, balance their budget, and warp their economy towards primarily export-oriented production to get their payments in balance.

DL: Besides being a trade union researcher and strategist, you’ve been an open and active democratic socialist for your entire adult life. You helped found the DSOC Youth Section in 1977, and served on the NPC from 1981-1993. You are also an editor of Dissent. Is there anything unique that socialists — and democratic socialist parties and organizations — bring to the struggle for global justice?

ML: The socialist movement has always stressed the need for democratic structural change. We need it in the US and also in the global economy. What Mike Harrington taught me was that one had to connect the long-run vision to today’s practical politics. We need to understand the type of global institutions we want so we can fashion immediate reforms that move us in that direction. Even though any given reform by itself may be insufficient to achieve global democracy. A socialist analytic framework enables one to see that structural transformation of the world’s economic and political system is what’s at stake, not simply beating up on bad corporations.

Furthermore, socialists know that what is at stake is the distribution of power between corporate elites and ordinary citizens. That means democratic forces have to influence the policies of nation-states and build international solidarity among social movements, progressive nation-states and regional blocs, such as the European Union. Socialists bring an insight into the very nature of the social structure of power we are fighting and a vision of how international solidarity is needed if we are to democratize the economic structures which govern our daily lives.