Place, Space and the New Labour Internationalisms

307 Pages·2001·1.231 MB·English

PLACE, SPACE AND THE NEW LABOUR
INTERNATIONALISMS
About the cover
La Solidaridad Obrera No Tiene Fronteras(Labour Solidarity Has No Frontiers)
is one of a series of five murals produced by US labour movement artist,
Mike Alewitz. Entitled The Worker in the New World Order, this was produced
for the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General
Workers Unions (ICEM). The series can be found at http://www.icem.org/
gallery/ gallery.html.
Apart from the influences of the Mexican tradition of left (and internation-
alist) murals, this one makes evident reference to the drawing by British
socialist artist Walter Crane, Labour’s Mayday, which was “dedicated to the
workers of the world”, and produced for the International Socialist and
Trades Union Congress, 1896. More of Crane’s work can be found on
the website of the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, at
http://www.iisg.nl/exhibitions/art/indexcrane.html.
The Editors
Place, Space and the
New Labour
Internationalisms
Edited by
Peter Waterman
and
Jane Wills
Copyright © Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2001
First published as a special issue of Antipode Vol.33, No. 3, 2001
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ISBN: 0-631-22983-3
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Contents
Place, Space and the New Labour Internationalisms
Introduction: Place, Space and the New Labour Internationalisms:
Beyond the Fragments?
Peter Waterman and Jane Wills 1
New Developments in Trade Union Internationalism
Trade Union Internationalism in the Age of Seattle
Peter Waterman 8
Southern Unionism and the New Labour Internationalism
Rob Lambert and Eddie Webster 33
Rethinking the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions
and its Inter-American Regional Organization
Kjeld Jakobsen 59
Transnational Capital, Urban Globalisation and Cross-Border
Solidarity: The Case of the South African Municipal Workers
Franco Barchiesi 80
Labor Internationalism and the Contradictions of Globalization:
Or, Why the Local is Sometimes Still Important in a Global Economy
Andrew Herod 103
New Issues for Labour Internationalism
World Trade and Workers’ Rights: In Search of an
Internationalist Position
Rohini Hensman 123
NAFTA’s Labor Side Agreement and International Labor Solidarity
Lance Compa 147
European Integration and Industrial Relations: A Case of Variable
Geometry?
Richard Hyman 164
Uneven Geographies of Capital and Labour: The Lessons of
European Works Councils
Jane Wills 180
vi Contents
Women Workers and the Promise of Ethical Trade in the Globalised
Garment Industry: A Serious Beginning?
Angela Hale and Linda Shaw 206
Propositions on Trade Unions and Informal Employment in
Times of Globalisation
Dan Gallin 227
A Manifesto Against Femicide
Melissa Wright 246
Union Responses to Mass Immigration: The Case of Miami, USA
Bruce Nissen and Guillermo Grenier 263
Index 289
A n t i p o d e
Edited by
Jamie Peck and Jane Wills
For 30 years Antipodehas been the place to
publish radical scholarship in geography. The
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1
Place, Space and the New Labour
Internationalisms:
Beyond the Fragments?
Peter Waterman and Jane Wills
[I]nternationalism ought to consist, not only in listening attentively
to an internationalist discourse, but in contributing to it on our own
account. We are not truly present in any conversation
if we are only silent auditors … Internationalism should not be like
a net-work of television stations, each beaming nationalprogrammes
to passive viewers in alien lands. It should be a concourse, an
exchange. (Thompson 1978:iv)
The solution … needs more than just ad hoc contact between the
different movements. Neither is the merging of the movements any
solution; there are good reasons for each movement preserving its
autonomy, controlling its own organisation. For women, blacks,
trade unionists, gays, youth and national minorities have specific
interests which may sometimes be antagonistic to each other both
now and probably in a socialist society. The solution lies in bringing
together all those involved in the different movements and
campaigns who agree on a wider programme of socialist change,
based on demands of the different movements in the context of
organising for social ownership and popular political power.
(Rowbotham, Segal and Wainwright 1979:5–6)
A network … is a set of interconnected nodes—and has no centre
… [D]ominant activities in our societies are made of networks:
global financial markets; production and consumption organised
around the network enterprise … global/local media connected
in the electronic hypertext … the network state, made of
supranational, national, regional and local institutions lining up to
2 Peter Waterman and Jane Wills
exert joint influence on global flows of wealth and information … I
would also add that, increasingly, counterdomination operates
through networks as well, as in the case of the environmental move-
ment, or of countercultural movements, or human rights organ-
isations, linking up the local and the global through the Internet.
Because networks are extremely efficient organisations, they
eliminate, through competition, alternative structures, so their logic
expands. (Castells 2000:110)
In the wake of antiglobalisation protests in Seattle, Washington,
Davos, Prague and Porto Alegre (not to speak of such localised anti-
global protests as those in Cochabamba in Bolivia, in India and both
inside and outside French outlets of McDonalds), increasing numbers
of people are taking part in dialogues about the theory and practice of
internationalism. There is renewed energy to find alternatives to neo-
liberal globalisation, and it is becoming more widely acknowledged that
labour/union internationalism is central to the struggle. Yet, as presently
constituted, trade unions appear ill suited to the coalition politics and
alliance-building so critical to contemporary counterculturalprotest.
The present collection of arguments about labour internationalism
provides both a critique of the prevailing order of things in the labour
movement and a contribution to discussion about alternatives to such.
In the post-Seattle period, at a time in which international unions,
labour-oriented NGOs and related social movements are coming
together to discuss common international strategies in the light of
globalisation, we hope this collection will be seen as both an original
and a timely publication.
Classically, labour internationalism has been thought of, or fought
for, in terms of a homogeneous working class—seen as the universal
emancipatory subject. This internationalism has been mostly dis-
cussed in terms of political economy, whether of the left or the centre.
As the development of capitalism was accompanied by a state-defined
nationalism, political economy often followed this course, contrasting
the international nature of capitalism with the national nature of the
state. Within this tradition, trade union internationalism came to mean
the interrelation of national trade union bodies, whether this combin-
ation was to serve reformist, revolutionary, practical or moral goals. The
labour internationalism of the national/industrial capitalist period even-
tually declined into institutionally defined trade union forms, mirroring
the ritualistic procedures of interstate and interorganisational politics.
In the meantime, what in the 1970s and 1980s was called “the inter-
nationalisation of production” has transmogrified into something much
Place, Space and the New Labour Internationalisms 3
more general, called “neoliberalism” or “globalisation”, “mondial-
isation”or other names, each with disputed meanings. Whatever name
we give to this process, however, there is increasing agreement on both
the political and theoretical left that it is undermining or transforming
the state-defined nation, industrial relations, the welfare or collectivist
state, the trade union, the “homogeneous” working class and such
formalised union internationalism as remains. It has also, of course,
undermined traditional ways of viewing and understanding the world.
As the intellectual and activist left splintered into different bodies of
thought and action, reflected in the growth of academic feminism,
social geography, cultural studies and environmentalism, worldviews
have also been crafted that look beyond nation-states. Radical geography
has itself given particular attention to the differing roles of gender, race,
sexuality, labour and environmentalism in the production of place,
space and scale inter/nationally (see Blunt and Wills 2000; Harvey
1996; Herod 1998, 2001; Massey 1994; McDowell 1999; Peck 1996).
Yet the question of whether we are finally moving “beyond the frag-
ments” remains open. Scholars are still searching for ways in which
complexity, difference and multideterminacy can be combined with a
universalism relevant to the transformation of the contemporary world
(Fraser 2000; Harvey 2000; McDowell 2000; Smith 2000). Radical
thinkers and activists are still grappling with the challenges posed in
the UK by Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainwright
(1979). In her introductory remarks to Beyond the Fragments (1979),
Wainwright highlighted two problems to be faced in uniting a variety
of political agents in the struggle for social change. The first was the
need to find common cause while meeting the needs of all oppressed
groups; the second was to unify popular protest from the community
with that of workers in the workplace. She also used the word “social-
ism”—a word with a marginal presence, even today, in both the minds
of intellectuals and the mouths of labour activists internationally.
In this collection, authors explore the ways in which labour can find
both itself and its allies in international struggle to transform the
present order of things. The politics of coalition and alliance are
evidently and increasingly critical to the future of trade unionism
and labour internationalism. Indeed, the relevant places/spaces of
such new internationalisms must also surpass physical cartography
to include those of cyberspace and utopia. Our contributors include
internationally minded and labour-oriented academics alongside
theoretically minded internationalist labour activists. This facilitates a
critique of dominant, and even alternative, labour internationalisms
alongside constructive proposals for the future—Gramsci’s pessimism