Sat, 4 Mar 2000 10:34:08 -1000 From: Stephen E Philion <philion at hawaii.edu>
This is an outstanding article, one which takes the labor movement where it is and, given that, where it might be able to go.
Steve
WORLD LABOR NEEDS INDEPENDENCE AND SOLIDARITY By David Bacon March 4, 2000
Within weeks of the Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade Organization, thousands of workers at India's state power company struck to prevent the privatization of electricity generation and distribution in Uttar Pradesh. Despite the jailing of hundreds of their leaders, they succeeded in halting it, at least for a time. Meanwhile, in ports along the subcontinent's coast, thousands more longshore workers also stopped work over the same issue - privatization.
Both battles are part of a class war against pro-capitalist economic reforms. Not just in India, but around the world, workers have been fighting for over two decades to keep the social gains they won in the years following World War Two. These struggles dramatize the new problems workers face in the global economy, as well as their refusal to passively accept its new (or not-so-new) priorities.
Turning national enterprises over to private owners is a key component of these reforms - the hallmark of the neoliberal transformation of national economies. Privatization is imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (and now the World Trade Organization) on governments around the globe, through loan conditions, structural adjustment programs, and trade sanctions.
Privatization opens up important sections of the economies of countries like India to transnational corporate investment. Even more important, it reduces the ability of states to control their national economies, and use that control to promote social goals other than profit-making, whether promoting strategic industries, subsidizing prices for farmers and workers, or maintaining social benefits, high wages and unionization.
Privatization, however, has consequences which give unions and workers a big stake in opposing it. Almost invariably, workers at privatized enterprises face huge layoffs and wage cuts, as new private owners seek to cut labor costs.
The transformation of national economies around the world, in which privatization plays a key role, has forced world labor to debate the meaning of international working-class solidarity. Part of that argument surfaced in Seattle, over the issue of international labor standards and their enforcement. This debate will grow even more heated, as workers discuss not only ways of fighting growing corporate power, but revisit even more basic questions. Should encouraging profit-making and productivity be the overriding criteria in making economic decisions? Do countries have a right to control their own economic development? And should labor challenge private ownership itself, or merely argue over the conditions under which workers sell their labor power to corporate employers?
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