A dosage of our own prescription?
Labor’s World
“How defacing a statue of Winston Churchill advances the cause of workers rights is likely a mystery to most people. But not, apparently, to Phil Knight. On the eve of the May Day rampage in London and similar protests across the U.S., Nike’s CEO yanked his company out of the renewal of a $24 million licensing contract with the University of Michigan.
Nike says Michigan officials were in effect demanding an open-ended commitment to a university code on labor practices that hadn’t itself been finalized. Though it may change few minds on campus, the move signals that university administrators will no longer have the luxury of accepting checks from Nike while caving in to a growing campus “anti-sweatshop” movement whose real agenda is set not by students, but by John Sweeney and the AFL-CIO.
Though union officials describe their agenda as exporting U.S. labor standards, the truth is that there is no trade agreement the unions have supported. Understand this and today’s hard push to sabotage the Fair Labor Association, which the unions originally backed and whose labor practices code they helped draft, becomes obvious. Put simply, organized labor will not be party to any deal that would have them putting a seal of approval on a foreign-made shirt or soccer ball.
At the bottom of the debate over sweatshops and labor practices in the “global economy” lies a harrowing conflict of interest: the unions want
to keep all their jobs here. Advances in trade and technology made this a losing argument until organizers hit on a brilliant strategy, which was to operate through the students. Suddenly a new generation of “activists” has emerged.
It paid off big at Seattle, when Bill Clinton gave a nudge and a wink to the goons heaving rocks at the local Niketown and Starbucks outlets. He said the real problem was that the WTO hadn’t opened “the process up to all those people who are now demonstrating outside.” With this one brief aside, the trade interests of the world were put on hold in hopes of shoring up a core constituency for Gore 2000.
For those serious about sweatshop abuses abroad, the truth is that labor already had a seat at the table. Only four years ago Mr. Clinton’s own Department of Labor pushed for the founding of the FLA, a coalition of apparel and footwear manufacturers, university presidents, human rights and labor activists whose aim was to come up with a uniform code for doing business abroad and a workable way to monitor it.
Three years ago, at a White House ceremony announcing an agreement on just such a code and monitoring practices, Jay Mazur, president of the Union of Needleworkers, Industrial & Textile Trades Employees, waxed enthusiastic.
“All of us with a stake in this industry, a stake in the global economy, a stake in our democratic way of life, have found common ground and mapped out a route to dignity and respect in the workplace,” he said.
The Mazur union figures prominently in this battle, because out of student internships it sponsored several summers back (the “Summeristas,” the AFL-CIO calls them) grew the student movement we have today. Though many of these students doubtless believe they are helping the Guatemalans working in an apparel factory or the pregnant Indonesian at a sneaker plant, in fact they are being used to advance an agenda that U.S. labor would find hard to push on its own.
In recent months, the new agenda became attacking the credibility of the FLA and its monitoring in favor of organized labor’s new alternative, the Worker Rights Consortium, which has been endorsed by everyone from the United Steelworkers to the International Socialist Organization.
For the last few months their representatives in the anti-sweatshop movement on campus have pushed for schools to renounce the FLA and join the Worker Rights Consortium, which is precisely what the University of Michigan did. Due process was an early casualty.
At the University of Madison students occupied the president’s office; at Purdue a group went on a hunger strike, while protests and rallies occurred at dozens of other campuses. The WRC Web page now lists 49 colleges as having signed up. Meanwhile the predecessor Fair Labor Association floundered, not because it didn’t have an agenda but because — surprise! — the Clinton Administration no longer found it convenient. The President gave the FLA group his initial endorsement, but has since been reluctant even to mention its name.
Which leaves us where we are today. The University of Michigan losing a lucrative contract. The right-minded FLA shunned by the Administration that fathered it. And the campaign against global trade taking to the streets, with demonstrators breaking into McDonald’s in Britain while their counterparts smash another Nike window in
Seattle. In the meantime, a huge question mark now hangs over a landmark trade deal with China again ostensibly supported by both Messrs. Clinton and Gore. No wonder John Sweeney is smiling.”
