VIEWPOINT
International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations
Rampe du Pont-Rouge, 8, CH-1213 Petit-Lancy (Switzerland)
tel: + 41 22 793 22 33, fax + 41 22 793 22 38, e-mail: [email protected] - www.iuf.org
president: Frank Hurt, general secretary: Ron Oswald, press officer: Peter Rossman

Geneva, February 11, 2000

The following text will appear as an editorial in the forthcoming issue of the IUF News Bulletin (1-2/2000).

The collapse of the WTO "millennium round" talks in Seattle should be welcomed by the international trade union movement for three reasons. First, because the toothless proposals offered in response to trade union demands for firm language on labour rights failed to meet the urgent need for enforceable mechanisms to ensure international compliance with core conventions of the ILO. Left on course, the negotiations would have brought substantial gains for the corporate agenda and nothing for ours.

Second: the deadlock temporarily halts the WTO's further advance into agriculture and services (including health, education, and what the WTO calls "environmental and cultural services"), giving us a breathing space in which to defend these vital areas from corporate attack. We have gained time to educate, organize and mobilize around counter-proposals and programs of our own.

Third: Seattle effectively brought the WTO into the forefront of public debate, where it belongs. Global trade and investment have far too many implications for our work, our communities, and our environment to be left to the corporate representatives and lobbyists who have been writing the rules of the globalization project. It will now be considerably more difficult for both national governments and the WTO to resist the growing public demand for greater transparency and accountability in the way they do business.

The Seattle demonstrations were an impressive manifestation of the depth, variety and potential strength of global resistance to corporate domination. But they were not responsible for the breakdown of the negotiations, which was primarily due to the structural tensions at the heart of the current world trade regime. The major fault line in Seattle was between the US and the European Union, as each sought greater reach for its "own" transnational industries and agribusiness complexes while attempting to placate an aroused public opinion. Some of these differences will be reconciled, as they were at the January Montreal meeting which produced the "biosafety" agreement on international trade in genetically modified organisms. Other sources of friction will prove more difficult to resolve.

We cannot rely, however, on the existing trade blocs, or shifting political alignments, or the proponents of a dubious "third way" to do our work for us if we are serious about transforming the structure of world trade. President Clinton's endorsement of a labour rights clause at the WTO must be set alongside the continual refusal of the US government to ratify and observe ILO core conventions on freedom of association and collective bargaining. A recent ICFTU report called violations of these rights in the US "massive, ongoing, and appalling". The EU, despite its recent advocacy of "multifunctionality" (a concept we support), continues to promote the destruction of small farmers at home and rural producers abroad through its massive export subsidies. So, too, does the US, where family farmers have become an endangered species.

Seattle highlighted the shameful marginalization of the developing countries from an organization which purports to represent the consensus views of its international member states. While we support the call by developing nations for an end to exclusion and for equal rights at the negotiating table, we must continue to expose and refute the position of governments whose opposition to a social clause conceals a "comparative advantage" based on repression, bonded and child labour. The government of India, which continues to publicly campaign against the inclusion of labour rights at the WTO, showed the oppressive reality behind this ideological posture when it recently arrested hundreds of trade unionists and used the armed forces to break strikes by dock and power workers seeking a moratorium on privatization. The issue is not, as some governments and NGOs would have us believe, a conflict between "North" and "South". It is how to defend the democratic and trade union rights of workers on both sides of the development divide from a globalization process which is undermining these rights while ravaging living and working conditions, public services, and the environment around the world.

The WTO's mandate to eliminate "non-tariff barriers to trade" rests on the fundamental requirement, inherited from GATT, to exclude from regulation "production processes and methods" (PPMs), i.e. the social and environmental conditions under which commodities and services are produced and enter into international commerce. For the WTO, a banana, once it crosses national borders, is a banana like any other. It may not be distinguished from other bananas even if the workers who produced it have had their union busted by death squads, or have been routinely exposed to lethal pesticides banned in their country of manufacture. A child's toy is a child's toy, and no country may "discriminate" against its import because it has been produced by women workers subjected to periodic pregnancy tests and locked in firetraps patrolled by private armies.

The reduction of all goods and services to tradable commodities through the exclusion of PPMs makes it possible for the WTO to strike down as trade barriers laws designed to protect worker and consumer health, public services, the environment and food safety, while easing the way for the corporate appropriation of natural and even genetic resources which need protection, not commercialization, for the common good.

The fundamental task of the trade union movement has always been to regulate, through collective organization and collective bargaining, the processes and methods of production. The entire structure of democratic civil society rests on this foundation. It is now under direct attack from the WTO, which is dismantling the layers of regulation and social and environmental defense painstakingly built up by civil society over more than a century.

We will not change the WTO by adopting its language or seeking minor amendments to its rules. "Side agreements" on labour rights and the environment were appended to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to sell the scheme to a skeptical public. They have failed to halt the general erosion of union bargaining power and trade union rights and the wider expansion of dangerous, polluting workplaces from the border areas to which they were previously confined. Under NAFTA, moreover, Mexican workers and peasants have experienced a substantial decline in living standards, while US and Canadian workers are still waiting for the benefits of "free trade" to trickle down.

The convergence in Seattle of international labour with a wide spectrum of NGOs around a common platform of rolling back corporate power previewed the kind of global coalition we need to carry though our vision of the global economy. The labour movement has never been for "free trade" as an end in itself, but for trade that raises living standards and promotes sustainable development and democratic rights for all. The challenge now is to move beyond protest to the more difficult task of elaborating a new international framework for subordinating corporate appetites to human needs.

Above all, mechanisms must be found for disciplining companies that violate core conventions of the ILO, an organization whose remit at present is limited to measures against member states. The Pinochet affair and the international criminal tribunals on ex-Yugoslavia and Rwanda established the principle that heads of state are not exempt from international law. Should corporations not be held directly accountable for human rights violations?

We need "rules-based trade", but not the current rules of the WTO, whose entire edifice is built on shielding transnational companies from effective regulation. Agriculture, particularly issues affecting food security, and essential public services including health and education, need to be declared "WTO-free zones". The defining principles and rules of a global economy geared to human needs must ultimately incorporate not only the core conventions of the ILO, but the other international agreements which mark the emergence of global civil society from the wreckage of fascism and world war: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the covenants on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and on Civil and Political Rights, and the multilateral agreements on the environment, among others. These rights must be recognized and enforced if global solidarity is to take precedence over global exploitation.

The International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations (IUF) is an international trade union federation composed of 346 trade unions in 120 countries with an affiliated membership of 2.6 million members. It is based in Geneva, Switzerland.