China Trade, the Yellow Peril?

by Charles Walker

Some commentators are saying that the Seattle anti-WTO demonstrations have ensured that foreign trade will be a weighty political issue in this year’s presidential election. But even before the Seattle actions, organized labor intended to campaign against the U.S. Congress’s granting China the same access to the U.S. market that many other countries have. The AFL-CIO effort promises to be as intense as its anti-NAFTA campaign of 1992–93.

“We will flood every Congressional office with phone calls, letters and visits,” James P. Hoffa, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, said. “We will do whatever it takes. And with the momentum from Seattle, we will win” (New York Times, January 11, 2000).

There’s a bigger question for workers than whether the AFL-CIO wins the Congressional battle, or loses, as it did in its anti-NAFTA fight. The bigger question is whether the AFL-CIO’s anti-China trade strategy is in the interests of American workers, and Chinese workers too, for that matter.

The AFL-CIO says that primarily it wants to ensure that China has fair labor standards, that Chinese workers have the right to organize unions, bargain collectively, and otherwise act to achieve a decent standard of living. It denies that it is using its objections as a cover to hide a protectionist agenda to safeguard profits for certain domestic industries in hopes of saving some workers’ jobs.

Nevertheless, labor’s opposition to NAFTA partly meant opposing reductions in trade barriers with Canada, a country whose labor laws are at least equal, if not superior to U.S. labor laws.

Whatever the union tops’ intentions, there’s no denying that the effects of their present China trade policy could be virtually the same as their earlier nakedly protectionist “Buy American” policy. That approach sought to keep American workers on the job by protecting the profits of internationally uncompetitive domestic firms, at the expense of foreign workers. While that may seem understandable to many American workers, clearly it’s not a solidaristic, internationalist approach.

That’s because rather than uniting workers across borders, it allows bosses to continue to whipsaw workers, forcing them to compete with each other, making it easier to conquer them. Clearly, whipsawing workers across national borders is just a variation on whipsawing workers within national borders. Just as clearly, unions that condone whipsawing are attacking the very foundations of unionism.

Of course, it’s too much to expect the present labor union leadership to adopt a socialistic policy of seeking production for human needs, rather than profits. And it’s too much expect the union bureaucrats to fight to liberate workers and the economy from the private profit restraints that shackle productivity, and the horrendous waste, poverty, and insecurity that are inevitable under this undemocratic economic system — capitalism.

Unfortunately, the union chiefs can’t even be expected to take on the bosses over the good paying jobs that daily are lost because of job streamlining, downsizing, and ordinary speedup. In fact, it’s likely that many more good paying jobs are lost due to domestic company cost-cutting than due to international trade. Rather than seeking to mobilize the pro-worker sentiments revealed by the Seattle demonstrations, and still earlier by the widespread public support for the 1994 Teamsters strike against UPS, and fighting to create jobs by reducing the workweek with no reduction in wages, the bureaucrats have virtually traded away the eight-hour day and millions of jobs — in exchange for overtime pay for some and pink slips for others.

Now the union tops are embarking on a political trade fight that may ignite the same narrow passions that once divided workers along racial lines, whites against Chinese, and of course, whites against Blacks. Hopefully, things will not come to that. But even so, American workers will still need to find a  leadership and a program based on their interests, and not the dog-eat-dog choices of capitalism.

January 21, 2000

Korean Auto Strike — International Solidarity Opportunity

On April 6, thousands of Daewoo Motor auto workers began a national strike, protesting the proposed sale of the Daewoo car company by creditor banks to General Motors or Ford (Associated Press, April 9). “Fearing such a sale would result in mass layoffs,” auto workers from Hyundai, Kia, and Ssangyong walked out in solidarity. Reportedly, the strikers are demanding that Daewoo be nationalized or sold to a local company. The South Korean government has issued a “strong warning” against the strikers. It said: “We will sternly deal with illegal strikes…If the management of Daewoo Motor does not normalize soon, our auto industry will fall behind international competition…”

Clearly, Korean ruling circles are intent on protecting their investment in the domestic auto industry, even at the price of selling part of it to U.S. auto behemoths, prime advocates of lean and mean productivity policies. “Government officials and Daewoo Motor creditors have indicated a foreign takeover of the automaker is desirable so that local industry could benefit from the introduction of advanced business practices foreign bidders offer,” Reuters reported on April 4.

The Korean government has used brute force (mass arrests, riot police, tear gas, helicopters, and bulldozers) against auto workers before. Clearly, the Korean auto strikers could use some international solidarity, and fast. But no solidarity could be more potent than the solidarity of the United Auto Workers Union (UAW), headed by President Stephen Yokich. A sympathy walkout by auto workers at Ford and General Motors, opposing the takeover of Daewoo, would not only tremendously raise the price of the proposed takeover for the U.S. firms; it would raise the level of international solidarity far higher than the usual labor-sponsored international conferences, paper resolutions, and token actions.

While such an international job action would be astounding, it would be consistent with the AFL-CIO’s newly proclaimed advocacy of “international solidarity with our brothers and sisters in emerging nations as well as in developed nations to create equitable, democratic, and sustainable growth.” Moreover, it would signal that a major section of the U.S. labor officialdom had truly turned its back on narrow, job-trust protectionism, and that it was sincere in claiming that its trade policy proposals are essentially designed to back up exploited workers everywhere.

Such a sign would be welcome especially from the UAW leadership, which has been notorious in the past for opposing the import of union-made cars. In any event, if Ford or General Motors gains control over Daewoo, it can be expected that that control will be used to pit U.S. auto workers and Korean auto workers against one another, much like the auto firms today successfully play off UAW auto locals against each other in competition for jobs. The Korean strike offers U.S. auto workers and the UAW leadership the opportunity to turn the tables on auto bosses both here and overseas.

— C.W