SEATTLE, Oct. 19 – In today’s “global economy,” corporate executives can move capital and send our jobs overseas with the ease and speed of a mouse click. Companies scour the globe seeking the cheapest possible labor costs and weakest environmental safeguards. Often they settle down in countries where brutal dictatorships enforce near-slavery conditions on their citizens, in order to keep the unions out and the corporations happy.
“Transnational corporations are attempting to create a global nightmare for workers to live under,” said National Secretary-Treasurer Terri Mast, as she announced the formation of the IBU Puget Sound Region’s WTO Mobilization Committee today.
“And to administer this ugly future, they have set up the WTO.
“But we in the labor movement reject that nightmare. Right now we have a unique, historic opportunity – a chance that may never come again – to confront anti-worker trade policies and fight for our vision of a different kind of future.
“The IBU will be out in force in Seattle to do just that!”
The WTO Mobilization Committee’s purpose is to inform IBU members about the dangers to their jobs and well being that the World Trade Organization represents, and to muster a large IBU contingent to participate in the march and rally against the WTO’s Nov. 30 trade summit in Seattle. It will also organize Puget Sound members to provide housing to accommodate IBU and ILWU members who will be traveling from up and down the West Coast to attend the protests.
The committee will meet at the IBU hall at Fisherman’s Terminal, Seattle (1711 Nickerson St., Suite D), at 1600 hours each Friday afternoon, beginning Oct. 29. Members are urged to join this rank and file committee and help build towards a huge IBU contingent at this urgent labor march.
Noting that the ILWU International Executive Board, at its August meeting in Canada, strongly encouraged all locals and divisions to endorse and participate in the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle, Secretary-Treasurer Mast also announced that the Puget Sound IBU will call a stop-work meeting for all Towing Industry members on Nov. 30 – to coincide with the rally and march. She also said the IBU leadership urges all other members to take the day off on Nov. 30, and join the IBU/ILWU contingent in the demonstration.
The World Trade Organization – set up in 1995 as the successor to GATT (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) – is an institution of member countries’ trade representatives and global corporate executives. Its purpose is to promote “free trade” policies globally, by developing and then enforcing trade agreements like NAFTA among its member nations. It can punish nations it finds in violation of its rules using various forms of economic coercion including trade sanctions.
The WTO’s rulings have accelerated the growing domination of the global economy by transnational corporations, and increased corporate profits at the expense of long-standing workers’ rights, public health, and environmental protection standards in many countries. It can overrule any member nation’s labor and environmental laws – developed over years of workers’ struggles and adopted by democratically-elected governments – that restrict “free trade.”
Because of its judicial and enforcement powers – especially its ability to force governments to repeal national standards and laws or suffer terrible economic retaliation – many opponents even believe that the WTO represents a threat to democratic society as we know it. They fear it will replace national legislation in the public interest through representatives elected by the people, with global legislation in the interests of capitalist profit by appointed trade diplomats accountable only to the world’s 500 largest corporations.
The trend of economic globalization institutionalized by the WTO fosters a devastating international “race to the bottom.” Past trade liberalization pacts, such as NAFTA, resulted in the elimination of safe, good-paying, union jobs here at home. The jobs that replaced them have been in Third World countries where labor is cheap, and where governments enforce brutal sweatshop conditions on workers. The lost jobs and growing class inequality between workers and the rich in the U.S. translates into child labor, forced labor, poverty and police-state measures abroad, as well as environmental destruction and public health disasters around the world.
The privatization and deregulation policies promoted by the WTO threaten the jobs and working conditions the IBU, the ILWU and the rest of the labor movement struggled for generations to organize and maintain. Our livelihood will be on the line if the global corporate assault on workers’ rights, consumer protection, public health, and environmental laws isn’t beaten back.
The IBU – and the ILWU as a whole – supports international trade; our jobs, our livelihood, and the existence of our organization depend directly on commerce between nations. But our Union opposes any expansion of the powers and authority of the WTO.
We demand that the architects of the world’s trading system take a step back, assess the results of past trade liberalization, and institute new rules to address workers’ rights before further action on international trade liberalization is taken.
The unfair tilt of the WTO, and its rules toward profits for transnational corporations over working people and human rights, must be reversed. The international community must harness the power of international capital to solve the problems of social injustice and economic inequality, not for the pursuit of profits by the privileged few.
To assure these changes, representatives of the international labor movement must have an equal place alongside the agents of international capital at the table where the rules for the world’s economic and social future are being negotiated.
We are uniting in action on Nov. 30 to send our message loud and clear: We won’t let the WTO and its backers run roughshod over workers, or abolish the conditions and protections we’ve gained over generations of struggle. They may seek to write rules for world trade, but so long as we are excluded from that process and our rights are ignored, we who do the work can also disrupt trade. We might not stop this WTO meeting, but international commerce can’t go on without us!
Union members and environmental and human rights activists from all over the globe will be converging on Seattle to fight for a fair global economy. Together, we’re committed to establishing trade laws based on international solidarity around a progressive, pro-worker, pro-environment, pro-community, pro-human economic agenda.
