Higher Standards?
Should labor and environmental standards be incorporated into the
WTO, or is that the wrong place for them?
Wallach: When the WTO was established, many environmentalists pushed
for an environmental working group in the WTO. They got one, and
after five years, many of its most energetic proponents are now
saying that this working group has turned into a trade-dominated
entity where environmental laws are studied not to safeguard them
but rather to figure out how to get rid of them. We don't want to
put the environment in the hands of an organization whose charge and
worldview is commercial. That would be like putting the Endangered
Species Act in the middle of the bankruptcy code. We need to have an
entity of equal stature, and we need the WTO to be cut out of
national and international environmental policies. Global labor
movements now have all the enthusiasm the environmentalists did five
years ago about putting standards into the WTO. I personally am very
skeptical.
Lee: We've built a very strong consensus among labor unions around
the world about the importance of incorporating enforceable workers'
rights into international trade agreements. These include the
freedom of association, the right to bargain collectively and
provisions on child labor, forced labor and employment
discrimination. The question is how international organizations can
support the goal of observing core labor standards. The IMF and the
World Bank could include as one of the conditions for loans the
observance of these standards. By not having any rules on workers'
rights, the WTO makes it difficult for countries to implement and
enforce core labor standards. The very absence of rules undermines
countries' abilities to enforce them. But frankly we're a long way
from having consensus that this is an issue the countries want to
discuss. Because the WTO is a multilateral organization, we need to
start with some more modest goals of opening a dialogue about what
constructive role it can play in promoting core labor standards. Our
ultimate goal is to incorporate workers' rights and environmental
protections into WTO rules. But we can't start with that. In the
short term we hope to force the WTO to acknowledge that its actions
have a bearing on labor standards and begin a conversation that will
one day lead to a change in the rules.
Moody: I think there are problems with standards. The whole purpose
of these multilateral agreements is to break down barriers to trade
and investment. There's also a problem of enforcement. Can you
imagine the US government using the WTO to sanction Indonesia
because Indonesia is being nasty to its trade unions? I think labor
is taking this tack because it's the easy one to take. Why aren't
they a little bolder? Labor should be taking on the multinational
corporations on a worldwide scale. There are some examples of that
happening recently--but we need a lot more, and not the ceremonial
approach of the past. A good example of what could be done was the
recent oil workers' strike in Indonesia. The US oil workers' union
[now merged into PACE] and the international trade union secretariat
launched a pressure campaign on the corporations. And the Indonesian
strike was won. There are networks being built between workers in
the United States and Mexico and Europe. We need more cross-border
exchanges at the rank-and-file level. There are high-level
organizations like the secretariats, which sometimes do good things,
but have the problem of being federations of federations.
Bello: People in the South have been saying that putting the
determination of whether goods are being produced in socially
acceptable ways in the hands of the WTO is putting it in the hands
of the wrong organization. Instead, let's strengthen the ILO, let's
strengthen multilateral environmental agreements. Northern NGOs have
been too quick to try to use the WTO as an enforcement mechanism.
Clearly, environmental groups in the North are on the right track in
examining how commodities are made or how fish are caught. But often
there's little sensitivity that jobs are at stake in the South.
There should be ways that green technologies from the North could be
made available to Southern countries at low cost to facilitate
cleaner methods of production. With labor, too, the issues are quite
complex. It often seems that we're not just talking about extreme
sweatshop conditions in the South but about a demand that labor
standards overall be radically upgraded. And this does not take into
account historical social conditions that exert influence beyond the
desire of multinationals for cheaper labor.