Happy Birthday, My Dear!

The birthday I’m celebrating here is that of my wife, Dzung, the 37th of her birthdays that we’ve celebrated since we married. The image on this e-card is the cover of the Vietnamese literary quarterly that she edits and publishes with a team that includes Vu Tha Hoa, an artist in Paris who contributed the cover’s painting.

Dzung and I are both writers, but she is also a poet, and much more prolific than I am. To my one book (see cover at right), she has published seven. Two of her books are so moving that some people read them straight through, without even stopping for sleep. Who would ever read a book on globalization in one sitting.

Dzung felt that Co Thom’s cover doesn’t quite blend in with this blog. Yet, more technologically advanced than I am, she created a JPG file of the cover for me.

A full-page ad for Justice at Work appears in the current issue of Co Thom. As an old friend of mine has said, nepotism is okay if it stays within the family.

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Reviving the anti-sweatshop movement

“Nearly 20 years of anti-sweatshop activism has come to naught,” says a veteran campaigner against sweatshops, Jeff Ballinger. He contends, therefore, that it is urgent to try a new, more effective, strategy.

In the lead article of Dissent magazine’s summer issue, Ballinger lays out his thoughts on such a strategy. The article's title: “Finding an Anti-Sweatshop Strategy That Works.”

As an illustration of the anti-sweatshop movement’s failure, he cites a who-got-how-much breakdown of the $38 price of hoodie sold in the University of Connecticut bookstore a couple of years ago. Out of that $38, the workers in Mexico who produced it received a meager l8 cents. “The workers’ share could hardly have been lower when the movement began,” writes Ballinger, who himself helped create the movement.

From his own experience working with workers in the United States and Asia, he is convinced that to get rid of sweatshops, you have to start by helping workers “empower” themselves – get them involved in learning the facts of their vulnerable situation and the way to do something about it.

How to help under current circumstances? In Ballinger’s view, “fighting sweatshop abuses here and abroad will not be key policy undertakings of Barack Obama and his team.” He presumably means that strong anti-sweatshop legislation may get sidetracked by other priorities, such as battling for health care and financial reforms.

But even so, Ballinger insists, the executive branch has available a wide set of initiatives that it could take on its own – initiatives that “would at least begin an assault on global sweatshop practices.” That beginning should be launched by President Obama himself: “Addressing the rule of law as applied to the workplace ought to be a slam-dunk for the President and the recently re-energized State Department.”

Among the specific initiatives that Ballinger proposes for a “no-nonsense strategy” are these:

-- Expand the Bush administration’s “Trafficking in Persons” program to include workers lured to leave their Asian home countries for sweatshop jobs elsewhere in Asia.
-- Be sure to connect with real labor activists, in Asia and Central America especially.
-- Have AID missions adopt “worker empowerment” projects, such as those that involve workers themselves in using survey-research tools to gather information useful to local legal aid groups as well as to unions.
-- Have U.S. Embassies gather labor and environmental information in a more focused and systematic way, for example, by reporting meaningful details on enforcement by labor inspections.
-- In addition to raw data, gather wiki-style narratives on recent strikes, the human effect of sub-par wages, outright wage-cheating, and other pressing issues, as well as local academic papers on these issues.
-- Share information on these subjects with U.S. corporations that contract out work to local factories and offices.

Ballinger is currently finishing up work on a PhD degree, aided by a grant from the Laborers International Union. For the full text of Ballinger’s article, click here.

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The Durability of Nike’s Sweatshops

Nike is turning a blind eye to labor abuses in Vietnam factories that mass produce Nike’s athletic shoes and other sports equipment for export. That’s a finding of on-site research in Vietnam conducted after a strike last year by 20,000 workers in Nike’s supplier factories there.

A three-person team from Denmark that did the investigation spoke directly, and secretly, with the workers, including a low-level supervisor, “Mr. T,” who had presented the worker demand for a pay increase to management.

The Danish Consumer Council, which sponsored the investigation jointly with 10 other organisations, published a feature article on the research in its magazine. One specific finding is really nothing new: that the government/Communist Party apparatus of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam has its own “union,” and is hostile to any organization and worker activity independent of the government/party-run union.

What is new in the report is evidence that the Nike’s business operation within the Communist system conflicts with Nike’s own code of conduct and tarnishes its own self-image as a decent company.

A company like Nike ought to “make sure that no workers are inappropriately punished for their participation in a strike,” says Tim Connor, labor rights coordinator for Oxfam/Australia.

In Vietnam, uniformed police, called in by management, successfully broke the strike through ruthless tactics that included firing 100 leaders of an underground movement that promoted it. (Nike says there were no firings.} According to an internal Nike document and the testimony of Mr. T and others, Nike stayed on the sidelines while the police quashed the strike and the movement.

On the surface, the strike was triggered only by the demand for a living wage. Yet, as usual in such circumstances, other grievances fueled the walkout. When a worker fails to meet her production quota, for example, she is hit with a 15% deduction of her monthly pay. Workers assemble shoes with toxic glue, with a bonus for tolerating headaches and other possible effects.

For more information on the conduct of Nike and other brand-name companies, see http://www.consumersinternational.org/.

I learned of the Danish report through one of the regular contributions that Jeff Ballinger makes to lists maintained by Oxfam Australia.

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A Pope Speaks Truth to Power, But Who Listens?

In formally signing his new encyclical letter on June 29, Pope Benedict XVI said that it will return to social themes expressed by Pope Paul Vl in his encyclical “On the Development of Peoples” (Populorum Progressio) four decades ago.

That should mean that Benedict’s document, to be released July 7, during the summit meeting of G8 powers in Italy, will raise controversial issues about globalization, as Paul VI did about development. The new encyclical, Caritas in Veritas (Love in Truth), promises to be an eye-opener.

In Pope Paul’s 1987 assessment, healthy development embraces both economic and social progress. The separation of economics from “human realities” is unacceptable and results in a wide range of evils.

Among them are the “flagrant inequalities” not just in wealth but also in power among individuals. Instead, the goods of the earth should flow freely for all. All people have the “right to glean” what they need from the earth. To that basic right, “all other rights whatever they may be, including the rights of property and free trade, are to be subordinated.”

In support, Paul VI quoted the words of St. Ambrose:

“You are not making a gift of what is yours to the poor man, but you are giving him back what is his. You have been appropriating things that are meant to be for the common use of everyone. The earth belongs to everyone."

Paul VI condemned “certain concepts [that have] insinuated themselves into the fabric of human society. These concepts present profit as the chief spur to economic progress, free competition as the guiding norm of economics, and private ownership of the means of production as an absolute right, having no limits nor concomitant social obligations.”

“This unbridled liberalism,” he added, “paves the way for a particular type of tyranny, rightly condemned by our predecessor, Pius XI, for its results in the ‘international imperialism of money’.”

For Paul VI, “trade relations can no longer be based solely on the principle of free trade, unchecked competition, for it very often creates an economic dictatorship. Free trade can be called just only when it conforms to the demands of social justice.”

Just because a poor country has signed a trade deal with a rich country does not make the agreement legitimate. “When two parties are in very unequal positions, their mutual consent does not guarantee a fair contract; the rule of free consent remains subservient to the demands of the natural law.”

In his closing summary of the crisis “in all its dimensions,” Pope Paul wrote: “The moment for action has reached a critical juncture.”

That appeal was soon forgotten. If Pope Benedict returns to Pope Paul’s principles and applies them to globalization, will he receive a more positive result? Will his analysis and counsel find a place on the G8 agenda? Or on the agenda of the Catholic hierarchy of the United States?

The full text of Papal encyclicals, past and present, can be found in several languages on the Vatican website (www.vatican.va), which has a superior search engine.

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Employee Free Choice Act 'supported by Catholic social teaching'

“The present legal and moral framework that is intended to assist workers to form unions is badly broken,” a group of Catholic scholars declare in a public statement. Consequently, they are lending their support to the proposed Employee Free Choice Act for its being “rooted in and supported by Catholic Social Teaching.”

The statement, signed by more than 140 members of the Catholic Scholars for Worker Justice, was published in the June 28 issue of the National Catholic Reporter and will appear in America magazine in July.

“An a priori presumption for unions” is embedded in Catholic social teaching, according to the statement. “Catholic teaching states that the right to organize belongs to workers alone and cannot be abridged or annulled by civil or ecclesiastical authorities. The method or venue that workers choose to form a union is also their choice: workers may say yea or nay, stand or sit, sign statements or cards, or hold a secret ballot election.”

Provisions of the Employee Free Choice Act “strongly reflect the Catholic position that the decision to form or join unions is always the workers’ choice,” the group says, and lists the bill’s chief provisions, all of which business groups vigorously oppose.

The full text of the statement and its signers can be found here


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Double standard on labor standards

You are an employer under pressure from corporate stockholders to increase the returns on their investment. You decide the way to do so is to slash your present and future labor costs by firing your current workers en masse and recruiting a set of new ones, people among the unemployed so anxious for a job that they accept anything you impose: sub-minimum pay, no vacations, a seven-day workweek, no sick pay, and other drastically lower labor standards associated with a sweatshop.

As an American employer, you would not be able to implement so radical a decision. It would be illegal. It would be bad public relations. It would also, in the eyes of most people, be immoral. You couldn’t get away with it.

But what if instead of hiring other workers in America, you hire workers overseas – foreign men, women, and children willing to work in the real sweatshops of the kind that dot the Asian industrial landscape.

In both cases you impose harm on Americans, and you undermine the progressive U.S. labor market practices built up over decades. Oddly, however, you would be judged harshly in one case and not the other. That’s because we draw a sharp line between the two radical moves, even though the effect in the United States is exactly the same.

Why does an illegitimate and unacceptable radical change in one case become legitimate and acceptable in the other? Simply because one radical change is consummated across borders under the protection of international trade laws that are deemed superior and not be interfered with.

The above paragraphs reformulate a crucial policy inconsistency conveyed by Dani Rodrik, professor of international political economy, in his June 16 talk at the London School of Economics. In outlining the possible future of capitalism (see my June 21 posting) he briefly discussed labor standards as an important globalization issue that needs to be much better understood.

“And yet,” he added, “we have no good way of even talking about this.”

Why is the labor standards issue so little talked about in Washington power circles these days?

Mostly, I think, because the agenda-setting power circle has made up its collective mind on this issue. The unspoken assumption is that today’s trade rules, despite some flaws, are sufficiently legitimate and really have nothing to do with the grave harm imposed on American workers.

Rodrik’s 90-minute talk, as recorded on video, is a good short overview of why the flaws are threats to globalization itself. His video presentation on “Capitalism.3.0” can be found on the London School’s Website. The quickest way to access it is through Rodrik’s June 18 posting on his Weblog at http://rodrik.typepad.com/

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Envisioning a Reborn Capitalism

The present global economic crisis has shaken capitalism down to its roots. What will, or should, replace it? Dani Rodrik, professor of political economy at Harvard’s school of government, dealt with that question on June 16 in a public lecture at the London School of Economics.

Rodrik warned against making two opposite mistakes in reacting to the crisis: returning to the protectionism of the 1930s (unlikely, unless the U.S. succumbs to even deeper recession) or making “an ambitious effort to take economic globalization to the next level.”

But neither approach would address what Rodrik rightly considers the fundamental problem of the world economy: “the imbalance between the reach of markets (global) and the scope of their governance (mostly national).”

For a Moderate, Moderated Globalization

The scenario that Rodrik advocates is “an intermediate level of globalization.” Its key element: allowing countries to retain much greater domestic “policy space” when domestic requirements conflict with the requirements of international integration. (In other words, a serious need of a country’s own citizenry should trump WTO rules.)

Rodrik’s intermediate level of globalization would not be “a retreat from globalization per se” but a retreat from the gung-ho globalization of the post-1990 years. Unfettered financial globalization and free capital mobility would lose their power as driving forces under his vision of Capitalism 3.0, the assigned title of his London talk.

A major reality that Rodrik recognizes is that “democratic governance and political communities are organized within nation states, and are likely to remain so in the immediate future.” So it is still up to nation-states to act in concert toward Capitalism 3.0 under "guidelines" such as the following:

There is no “one way” of globalization: institutional designs that underpin market economies will differ according to domestic preferences and needs.

Non-democratic countries may be subject to more restrictive global trade/investment rules “since it cannot be presumed that their choices reflect the needs of their citizenry.”

“Like-minded” nations would be able to “deep integrate” (pursue a high degree of free trade and other mutual economic arrangements).

Where deep integration is not feasible or desirable, the countries would rely on “traffic rules” to manage the interface among the various national institutional arrangements.

It is in his “traffic rules” that Rodrik offers some details on putting the “guidelines,” or general principles, into specific rules. What might such traffic rules look like? In the Power Point presentation of his talk, he offers two sets of traffic rules – “illustrations,” not blueprints.

-- Regarding WTO trade rules, for example, he proposes a special “development box” for developing countries to exempt them from some currently prohibited practices that don’t fit their situation.

-- Among the traffic rules for finance, he proposes recognition of the right of governments to interfere in cross-border financial flows that undermine a country’s own regulations.

A video of Rodrik's presentation can be accessed through the June 18 posting on his Weblog at http://rodrik.typepad.com.

Rodrik’s latest book is "One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth." His writings appear regularly in the world press through an international press service called Project Syndicate.

The Vatican is expected to release a new document (called an encyclical) by Pope Benedict XVI late in June. Once scheduled to be released in September last year, the encyclical’s publication was delayed to take into account the economic crisis. Judging by previews given orally and in writings by the Pope, its analysis of globalization will be remarkably similar to Rodrik’s.

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