Al Gore, a friend to labor. Right, and G. Bush is a compassionate guy.
We don't want a place at the table, we want to burn it.
Chuck0
alex lantsberg wrote:
>
> AFL-CIO president blasts globalization
> By David Armstrong
> OF THE EXAMINER STAFF
>
> 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
--
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