Globalization, Contractual Employment, and the Decline of Labor Unions by Bernard Joseph Esposo Guerrero is another valuable contribution to FTL. Understanding the problems faced by labor unions in the developing world is essential to developing international labor solidarity.
Read the entire essay and offer your feedback so we can begin to move forward.
Politics, Globalization, and Food Crisis Discourse by
Bernard Joseph Esposo Guerrero is a welcome addition to FTL because it adds a global dimension to the forum on combating globalization. During these times of global economic crisis, Guerrero’s analysis offers us a chance to understand events from the point of view of developing nations.
This information is vital to developing our ability to think globally while acting locally.
Read the entire essay and comment.
Royal Dutch Shell’s program to slash 5,000 jobs by the end of 2009, many of them at its US headquarters in Houston, Texas, is the latest example of the impact of neoliberal globalization on working people. Dubbed a “job migration” by Shell, the program will transfer many good-paying corporate white-collar jobs to “shared service centers” in India and the Philippines.
The history of Shell in the USA follows the corporate strategy of what we have called a war of attrition against US labor. Shell moved its US headquarters from New York City to Houston in 1970 at the height of the runaway shop movement in order to exploit cheaper white-collar labor in the US South and is now jumping on the bandwagon of offshoring to the Far East for the same purpose — to increase profitability.
The rationale that Shell offers is that they must “get leaner to compete”, but their latest labor program, dubbed, Transition 2009, though good for the company’s bottom line, exacerbates the economic crisis in the US — every job lost reduces the demand for goods and services and undermines the position of working people even more. This pervasive practice of offshoring is another neoliberal initiative that is as short-sighted as the runaway shop program was.
Until sustainable economic policies replace the opportunistic schemes of neoliberal globalization — the position of working people across the nation will continue to deteriorate. We have listed specific policy changes for meeting the present crisis in the Fighting Back section of “The Fight of Our Lives”.
AMITY ISLAND–June, 1975. Police Chief Martin Brody, who had just recovered the mangled body of the victim of a horrific shark attack, was called to an emergency meeting of the town council. There is was shark problem, Amity Mayor Larry Vaughn informed Brody, no need to be alarmist. The tourist season was about to open and business needed to proceed as usual. Brody reluctantly deferred to the businessmen who ran the town. The disastrous results are cinema history (JAWS).
GRANITE CITY, Ill. — March, 2009. Jeff Rains, a retired steelworker from the Granite City steel mill made a disturbing discovery. While waiting for a slow freight train to pass by, he noticed that the flatcars were loaded with stacks of steel pipe — all clearly stenciled, “MADE IN INDIA” (For photos and story see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/business/economy/16pipe.html?scp=1&sq=pipe%20from%20India&st=cse). This pipe was passing through his city where the local steel mill has been shut down since December — the first time in its 130 year history — and 2,000 workers (10 percent of the city’s work force) have been laid-off.
The final destination of the Indian tubing was the 1,600 mile Keystone Pipeline now being constructed to transport oil from the tar sand fields in Alberta, Canada to refineries in Oklahoma. A section of this pipeline will pass close to Granite City. Forty percent of the 560,000 tons of pipe purchased for the project was produced in India.
“I was very mad when I saw that they were imported; I wondered why this pipe had not been made in the United States,” the New York Times quoted Rains as saying.
After the train had passed, Rains headed to the local union hall to sound the alarm.
Rains’ alarm got lost in transmission. In defiance of logic and common sense, the United Steelworkers’ leaders continue to endorse the free trade policies that have stimulated the mass offshoring of US manufacturing jobs to the cheapest labor markets on earth. With convoluted reasoning union officials argue that the Indian and Chinese steel flooding the US market is not a result of free trade but “a violation of fair trade“! It is the generous subsidies of the Indian government, they contend, that allows for the dumping of steel in the US at below market value. Not a word was said about the US government underwriting the brutal exploitation of foreign labor abroad or ignoring the needs of displaced workers at home.
There are no sharks in the water, Mr. Rains, and free trade is good for you and your community!
US capitalism is utilizing all of the resources that it commands–the mass media, well-funded think tanks and lobbyists, extensive university connections, and class collaborators within the ranks of organized labor–to obscure the critical issue that is at the heart of the current national and global crisis–the fact that free trade labor is a zero-sum game for working people that they will continue to lose until they confront it openly (http://combatingglobalization.com/articles/free_trade_labor.html).
The sharks in the water in the present scenario are the free trade advocates who are working feverishly behind the scene for more free trade to solve the current crisis of capitalism. The last thing working people of the world need now is to continue swimming with the neoliberal sharks.
In the midst of the current US and global economic meltdown, transnational capitalism is seeking ways to strengthen its position at the expense of working people in North America and worldwide. We warned of this in Combating Globalization but did not expect to see capital’s initiatives launched so soon after the US elections.
It is reported in the newspaper article Cross-border truck plan is being revisited that pressure to allow US and Mexican carriers to make deliveries into the interior of each other’s country, a provision of NAFTA that was blocked by the actions of labor unions, independendent trucking associations, and environmental organizations in 2007, is mounting on the US Congress.
The NAFTA Corridors: Offshoring US Transportation Jobs to Mexico presents an in-depth analysis of transnational capitalism’s plan to employ free trade transportation labor from the South to undercut labor in the North. This article exposes all of the facts that are obscured in mainstream news accounts.
The threat of this renewed globalization scheme against Northern labor in general and transportation workers specifically is very real.
Combating Globalization reports how a provisional victory for labor was won and offers lessons that are applicable today. The struggle will be much more intense this time around.
If capital is allowed to strengthen its position vis-a-vis labor during this economic crisis, the increasing inequality and environmental damage that accompanied past neoliberal globalization is just a preview of the future.
To meet this clear and present danger, old alliances will have to be strengthened and new ones formed.
Times is short–congress is scheduled to begin meetings on this issue later this week.
In Combating Globalization we caution that transnational capital will turn to increasing globalization as part of their strategy for economic recovery and thereby undercut the working people of North America even further.
This is exactly what is happening in the financial sector of the US economy.
In the past six years the dozen US banks receiving the biggest rescue packages have requested visas for more than 21,800 foreign workers .
In the last three months of 2008, these same banks announced more than 100,000 layoffs.
Allowing these banks to replace US workers with foreign workers will contribute to the attrition of working people in the US and reinforce the trend of growing inequality in the nation.
The time to formulate an aggressive strategy for combating globalization is now.
“Modern economic class struggle–the unremitting fight over the distribution of the wealth created by social production…”
Free Trade Labor — Comment
Sunday, February 22nd, 2009The impact of NAFTA on income equality across North America offers a good starting point for understanding the consequences of free trade labor on working people.
Read the article
Tags: combating globalization, free trade labor, globalization, income inequality, inequality, labor, NAFTA, neoliberal globalization, offshoring, poverty
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