Ensuring a Decent Global Workplace; Labor rights belong in trade agreements.
Linking workers' rights to international trade is an idea whose time has come and stayed, despite the best efforts of free trade ideologues to chase it away. In looming congressional debates about "fast track" negotiating authority, the Bush administration and Congress confront powerful demands from workers, trade unionists and a wider public for rules protecting human rights and labor rights, not just corporate investments, in trade agreements.</br></br>"That's protectionism" is a stock reply of government officials, international economists, multinational executives and many pundits trying to make a labor rights-trade link go away. Instead of engaging critics on the merits, their one-dimensional argument goes like this: (1) Expanded trade spurs investment, growth and wealth creation in developing countries; (2) after they can afford it, developing countries and companies operating in them will stop violating workers' rights and share the wealth.</br></br>The first proposition is plausible, leaving aside debates about long-term vs. speculative investment and sustainable vs. destructive growth. But the conclusion does not follow. After wealth has been created, respecting workers' rights and paying them fairly is still a choice, one that doesn't always depend on economics. Instead, choosing justice for workers is driven by organizing, bargaining and political action, increasingly on an international scale.</br></br>In Sri Lanka a few weeks ago, I met dozens of young women from factories in that country's fast-growing free trade zones who explained that the government's Board of Investment sets up company- controlled "worker councils" and gets rid of workers who try to form real unions.</br></br>China's economy has grown impressively in recent years, but workers attempting to form independent unions there are dismissed, harassed and jailed. The rate of fatal factory fires keeps pace with the booming apparel export sectors of Bangladesh and Thailand. When Malaysia tried to pass a law allowing independent union formation in its burgeoning electronics sector, U.S.-based multinationals mounted a collective threat to decamp for Indonesia unless the law was reversed. They got their way.