Bringing global free-traders to heel and unleashing the voting power of union families at home top the agenda of organized labor, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said Wednesday in San Francisco. Sweeney, on a two-day swing through the West, met with workers at Laguna Honda Hospital in The City, and stumped for Vice President Al Gore in advance of Gore's debate with Bill Bradley in Los Angeles. Sweeney referred to Gore, whom the AFL-CIO has endorsed for the White House, as "our working families' candidate." Sweeney met with journalists before addressing the Commonwealth Club of California. On both occasions, he characterized the widely publicized street demonstrations in Seattle against the World Trade Organization last November as a warning to multinational corporations and governments who have been promoting worldwide trade liberalization. "We all recognize that globalization is here," Sweeney said. "We want to have workers at the table when trade deals are negotiated. Seattle opened up the process. You're not going to see these deals being done behind closed doors." Sweeney took issue with media coverage of the WTO in Seattle which he said unfairly played up the street violence. "The violence was a relatively small group of agitators," Sweeney said. "We had an organized march of somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000, and it was as orderly a march as one could ever see." Be that as it may, televised images of rioters linger in the memory, and Seattle's chief of police subsequently resigned as a result of the incidents. Sweeney said that the AFL-CIO did not believe the United States should withdraw from the WTO, as proposed by some Republican members of Congress. Instead, the AFL-CIO believes that the WTO must work more closely with the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the International Labor Organization to formulate new rules for global business. Those rules, he said, should safeguard environmental protection, the right of workers to join unions and basic human rights. "We're interested in more than just a new trade policy," Sweeney said. "We want a new direction, a new internationalism." Sweeney called for an end to child labor and prison labor and the worldwide promotion of democracy. He was highly critical of current global trading arrangements, and called the North America Free Trade Agreement among the United States, Mexico and Canada "a failure," charging that it failed to protect occupational health and safety, especially in Mexico. "Mexico has decent labor laws, but they're not enforcing them," Sweeney said. Sweeney also criticized China for its weak record on human rights and workers' rights, and said the AFL-CIO opposed conferring permanent Normal Trade Relations status on China. The organization has also broken with its political allies in the Clinton administration by opposing China's proposed admission to the WTO, which Clinton supports. "We do not think China should be given a free ride," he said. "China hasn't lived up to the trade agreements they have signed with us in the past. There has to be some kind of review and some kind of enforcement." Sweeney characterized labor's efforts to bring U.S.-style democracy and workers' rights around the world as "a crusade." "At the beginning of the last century, we faced a similar challenge over rules for our domestic economy," he noted. "We outlawed child labor, we wrote antitrust laws, we established wage and hour standards, workplace health and safety and environmental protections and banking regulations, and we guaranteed the freedom of workers to join unions." Such far-reaching reforms, Sweeney declared, "grew a huge middle class that won two world wars and one cold one and set standards of human rights for the rest of the world to follow." Fast-forwarding to the present, Sweeney said that putting a stop to giving "China permanent NTR is the first real fight of our new campaign, and we are determined to win it on our own terms."
_________________________________________ There are those who struggle one day, and they are good. There are those who struggle many days, and they are better. And then there are those who struggle all of their lives. These are the essential ones.-------Berthold Brecht