Rakesh said:
"It does still seem to me to be a mistake for the AFL-CIO to lobby the capitalist state to impose sanctions on countries that it finds to have violated eco-labor standards as such sanctions will doubtless only be applied for said bargaining purposes by a capitalist state"
And Ted (Dace) said
> Regarding the alliances Big Labor is developing with unions in the South,
> are these efforts directed toward ultimately stemming the tide of peasants
> being driven into the maw of the Beast? Or will newly emerging
> labor rights help only the "lucky" few who manage to get work in the
> metastasizing market
> economies of the world's SAPped nations? The AFL-CIO, at least under
> current leadership, is not prepared to defy the Clinton/Gore neoliberal
> agenda. When it comes to big issues, Big Labor will cave. Our opponents
> are not limited to the corporate elite. Sometimes any elite will do.
First, the whole phrase "Big Labor" is a rightwing propaganda term like "union bosses", all phrased as if union leadership really has an equal role with Big Capital in firing people and running the system.
On one hand, the AFL-CIO gets slammed by Rakesh for even trying to influence the shape of globalization; in the abstract Rakesh wants a new regime of empowered third world workers standing up for their own rights with US labor support, but in the short-term, he wants labor to make principled noises of opposition while capitalists implement free trade rules unhampered by eco-labor standards.
Rakesh then assumes that labor is too weak to achieve anything better.
And one the other hand, Ted slams them because he assumes that any standards the AFL-CIO fights for will not go far enough. Aside from the fact that Seattle showed that the AFL-CIO is building alliances with advocates of sustainable agriculture, Ted's critique assumes that labor has so much power that whatever they achieve, if they don't completely defeat neoliberalism, that's a deliberate choice by the Big Labor elite.
So Ted assumes that labor is so strong that limited success is a sign not of limited power but of "caving."
So in the intellectual assault on labor, the AFL-CIO can be painted either as a weak pawn of capital or as a venal "Big Labor" co-partner with capital, depending on which mode serves the argument. Some writers are consistent enough to use one or the other mode, but I've seen many that explicitly use both.
What these critics avoid is dealing with the possibility that labor has very real but also limited power (the situation I think matches reality). What that means is that even the most idealistic union leaders will end up fighting for and settling for less-than ideal compromises, in the belief that they will allow another fight another day. And limited power implies tactical and strategic decisions that can be criticized as the wrong ones strategically, but not because the goals are necessarily different from the critics.
Take Rakesh's critique-- yes, eco-labor standards will on occasion be used by developing countries to sanction developing nations. Given the fact, the US already uses Super 301 sanctions and imposes the Cuban embargo without much worries, why this creates a new regime of abuse against trading purity is unclear to me. It seems like the capitalists already have leverage to use the trading system as is for their benefit. What eco-labor standards create is a tool that could be used, given the real but limited power of labor (and other progressive forces) noted above to have environmental and labor concerns dealt with in the trading regime. Assume no labor power and that makes no sense, but assume some power and the results will be that whether the abuses occur within Indonesia or the United States itself, labor will be able to mount campaigns globally using the leverage of those standards.
That said, my assumption is that capital is not prepared itself to accept those standards in the trading regime, precisely because they see the opening for labor and enviro mobilization, so the "fix it or nix it" fight amounts to "nix it."
The interesting question for progressives is that the new trade round is focused heavily on agriculture. This is the area where developed countries are most abusive in keeping out the exports of developing nations often desperate to find a market for their core agricultural crops (especially after IMF adjustments that have driven up production and driven down the current price). So a pure "nix it" approach does mean that progressive activists are lining up in defense of privileged individual farmers and agribusiness in the developed world. Conversely, if agricultural is allowed into the WTO, keeping out labor and enviro standards just means that corporate toxic pesticide use and exploitive migrant labor will be considered perfectly equitable, thereby destroying any chance for sustainable peasant agriculture to have any kind of level playing field.
I hear intellectuals like Ted going off on labor as an "elite", bashing those most directly fighting corporate power while they write about it, and it illustrates the difference between doing and watching the television screen while yelling obscenities at the coach for calling the wrong plays.
Organizing, especially long-term organizing for fundamental change, is inevitably involved in compromises, because compromises are what you take when you don't yet have power to get everything you want. (I'll avoid the obligatory Lenin example) But if you can't spend the time analyzing the difference between compromises made because of the limits of power versus compromises made for venal reasons, or bother to understand how different compromises set forces up to fight again in another round of combat with global capital, then the analysis just degenerates into propagandistic mush.
Such as when leftists mouth rightwing propaganda like "Big Labor."
-- Nathan Newman