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... of town. " Which is to say, there is no Richard J. Daley in Seattle, and the blue meanies of the Chicago police -- who happily walloped passers-by in their pursuit of demonstrators -- have been supplanted here by a force that hasn't walloped even violent demonstrators for fear of offending the peaceful ones. In all the news coverage on Seattle TV Tuesday night, there was just one shot of a gun being pulled -- not by a cop or a demonstrator, but by a WTO delegate frustrated by his inability to get to the hall.
One of the dignitaries who couldn't get into the WTO's opening ceremonies was the featured speaker -- Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. It was the second of two disasters to befall Albright in Seattle, the first being a private meeting the day previous with AFL-CIO president John Sweeney and other union leaders. Sources report that Sweeney & Co. let Albright know the full extent of their rage at the Clinton administration's deal to let China into the WTO. Indeed, relations between the Clinton White House and labor are about as icy now as they " ve ever been. In October, the administration put forth the idea that the WTO should form a working group to study and assess the effect of trade on labor rights and standards.
This fell far short of the AFL-CIO's position, which is that the WTO should develop a code for labor standards and rights, and administer sanctions to nations that violate them, just as the WTO currently administers sanctions against nations that violate property rights. Even so, Sweeney agreed to sign a letter commending the administration for this small step, chiefly, as he explained it, because a number of prominent business leaders signed the letter too, thereby acknowledging that trade might possibly have some effect on workers. But no labor leader in a union impacted by trade actually believed that a study group would accomplish anything; neither did Sweeney. The presidents who'd seen their members' jobs exported or threatened by free trade -- chiefly, George Becker of the Steelworkers, Steve Yokich of the Auto Workers, Jim Hoffa of the Teamsters -- let Sweeney know they thought he'd been snookered. The federation president was already on the defensive on trade, then, when the Clinton administration announced its deal to admit China to the WTO. For labor, this instantly negated all the kind words that Clinton and his lieutenants were mouthing about raising the profile of labor and environmental concerns within the WTO.
The WTO acts by consensus, certainly by consensus of its major members, and the prospect that China -- which independent authorities estimate has at least 850, 000 workers in forced-labor camps run by the army, where child labor is rampant and unions are viewed as treasonous -- would permit the WTO to pass any binding labor code was nonexistent. With the administration's decision on China, Sweeney himself felt snookered. He'd signed that damned letter, he'd prodded the federation to endorse Al Gore, and now the administration had abruptly signaled that it didn't wish the WTO ever to enact even the most modest of labor standards. Two weeks ago, Sweeney delivered a speech saying that without binding labor standards, the round of negotiations that the WTO would begin in Seattle should never even commence.
In its 60 -year relationship with the Democratic Party, labor has grown inured to the thousand casual affronts the party inflicts upon it, but the China deal, coming when it did, was a bit much. At least partly in consequence, the rhetoric at labor's Tuesday rally -- a stunning event with 15, 000 unionists and 5, 000 activists from environmental, human-rights, church and consumer groups, with stilt-walkers decked out as corporate demons, sporting death's-heads and Edward Scissorhands fingers -- was a throwback to a time when labor was an outsider to the political system. AFSCME president Gerry Mcentee, the union head most deeply enmeshed in Beltway inside politics, seemed to lift his talk from Karl Marx's manifesto. "The system turns everything into a commodity!" he bellowed. "A rain forest in Brazil, a library in Philadelphia, a hospital in Alberta! We have to name that system: It is corporate capitalism!" There's a lot more at work here than pique, of course. When it comes to the WTO, Gerry Mcentee and John Sweeney are outsiders, just like the union leaders of 100 years ago, who could get no one in the national government to hear them out. As the rally made clear, their frustration is matched by European trade unionists.
The governments in power in France, Italy, Germany and Britain are theirs, after all; they are socialist or social democratic or labor. Both separately and together, though, these governments are even more relentless advocates of free trade, devoid of binding labor standards, than Bill Clinton's. Addressing a meeting of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) -- the global federation of national union federations -- in Seattle on Monday, European Union Trade Minister Pascal Lamy said the EU was committed to basic human rights in the workplace as a fundamental right -- but that developing nations would never support this within the WTO, and a separate forum should take it up, without even considering setting binding standards. "The European Union needs to dialogue with developing nations, " he told the assembled unionists, many of whom concluded that Lamy might need to dialogue with himself. Some of the historically left European governments proclaim themselves the champions of the developing nations, whose governments are resolutely opposed to transnational labor or environmental codes. The problem, as ICFTU head Bill Jordan notes, is that they have "no class analysis of the Third World" -- where the elites represented in government profit from trade deals no matter how grotesque are the sweatshops they create. While support for labor standards is nowhere to be heard from the trade delegates of the developing nations, it was sounded repeatedly by the South African, Caribbean, Malaysian, Mexican and Chinese union activists (some of whom had spent years in prison for their efforts) who addressed Tuesday's AFL rally. "What's good for Ford workers in Detroit is good for Ford workers in Mexico and South Africa, " said Glen Mpufane, a South African mine worker who called for a global minimum wage. (Following Mcentee's Marxian lead, he concluded, "Workers of the world, unite -- against the WTO!" ) Mass opinion has always been dubious about free trade; that is one reason why the AFL-CIO was able to persuade House Democrats to kill the administration's proposal for a fast-track process to approve trade deals (that is, a process with no possibility of congressional amendment of the deal) in 1997.
One recent University of Maryland poll shows 78 percent public support for the idea of making labor and environmental concerns a factor in all trade deals. Elite opinion, however, has long viewed the case for free trade as axiomatic. Free trade made nations richer, which made them more democratic, except when it didn't (one of those pesky anomalies the theory hasn't fully explained away). But labor has already forced one key segment of the elite -- the administration and its consulting ideologists at the Democratic Leadership Council -- to alter its rhetorical position on trade. This week, everyone from Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers to trade rep Charlene Barshevsky -- has suddenly been talking up the virtues of a humane global-trade order. "We must pay more attention to labor issues, " Summers wrote in Monday's Financial Times, casually jettisoning the beliefs of a lifetime. It is rhetoric, of course.
The working group the administration seeks will be powerless, and the entry of China will effectively negate all subsequent attempts at protecting worker rights. But rhetoric, however insincere, can have an effect. In this case, it reflects not only the political needs of Al Gore, who can't afford to have the administration estrange labor any more until the primary season has passed, but a shift in the intellectual climate. The momentum for laissez-faire policies in domestic affairs has peaked. The war on the state waged by Reagan, Thatcher and Gingrich has been called off. Only at the level of world trade does the cult of laissez faire continue to hold sway, but the case is getting harder and harder to make.
If increased wage equity and environmental safeguards are once again valid concerns in national affairs, it grows harder and harder to argue that they " re mere sideshows to the transnational economy and society. While elite opinion begins to waver, popular opinion has now gained a focus. At Monday night's march for debt forgiveness, at Tuesday's labor march, people came out of their shops and businesses to cheer the marchers on. While the trashing and gassing was proceeding apace on Tuesday afternoon, just three blocks away office workers laughed as a chorus sung mock Christmas carols with anti-WTO lyrics. There was anger at the inconveniences the marches caused, anger at the anarchists for sure.
But on the whole, the protesters in Seattle were nobody's outside agitators. These were the kids at U Wash, the ladies from church, the guys at Boeing. It was Seattle that was marching this week. To the WTO, Singapore has never looked better. Bibliography:
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