Global Policy Forum

By Jim Wright

The central problem of the coming century may have been forecast in one mid-December headline. The $81 billion Exxon-Mobil merger, the biggest yet in this dizzying cycle of mega-monopolies, is eliminating 16,000 jobs to swell its stock profits by $3.8 billion. That's the story, a microcosm of what's happening worldwide.

Across the whole spectrum of global business investments runs a common theme: mergers, layoffs, downsizings, outsourcings, all in the name of efficiency. For governments, "privatization," the sale of national public assets to private multinational corporations. Scattered U.S. plant closings, opening doors to incorporate the products of ever-cheaper labor abroad.

All very good for investors. Not so good for the world's working families. Globalization is an irreversible fact. Our challenge for the 21st century will be to control it, manage it and humanize it. There must be some common rules to assure that it serves rather than exploits ordinary people.

In 1993, I believed that the result of the North American Free Trade Agreement would be higher living standards for the average citizen in Canada, the United States and Mexico. Results, after six years, are disillusioning. Workers in Mexico are not better off. They're worse off. Wages in 2,000 "maquiladora" plants employing Mexican workers have not risen. They've fallen. Well-known U.S. corporations, encouraged by official policy, are paying about one-fifth the U.S. minimum wage. There was supposed to be a fair labor component to the treaty. A NAFTA agency, with headquarters in Dallas, was supposed to monitor labor agreements to guarantee that wages and working conditions would be favorably, not unfavorably, affected by the treaty. It never worked. It wasn't set up to work. It had no teeth, no enforcement mechanism. It was all talk. Finally, the Dallas agency was just unceremoniously closed. The charade ended. Nobody seemed to care what happened to the workers.

Most of the downsizing and outsourcing on the part of the multinationals here at home is a transparent attempt to divest themselves of their legal and contractual responsibilities to their own employees. Setting up new dummy corporations, or dealing with low-wage employers, they can escape responsibility for health and retirement benefits and not have to meet the wages they've negotiated with their own unions. As result, corporations get by for less money, and with less responsibility. Profits soar. And who gets the short end of the stick? The workers, of course.

Cumulative social results of all the mergers, outsourcings and foreign investments include an ever-increasing number of Americans not covered by health insurance, lower-paying and less secure jobs, an increase in the number of working poor, and the new norm of middle-income husband and wife both having to work to achieve the buying power that one salary provided formerly.

It was a mounting work-force frustration with all this that erupted in the streets of Seattle to greet the World Trade Organization in early December. This is the story behind the demonstrations. Not the little handful of well-publicized fools who destroyed property. The persistent, peaceful, mainstream complaint that swelled to a chorus from 45,000 orderly demonstrators was this: Listen up, WTO. You've forgotten the common man and woman. In all your cozy, sophisticated trade dealings between nations and corporations, you've lost sight of people. The workers. The ones whose labor produces these goods. Inside the convention center, envoys from 135 member nations, accustomed to dealing in private, seemed stunned, surprised. In bafflement, they asked: Who are these people? What concern are terms of trade to them? What concern, indeed?

Ever so unconsciously, we've strayed from our path. For most of the 20th century, America was intent on spreading the good things wider and wider. A people's capitalism. From Theodore Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson, that was our mission. The American dream. Dependable jobs and livable wages. Homeownership a universal family right. A car in every garage. Secure retirement. Affordable health care. Higher education, ever more attainable for all God's children. What immense progress we made! Our 20th century, opined President Franklin D. Roosevelt, would be celebrated as the "Century of the Common Man." We were not developing "wealth for its own sake," said FDR. "Wealth is the means and people are the ends."

What happened? We seem today on the verge of becoming a corporate state. Worker productivity has risen dramatically, but wages haven't kept pace. More economic power settles in fewer hands each year. A few enormous corporations control more wealth than national governments. And there's less public accountability. But now there's a belated, almost sudden awakening. People increasingly realize how far, and how fast, we've drifted. After a generation of somnambulence, government is rediscovering its anti-monopoly responsibilities to the public.

And if countries like China are to be our new trading partners, somebody must make some new rules for the rights of working people everywhere. To outlaw child labor. And slave labor. And indentured labor. And exploitative sweatshop wages that bleed away life's juices from vulnerable people who have no other place to go for a job. So that they may be customers, too. Work for the 21st century.

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