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New Trade Policies Needed to Protect Workers |
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Columbia University law professor Mark Barenberg proposes new strategies to ensure that trade agreements protect and advance workers’ rights and says “we should incorporate labor rights and standards in the fundamental ground rules of the new global economy.”
Barenberg is author of a report released today, “Sustaining Workers’ Bargaining Power in an Age of Globalization.” In the report, he argues that trade pacts need rules to allow human rights organizations to constantly monitor whether U.S. trading partners actually comply with international labor rules.
The report, released by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) as part of its Agenda for Shared Prosperity, suggests specific policies that would result in the same type of tough enforcement rules to protect workers’ rights that now exist for violations of property rights in trade agreements.
Among other proposals, Barenberg calls not only for sanctions against individual companies that violate workers’ rights, but also for expansion of those punishments to the government involved and other companies that trade with the violators.
Barenberg says workers’ rights rules “must be as real and enforceable as the rights of investors.”
We should not accept a trade agreement or trade legislation that tangibly advances the interests of investors and corporations but puts core labor rights only on paper, failing to bring about real gains for real workers.
AFL-CIO Policy Director Thea Lee says ensuring workers’ rights in trade agreements is good for business and the world economy. Speaking at a forum on “Labor and the American Trade Agenda” earlier this month, Lee said enforcing workers’ rights globally helps create markets for our products, provided policies are in place that develop the U.S. economy.
Lee said the relentless corporate onslaught against unions and the rush to move manufacturing jobs offshore in search of the lowest wages has decimated the middle class in the United States, but has not produced a middle class in other countries.
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“Lee said the relentless corporate onslaught against unions and the rush to move manufacturing jobs offshore in search of the lowest wages has decimated the middle class in the United States, but has not produced a middle class in other countries.”
The World Socialist Web Site (www.wsws.org) has been posting stories about the disasterous effect of capitalist economics on the U.S. and international working class for over 10 years.
The articles linked below further examine the current global economic crises and the effects these crises have on working people in the U.S. today.
Dollar devaluation and the working class
13 October 2009
Barry Grey
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/pers-o13.shtml
There are growing signs of a major shift in world currency alignments. Since March, the US dollar has steadily declined, depreciating by 13.3 percent on a trade-weighted basis. Last week the decline accelerated, driving gold prices to record levels and prompting a number of Asian central banks to intervene on currency markets to slow the dollar’s fall.
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A strong and stable dollar was the bedrock of the international capitalist monetary system that was established at the Bretton Woods conference at end of World War II. The dollar has served for nearly seven decades as the world’s supreme trading and reserve currency. The unique and privileged position of the dollar—which brought with it immense advantages for US capital—was based on the unchallenged economic supremacy of the US at the end of the war. That, in turn, was founded on the global dominance of American industry.
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To allow the dollar to continue to fall is to acknowledge the reality of America’s decline and the necessity for world capitalism to find a new basis for growth. At the heart of such a global economic “rebalancing” is a fundamental restructuring of class relations within the United States.
The Bretton Woods framework gave the American bourgeoisie a huge advantage in managing social relations within the US. The US ruling class could utilize deficit spending and inflationary policies to make concessions to the demands of the working class because the world accepted the dollar regardless. Without that advantage, the US must adhere to onerous fiscal and monetary restraints, the burden of which is to be placed on the working class.
This process is already well underway. In the name of global economic rebalancing and reform at home, the Obama administration is seeking to cut the consumption of the working class, slash production costs and drive up US exports.
This amounts to subjecting American workers to the type of economic “shock therapy” that the US-dominated International Monetary Fund has prescribed for a host of indebted Third World countries over the past quarter century. Currency devaluation, accompanied by cuts in state expenditure for social services and the use of mass unemployment to drive down wages and increase exploitation—these are the methods that are now being employed against the American working class.
The process by which the US closed down its manufacturing facilities and farmed out production to cheap labor havens around the world—which produced the unsustainable reliance of the US on infusions of credit from surplus nations such as China and Japan—is to be reversed. Industry in the US is to be revived, but on the basis of the destruction of the wages, working conditions and living standards of the working class.
The US is to become a low-cost producer of goods for the world market. The American working class is to experience levels of exploitation which it hasn’t faced in a century. Its wages and living standards are to be brought more closely in line with those faced by the super-exploited workers of Asia.
This policy of class war underlies Obama’s assault on the jobs and wages of auto workers, his refusal to provide aid to bankrupt states and localities, and his drive to gut health care benefits for workers and attack entitlement programs, beginning with Medicare.
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The working class of the United States, however, has no intention of submitting to its own impoverishment. The stage is being set for a revival of the class struggle in the US and internationally on a colossal scale.
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(follow the link above for the full story).
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And the following related article is of interest:
White House defends inaction on jobs crisis as unemployment grows
By Jerry White
13 October 2009
Brushing off criticism that the administration has done nothing to stem the loss of millions of jobs, President Obama’s leading economic advisor claimed Monday that the US was well on the way to recovery, while acknowledging that unemployment may become a permanent feature even after economic growth resumes.
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Everything the administration has done since coming to office has been to secure the interests of the financial elite, which has used its public-funded bailout to consolidate its grip over the economy, resume its reckless speculation and reward itself with massive bonuses. Economists are now predicting a wave of new mergers and acquisitions of corporations, which will further enrich big investors, while leading to destruction of tens of thousands of more jobs.
But no relief has been forthcoming to the tens of millions of victims of the capitalist crisis.
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(follow the link below for full details:)
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/jobs-o13.shtml
IMO ‘globalization’ is definitely NOT ‘in the best interests’ of the USA. And it appears it may not be so good for the rest of the world either!