Surely with globalisation a key strategy should be to forge international labor links and for labor in developed countries to press for improved wages and working conditions in less developed countries.
As long as labor is much cheaper, benefits fewer, environmental and other controls weaker in developing countries, capital will usually find it more profitable to invest there rather than developed countries.
--- Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
> Jim Straub wrote:
>
> >I challenge anyone in our list to point to an
> alternate, workable
> > strategy to rebuild the labor movement up from 7%
> of the private
> > sector in the US's current political climate and
> alignment of forces.
> ======================================
> Unfortunately, the decline in union density over the
> past three decades
> doesn't primarily turn on the question of strategy,
> as both sides in this
> exchange seem to believe.
>
> Intead, the crisis of the labour movement is
> essentially a by-product of
> globalization and the opening of new markets, which
> have given Western-based
> multinationals easier access to a worldwide pool of
> cheap labour. No amount
> of theorizing will be able to adequately compensate
> for the fact that unions
> arise in conditions of labour shortage, and decline
> when there is a surplus
> available to do the work.
>
> Unions expanded apace with the capitalist industrial
> economies in the 19th
> and greater part of the 20th centuries. Labour
> shortages gave workers
> progressively greater organizing opportunities and
> bargaining power. They
> pursued their objectives illegally, militantly, and
> often violently until
> capitalist states seeking industrial peace finally
> sanctioned and contained
> working class demands to organize and negotiate in
> an institutional web.
> Today, the greater potential for union organizing -
> where discussion of
> strategy is more immediately relevant - is in the
> high-growth developing
> countries.
>
> Even if you abruptly lengthened hours and cut pay
> and benefits and further
> degraded working conditions in the US and the other
> core capitalist
> countries tomorrow, that would be a necessary
> condition for the growth of
> trade unionism, but not a sufficient one. Workers
> also need some assurance
> that if they risk job action it will not cost them
> their jobs or, failing
> that, there will be other jobs available. Recall
> that the great burst of
> union organizing in the 30s did not occur at the
> depths of the depression,
> when unemployment was at its peak, but as the
> economy began to fitfully
> recover and there was at least the appearance of
> increased demand for
> assembly line workers.
>
> The current generation of workers is dispirited
> rather than hopeful. The
> reluctance of unorganized workers in new sectors to
> unionize or of unionized
> workers in older sectors to resist concessions is
> primarily the result of
> the pervasive job insecurity produced by the
> heightened mobility of capital.
> The union leaderships are mainly a reflection rather
> than cause of this
> sentiment, and their mostly unproductive internal
> conflicts, like those on
> the left, the result of frustration with changed
> historical circumstances
> which lie largely beyond their control.
>
> That's not to say these discussions shouldn't be
> had, but not, it seems to
> me, in the absence of context as starting point.
>
>
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