The strongest bond of human sympathy outside the family relation should be one uniting working people of all nations and tongues and kindreds.
—Abraham Lincoln

A country or even a city (Ciudad Juarez, for example) can become open for business in many ways—or at least many variations on a couple of ways. Needless to say, the world is profoundly complex. Generalizing, I mention two possible ways here which I will write about in more detail soon. My word choice and inflexion are, admittedly, a result of my bias.

One way is via an increased police state or military state of terror and repression (Haiti, over and over) of Labour rights (Colombia, right now), keeping wages low, protest oppressed, and giving, say, paramilitary protection for foreign interests to come in, pay off a few, and exploit resources and workers. Unfortunately, multinational corporations in the West rarely if ever bring with them the laws that regulate them in their original country (labour laws, human rights laws etc). Indeed, those laws and regulations are the reasons they leave—feeling they cut too much into profit, and profits are readily available elsewhere (despite the difficulty of moving). I’m making it black and white, but the math is clear.

The other way is to try to create stability through decreasing oppression and increasing the rights of workers and labour groups. This can make the country more stable, although it can be discomforting to the lock on Power of the Powers that be, and decrease external business interests (because they have to pay a decent wage, making leaving their own country less attractive). Remember, it was the perceived cut into profits because of these same enforcements (labour rights etc) that made the corporation leave in the first place.

Now I don’t deny many problems of corruption and gross hierarchy in labour movements all over the world. But labour in the general press seems to be almost entirely left out of the conversation about increasing human rights and standards of living in the developing world. This despite the fact of the vital role of solidarity and labour in increasing standards of living and human rights in Canada and the US and Europe, under brutal conditions at the end of the 1800s and through the 1900s, being undeniable (I can site endless examples).

Where did not only civil rights come from (solidarity), but the eight hour work day, a decent wage, weekends, health benefits, the right to associate etc?

For countries all over Africa, and in Haiti, the conversation among Leaders, the Powerful and the Media seems to be largely between the necessity of the free market and/or the problem of aid. Indeed, if the market is “safe” for foreign investment—regardless of domestic oppression, even in the extreme—the country generally gets a big thumbs up.

Take former President Bill Clinton, whom I strongly salute for his relentless work in Africa and, recently, in Haiti. His commitment seems to be sincere. Nonetheless, his comments on Colombia in Foreign Policy Magazine recently seem to be typical if not dangerous by what they omit. And why omit them? He asks this question about President Uribe of Colombia:

There are lots of fascinating leaders in Latin America worth studying. But I think it’s worth looking at Colombia. How has Medellín been given back to the people of Colombia? We all know President Uribe has faced criticism in the U.S., but how did Medellín go from being the drug capital of the world, one of the most dangerous places on Earth, to the host city of the 50th anniversary of the Inter-American Development Bank? I would look at that.

Fair enough. But in his praise, he fails to mention that in the area of labor and labor rights in Colombia, since 1986, over two thousand trade unionists have allegedly been killed:

Since 1986 [up to February 2008], there have been more than 2,515 documented killings of trade unionists. Many have been tied to multi-national corporations. The trade agreement would increase the presence and power of multi-nationals.

That may not be ethnic cleansing—though it may largely be people of the same ethnicity—but it clearly is ideological or class cleansing. Is that not also a crime against humanity?

And according to the NFB film The Coca-Cola Case:

Columbia is the trade union murder capital of the world. Since 2002, more than 470 workers’ leaders have been brutally killed, usually by paramilitaries hired by private companies intent on crushing the unions. Among these unscrupulous corporate brands is the poster boy for American business: Coca-Cola.

Here’s the trailer.

If you read through this interesting article from Regan Boychuk on Haiti—The Vultures Circle Haiti at Every Opportunity, Natural or Man-made—you will see more of what I am talking about. Open for business does not by any means necessarily mean anything about human rights, labour rights or a decent wage.

An excerpt:

The [American (and Canadian?) supported] Duvalier dictatorships (1957-86) killed tens of thousands of Haitians, but they also opened Haiti up to do assembly work for foreign corporations in the late 1960s. The tyrants were swiftly rewarded with a ten-fold increase in international aid—most of which was stolen or otherwise misspent, but donors didn’t much care as long as their business interests were being attended to.

Haitian workers were “closely supervised and controlled by the government”, which kept “wage rates at very low levels” – “undoubtedly… the single most important factor influencing the location of assembly industries in Haiti”, according to economist Monique Garrity.

Even the World Bank admitted the “assembly industry is largely outside the Haitian economy” and made “no fiscal contribution.”

During this experiment in sweatshop development between the 1970s and 1980s, absolute poverty in Haiti is estimated to have increased 60 per cent—from 50 to 80 per cent of the population.

A shorter version of the article is here, in the Georgia Straight.

Milton Friedman once said (and I’ve heard Clinton echo the phrase) that, paraphrasing, capitalism (or free market economics) is not sufficient for democracy, but it’s necessary if there is to be a democracy. In other words, without capitalism there can not be democracy. There is truth in that, of course, depending on definitions of democracy and capitalism.

However, I would suggest (and Milton likely never would!) that, with a cursory glance at history and present history, labour rights and worker rights—the right to organize, to speak freely—are both sufficient and necessary for democracy, because they are a huge part of a democracy. If you have one, you likely have the other.

The fight is never about grapes or lettuce. It is always about people.
—Cesar Chavez

How can anything be considered truly free market when the setting of wages, between, say, wages that would lead a corporation to break even and wages that would lead a corporation to go bankrupt, is always arbitrary? The market doesn’t choose. Between the possibilities, which can be immense, the corporation chooses. In self-defense against, say, a wage that workers see as oppressive or unfair, the workers fight back.

Those who fight for economic deregulation, so-called, are generally very happy to regulate wages. Being forced to work ten hours a day is a regulation. Being forced to work seven days a week is a regulation.

It is no coincidence that both totalitarian societies like Communist Russia and their oppressed satellites (Poland’s Solidarity Trade Union Movement opposed this oppression in the 1980s) and deeply fascist totalitarian societies like Nazi Germany or Pinochet’s Chile have always crushed democratically run unions. The same we see in Colombia today, in the extreme, Clinton’s praise notwithstanding.

I realize I’m not being precisely precise, but think about it. Any comments are appreciated.

Lots of love,

Pete

This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 1:24 pm and is filed under posted. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.