Progress on core labour standards in the WTO: A victory for workers?
Gerard Greenfield
One of the victories” claimed by many trade unions and NGOs at the WTO trade talks in Seattle was US President Clinton's support for the proposal to include core labour standards” in the WTO. To make this point, Clinton announced that the US would sign the Convention on Worst Forms of Child Labour (Convention No. 182) introduced by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in 1999. This concern with worker and trade union rights was welcomed by mainstream trade unions like the AFL-CIO as a sign that the WTO agenda is being reformed.
However, in QuanQiuHua JianCa Issue #3, we looked at the problems of how a social clause in the WTO would really work. Based on this, it is hard to understand why this was a victory” for trade unions and NGOs in Seattle. The signing of the new ILO Convention on the worst forms of child labour by the US government was certainly welcome, but the fact is that the US government only signed the new convention and still has not signed the original Minimum Age Convention which is a core labour standard. The difference is that the new convention deals only with extreme forms of child labour, and so the US government is avoiding the problem of more general forms of child labour in the US.
An even greater contradiction underlies this victory.” The US government has only signed one out of the five core labour standards proposed under the social clause. It signed the Abolition of Forced Labour Convention in 1991 (34 years after the convention was introduced) and has still not signed the ILO Conventions on freedom of association, the right to organise and bargain collectively, equal pay for equal work, or minimum age.
Even this core ILO Convention on forced labour is constantly violated in the US. The US prison system has been privatised and commercialised so that prison labour is a cheap source of labour making products for the consumer market and is growing source of corporate profit. But since these prison-made goods are not exported, this will never be challenged by a social clause in the WTO. The social clause is only concerned with goods that are traded internationally.
For example, goods made with prison labour in China are exported, so this would could be judged as unfair trade under a social clause in the WTO. Goods made with prison labour in the US are consumed in its large domestic market and not exported, so the US companies and the US government will not be affected by the social clause. The Chinese government often points to worker rights violations in the US to say, See, you also repress workers, so you cannot criticize us.” But our position must be very different from this. The real problem should be clear - prison labour. We must see this not as a China issue or US issue. Is it an international working class issue, and we must oppose prison labour in both China and the US, as well as every other country. This applies to all worker and trade union rights violations regardless where it takes place.
So the question remains: If the AFL-CIO is celebrating the victory” of the US government's support for putting core labour standards in the WTO, why doesn't it get the US government to sign the other four ILO Conventions?
We must then ask why they think that these core labour standards should only apply to the trading partners of the US? What this suggests is that neither the US government nor the AFL-CIO is concerned with implementing core labour standards inside the US. Rather, the social clause in the WTO will only be used against other countries. If this is so, then it seems that once again this is about foreign policy, not workers’ rights.
In the same way, governments which reject the social clause in the WTO also use workers’ rights against workers. The authoritarian governments of China, Malaysia and other countries in the South” claim that the core ILO Conventions should not apply to them or that these are Western values.” This is just another way in which worker rights are used by governments for their own interests. As such we should be clear that the core ILO Conventions express basic worker and trade union rights which are universal and are common to workers everywhere. There is no difference between workers’ fundamental rights in developed” or developing” countries.
Therefore we should support the basic worker rights in the core ILO Conventions, while at the same time opposing the WTO regime, TNCs, and the governments that support them. That includes the US government and the Chinese government.
Back to Basics
One of the basic problems with the social clause proposal is that worker and trade union rights cannot be balanced with the WTO's free trade regime. Free market policies, privatisation, the destruction of social welfare, labour market deregulation, increased unemployment and more powerful TNCs further destroy worker and trade union rights. How can workers organise unions and fight for their collective rights when they are faced with lower wages, higher living costs, less access to education and health, privatised pensions, growing unemployment and more powerful corporations?
The very logic of the WTO is that everything is a commodity. Health, education, pensions, water, traditional knowledge, plant and animal life - everything - is a commodity to be bought and sold for profit by capitalists. The very purpose of the WTO regime is to break down any barriers that prevent capitalists, especially TNCs, from turning everything into a commodity.
That is why the proposal to include core ILO Conventions in the WTO regime is so ironic. We should recall that in the ILO's declaration of its aims and purposes in Philadelphia on May 10,1944, the very first principle declared is:
Labour is not a commodity.
From Philadelphia in 1944 to Seattle in 1999 we have gone from the principle that labour is not a commodity to the acceptance of the WTO regime's commodification of all that exists. What kind of victory is that?