Program for a Nascent Movement?

ILWU Asks, What Next After Seattle?

ILWU President Brian McWilliams writes in the union’s paper, The Dispatcher (December 1999), “The labor movement did itself proud in Seattle, demonstrating its resurgence as a progressive social  force in the U.S.” Then he asks, “Where does this burgeoning movement go from here?…What should be the response and program of a progressive union movement in dealing with corporate globalism?”

McWilliams’s answer is that labor, environmentalists, and social justice activists can only deal with attacks by international capital if workers organize internationally. He states that the ILWU is an active member of a number of international workers organizations.  “Through these organizations and the contacts we made in Seattle, we can continue development and active advocacy of international labor standards.”

However, he adds, “we must respect differences in social and cultural norms. For example, although we may want to prohibit child labor, in some countries the income children bring in is crucial to a family’s survival, so such prohibitions must include alternatives to  make sure that the policy doesn’t become an enforcement of poverty.”

McWilliams doesn’t suggest what those alternatives might be, but he does stress that the fledgling movement should also “recognize the shortcomings of labor rights in the developed countries and move to improve them in such areas as prohibition against strikebreaking, obstacles to organizing and collective bargaining, the right to free health care, living wages and protection for the rights of immigrants.”

McWilliams adds that U.S. unions’ international strategy should “address the significant gap in living standards between workers in developed and less-developed countries” and take “a critical position toward U.S. economic and military policy that plays a role in enforcing that living standards gap.”

McWilliams’s proposals could well be part of a minimal guide for  U.S. unions and the Seattle activists. But he doesn’t say how an authoritative program for the movement might be assembled and by whom. Should organized labor call a convention, similar to an AFL-CIO convention, and formulate a program that hopefully would inspire a mobilization of unionists and others to defend and raise living standards?

Should the many organizations, including unions, that worked to build the Seattle demonstrations take the responsibility for formulating an action program that appeals to workers, environmentalists, and social justice activists?

McWilliams didn’t suggest that, in light of the Seattle turnout and militancy, the AFL-CIO ought to immediately turn its attention to testing American workers’ readiness to take on the corporate elite. It’s only a guess, but perhaps McWilliams views the chances of getting the rest of U.S. labor officialdom to commit to building a fighting mass social justice movement as virtually nil. For McWilliams strongly objects to the weak-kneed compromise that AFL-CIO head John Sweeney has offered the U.S. financial and industrial elite.

The official AFL-CIO position asks that labor have a seat at the WTO table when trade agreements are being drafted and that these agreements incorporate enforceable labor and environmental protections. But expecting the corporate trade bureaucrats who run the WTO to enforce labor rights is like asking the fox to guard the hen house.

McWilliams doesn’t say so, but Sweeney’s fox-in-the-hen-house offer to the corporate bosses has a lot in common with labor-management committees and tripartite boards of bosses, politicians, and union bureaucrats. These days, such business-unionist, class-collaborationist schemes and traps are as popular with bureaucrats as their sky-high salaries and gold-plated perks. But if this is McWilliams’s thinking — and if it is, he’s right — then the AFL-CIO, led by John Sweeney, is leading the movement into a demoralizing dead-end with its demand to sit at the WTO table.  If that’s McWilliams’s understanding, then no wonder he skipped over the problem of how to organize and mobilize a mass force that could exact meaningful concessions from the ruling corporate powers.

January 21, 2000