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salon.com > News Dec. 8, 1999
URL: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/12/08/wto

The seeds of Seattle
As anti-globalization protesters ask themselves, "Where do we go from here?"
Seattle enters the lexicon of civil disobedience.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Bruce Shapiro
Anyone awakening from a week in a coma could be forgiven for feeling
disoriented: The protestors now departed from Seattle's streets have shifted
the nation's political reference points by 20 years. While Wall Street and
Washington reconvened Monday morning for business as usual, it is already
evident that Seattle is one of those critical incidents in the political
culture, like the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings or the Tet offensive,
after which the language of public debate is never the same.
A week ago, anyone who questioned the World Trade Organization and the
broader logic of the global corporate marketplace was spitting in the
historical wind -- an object of derision by free-marketeers, a tedious,
pietistic windmill-tilter to the media.
The remarkable events in Seattle changed that. "We're seeing a lot of new
things in Seattle. Some things that haven't happened in a long time, and
some things that are not supposed to happen at all." That was CNN's low-key
but astute political analyst Bill Schneider, feeling the earth move under
his feet.
According to the conventional wisdom of post-Reagan America, nothing that
happened in Seattle computes. But with the crosscutting spectacles of street
protest and collapsing trade talks, the political center of gravity has
moved several steps leftward. President Clinton abandoned seven years of
free-trade orthodoxy -- and infuriated his advisors -- by proposing that
labor standards be brought to the WTO table. Even laissez-faire Republican
William Safire writes this week that any commerce system that ignores
sweatshops "does not deserve the name 'free trade.'" The question is not
whether the terms of debate have shifted, but why -- and where the argument
goes from here.
Many commentators quickly compared Seattle to the 1968 Democratic
Convention. But a more telling comparison is the emergence of the Solidarity
movement in Poland in the 1980s.
Like Solidarity's birth in the Gdansk shipyards, Seattle was (as Canadian
journalist Naomi Klein put it in a keenly observed New York Times op-ed) the
"coming-out party" for a long-evolving coalition: not only those Teamsters
marching happily alongside environmentalists in sea-turtle suits but
religious communities, college anti-sweatshop activists and advocates for
third-world debt relief.
And like Solidarity, Seattle happened because a new generation of union
leaders listened to thoughtful radical intellectuals, who proposed that the
real issue was not simple job protection but global democracy, and a broad
vision of inclusive, equitable society.
Those reporters and commentators who portrayed Seattle as a festival of
paranoid, Pat Buchanan-style economic isolationism simply had not been
listening to the labor movement lately. "The real debate is not over whether
to be part of the global economy," AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said in a
little-remarked National Press Club speech last month, "but over what are
the rules for that economy and who makes them" -- a comment that would be
unthinkable from the mouths of any of his buy-American predecessors, or from
Sweeney himself until recently.
Indeed, resounding through Seattle's protests and the media's coverage were
ideas uttered until recently by only those stalwart dissenting intellectuals
who had spent the early 1990s trying to understand why local social
movements that normally had little to do with one another all found
themselves hard up against newly global corporations.
In the late 1980s, for instance, historian Jeremy Brecher and union
organizer Tim Costello began a series of articles about the future of the
American labor movement. Both writers have roots in the valleys of New
England, where the Industrial Revolution came early but where in the
mid-1980s hard-working mill towns watched helplessly as corporations moved
their operations to lower-wage communities in the South or overseas. Brecher
and Costello thought they were recounting how American unions and
communities could fight such plant closings.
But as they looked closer, they realized they were on to a bigger story: How
a radically changing global economy gave corporations a new power to find
whatever locations had the lowest wages and weakest environmental laws. The
global economy pits one nation against another for capital flow and jobs.
Environmentalists who had succeeded in banning DDT from the United States
found corporations dumping the carcinogenic pesticide on developing-world
fields. Unions found manufacturing jobs disappearing abroad. Human-rights
lawyers found that American corporations enjoyed the "efficiency" of
locating their labor force in countries with authoritarian military
governments -- like Nike's child-labor shops in Indonesia and Chiquita's
Honduras plantations.
Writing first in small-circulation political magazines, then in their
now-classic book "Global Village or Global Pillage," Brecher and Costello
coined a phrase to describe this worldwide spiral: "the race to the bottom."
Instead of a rising tide lifting all boats, they declared, the global
economy has created unprecedented gulfs between wealth and poverty. Today,
for instance, the world's 200 richest individuals have more wealth than the
poorest 2 billion people combined, and according to the World Bank 200
million more people live in poverty today than in 1987.
Against such powerful multinational forces, American labor's traditional
tactics had little power. As Elaine Bernard, director of the Harvard Trade
Union Program, bluntly put it to me, "The new trade regimes are making the
old rules of labor organizing not work."
The only way to stop the race to the bottom, Brecher, Costello and
like-minded analysts declared, is to raise the floor: The higher the wage,
environmental and human rights standards worldwide, the less capacity
corporations would have to pit one nation's workers against another's.
By the mid-'90s, as one AFL-CIO official told me, "a lot of local unions
were already redefining international affairs for us." General Electric
workers in Texas had begun working with Mexican unionists employed by the
same company, trading everything from negotiating strategies to members'
union-logo-emblazoned windbreakers. Beginning in 1994, 4,000 American
steelworkers and rubber workers went on strike against Japanese-owned
Bridgestone/Firestone corporation. The Japanese trade union council sent
dozens of members to the U.S. to help with leafleting and demonstrations;
the Americans, in turn, helped raise funds for Japanese railway workers
being displaced by industry restructuring. Striking workers at a
Japanese-owned hotel in Los Angeles built similar bridges. Such cooperation
would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier.
The important news from Seattle is not the tear gas and window-smashing. The
news is the acceptance of this globalist perspective at the highest ranks of
the American labor movement, in practice as well as rhetoric. Brecher, whose
new documentary film based on "Global Village or Global Pillage" opened the
entire week of protest with a Seattle screening, says the demonstrators
"effectively reframed the issue as rules protecting corporations vs. rules
protecting people and the environment." Even Brecher and Costello's simple,
clear shorthand analysis -- the "race to the bottom" -- was everywhere:
cited in dozens of news reports last week, uttered by Labor Secretary Alexis
Herman, by protest leaders and even by defensive corporate officials.
And as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported, the week's largest rally
brought onstage "dozens of U.S. workers ... who had lost work when their
plants moved to poor countries. Beside them were workers from third world
countries who have won jobs in U.S.-owned factories but are making less than
a dollar an hour and are desperate to organize unions in their countries."
With the message of Seattle now at large in the political culture, what is
next? Will Seattle stand as the Gdansk of globalization, offering an
alternative vision to the worldwide "race to the bottom" the way Solidarity
heralded the downfall of Soviet Communism -- or will a minor course
correction by global free-marketeers like Clinton and Gore divide and
dissuade critics?
The first test is likely to come early next year, when Congress votes on
permanent most-favored-nation status for China. China, even without being
admitted to the WTO, is the very embodiment of the race to the bottom: the
worst exploiter of workers and the worst poisoner of the environment in
Asia. President Clinton (wearing his pre-Seattle free-trader's suit)
negotiated China's admission to the WTO, but it depends upon that
congressional vote, tentatively scheduled for February. At a press
conference Wednesday afternoon at the State Department, Clinton promised an
"all-out effort" to pass the China-WTO deal, but admitted that the issue
divides even his own party.
In the past, arguments against most-favored-nation status for China were
cast in narrow terms: punishment for Tiananmen Square or the 1996
weapons-and-contributions scandals. But this time, there is an opportunity
to raise a broader issue: What kind of global economy do we want? What
commitments to labor and environmental standards must be exacted in return
for any nation's right to participate fully in the global trade system?
The test for the Seattle coalition will be whether that message can be
broadcast and enhanced -- or whether the MFN opponents will fall back into
the familiar trap of anti-foreigner, anti-Asian bigotry and a return to
protectionism. The test will be whether China activates the sort of
grass-roots cooperation that made Seattle a turning point -- or a return to
lobbying-as-usual by disconnected issue groups.
One thing is certain: After Seattle, it is no longer possible for anyone to
argue that there is no American left. In Seattle, long-simmering cultures of
opposition emerged with an articulate common challenge to the worldwide
corporate agenda. The century's-end convergence of mass protest and
collapsed negotiations in the world capital of the information-age economy
mark the end of a 20-year infatuation with corporate deregulation, a cult of
the global marketplace that began under President Reagan and finally
collided head-on with reality in the streets of Seattle and the conference
rooms of the WTO. 
salon.com | Dec. 8, 1999


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