Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy

350 Pages·1997·5.449 MB·English

by  Kim Moody

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Workers in a Lean World
Unions in the International Economy
•
KIM MOODY
VERSO
Lcncon 1\evv Ycr<
First published by Verso 1997
0 Kim Moody 1997
All rights reserved
Reprinted 1998,1999,2001
The right of Kim Moody to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London WlF OEG
USA: 180Varick Street, New York NY 10014-4606
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN 1-85984-867-2
ISBN 1-85984-104-X (pbk)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Moody, Kim.
Workers in a lean world :unions in the international economy I
Kim Moody
p. em.
ISBN 1-85984-867-2 (cloth).- ISBN 1-85984-104-(pbk.)
1. Trade-unions. 2. Working class. 3. Labor market.
4. Competition, International. I. Tide.
HD6483.M55 1997
331.8!hlc21 97-28877
CIP
Typeset by SetSystems Ltd, Saffron Walden, Essex
Printed by Biddies Ltd, www.biddles.co.11k
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii
INTRODUCTION 1
1 World-Class Working Class 9
Part 1: Capital's Offensive
2 A Certain Kind of Globalization 41
3 North-South Divide: Uneven Development 51
4 Corporate Power and International Production 67
5 The Rise and Limits of Lean Production 85
Part II: Capital's Cops
6 Corporatism, Neoliberalism, Free Trade, and the State 117
Part III: Labor's Response
7 Pulled Apart, Pushed Together 143
8 Crisis of the Working Class 180
9 Looking South 201
10 Official Labor Internationalism in Transition 227
11 Rank-and-File Internationalism: The TIE Experience 249
Conclusion: Toward an International Social-Movement
Unionism 269
EPILOGUE 293
NOTES 311
INDEX 335

Acknowledgements
Because I have learned from so many, it is hard to pick out those to thank.
It was hard enough when I completed An Injury To All in 1988, which
covered only one country. Workers in a Lean World covers many countries
in a very different period and the debts I owe to people around the world
are all the greater. Some, however, are obvious. In the realm of day-to-day
work and my own development are: the past and present staff members
of Labor Notes; the pioneers in analysing lean production and labor
management cooperation, Mike Parker and Jane Slaughter; Ken Paff and
many other activists in the Teamsters for a Democratic Union; Jerry Tucker,
Elly Leary, and so many in UAW New Directions; and countless other acti
vists fighting for a more democratic, effective labor movement in the US.
Across the seas and borders my guides and mentors of recent years
include: Heiner Kohnen and Jens Huhn at TIE-Bildungswerk/Germany;
Francine Bavay and Christophe Aguiton at SUD; Michel Bousquet of the
CGT; Ben Watanabe and Hideo Totsuka in Japan; Sheila Cohen in the
United Kingdom; Hector de la Cueva of CILAS in Mexico; Carlos Vallejo
and Robin White of the Comisiones Obreras in Catalonia; and though I
have only met them a few times, Sam Gindin, David Robertson, and other
leaders and activists in the Canadian Auto Workers.
This book could never have been written without the time I spent with
workers and unionists from around the world, whether in their country or
mine, whether in interviews or just hanging out and talking. There are too
many to name, but they came from Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Taiwan,
France, Germany, Spain, Japan, the United Kingdom, South Korea, and, of
course, the United States. In addition to those mentioned above, there are
also many researchers/activists who have shared observations and ideas
that helped me piece together the evolving puzzle of lean production. In
the realm of political economy I owe much to the work of Anwar Shaikh
and Howard Botwinick.
I decided not to dedicate this book because there are too many candi
dates. But I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge some of the groups
vii
viii Acknowledgements
that have inspired me in recent years, notably: the locked-out workers at
A. E. Staley in Decatur, Illinois; the strikers at the Detroit News Agency
papers; and all those Teamsters who have helped bring about the most far
reaching revolution in any union in the US. Out of these struggles, win or
lose, come the kinds of working-class warriors this book is all about.
Introduction
This is not another globalization book. While there are three chapters that
discuss the dynamics and structure of the process called globalization, this
book will not tell you in great detail that the parts in cars and airplanes
come from different countries or that American music and clothing styles
(often produced elsewhere) can be purchased anywhere in the world by
those who have money. You probably knew that already. Nor will you be
told over and over that the world is full of sad-sack victims, though the
victims number in the billions and their plight will be recorded here. The
focus here is not on victims, but on resisters. Finally, this book will not
prescribe some policies to make the institutions of globalization more
representative or benign, though it will try to point to some ways to
change the intolerable behavior of these institutions.
The real topic of this book is the working class: its paralysis in the
face of global industrial restructuring; its difficulties in capturing or
even influencing its own organizations; its disorientation in the face of
changes in racial, ethnic and gender composition; its degradation in the
dog-eat-dog competition of the world market; and its rebellion against
these conditions. Amidst predictions of the end of trade unionism and
even of the working class, working people returned to center stage in the
mid-1990s. To be sure, they were always there in the wings, resisting
locally in the best ways possible while paralysed by the fear of job loss.
The working class never goes away; it is the vast majority; but it
frequently goes unnoticed by the media that frame our perception of
society.
The idea for this book came from my experience. As a member of the
staff of lAbor Notes for almost twenty years, I have had the good fortune to
get to know hundreds of trade union activists the world around. The
majority of them, of course, are in the United States, but many of them
come from other lands near and far - from Canada to Japan, Mexico to
France, El Salvador to Germany, from Brazil to Britain, and more. While I
have had the patience to read much of the globalization literature, it is
1
2 Workers in a Lean World
these many union activists who have taught me what the deepening of
international economic integration is really about.
When I started this project, in 1994, the rebellion was barely visible.
While I was doing research in Europe, two events took place that gave me
confidence in the project. The first was the general strike in Nigeria. I had
done my Master's degree thesis on the Nigerian labor movement many
years before and knew something of the risks these trade unionists were
taking in the face of a ruthless military government. The incredible heroism
of these union leaders and activists led me to look once again into that
country. But before I got far, the movement was crushed by the same
military that had crushed Nigerian labor over twenty-five years earlier.
Support began to build among British trade unionists and American Black
community activists, but it was all too little, too late. If I had had any
doubts about the willingness of workers to fight when pushed to the wall,
and the need for effective international solidarity, the Nigerian struggle
put them to rest.
At the same time, while I was researching in London, I read in the
Financial Times of a strike in October 1994 by an unnamed local union
against General Motors (GM) in Flint, Michigan. Like the Nigerian strike,
which brought the oil industry to a halt, it only made the international
news because it disrupted a major transnational corporation (TNC). I knew
who the GM strikers were and why they were striking. Their leaders were
members of the dissident New Directions caucus in the United Auto
Workers' union, just as the Nigerian strike leaders were political dissidents
in their country. The proportion of heroism and risk was clearly different,
but the motivation was not so different.
Reaction would vanquish them both for the moment. The military
government of Nigeria would imprison strike leaders. GM, assisted by the
national leaders of the auto workers' union and the mayor of Flint, would
defeat the New Directions leaders in the next union election by telling the
workers that there would be no new product for the plant and GM would
leave Flint if the dissidents were re-elected. The "official" candidate won.
The plant, however, was left with no new product, GM management
headquarters left town, and other facilities were closed. It was one more
reminder that these days most business decisions are made by transna
tional corporations in a world-wide context - giant businesses balancing
resources between major markets. The pathetic attempts of union leaders
and local politicians to "save jobs" by conforming to corporate priorities
have little or no impact in the end. Whether this kind of protectionism is
local, as in the Flint case, or national, as when unions support massive
downsizing at corporations like GM or AT&T in the name of "competitive
ness," it is a dead end for workers and their unions.
Introduction 3
On the other hand, this approach fits well with the corporate shift
toward lean-production methods in almost every industry, discussed in
chapter 5. Most of these pr?grams include labor-management cooperation
structures and promote a company-minded "win-win" mentality. The
problem, of course, is that there is no "win-win" solution to the age-old
conflict between employer and employee. The adage that "our income
(time, health, and safety) is their cost" remains as true as ever. Someone
wins and someone loses something in this economic and social tug of war.
That is the stuff of trade unionism.
This bonding of union leaders and employers takes on the grander
ideological form of "social partnership" in Europe. In Japan it is known as
enterprise unionism. Its academic name is often "human resources man
agement." By whatever name it is known, a style of unionism that adapted
to these management practices spread across the world in the 1980s. By
now it is common among union leaders who populate both the national
unions and labor federations and the institutions and meetings of the
official international trade unionism dealt with in chapter 10.
This current of thinking now forms what one writer called "global
business unionism," a post-Cold War version of old-style American "pure
and simple" unionism.1 It is ironic that none of the AFL-CIO's government
backed Cold War efforts to promote American-style business unionism
was nearly as successful as the corporate offensive that put
labor-management cooperation schemes on the industrial agenda in the
past fifteen years. This is, to a large extent, a reflection of the fact that the
lean-production methods that underlie this ideology are now almost
universal across the industrial world. They have modified, though not
eliminated, the mass-production techniques that preceded them. Like the
mass-production techniques of earlier years, these lean mass-production
methods have spread from manufacturing to almost every kind of work
organized along modern lines.
"Global business unionism," like its American predecessor, essentially
accepts the new order and settles for negotiating the price of labor. At the
national level, mergers of unions are seen as a more efficient means of
administering the wage bargain in this new lean era. Internationally, there
is confusion about how to function in the post-Cold War epoch, strong
nationalist practice dressed in the newer language of "partnership," and a
debilitating protocol that inhibits effective action.
Books and essays stating that unions must go global to match employers
are not hard to come by these days. What should be clear from what is
said here, however, is that building a genuine, effective practice of
international labor solidarity capable of halting or reversing the global
race to the bottom will involve more than simply making international