Open World Conference of Workers
In Defense of Trade Union Independence & Democratic Rights
WHC Report Section 4
Dear Brothers and Sisters:
Please find below Part 4 of the continuing report on the November
14-16, 1997, Western Hemisphere Workers' Conference.
Part 4 contains the following media reports on the conference:
1) The article in People's Weekly
World on November 29, 1997, on the Conference;
2) The full, two-page conference report
spread that appeared in the November 1997 issue of The Dispatcher, the newspaper of the International
Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). This report includes four sections: an overview article, a piece on the U.S. State Department's
blocking of worker access to the conference, an interview with a docker from Santos, Brazil, and excerpts from some of the conference speakers (voices from the hemisphere);
3) Excerpts from the San Francisco Frontlines
newspaper issue from December 1997.
Labor Meeting Targets NAFTA, Privatization
By HERB KAYE
People's Weekly World, Saturday, November 29, 1997
SAN FRANCISCO -- Jack Henning, former head of the California Labor
Federation, told delegates to the Nov. 14-16 Western Hemisphere
Workers' Conference Against NAFTA & Privatizations "the answer to
global capitalism is global unionism and labor has to be at the heart
of the resistance."
"Never forget," Henning told delegates, "that capitalism was never
founded to advance the interests of working people. We can never be
secure until we break the power of global capitalism."
Henning called the defeat of "fast track" legislation a victory for
the labor movement and its allies. "We are in a life-and-death
struggle over the attempt to spread NAFTA," he said. "Arkansas may be
a Right-to-Work (for less) state, but the majority of the U.S. is not
and doesn't intend to be."
The conference was hosted by Walter Johnson, secretary-treasurer of
the San Francisco Labor Council, and endorsed by several state and
local labor leaders, including Art Pulaski, executive
secretary-treasurer of the state federation; Katie Quan, northern
California director of UNITE, and Ed Rosario, president of the San
Francisco Chapter of the Labor Council for Latin American
Advancement. Participants included union leaders from a dozen South
and Central American countries. Karen Talbot, director of the
Committee in Support of Trade Union Rights, was instrumental in
organizing the event.
A delegation of Cuban labor leaders were denied U.S. visas but sent
a message expressing their appreciation for Johnson's efforts to
"improve AFL-CIO relations with Cuban trade unions."
The conference heard reports by leaders of Latin American unions
telling of the drastic effects of privatization of industries and
resources and the accompanying massive layoffs, dislocation of
economies, and impoverishment of millions.
Luis Greenhalg, federal deputy of the Workers Party of Brazil,
charged the government withdrew funds from public enterprises, making
them inefficient and money-losers. "They then sold them to private
interests at bargain prices," he said, adding that the nation's
largest coal mine, as well as light and power utilities, were among
those privatized.
Juan José Gorritti Valle, general secretary of General Workers
Federation of Peru, said that the electrical, mining and education
systems in Peru have been privatized with the loss of many jobs. He
said the leader of the Electrical Workers Union was killed by
government agents.
Michel Henri, general secretary of the Airport Employees Union of
Haiti, told of the privatization of the glass and cement industries
and of the fact that rice, in which Haiti was once self-sufficient,
now has to be imported because of the policies that favor foreign
imports.
Hebe de Bonafini, president of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo
(Committee of Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina), gave an
impassioned account of the relentless quest of the Mothers for the
"disappeared" during the War of the Generals in the 1970s. "We will
continue our "march" for truth and justice to the last drop of
blood," said Bonafini.
The conference devoted major attention to the Multilateral Agreement
on Investment (MAI), spawned by the U.S. Council for International
Business. It is now being discussed in secret by the World Trade
Organization (WTO), with the developing nations excluded from the
negotiations.
According to WTO General Director Renato Ruggerio, the aim is "to
write the constitution of a single global economy that would
guarantee that there were no national regulations or national laws to
stand in the way."
This effort to impose a world safe for capital investment is a kind
of NAFTA on steroids, aimed at nullifying the role of unions or other
resistance to lowering the standards of working people to assure
maximum profits for investors.
Stan Gacek, western hemisphere director of the AFL-CIO's
international affairs department, praised the conference for having
the right strategy and moving in the right direction with its call
for a total campaign against NAFTA and MAI.
When asked whether the AFL-CIO's International Affairs Department
was continuing to fund the American Institute for Free Labor
Development (AIFLD), Gacek stated flatly, "We are no longer in the
business of being centers for the Cold War. There is no AIFLD. There
is a Solidarity Center through which we are working with all unions
in Latin America."
This year, as part of that activity, they invited Brazilian unions
that operate at GE plants there, as well as GE unionists from
European and other countries, to come to Washington to coordinate
bargaining with GE unions in the U.S.
"We have got to have a genuine trade union agenda," Gacek said to
loud applause, "not a U.S. government or a corporate agenda."
The conference concluded with adoption of a Final Declaration
emphasizing the importance of continuing the struggle against NAFTA
and MAI. Conferees agreed to the proposal of the Chilean delegation
to hold a common day of action in April 1998, when the heads of state
from throughout the Americas will convene in Chile to discuss the
creation of a Free Trade Area of the Americas.
From
the November
1997 issue of The Dispatcher, the newspaper of the International
Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU)
WORKERS FROM THE ARCTIC CIRCLE TO TIERRA DEL FUEGO RAP GLOBALIZATION
MAQUILADORA NATIONS
By Tom Price
Workers responding to the increased globalization of capital are
organizing across frontiers in numbers unheard of in nearly a century.
The International Conference Against Privatizations, held in Mexico
City in March 1996, called for a meeting of workers representing the
entire Western Hemisphere. The California Federation of Labor,
AFL-CIO, at its 21st convention on July 31, 1997, unanimously adopted
a resolution to sponsor such a gathering -- and the Western
Hemisphere Workers' Conference against NAFTA and Privatization was
born. (The ILWU endorsed the conference at its International
Convention last April.) Some 346 delegates from 20 countries, along
with many other interested activists and media, convened Nov. 14-16,
1997, in San Francisco.
"Capital has no boundaries or borders. Exploitation has no borders
and workers should accept no borders in uniting to defend our
interests and gains," said the conference call-to-action.
The conference's final declaration stated in one sentence its goals
and results: "We have gathered to give testimony to the deleterious
effects the transnational corporate agenda has had on the working
people of this hemisphere and to improve our capacity for mutual
support and solidarity in our responses to this assault on living and
working conditions and democratic rights."
International trade organizations, outside the control of any
elected bodies or even nation-states, are making decisions that
directly destroy environmental regulations and pit workers from one
country against another in a rat race to the bottom of the wage pile.
Banking rackets such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) hold
countries like Mexico, Poland and Brazil by the throats and force
social wage cuts as a condition for not foreclosing on loans and
imposing international economic sanctions.
In the early 1980s, when NAFTA was not yet even a gleam in Ronald
Reagan's evil eye, the IMF forced Mexico to eliminate farmers'
subsidies for beans and flour and charge full market price to the
consumer. This was the gateway to further attacks on the
redistributive nature of the Mexican state, minimal as that may have
been, and the beginning of a massive transfer of wealth from the
producers to the owners. Millions have been driven off their land,
which has again become a commodity for the first time since the
revolution of 1917. This is just one cruel example of the results of
"privatization," the selling of the publicly held property to
corporations and the ruthless exploitation of workers and the
environment.
From Liverpool to Japan, dockers are under similar attacks, as ports
are sold to private corporations who then use the nearly nonexistent
labor and environmental standards to squeeze every drop of profit
from what used to be the people's property.
Throughout the weekend, workers swapped stories in workshops and
industry caucuses, stories with different casts and settings, but
that echoed the same themes of privatization and casualization, all
adding to the weight of the testimony against what George Bush,
taking a phrase from Hitler, called the New World Order.
The conference closed Sunday with wrap-up speeches and songs.
Thousands of words of information were exchanged, as were hugs and
empathy between workers from so many different places.
The Final Declaration of the conference included a call to action
for next spring:
"We propose a common day of action against the extension of NAFTA,
against continued privatization and destruction of our public
services, and against the attacks on our rights and gains. We aim to
hold this day of action in April 1998, on the day the heads of state
from throughout the Americas will convene in Chile to discuss the
creation of the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas)."
U. S. STATE DEPARTMENT BLOCKS WORKER ACCESS
By Tom Price
With NAFTA in place and global trade agreements greasing the wheels
of international trade with unprecedented slipperiness, it might seem
strange there would be such trouble getting people to a conference on
globalization.
In fact, one of the topics discussed was the Multilateral Agreement
on Investment (MAI), a new scheme in which governments give up their
national sovereignty to lubricate the flow of international capital
in a frictionless torrent towards the lowest-wage parts of the world.
However, the flow of people encountered opposition from the U.S.
State Department. Seventeen delegates from Haiti were supposed to
attend, but only four actually made it, according to Ed Rosario,
Conference Coordinator.
"They applied for visas at the U.S. Consulate and the Consul,
Allison Insley, told them they were 'not a credible grouping,' that
they must have bought the letters from the San Francisco Labor
Council!" said Alan Benjamin of the U.S. Labor Party. "They arrived
at the Consular offices in Port-au-Prince with signed invitations,
union credentials and mandates, two-way plane tickets and passports.
Insley insulted them, said they weren't who they said they were."
Insley questioned them about NAFTA, inquiring that since Haiti
wasn't in NAFTA, why would they be interested in the conference
anyway? The delegates responded that their local trade pact, the
Caribbean Community (Caricom), was expanding, as is NAFTA. Adding
ignorance to insult, Insley said that the AFL-CIO supported NAFTA.
Then Stan Gacek, Western Hemisphere Director of the International
Affairs Department of the AFL-CIO, weighed into straighten out the
Consul and got visas for three of the workers, the fourth was already
in the U.S.
"The behavior of the Consul indicated to me that there was something
more going on than just the fear of illegal immigration. The
government is saying that Haiti is a great success story for Clinton
diplomacy -- but that success is premised on privatization and IMF
policies that destroy native industries and lay off thousands of
people. The U.S. doesn't want this delegation coming over here and
telling everyone what the cost is of that success," Benjamin added.
Of the 30 Ecuadoran delegates only eight got visas. "A lot of them
were indigenous people protesting the takeover of their land by
recently privatized oil companies," Benjamin said. "The nationalized
industries had guarantees of labor rights but the private companies
are under no such requirements. This is called 'deregulation'."
Luis Mesina, General Secretary of the National Bank Workers of
Chile, also encountered difficulty from his own government, which
threatened him with three years in prison if he attended. Gacek
intervened again, and the Chilean government dropped its threat.
Delegates from the Cuban Labor Federation were denied visas, not
surprisingly, by means of what the State Department would call
technicalities. They continually asked for additional information
until the 30-day deadline had expired. The Cubans had applied 60 days
in advance.
"The Conference showed the hypocrisy of the government's advocacy of
the unfettered ability to make profits across national boundaries
and, at the same time, its restriction on the free flow of workers
and information," Benjamin said. "When it comes to workers getting
together and talking, that's a barrier to trade. Labor rights are a
barrier to trade. Labor codes and collective bargaining agreements
are a barrier to trade."
A SANTOS DOCKER SPEAKS OUT
An Interview with Brazilian Unionist Francisco Nogueira
By Marcy Rein
(Translation by Clifton Ross)
Dockers in the Brazilian port of Santos occupied two ships last
April to resist the privatized COSIPA steel company's attempt to work
its cargoes with non-union labor. Days after the occupation they
launched a Web site, linking with the Liverpool dockers via the
Internet and proclaiming "Santos-Liverpool-Amsterdam-Seoul -- One
World, One Struggle."
Their dramatic act caught the attention of longshore workers around
the world. Hundreds responded to their call to send faxes and email
to Brazilian President Enrique Cardoso.
Then suddenly the Web site went dead, calls and faxes to the Santos
dockers went unreturned. At the Second International Dockers
Conference in Montreal a month later, the Brazilian delegate's seat
stayed empty, with others wondering uneasily what had happened. So
when we heard the Brazilian dockers would be represented at the
Western Hemisphere Workers' Conference, it seemed an ideal chance to
get the end of the story.
The Dispatcher caught up with Francisco Nogueira well into Saturday
evening, after the conference's longshore caucus. Nogueira is vice
president of the Sindicato dos Empregados Terrestres em Transportes
Aquavarios do Estado de Sao Paolo, which represents a range of port
workers, excluding stevedores.
Noguiera handled containers on board ships before being elected to
his full-time union job. Union activism runs in the family; his
father had been a leader in the stevedores union.
The occupation of the two ships in Santos lasted 28 days and
attracted tremendous solidarity, Nogueira said. The strikers got no
wages during this time, and survived on donations from other union
members. Sympathy strikes broke out at all Brazil's major ports, and
hundreds of dockers came to Santos and camped out on the dock by the
occupied ships.
The government called in the federal police to end the occupation.
When they entered the ships, the workers left peacefully. The strike
was a partial victory, Noguiera said, because it got a lot of media
coverage and through that changed public opinion. "It sent a message
about the situation of the stevedores," he said.
But the government did break the strike. Once the workers were off
the ship, COSIPA brought in scabs. With their position weakening, the
unions decided to compromise. The unions and the company are still
negotiating the final terms of employment, but currently half the
COSIPA ships are worked by union labor and half by non-union labor.
Half the union workers lost their jobs after the strike as COSIPA
brought in casuals. These day workers, many drawn from the swelling
ranks of Santos' unemployed, work for $200 per month, half the
prestrike rate for similar work.
As a steel company, COSIPA was a strategic target for the
government, which is also trying to privatize other strategic
industries, such as mining and oil. "The government doesn't privatize
dead industries," Nogueira said. "It wants to attract foreign
capital."
COSIPA is owned by Japanese capitalists, but functions as an arm of
the Brazilian government -- "un brazo, Nogueira said, rolling back
his sleeve and pointing to his forearm for emphasis. The attack on
the dockworkers at Santos was premeditated by the government, he
said, which wants to use this as a "recipe" for breaking the unions
at the other terminals.
A second terminal in Santos was privatized Oct. 17. Within the
month, some 2,000 workers there were casualized.
In putting down the COSIPA occupation the Brazilian government made
use of deregulation legislation passed in 1993 for the first time.
Conservative union leaders let these laws go through, Nogueira said.
They didn't respond until the people cried out. Now a new generation
of union leadership is reviving the militant spirit: We saw this at
work in the occupation, he said.
Several other ports have already been privatized as part of Brazil's
National Privatization Program, instituted in 1991. Santos is a
holdout. Known as Brazil's "red city," it has a long history of
struggle and was run by the Workers Party from 1988 to 1996.
In resisting casualization, Nogueira and the members of his union
identify with the Liverpool dockers. The union maintains a Liverpool
Solidarity Committee, and delivered a letter to the British Consulate
in Sao Paolo on the International Day of Action, Sept. 8. It asked
the government to intervene on behalf of the dockers. "Tony Blair is
a labor prime minister; he should be able to do something," Nogueira
said.
The Santos strike accelerated moves to unify the port unions, now
divided into nine different unions. Each occupation has its own
organization, among them stevedores, guards, checkers, clerks and
several others. People were thinking about unification before the
strike, but now it's a real project, Nogueira said. The workers see
COSIPA as a warning of things to come, and unity as their best tool
for resistance.
"The situation in Brazil is no different from anywhere else,
especially Liverpool," Nogueira told the longshore caucus at the
Conference. The government has pushed deregulation and privatization.
Neoliberalism is going forward and destroying the whole working
class. People who work in the public sector are losing jobs to
privatization. All kinds of workers are earning less and working
harder.
"After the conference we need to continue the contact with unions of
port workers around the world -- 'sin fronteras'," he said. "We must
unite to fight the market."
VOICES FROM THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE
Hebe de Bonafini, Argentina, Coordinator, Madres de Plaza de Mayo
"I cannot speak as a labor representative because I am not. Instead
I speak on behalf of the 30,000 people who have disappeared in my
country. There is no doubt that our disappeared children would be
forcefully opposed to the economic policies that squash us and leave
us without food or shelter.
"These policies resulted in 10,000 people being killed on the
streets of Argentina and 1.5 million being driven into exile and
thousands jailed. And all this simply to impose an economic strategy.
This is killing our country. We are happy to participate in this
conference against the reduction of labor standards, casualization,
and so-called free-trade agreements. As many would say, we are in the
entrails of the beast."
Nobert Gbikpi-Benissan,
General Secretary, Federation of Independent Unions of Togo
"We are a small country on the west coast of Africa. Like many other
countries, we suffer from 'structural adjustments.' Our situation is
complicated by the fact that we live under a dictatorship that for
the last 30 years has crushed our population. Ours is one of the
poorest countries in Africa, and our liberation struggle is both on
the level of human rights and fundamental freedoms, including freeing
one's self from the structural adjustment plans and poverty.
"You know that Africa today is the continent of the dislocation of
the states and populations in the wars. The workers have the
historical responsibility to help stop this dislocation. This is why
we are here at this conference and bring the greetings of African
workers."
Cajuste Lexiuste, former general secretary, General Workers
Confederation of Haiti
"We, the workers, are over-exploited and scorned, while actually we
represent a force. We must organize ourselves to build real
international unity to struggle against the death plans of the IMF,
World Bank, and GATT.
"In any economic system there are three factors: production,
distribution, and consumption. We, the workers, have produced all the
wealth in the world. And yet we have not been included in the
distribution of that wealth. It is an anomaly we cannot let continue
here.
"Today our country, Haiti, is occupied. The occupiers have come to
Haiti to bring 'democracy.' In fact what they have brought is
corruption and insecurity. We are requesting the support of the
workers of the world to fight against these death plans."
ILWU International President Brian McWilliams
"In the struggles in South Africa against apartheid, it was the
worldwide labor movement that produced the pressure that caused that
system to collapse. The same occurred in Nicaragua and El Salvador
with the coffee boycott.
"In the times just before the Second World War, West Coast longshore
workers refused to load scrap iron for the imperialist Japanese
government because it was being used against the peoples of China.
Not all of these efforts are immediately successful, but they do
solidify the feelings between workers and encourage that great
history to continue.
"Everywhere throughout the world, there is a concerted drive to
privatize the docks, break the system of unions on the waterfronts,
undermine conditions, and break those docker unions that have fought
so hard and so long to build the conditions they enjoy.
The Liverpool dockers are on the front lines of the fightback
against this assault. We in the ILWU have given them our full
support, and we urge all of you to do the same.
"One thing you may have read about in the papers is the fining of
Japanese ships in U.S. ports because of some misrepresented idea of
an unfair trade situation in Japan. What's really going on there, and
it's not related to you in the press somehow -- which shouldn't
surprise any of you -- is that through our tax dollars as workers in
this country, our government is using gunboat diplomacy to pressure
the Japanese government.
"We're sticking our big nose into collective bargaining and domestic
issues in Japan to force those Japanese dockers to give up the
conditions they fought for so many years, which is what they got for
supporting the mechanization and modernization. They got work
guarantees in exchange for the loss of many jobs. Now the American
government is trying, through a system of political leverage, to
change those collective-bargaining agreements in Japan. But they
don't tell you that in the newspapers.
"Since 1947, the ILWU has participated in and sponsored
rank-and-file worker delegations to countries around the world to
interface with other workers, to find out what's happening in the
workplace -- all of this so we can develop programs to fight these
international cartels that use every opportunity to make workers pay the price for their insatiable drive for profit.
"International solid
arity among workers is a cornerstone for building a successful
challenge to multinational exploitation and oppression of workers all
around the world."
Luis Mesina Marin, General Secretary, Bank Workers of Chile
"We in the Chilean Bank Workers Union have come to this conference
because, even though we are thousands of miles apart, we too are
feeling the effects of free trade agreements. In particular, we are
profoundly opposed to the so-called agreements for economic
integration. They reproduce the unequal laws of economic development,
which leads to a day-to-day inequality between rich and poor
countries and has violently harmed the workers of our country.
"Today we are witnessing the gross efforts of former dictator
General Augusto Pinochet, who is now in the Senate, to impose these
agreements and unfair labor legislation on the working class. We feel
that this conference is more important than ever."
Excerpts from San Francisco Frontlines (December 1997)
"The Western Hemisphere Workers Conference Against NAFTA and
Privatizations, held Nov. 14-16 in San Francisco, happened with
little notice from the mainstream media. With the exception of a few
articles buried in esoteric sections of newspapers or soundbites on
some radio and TV stations, nobody did much to call attention to
these 400 or so trade unionists from different countries.
People came from about 20 countries, including Brazil, Ecuador,
Mexico, Togo, France, Haiti and the United States. About 50 unions
endorsed the event and a number of them had members in attendance.
Report after report spoke about the resistance of workers and farmers
in different countries of Latin America to the terrible effects of
the imposition of NAFTA and NAFTA-like agreements. They talked about
NAFTA's devastating effects on the agricultural industry of Mexico --
which precipitated the Zapatista rebellion in 1994.
The devastating effects in Argentina, Chile, and Ecuador, and the
defiant positions taken by labor unions and some political parties in
those countries were recounted. In most cases, resistance was
countered by governments who want to be part of the NAFTA agreement.
This in spite of the effects on the economy of their countries. "This
is so," said a representative of Brazil, "because the governments
only represent the interests of big corporations which are the only
ones that benefit from the treaty."
Among the participants in the Conference were the Madres de Plaza de
Mayo -- the Mothers of the Disappeared -- headed by Hebe de Bonafini,
founder and president of the committee. She spoke about how the
Mothers were today continuing the struggle initiated by their
children. She had strong words of criticism for the U.S. government
and Armed Forces that trained, armed and supported the Armed Forces
of Argentina that murdered and "disappeared" 30,000 young activists,
trade unionists and intellectuals in the late 1970s and early '80s.