¡ª the dialogue of which millennium?
Peter Waterman (Retired from International Social Science)
I recall here - vaguely given the passage of time - Philip Roth's scandalous novel of the 1960s, Portnoy's Complaint. After a couple of hundred pages of hilarious but anguished sexual confession, it turns out that we are in the psychiatrist's chamber. And Dr Rosenstein-Gildenstern (or whoever) says to the narrator, `Gut. Shall ve begin?' (or whatever). Much of Labour's Complaint, as reported above, seems to have been taken on board by the Conference on Organised Labour in the 21st Century (COL21). Now to be seen on a computer screen near you.
This international, trilingual, electronic conference is intended to contribute to a four-year research programme on the same subject, run by the ILO's International Institute of Labour Studies (IILS). COL21 is co-sponsored by the ILO and the ICFTU. Although officially launched in mid-September 1999, the conference site has an early list of contributions from 1998. In mid-August 1999, when I signed up to participate, the site further reported a December 1998 consultation, and published the contributions of three participants. It also published a Background Document, identifying as key areas for discussion:
· the changing patterns of employment and union membership,
· change in management-labour relations; the public status of unions,
· the impact of a hostile economic environment,
· the threat/challenge posed to national unions by economic internationalisation.
The conference is `aimed at trade unionists and labour researchers', intended to be open, and to allow for some kind of dialogue. Thus, there is offered the chance to respond to the two opening speakers, Juan Somavia, General Director of the ILO and Bill Jordan, General Secretary of the ICFTU. The opening statements of Somavia (1999) and Jordan (1999) were received too late for them to be added to, or substituted for, the statements discussed below. That of Somavia adds little either in quantitative or qualitative terms, reiterating the compromise at the origin of the ILO: `Yes to the market economy and no to the market society'. That of Jordan is more substantial in both terms, addressing itself to globalisation, the nation-state, global institutions, the corporations, the NGOs, and to the national and international union movement itself. It still, however, seems to be deeply divided in its concerns and address. Thus, it tries to combine a concern with `balance' and `fairness' within a globalising market society (which it does not call capitalist), with a morality that is in conflict with such. In the absence of specification, any such ethical appeal as might be here suggested is bound to be diffuse in meaning and blunt in effect. And the ICFTU address seems to be as much to governments, interstate organisations and corporations (persuading them to act in more civil ways) as to workers and citizens (mobilising them to civilise the hegemonic forces). Perhaps the most interesting parts are those concerned with the unions themselves and with their relations with the NGOs. It is to be hoped that these matters will be taken up during COL21.
Guest speakers will be regularly invited to act as panellists on subjects related to the above document. In a further specification, themes are extended to:
· employment and development,
· law and unions,
· responses to globalisation,
· unions and structural adjustment,
· collective bargaining and social dialogue,
· informal sector and marginalised workers,
· social protection,
· recruitment and organising,
· political strategy (relations with parties and NGOs),
· women,
· youth,
· union structures and services.
This event appears to have not only high web visibility but also legitimacy within at least parts of the labour movement internationally. My concern is that the initiative be not limited by the apparent ideological, institutional or even electronic parameters of the event. Let us consider these.
The theoretical/ideological parameter: assuming that which requires questioning?
I am here going to consider the three initial `non-interactive' papers posted on the COL21 site in 1999. Whilst not being ILO papers, they were obviously invited and posted on ILO initiative. They may be taken as suggesting at least the initial ideological extent and limitations of the planned event.
A couple of quotes from the COL21 paper of Henk Thomas (1999), a Dutch social-democratic professor of labour studies at an institute of development studies, reveal an analysis that not only assumes uncritically the past, present and future development of capitalism, in all its emanations (and under all its pseudonyms), but also an existing interstate hierarchy, with unions everywhere in the female inferior position, i.e. providing a service to male superiors. Thus, in
Western European countries the labour movement has continued to acquire a high degree of legitimacy in addressing issues of the wider social agenda. One may mention the role of the labour movement in restructuring the economy, such as the need for wage restraints in the eighties when global competitive forces had a huge impact on the reshaping of Western European economic structures as well as on major characteristics of labour markets. Also, the distinct role that trade unions have played in enterprise restructuring, such as in the restructuring of the automobile industry in the United States, is proof of union strength and potential[ ]
A special policy issue forms the role which development co-operation may play in strengthening the position of trade unions in weak labour markets and in situations where as yet no organisational labour strength could be built. Development cooperation - both bilateral and multilateral - has at times allowed for generous donations to the trade union movement. For example, special subsidies granted to donor trade unions to enable programmes of institutional building for the receiving labour organisations. Such funding may have a national approach and thus contribute to the building and expansion of strong programmes of international co-operation. Also, cases such as the Danish one with a strong preference for multilateral channelling of funds, e.g. through the ILO or ICFTU, each with its regional headquarters, have become part of the current donor scene.
I will not go into the assumption about union legitimacy within Western societies (widely noted as falling, since the 1960s, along with that of government, political parties, the churches, business, the judiciary, the press). Nor about the, now-rejected, US auto union's `company-union love-fest' (Moody 1998: 63). The major point to be made is that the argument uncritically assumes: a certain underlying institutional framework (if we include particular labour market patterns); the `developmental' function of trade unions within both `developed' and `developing' countries; that those of the former should act as (state-funded) patrons/missionaries/intermediaries in relation to those of the latter. `Development' here, everywhere, means the development of capitalism. There is an assumption, further, that developed capitalism means developed unions, with the best developed union/capitalism relation being in states like The Netherlands and Denmark, which also have extensive state-funded programmes for `developing' countries. The notion that, particularly with globalisation, we are in one world of struggle, in which the first may be the last and the last may be the first (earlier, admittedly, a Christian notion than a Social-Democratic one), appears foreign to Thomas. There is here accepted, in other words, almost everything that has been questioned or problematised in the earlier part of this essay. The analysis, it must be said, also lacks any sense of crisis and seems motivated or informed less by any academic discipline, theoretical school, social values or humane ethic than by the purpose of advertising a policy or consultancy service to `development co-operation' in general, the ILO and ICFTU in particular! As such the piece seems unlikely to be of value to those within these institutions who recognise that the crisis of labour internationally is a crisis not only for but also of these institutions. Or who, unlike Thomas, recognise the existence of globalisation - or at least `globalisation'.
Robert Taylor is the labour specialist of the Financial Times in London (a fact curiously omitted by the ILO). His contribution (1999) is consistent with the pieces of Breitenfellner and Ramsay, covering much of the same ground. It also assumes tripartism, therefore ruling this out of discussion. In line with a tripartite view of the world, he is as much concerned to adjust unions to global capitalism as global capitalism to unions. And he considers that (inter)government organisations can or should play the articulating role between these:
[I]t is evident trade unions need to demonstrate their approach is not incompatible with the creation of successful market economies. Trade union rights are good for workers but they are also good for business. The most affluent countries in the world are the ones which not only have trade unions but also integrate them successfully into their societies through forms of corporate governance and in alliance with non-governmental associations.
Few trade unions have managed so far to come to terms with the new world of increasing globalisation but if they hope to survive and grow again they will have to make radical accommodations [T]he need for more transnational industrial relations requires the trade unions to reassert their primary objectives in a modern language that resonates in the flexible labour markets and workplaces But the attitude of governments cannot remain passive and disinterested. A sympathetic public policy approach is required if trade unions are to develop, providing legal frameworks that do not prevent the development of transnational industrial relations[ ]
For success, more trade unions at international level will need to forge links with non-governmental organisations. In its 1997 report on the state in a changing world, the World Bank called for a public strategy that required trade unions to establish networks that embrace the wider civil society beyond any specific workplace or industry with environmental, community and women's groups. In this way, it is argued, they can reach common cause, integrating producer with consumer interests and helping to revive a more active and ethically responsible social citizenship. This will be helped by the changing role of the state from being less the direct provider of rights and services to being the enabler of diverse and pluralistic activities in a society which encourages and promotes secondary and autonomous civil associations. It means also trade unions will have to make a strategic break with their more traditional workplace-centred culture and embrace more decentralised and flexible structures that appeal more to individual employees both as workers and consumers.
It is somewhat alarming for myself - as an advocate of a unionism oriented toward social movements and civil society - to here discover how rapidly the World Bank has adopted and adapted these into something functional to its own hegemonic purposes (though this is, as argued below, a game that subalterns can also play). More alarming is to see Taylor depending on the state and interstate organisations to legitimise social alliances between movements that, in recent decades, have themselves identified capital, state, technocracy, patriarchy and the World Bank as the source of the problem rather than the means to a solution (George and Sabelli 1994:223-51)! Global civil society is here reduced to a global neo-Keynesianism.
Richard Hyman (1999b) is a professor of industrial relations, and a reputation as a Marxist theorist on labour. He also falls amongst my institutionalists, but his point of reference and address is clearly the labour movement rather than `industrial peace', `development' or tripartism. In confronting the multiple global crises - of work/lessness, of unionism and of society more generally - he seeks solutions within the labour movement itself, or around it amongst allies. His central argument is the necessity for labour to begin a new battle of ideas. In part this is by entering the institutional/ideological terrain of the new workplace and processes, revealing their contradictions or duplicities, and bending them to worker interests. He proposes a new labour project addressed to Security, Opportunity, Democracy, Community and Solidarity. This is a thoughtful and provocative piece that should appeal to the more modern and/or radical international unionists. Above all, it reconnects a contemporary or future unionism to its origins, and with a broader social and international history:
Solidarity forever is one of the most fundamental trade union slogans. Solidarity has a double meaning: support by union members for each others struggles, but also support by the stronger for the weaker within society (or indeed between nations). The broader, moral underpinnings of collective action have in many countries become eroded; if solidarity is to survive, it must be re-invented. The diversity of work and labour market situations in the contemporary world means that a traditional, standardised trade union agenda can be neither practically effective nor ideologically resonant. The task is to move from an old model of mechanical solidarity to an new model of organic solidarity Any project aiming to create such a model must recognise and respect differentiations of circumstances and interests: within the constituencies of individual trade unions, between unions within national labour movements, between workers in different countries. The alignment and integration of diverse interests is a complex and difficult task which requires continuous processes of negotiation; real solidarity cannot be imposed by administrative fiat, or even by majority vote. Its achievement is possible to the extent that unions rediscover the conviction, and persuade both their own members and members of civil society more generally, that they have a mission as a sword of justice.
I am not convinced that the Hyman strategy, of against-from-within, is one that can connect the labour movement with others that begin from non-, anti- or post-capitalist premises. Nor am I sure whether the `continuous process of negotiation' between workers, between unions, between countries, can be carried out in a forum hosted by the ILO, sponsored by that organisation and the ICFTU.
The institutional parameter: the ideologies of the structures
We are, today, increasingly sensitive to the power relations underlying and surrounding, as well as within, our theoretical, ideological, analytical or strategic utterances. The notion of a `Conference on Organised Labour in the 21st Century'; that it is hosted by the International Labour Organisation; that it is sponsored by the Director of the ILO and the General Secretary of the ICFTU; that it is meant to contribute to a project of the ILO's research institute; that this dialogue is being monitored by the ILO; that it is in all or part copyrighted - all these must be seen as part of the process, and therefore likewise open to analysis and challenge. The notion that structures carry their own ideologies comes, relevantly, from a critique of the ILO by Jeff Harrod (1977). Harrod's paper actually gives an overview of the history, structure, activities and functioning of the ILO, with a particular focus on the `developing countries'. It therefore also deals with the `ideology of the programmes', and the tensions between the two ideologies. Along with the elsewhere mentioned work of Robert Cox, it provides an essential point of reference for a contemporary critique of the ILO.
Both the ILO (as the highest instance of international labour relations, norms, laws) and the ICFTU (as the major international representative of unionism) are today suffering something of an identity crisis. This is, as already suggested, a result of a revolution within capitalism which is tending to undermine and/or circumvent them. Both the ILO and the ICFTU are products of the national/industrial/colonial stage of capitalist development. Both were products of massive (inter)national social movements, conflicts and consequent world wars. The ILO, and the ICFTU's forerunner, the IFTU, came out of the social conflicts that preceded WWI. They represent a surprisingly long-lived and durable international compact between unionised labour, capital and state. They could also be seen as having offered, jointly, a cosmopolitan and reformist alternative to the Communist International and revolutionism. The ICFTU came, similarly, out of WWII, being even more marked by what now became the Cold War between the liberal capitalist West and the authoritarian Communist East - with each trying to control the de-colonising South. Both the ICFTU and the ILO are literally international in the sense of their constituents being defined in terms of nation-state identity.
Jointly these institutions have expressed a liberal-cum-social-democratic project of bipartite or tripartite labour relations. The 19th Century `social problem', Labour versus Capital, became the 20th Century `social compromise', with the State as supposedly neutral arbiter. Since 1945 the ILO and ICFTU have increasingly shifted the focus of their attention (and funding) from the socially unstable capitalist core to the socially unstable capitalist periphery, and their primary discourse from `industrial peace' to `development'. The ILO might be surviving better than the ICFTU in so far as it long ago discovered how far `work' goes beyond the sphere of bi- or tripartite industrial relations. What is more, it continues to be a state-funded organisation (despite continuing tensions with the US), has massive staff and resources, and is part of a family of United Nations agencies. The ICFTU, on the other hand, has a tiny staff, its affiliates grant their international a token one percent of their national income, and it is thus dependent for 40 percent of its income on state or inter-state `development co-operation' funds.
The ILO and ICFTU were also marginalised, in different ways, during the UN-sponsored Social Summit of 1995. The ICFTU found itself defined as one non-governmental organisation amongst a myriad, rather than the privileged representative of the poor. It was reduced to publicly arguing that the event should have been run by the ILO, or on ILO lines, which would have put Labour proudly on the podium, as a partner of Capital and State, patronising the `single issue' NGOs! Yet the ICFTU is for 40 percent of its activity, the kind of development NGO it was, until just after the Social Summit, either dismissing or denigrating.
Given all the above, it seems reasonable to speculate that Bill Jordan and Juan Somavia (who was Chair of the 1995 Social Summit!) are jointly concerned to either restore their organisations as the central international institutions of labour representation, dialogue, compromise and norm-setting for the 21st century. Although a well-informed respondent to a draft of this paper assures me that it was an ITS initiative, with the ILO being suggested as a less-partisan convenor of such a dialogue than the ICFTU itself.
In so far as the ILO represents a contribution toward a cosmopolitan law above that of competing and conflicting capitals and nation states, one should be in favour of not only preserving but extending it. This would be compatible with the argument of Forman, as well as of more substantial arguments in favour of cosmopolitan democracy and global citizenship (Held 1995). Held, indeed, even seems to consider the ILO, with its tripartite structure, to be some kind of model for a reformed set of UN institutions open to civil society. I do not know, to start with, whether significant representatives of capital, capable of taking decisions on behalf of their constituency and/or imposing `best practice' standards upon them, are interested to take part. I am, moreover, not sure whether labour should favour structuring capital/management into interstate bodies of any kind. Most radical-democratic global movements are trying to reduce the direct or indirect influence of capital within such.
The current crisis of the ILO. I cannot claim current expertise on the ILO. Indeed, I am not sure who has such. Twenty years ago, a detailed, professional and damning criticism of the ILO was made by Robert Cox, a former insider, a highly-respected innovator in international and industrial relations theory (Cox 1996). This suggested it was bureaucratic, authoritarian, secretive and over-anxious to mollify the then-hostile government and unions of the USA. The ILO was thus apparently unfit to play its international liberal-democratic role even in the Old World Order. One would like to know whether it has become more democratic, flexible and independent of the hegemonic states in the intervening period.
But I am generally aware of the challenge presented to it by the development of new interstate institutions more central, or more appropriate, to the development of a neoliberal and globalised capitalism. And of the concern of itself and its supporters that the ILO should both assert itself and adapt itself to neoliberalism, globalisation, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation. As Breitenfellner (1997:544) says:
[T]he ILO is unique in that it is tripartite offering an example of how a future `global social partnership might function'. If the ILO were strengthened, it could take its place beside the WTO IMF and the World bank in the concert of world economic organisations' (Breitenfellner 1997:544)
And, as the ICFTU (1996) put it, in a defensive and diplomatic statement, addressed to the ILO's Governing Body, it should
· ensure that any steps to modify ILO procedures or structures are taken in full respect of the organisation's established mandate and with the aim of advancing its objects;
· continue to promote the ILO's role in international economic and social policy-making, particularly through enhanced and balanced co-operation with the IMF, the World Bank, the UNDP and the WTO, with a view to ensuring that considerations of social justice are taken into full account, and that workers' rights are respected;
The problem for the ILO is that the major corporations, capitalist powers, and the others involved in this concert, consider the ILO and long-standing labour rights and procedures as obstacles to `free trade'. And that the ILO, like most traditional liberal or social-democratic organisations, feels obliged to persuade these other parties that it is not so. One major way it has been trying to do this is through a new Declaration on Fundamental Principles (ILO 1998) that allows governments to accept the traditional standards - but without actually ratifying or applying them. The earlier-mentioned campaigning body, the Open World Conference, which has collected hundreds of labour movement signatures to a letter addressed to the WTO 1999 Conference, puts it like this:
In June 1998, under pressure from the WTO and IMF to create a `less constraining framework for ensuring international labour standards', the ILO adopted a new `Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work'. The principles and rights promoted in this declaration correspond to seven of the existing ILO Conventions. On June 20, 1999, the G8 Summit in Cologne, Germany, issued a communiqué pledging to `promote effective implementation' of this new ILO declaration.
We, the undersigned, state categorically: If this ILO `Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work' is to be of any value to working people the world over, the seven corresponding Conventions of the ILO must be ratified, implemented and enforced fully by every government participating in the WTO Summit in Seattle! (OWC 1999a)
As an inter-state organ, the ILO has never been able to impose the standards it sets. Rhetoric has always been more important than enforcement. This might be no bad thing in a movement or organisation addressed to the mobilisation of civil society. But this is hardly the image created by the ILO. And now it is confronting its crisis by further reducing such power as it might have had and reinforcing the rhetoric. Two questions arise in my mind here. The first is whether a policy of concession or appeasement is the wise posture to adopt in the face of fundamentalism. All labour and democratic history suggests the opposite. The second question is whether the ILO should even be trying to establish a niche as an international financial or economic development institution rather than the international labour rights one. I do not pretend to have an answer to this one. But, in any case, it does seem clear that the ILO is in need of not simply defence or reform but of reinvention in the light of the labour problem and the relevant social forces, as they exist under globalisation, in the 21st Century.
The current crisis of the ICFTU. As for the ICFTU, it seems to have been emasculated by not only the neoliberal assault but the very collapse of Communism! The ideological identity and often fragile cohesion of the ICFTU has, since its foundation, been largely dependent on being the enemy of its enemy. The loss of its own evil empire has left the ICFTU no other enemy than one which has not only become extremely powerful, aggressive and elusive (the Castells argument), but which appears not particularly interested to compete in the International Tripartite Games. Indeed, this is also true of Social Democratic national governments, including `Third Way' New Labour in the UK. See New Statesman 1999). One wonders how the attitudes of such might be projected within the ILO.
It is true that the ICFTU has, in the footsteps of Amnesty International, proven capable of sharply criticising the USA, the core capitalist state (which combines the maximum labour rights rhetoric with the minimum national and international implementation of ILO standards). In a detailed 15-page statement it declares that
The USA has ratified only one of the seven core labour standards, which cover the right to organise a trade union, to bargain, the prohibition of discrimination and child labour, as specified by the UN's International Labour Organisation (ILO). This is one of the worst ratification records in the world... (ICFTU 1999)
But it shows little or no capacity to address the international labour movement and public opinion about such issues, far less to mobilise them for visible and effective action. Indeed, I was only made aware of this document by the campaigning, mobilising, international labour network, the One World Conference (mentioned above and below). On globalisation, however, the ICFTU repeatedly finds itself outflanked. Whilst it was proposing or negotiating for a social clause in the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, a network of campaigning social movements and NGOs not only opposed the MAI but (taking advantage of inter-state contradictions) destroyed it. And whilst the ICFTU seeks for a place within the existing international financial institutions, others are insisting on the need and possibility of surpassing them with more relevant and democratic alternatives (Held 1998).
We thus seem to be faced with a major problem concerning what I would call `the principle of articulation for international labour and labour internationalism'. This is not only a matter of union ideology/ies, nor of their limited, varying or even declining representation of both labour-in-general (including that of women, the casualised, the self-employed) and the waged/salaried. It is a matter also of the relevance of even meaningfully representative-democratic organisations to both a globalised and networked capitalism and to any kind of labour movement. It has been suggested in a number of places above that the appropriate form for movements (national and international) today is that of the network, coalition or alliance. It is these that can be, as Enzensburger (1976) said of the electronic media, `As free as dancers, as aware as football players, as surprising as guerrillas'. Yet it would seem madness to reject the representative-democratic organisation that is, for millions of workers world-wide, their only defence against an increasingly global, aggressive and destructive capitalism.
Perhaps the solution lies, precisely, in distinguishing between labour representation and labour movement, between international labour and labour internationalism. The first should be seen as carried by the organisation, the second as advanced by the network. This may seem to be the empirical case when we consider the various conferences on labour and globalisation mentioned below. For the traditional international institutions of labour representation this would imply three steps:
· Abandoning the notion that they are either the sole or the privileged representative of labour. This is, after all, a privilege that, since it relates to the passing period of national-industrial capitalism, is also a prison;
· Recognising the network and networking as the source of movement and innovation. This would mean welcoming labour and labour-allied networks or NGOs into their fora - including that of the ILO;
· Recognising that the new internationalism is, primarily, a communications internationalism, with electronic media as primary means and a global solidarity culture as central value.
Much of such a programme of reinvention is, I think, either implicit or explicit in the earlier reviewed material. The rest is being, or could be, advanced by the networks.
Just as the networks in and around labour provide the - or at least a major - source for re-invention, so could and should institutionalised international labour be for the ILO. International labour surely needs to see the ILO not so much as a fortress that protects it than as a public platform from which it can address not only capital and state but global civil society (here understood as a site of permanent struggle against the ideological and institutional hegemony of market and state). I have already suggested the necessity for the inclusion of all relevant expressions of labour discontent (whether women's, environmental, petty-entrepreneurial, rural, etc). I have here no model in mind, but critical reflection on the UN Conferences and Summits of the 1990s might produce one.
The computer/communicational parameter: no parameters?
Participation in COL21, after just a week or so in August 1999, was impressive, in terms of numbers (462 signed up, almost 100 introductions/contributions), as well as of the interests and backgrounds of respondents. I had expected the response to be strongly skewed toward the US and UK, the academy, and the usual on-line suspects - Young, White, Male, Professional, Northern. For a direct contribution to COL21 (unpublished as of mid-October) from an Old, White, Male, Professional, Northern, Academic, see Waterman 1999c.
A rapid and impressionistic analysis, based on some 48 contributions, spread over four days in late-August, revealed the following: 43 were from core capitalist countries, primarily anglophone, mostly North American; 44 were from males; 25 were from union activists or employees and 25 from academics (the last two being often overlapping categories); 12 were from pro-labour NGOs; 16 appeared more oriented toward collective bargaining; 26 were concerned with international labour issues. About age and ethnic origin we can only guess. As of mid-October 1999, the number of contributions had risen to over 250. Although the intention was for participants to respond to the two opening statements (by now translated into Spanish and/or French), these had given rise to no serious overall response. Indeed, the only on-going debate was that about social clauses. Important as this issue is, the failure of more general discussion to develop is both surprising and disappointing.
It would be easy to dismiss such a participation, as limited precisely to the usual suspects. I prefer to take note of it as qualifying the open and international nature of the event, whilst stressing its radical potential. This lies in the number of academically-qualified/employed and union-oriented/allied participants concerned with the future of labour under conditions of globalisation. Moreover, the marginal presence of women, people from the capitalist periphery, non-anglophones, is not the end of the story. This is not, after all, an election, it is a discussion and even, possibly, a dialogue. Whilst we could end up with a lot of white, northern, anglophone, pro-labour academic guys talking to each other (about the implications of globalisation for anglo-saxon-type labour relations, and their European or international projection), the weight readers accord a particular contribution is not going to be determined by its representativity but its perceived pertinence. Let me select a few messages, from just one day's mail, that I perceive as pertinent for a dialogue on labour in the age of globalisation:
Date : Thu, 19 Aug 1999 10:09:46 +0200Subject: hello from san franciscoMessage: #1
My name is Medea Benjamin and I am the director of corporate accountability for the human rights group Global Exchange. I have been focusing on US transnationals and their labor practices overseas. Global Exchange was one of the groups spearheading the campaign against Nike for labor abuses in Asia, and we are presently undertaking a campaign against the garment company the GAP,pressuring them to pay their factory workers a living wage and allow
independent monitoring of their factories. We also recently launched a campaign around US businesses and workers' rights in China. I am very interested in being in touch with people who are involved in labor rights in the garment/shoe or toy industries so that we can collaborate!
Date : Thu, 19 Aug 1999 10:31:57 +0200Subject: IntroductionMessage: #5
Hello and greetings from Vancouver. My name is Ritu Mahil. I became a union organizer at age 5 when my parents first organized the Canadian Farmworker's Union. One of my earliest memories is picking berries on a farm, pretending to be a farmworker, and signing up members. Anyway, I've stuck with the movement ever since. Last year, as part of the Graduate Students' Society on campus I helped organize our university TAs into CUPE Local 4163. I am currently completing my Law and Master's of Public Administration degrees from the University of Victoria. My main motivation for pursuing both degrees was to further my understanding of labour relations. I am fortunate to presently be working in a firm in Vancouver which exclusively practices trade union side labour law. I am hoping to complete my MPA degree next year as well and am searching for a thesis/project topic which will combine my legal training and my interests in organized labour.Looking forward to an interesting discussion.
Date : Thu, 19 Aug 1999 10:58:32 +0200Subject: Re: IntroductionMessage: #13Hello to all participants; This is Kwang Young Shin. I am a professor in sociology at the Chung-Ang University in Seoul, Korea.I am doing research in labor movement and labor politics in the developing countries and the developed countries in a comparative perspective. Now I am working on the shifting labor politics during the political transition and economic globalization in East Asia. I am also interested in gender and labor movement. I teach industrial sociology, political sociology and class analysis. I am very pleased to have an opportunity to engage in the electronic conference on "Organized Labour 21", which will be vital for the next labour's struggle for justice and equality. Let's share our experience and research for the future.
How the IILS understands and uses the contributions is yet to be seen. This forum is, after all, created for the purposes of the IILS itself, the ILO and the ICFTU. But, if the initial participation is seen as potentially more radical than these bodies have demonstrated themselves to be, so are the parameters of an electronic forum more porous than those of an academic or trade union conference or publication.
I have been wondering whether such an open electronic conference, with email distributed by a list, and an accessible online archive of contributions, does not facilitate or provoke the creation of one oriented less to international labour relations and more to the international labour movement. What I am thinking about is the possibility of creating a parallel, or consequent, site/conference, in an electronic equivalent to the famous `sealed train'. As some readers may recall, Lenin returned to Russia from Switzerland during World War I, taking advantage of an offer from the German military-industrial-political elite, which mistakenly thought he would only undermine the Russian war effort. More recently, the same principle was exploited by East German dissidents, using West German audiovisual media to get their message back through East German censorship. Cyberspace is not necessarily more democratic than other media, but it is infinitely more open and flexible.
Certain international labour lists or sites have already signalled the existence of COL21, praised it or encouraged their visitors to take part in it. But what I am speculating about is the creation of a space oriented toward the international labour movement, which could, for example, download selected contributors/contributions, to encourage a more movement-focussed conference. There is, more modestly perhaps, nothing to prevent one creating, from contributions to COL21, one's own database of interesting email addresses, so as to invite participants to a parallel/later site or conference. And then, more ambitiously, of seeking to involve those presently marginalised or excluded.
The basis for my reflections here is a certain familiarity with the limitations of both the international trade union websites and the autonomous international labour ones. The former are, customarily, trade union bulletins or magazines in electronic form. They do not usually invite discussion. They may have areas locked off from the public. They are intended to broadcast, one to many, like a radio transmitter, not provide feedback like, well, a computer network. For a devastating critique of UK union sites see Lee 1999. For directories of relevant labour discussion documents and sites, see LabourStart 1999 and Workers on the WWW Unite! 1999. For an exceptional non-anglophone labour site, see Chronique de l'Itinérant Électronique 1999.
By the autonomous ones I mean the websites or lists run by pro-labour groups or individuals, and intended precisely to encourage direct solidarity, participation and feedback. Some are highly professional. Some are very lively places. Most are non-party and non-sectarian in both form and content (though self-obsessed and fundamentalist socialists have found the internet a godsend: at last they can practice their solipsism on a world scale). The lists often carry discussions, though these tend to be on immediate and dramatic problems or campaigns. Websites may indicate discussion pages. However, neither the themes discussed nor the range of discussants has, over a period of several years, touched what is already suggested by COL21.