One of the tropes of Sweeney-bashing around the trade issue is the claim that the unions only target foreign countries and non-US labor abuses. Which is just flat out wrong and makes the arguments associated with such arguments pretty suspect.
Such as this one:
>On Behalf Of Doug Henwood
> Second, the AFL has yet to use this investment strategy to influence
> behavior at U.S. corporations or banks, or in countries more within the
> American sphere of influence - ie Indonesia, South Korea etc. Supposedly
> that is what will follow from the PetroChina brouhaha, but I
> doubt it. China
> will get Patterson (who runs their Office of Investment) big
> press play; but
> not Korea. As a union activist told me the other day, "this is a strategy
> against a country, not a company."
This is ridiculously ignorant statement. I don't know who Doug's source is, but he is either uninformed or deliberately trying to be deceptive to make a propaganda point.
AFL-CIO unions have been mounting major corporate campaigns since the J.P. Stevens campaign in the 1970s and have accelerated them throughout the past decade. My old union, HERE, has one of the best corporate research offices in the union movement and makes such capital research and shareholder mobilization a key part of most major organizing campaigns, including a major (and partly successful) challenge to antiunion Marriott when it sought to restructure. The Farmworkers using a pretty complex capital strategy to engineer the buyout of an unfriendly company (whose organizing campaign for other reasons was unsuccessful). Union pension funds have targetted anti-union Columbia/HCA over accusations of fraud by the company. The Teamsters and UNITE joined by public employee funds, have battled KMart for many years. The Steelworkers have used capital campaigns to target Wheeling-Pittsburgh, Oregon Steel, and Bayou Steel in recent years.
Even the focus on Bill Patterson seems odd, since the AFL-CIO itself does not control pension assets; it's the associated internationals who exercise greater or lesser control over such funds. Most of the time, the media ignores these corporate campaigns, but this one obviously has strong public policy implications, so it made it into the news. But just because the media chose to cover this campaign does not mean that unions have not been engaging in these corporate campaign struggles against US firms.
This is all tough complicated stuff, so unions usually seize opportunities where they can. Given the law, when and where that influence can be exercised is incredibly tricky. The SEC can be incredibly anti-union, sometimes striking down union-sponsored resolutions purely because it was a union sponosring the proposal for its own interest. Most employment-related resolutions are flatly barred by the SEC. So the unions are required to act in many indirect ways and marshall allies in a system of threats, delays and blocks that force negotiation through such pressure. Seeking to block an IPO to force better working conditions is not some kind of biased, anti-China innovation, but a standard tool that has been used against US corporations. THe idea is that if companies are hit in the pocketbook, they start being more willing to negotiate on labor rights.
As for the idea that China is attacked but not other countries (Stephen Philion raised this as well), it might be worthwhile for people to check out the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers (ICEM) at http://www.icem.org/info/no1-99/toc.html which is the global federation behind the PetroChina campaign as well. In their publications, the federation listed these campaigns:
* in Columbia, demanding the end of antiunion attacks and detention of unionsts by the government * In South Korea, ICEM support for a victory at Hanol Pharmaceuticals that ended yellow-dog antiunion contracts * in Russia, support for striking workers seeking unpaid wages * a global campaign against Rio Tinto, the largest privately owned mining company in the world, challenging its antiunion practices in Australia, South Africa and other countries * an older campaign targetting US-based Bridgestone over their sacking of union workers
Too many folks on this list seem to read the capitalist press and assume that it gives a full briefing on what unions are doing. There is no anti-China bias in the AFL-CIO or any other international union campaigns. As Max indicates, the fact that some rightwingers also hate China gets the PetroChina campaign a bit more press and may make it more successful, but that has nothing to do with bias by the unions, just a happy coincidence of interests - a coincidence of interests that the WTO and IMF abolitionists normally have no problem with.
-- Nathan Newman