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Al Gore takes on challenger online
The vice president takes his aggressive attacks on Bill Bradley into cyberspace.
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Day of the Jackal
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In the late 1980s, for instance, historian Jeremy Brecher and union organizer Tim Costello began a series of articles about the future of the American labor movement. Both writers have roots in the valleys of New England, where the Industrial Revolution came early but where in the mid-1980s hard-working mill towns watched helplessly as corporations moved their operations to lower-wage communities in the South or overseas. Brecher and Costello thought they were recounting how American unions and communities could fight such plant closings.

But as they looked closer, they realized they were on to a bigger story: How a radically changing global economy gave corporations a new power to find whatever locations had the lowest wages and weakest environmental laws. The global economy pits one nation against another for capital flow and jobs. Environmentalists who had succeeded in banning DDT from the United States found corporations dumping the carcinogenic pesticide on developing-world fields. Unions found manufacturing jobs disappearing abroad. Human-rights lawyers found that American corporations enjoyed the "efficiency" of locating their labor force in countries with authoritarian military governments -- like Nike's child-labor shops in Indonesia and Chiquita's Honduras plantations.

Writing first in small-circulation political magazines, then in their now-classic book "Global Village or Global Pillage," Brecher and Costello coined a phrase to describe this worldwide spiral: "the race to the bottom." Instead of a rising tide lifting all boats, they declared, the global economy has created unprecedented gulfs between wealth and poverty. Today, for instance, the world's 200 richest individuals have more wealth than the poorest 2 billion people combined, and according to the World Bank 200 million more people live in poverty today than in 1987.

Against such powerful multinational forces, American labor's traditional tactics had little power. As Elaine Bernard, director of the Harvard Trade Union Program, bluntly put it to me, "The new trade regimes are making the old rules of labor organizing not work."

The only way to stop the race to the bottom, Brecher, Costello and like-minded analysts declared, is to raise the floor: The higher the wage, environmental and human rights standards worldwide, the less capacity corporations would have to pit one nation's workers against another's.

By the mid-'90s, as one AFL-CIO official told me, "a lot of local unions were already redefining international affairs for us." General Electric workers in Texas had begun working with Mexican unionists employed by the same company, trading everything from negotiating strategies to members' union-logo-emblazoned windbreakers. Beginning in 1994, 4,000 American steelworkers and rubber workers went on strike against Japanese-owned Bridgestone/Firestone corporation. The Japanese trade union council sent dozens of members to the U.S. to help with leafleting and demonstrations; the Americans, in turn, helped raise funds for Japanese railway workers being displaced by industry restructuring. Striking workers at a Japanese-owned hotel in Los Angeles built similar bridges. Such cooperation would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier.

The important news from Seattle is not the tear gas and window-smashing. The news is the acceptance of this globalist perspective at the highest ranks of the American labor movement, in practice as well as rhetoric. Brecher, whose new documentary film based on "Global Village or Global Pillage" opened the entire week of protest with a Seattle screening, says the demonstrators "effectively reframed the issue as rules protecting corporations vs. rules protecting people and the environment." Even Brecher and Costello's simple, clear shorthand analysis -- the "race to the bottom" -- was everywhere: cited in dozens of news reports last week, uttered by Labor Secretary Alexis Herman, by protest leaders and even by defensive corporate officials.

And as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported, the week's largest rally brought onstage "dozens of U.S. workers ... who had lost work when their plants moved to poor countries. Beside them were workers from third world countries who have won jobs in U.S.-owned factories but are making less than a dollar an hour and are desperate to organize unions in their countries."

With the message of Seattle now at large in the political culture, what is next? Will Seattle stand as the Gdansk of globalization, offering an alternative vision to the worldwide "race to the bottom" the way Solidarity heralded the downfall of Soviet Communism -- or will a minor course correction by global free-marketeers like Clinton and Gore divide and dissuade critics?

The first test is likely to come early next year, when Congress votes on permanent most-favored-nation status for China. China, even without being admitted to the WTO, is the very embodiment of the race to the bottom: the worst exploiter of workers and the worst poisoner of the environment in Asia. President Clinton (wearing his pre-Seattle free-trader's suit) negotiated China's admission to the WTO, but it depends upon that congressional vote, tentatively scheduled for February. At a press conference Wednesday afternoon at the State Department, Clinton promised an "all-out effort" to pass the China-WTO deal, but admitted that the issue divides even his own party.

In the past, arguments against most-favored-nation status for China were cast in narrow terms: punishment for Tiananmen Square or the 1996 weapons-and-contributions scandals. But this time, there is an opportunity to raise a broader issue: What kind of global economy do we want? What commitments to labor and environmental standards must be exacted in return for any nation's right to participate fully in the global trade system?

The test for the Seattle coalition will be whether that message can be broadcast and enhanced -- or whether the MFN opponents will fall back into the familiar trap of anti-foreigner, anti-Asian bigotry and a return to protectionism. The test will be whether China activates the sort of grass-roots cooperation that made Seattle a turning point -- or a return to lobbying-as-usual by disconnected issue groups.

One thing is certain: After Seattle, it is no longer possible for anyone to argue that there is no American left. In Seattle, long-simmering cultures of opposition emerged with an articulate common challenge to the worldwide corporate agenda. The century's-end convergence of mass protest and collapsed negotiations in the world capital of the information-age economy mark the end of a 20-year infatuation with corporate deregulation, a cult of the global marketplace that began under President Reagan and finally collided head-on with reality in the streets of Seattle and the conference rooms of the WTO.
salon.com | Dec. 8, 1999

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