Human Rights for Workers / Bulletin No. V-15 / http://www.senser.com / Robert A. Senser, editor, hrfw@senser.com.
Despite their active participation in the mass demonstration at Seattle a year ago, and smaller protest events since then, union leaders are not campaigning to shut down the World Trade Organization and its two sister organizations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Instead, a global network of unions is working to reform those three institutions, and making some (slow) headway with two of them, the World Bank and the IMF.
Some solitary souls within the labor movement, however, think this is a bad mistake. They maintain that the reform strategy legitimizes and revitalizes organizations that should die, and the sooner the better for working people in both developed and developing countries.
One of the most articulate exponents of this position is Gerard Greenfield, currently a visiting researcher with the Canadian Auto Workers, who most recently was the education program organizer for the International Union of Food Workers' Associations in East/Southeast Asia. Long a critic of globalization, he aims his sharp analytical tools particularly at the WTO in a lengthy new paper published on a Canadian Website called WTOAction, as part of a series in its section on research. Greenfield challenges two basic ideas about the WTO and other free trade arrangements, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA):
1. That they are simply agreements and institutions. No, he writes, they really are "regimes," specifically "arrangement[s] of political power between countries and between corporations and governments."
2. That they are simply about trade. No, he writes, they are more about global investment, with the concerted agenda of "increasing the power and freedom of corporations, especially of TNCs [transnational corporations]."
To bolster his argument that the "freedom [of corporations] is what defines globalization," Greenfield quotes Percy Barnevik, president of the ABB Industrial Group, one of the world's largest multinational enterprises: "I would define globalization as the freedom for my group of companies to invest where it wants when it wants, to produce what it wants, to buy and sell where it wants, and support the fewest restrictions possible coming from labor laws and social conventions."
Rolling Back Progress Made In Historic Struggles
"Getting rid of these restrictions," Greenfield comments, "has meant redefining domestic regulations in ways that protect the interests of TNCs while placing new restrictions on the ability of governments to regulate them." He cites data from the UN World Investment Report 2000: Of the 1,038 changes that governments made worldwide in their foreign investment laws, "94% increased the freedom of foreign investment and reduced government regulation." Moreover, the rulings of NAFTA and the WTO are "rolling back social and environmental legislation...[and] rolling back the past victories of labor and social movements."
As a result of Seattle, other protests, and increasingly negative public opinion about globalization, the WTO is undergoing a crisis of legitimacy, Greenfield says. "Those unions, NGOs, and social coalitions which want to reform agencies like the WTO...are helping the WTO out of its crisis of legitimacy...when the very thing we should be doing is deepening the crisis." He advocates a massive action and education campaign to abolish the WTO, subordinate multinational corporations to democratic controls, and reverse the tide of globalization.
Impossible? He quotes an editorial in the September 23 issue of the Economist magazine: "The protesters...are right that the tide of 'globalization,' powerful as the engines driving it may be, can be turned back," a fact that, according to the Economist, "makes the protesters--and, crucially, the strand of popular opinion that sympathizes with them--so terribly dangerous." Greenfield titles his paper "The Success of Being Dangerous: Resisting Free Trade & Investment Regimes.":
