Seattle: U.S. Labor Rearms, but Faces Thorny Issues
by Ron Lare
The author is a member of Local 600 of the United Auto Workers (UAW) in the Detroit area.
The World Trade Organization (WTO) meets to plan more efficient exploitation of workers. The bosses who put the WTO meeting in Seattle forgot about workers’ history. Workers took over the city in a general strike back in 1919, February 6–11. Seattle was important in the 1934 West Coast Longshore strike. Seattle progressives prominently supported the Nicaraguan revolution against Ronald Reagan’s “Contras.” Now, the November-December events in Seattle in 1999 may be the biggest shock to the bosses since the 1960s Vietnam War and Civil Rights demonstrations.
During the week beginning November 29, 1999, up to 50,000 people demonstrated in Seattle. City police, state troopers, and National Guard troops used tear gas, beatings, rubber and wooden bullets, the declaration of a “civil emergency,” a 24-hour curfew, and almost 600 arrests, not just to stop some window-breaking, but to say, “The rich of the world own this city and the planet.”
But Seattle was a defeat for the bosses. Some WTO meetings were canceled. The WTO did not get anything done. The Seattle police chief resigned the following week. Clinton tried to save Gore by making statements that sabotage future WTO work from the point of view of the big corporations.
The Seattle events carried further the kind of national mobilization by organized labor that was done for newspaper strikers in Detroit in June 1997. Seattle’s protests were the most prominent associated with U.S. labor since Solidarity Day I and II in Washington, D.C., in the 1980s. And the Seattle demos were politically more powerful:
This article looks at some controversial issues around the events.
Yokich and Hoffa: Militant Wing of AFL-CIO Leadership?
The October 1999 Labor Notes quoted Martha Baskin, who had organized for AFL-CIO demonstrations in Seattle, but resigned as King County Labor Council Fair Trade Representative in September: “If the AFL-CIO thinks such an organization [the WTO] is going to incorporate worker rights and child labor laws within its undemocratic structure, then they are, perhaps, living on another planet… I feel the national AFL-CIO, state and county labor councils mimic the autocratic structure of the WTO.”
The AFL-CIO bureaucrats did not want an alliance with some of the people in the streets, including very angry youth. But the “leaders” can blame themselves for the angry youth. The “leaders” have failed to fight for more jobs, and failed to organize the unorganized. Unionized youth could be the cutting edge of a powerful labor movement, but have been left in the streets without unions, jobs, or real leaders. Youth who do join unions are turned off by leaders who repress union dissidents and back the same politicians they protested in Seattle.
News coverage depicted UAW President Steve Yokich and Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa, Jr., in Seattle as the “hard” wing of the labor movement, over against AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. True, Hoffa and Yokich showed more independence of Clinton’s WTO policy. But that does not mean more independence of the Democratic Party. Yokich and Hoffa ally with the Democrats’ Gephardt wing. Let’s look at one of their policies.
Is It Progressive to Punish China?
The union bureaucrats are organizing for a Congressional vote to reject the recently negotiated U.S.-China trade agreement. Why?
We are told that China represses its workers, won’t let them join unions, and uses convict labor.
True enough. But from China to India to Haiti and on around the world, U.S. corporations exploit low-wage, repressed labor. Banning trade with nations victimized by U.S. corporations makes no sense. The U.S. is no model, with the world’s highest imprisonment rate (one-fourth of the world’s prisoners) and prisoners forced to work, and with rampant union-busting and sweatshops full of undocumented workers. Why single out China? Why don’t these union leaders fight harder against the real enemy at home, the corporations?
China is targeted partly as “red” or “socialist.” China isn’t socialist: its economy and government are not controlled by workers. There is also a racist undertone to the anti-China rhetoric, a suggestion that “these people” are willing to work for nothing, will take “our jobs.”
In any event, it’s deadly for the labor movement to try to punish China. Even if Gephardt is against China trade and the WTO is for it, anti-Chinese measures put labor in a de facto alliance with the WTO’s own anti-Chinese campaign: privatization.
The WTO wants to engage China in order to privatize what remains of substantial public ownership of Chinese production. Similarly, in the U.S., the bosses want to privatize municipal, health, and other public services. The labor movement should stand against privatization everywhere. (See articles elsewhere in this issue on privatization in China and protests against it by Chinese workers.)
An ironic reason behind some opposition to trade with “red” China is that China is seen as a competitor to the G-7 industrialized powers. So we must say to China (and Russia), “There is no more room at the top.” But it’s ridiculous for the big capitalist nations to discriminate against China because it might become…a big capitalist nation!
And singling out a non-white nation always has a racist aspect. (See Alexander Cockburn on the anti-China campaign in the December 1999 issue of Working Assets.)
“Reform” the World Trade Organization?
But still, shouldn’t we use the WTO to demand better working conditions, eliminating slave labor and child labor everywhere in the world?
First, the WTO will not develop poor nations, but keep them dependent on the “advanced” nations. In Seattle, speakers from developing nations said they are trapped in an imperialist world with no way out or up.
Second, if we get the WTO to intervene in national economies, the WTO will pursue its own agenda, not higher labor standards.
Before the Mandela government came into office in South Africa, the UAW used to remind its members that the U.S. and South Africa were the only two major industrial countries without laws against replacement of strikers. Striker replacement laws would be endangered by WTO intervention. The only thing that would bother the WTO bosses about child or slave labor would be laws preventing scab replacement of striking children or slaves.
In Brazil, every worker has the right to join a union, without a representation election. From the WTO point of view, that’s obviously got to go!
In some countries, corporations must ask local government permission to fire workers. That’s a barrier to “efficiency.” That’s got to go.
European workers have more vacation and sick time than U.S. workers. The WTO would attack those benefits, blocking the road for U.S. workers.
“Reforming” the WTO by demanding it intervene in labor issues is not only useless; it’s dangerous. WTO intervention would tend to “equalize” everything downward. We need to abolish the WTO, not “reform” it. We need international labor unions, not more efficient international bosses’ unions like the WTO.
The Teamsters’ top bureaucrat, James Hoffa, Jr., says, “We want a seat at the table.” But unions are not on the agenda — they’re on the menu. Demanding the WTO intervene to protect workers’ rights is like inviting the cops to protect our picket lines.
Or Build a World Union Organization!
“‘What is good for a Ford worker in Detroit must also be good for a worker in South Africa,’ exclaimed a representative of the South African Labor Network, adding, ‘It must also be good for a Ford worker in Hermosillo, Mexico.’” (Report on Seattle in Labor Notes, January 2000.)
The November 1999 UAW magazine Solidarity praises international solidarity: “After being permanently replaced…members of Steelworkers Local 850…won back their jobs and the best contract for the tire industry in decades. German-owned Continental AG was determined to break the union at the General Tire plant in Charlotte, North Carolina… Unity in the ranks…was matched by the solidarity of union members from seven nations. Eight hundred South African Continental workers staged a two-hour work stoppage in support…”
However, the UAW has not organized the Japanese auto assembly “transplants” in the U.S. It’s ridiculous for Yokich to demand that the WTO unionize China. Yokich could start next door, by threatening to strike Ford or GM if they won’t recognize the unions of workers’ choice in Mexico, and by working toward joint contract expiration dates on both sides of the border.
Just as low-wage factories in the U.S. South have to be organized, not boycotted, to protect workers’ interests South and North, so too, U.S. workers’ interests can be protected only by united action with workers in other countries.
Trade Wars Lead to Shooting Wars
“Free trade vs. fair trade” is the wrong question. There can be no “fair” trade in an unfair world. Part of that unfairness is the treatment of poor countries. Part of it is unfairness to workers in more industrialized nations like the U.S. We have common interests.
One Seattle protest condemned the “dumping” of steel from abroad in the U.S. But if all the workers of the world protest each other’s products, what will happen? Slogans like “Buy American” and “America First” set workers fighting each other at the borders instead of uniting internationally to fight the bosses. Trade wars lead to shooting wars.
What Should We Do?
The labor movement found itself allying in Seattle with militant and internationalist forces, including socialists. Labor must stop building cooperation with corporations and become more militant, anti-big-business, and internationalist.
We should send resolutions of support and donations to demonstrators and unions repressed in Seattle. We can work toward truly “international” unions, to fight the WTO and any other international bosses’ unions.
If the WTO disappeared tomorrow, economic repression would not. The international capitalist economy would still need to be fought with as much international labor solidarity as possible.
Labor Party and Labor’s Friends
Next year, our union leaders will tell us to support a Democrat whose policies they protested in Seattle. An alternative, the new Labor Party, is supported by several major unions from the Mineworkers to the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW, now part of PACE), and dozens of local labor bodies. Seattle showed that other progressive forces will unite with labor in fighting the system.
“We have to name the system…”
In fighting the WTO, workers realize that they are not just separately fighting each company’s bosses, or each nation’s government, but an international economic system. Despite his support for the Democrats, AFSCME’s Gerald McEntee went beyond the union bureaucracy’s usual rhetoric, as reported by Marc Cooper in The Nation: “We refuse to be marketized…We have to name the system and that system is corporate capitalism.”