Socialist Action /February 2000
China Trade: The Yellow Peril?
By CHARLES WALKER
Some commentators are saying that the Seattle anti-WTO demonstrations
have ensured that foreign trade will be a weighty political issue in the
run up to next year's presidential election. But even before the Seattle
actions, organized labor intended to campaign against the U.S. Congress
granting China the same access to the U.S. market that many other countries
have.
The AFL-CIO effort promises to be as intense as its anti-NAFTA campaign.
"We will flood every Congressional office with phone calls, letters
and visits," James P. Hoffa, president of the International Brotherhood
of Teamsters, said. "We will do whatever it takes. And with the momentum
from Seattle, we will win." (The New York Times, Jan. 11, 2000).
There's a bigger question for workers than whether the AFL-CIO wins the
Congressional battle, or loses, as it did its 1993 anti-NAFTA fight. The
bigger question is whether the AFL-CIO's anti-China trade strategy is in
the interests of American workers, and Chinese workers too, for that matter.
The AFL-CIO says that primarily it wants to ensure that China has fair
labor standards, that Chinese workers have the right to organize unions,
bargain collectively, and otherwise act to achieve a decent standard of
living. It denies that it is using its objections as a cover to hide a protectionist
agenda to safeguard certain domestic industries' profits, in hopes of saving
workers' jobs.
Nevertheless, labor's opposition to NAFTA partly meant opposing reductions
in trade barriers with Canada, a country whose labor laws are at least equal,
if not superior to U.S. labor laws.
Whatever the union tops' intentions, there's no denying that the effects
of their present China trade policy could be virtually the same as their
earlier nakedly protectionist "Buy American" policy.
That approach sought to keep American workers on the job by protecting
the profits of internationally uncompetitive domestic firms, at the expense
of foreign workers.
While that may seem understandable to many American workers, clearly
it's not a solidaristic, internationalist approach. That's because rather
than uniting workers across borders, it allows bosses to continue to whipsaw
workers, forcing them to compete with each other, making it easier to conquer
them.
Clearly, whipsawing workers across national borders is just a variation
on whipsawing workers within national borders. Just as clearly, unions that
condone whipsawing are attacking the very foundations of unionism.
Of course, it's too much to expect the present labor union leadership
to adopt a socialistic policy of seeking production for human needs, rather
than profits. And it's too much to expect the union bureaucrats to fight
to liberate workers and the economy from the private profit restraints that
shackle productivity, and the horrendous waste, poverty, and insecurity
that's inevitable under an undemocratic economic system.
Unfortunately, the union chiefs can't even be expected to take on the
bosses over the good-paying jobs that daily are lost because of job streamlining,
downsizing, and ordinary speedup. In fact, it's likely that many more good-paying
jobs are lost due to domestic company cost-cutting than to international
trade.
Rather than seeking to mobilize the pro-worker sentiments revealed by
the Seattle demonstrations, and still earlier by the widespread public support
for the 1994 Teamsters strike against UPS, and fighting to create jobs by
reducing the workweek with no reduction in wages, the bureaucrats have virtually
traded away the eight-hour day and millions of jobs in return for overtime
pay for some and pink slips for others.
Now the union tops are embarking on a political trade fight that may
ignite the same narrow passions that once divided workers along racial lines-whites
against Chinese and, of course, whites against Blacks.
Hopefully, things will not come to that. But even so, American workers
will still need to find a leadership and a program based on their interests,
and not the dog-eat-dog choices of capitalism.
Socialist Action /February 2000 |