Barkley on WTO, etc

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sun Dec 19 15:51:53 PST 1999


Rakesh Bhandari wrote:


>The US is threatening to invoke non application against China on the
>ostensible grounds of labor violations (right?)

The U.S. in the person of the Clinton administration? Extremely unlikely, since they're the ones who negotiated the WTO agreement with China. Clinton made some noises about labor standards during the WTO summit, but his negotiating team was in the convention center the very next day saying the president had "misspoken." It was gays in the military all over again - Clinton said something convenient to woo a particular audience, and then retreated the day after.

So the AFL-CIO isn't the avant garde of the revolution. We all know that. They're showing more signs of enlightenment than they did 5 years ago, which is something that deserves at least a brief round of applause.

I'll bet that were there unions and some kind of left in China, it'd be opposing China's WTO entry. Since the government would immediately jail such forces, we can't poll them directly. But what would solidarity with the Chinese working class dictate in your eyes, Rakesh?

Doug



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