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June 19, 2003
Globalization and the mobility of capital have forced the Latin American labor
movement to work on an international level and incorporate many new actors in
the struggle for labor rights. The shift toward transnational coordination in
the labor movement has achieved important victories in making large apparel
companies responsible for workers in their supplier chains. While this
transnational coordination has often been effective in achieving higher labor
standards and curtailing human rights violations in maquila
factories or factories in free trade zones, it is frequently complicated by
competing motivations and conflicting interests, which can limit the effects of
joint action.
In Central America there are many examples of transnational cooperation
successfully forcing large brand-name companies to stop human rights violations
in their suppliers’ factories. Mandarin, Do All, Hang Chan, and Amitex are only
some of the factories in El Salvador where, after a mass dismissal for union
discrimination, famous brands like The Gap, Liz Claiborne, and Phillips Van
Heusen, among others, called on their supplier to correct these violations. In
all of these cases, labor and human rights organizations in Central America
worked together with activists from Canada, the United States, and Europe to
force the brand-name company to act.
The organization I work with, Independent Monitoring Group (GMIES), is a Salvadoran group that monitors
labor conditions in El Salvador. It was formed in 1996 with the mission to
monitor and record labor abuses in maquila factories. The independent
monitoring of labor conditions is often the result of the joint action of
national and international actors working to pressure the national government,
contractors, brand-name companies, and consumers to address labor rights
violations. By auditing and releasing public reports, independent monitoring
groups have contributed to resolving serious violations of labor rights, such as
excessive working hours, forced overtime, sexual harassment, and lack of freedom
of association. While this shift toward more transnational coordination in the
labor movement has allowed labor groups in developing countries more access to
factories, more ability to monitor labor conditions on-site, and more immediate
results in labor disputes, it has also created tensions between groups, limited
the autonomy of local groups, and left some workers behind.
Some of these tensions can be seen in the relationships between Northern and
Southern labor groups. Labor activism around maquila factories often
involves relocating the sphere of action and building transnational alliances,
which allow workers to reach consumers in the North. Consumer pressure is
essential to persuading apparel companies to act responsibly. However, these
alliances are not free of difficulties. The geographic segmentation of
production has put workers from the North at a disadvantage. When some of their
jobs were relocated to the South, Northern activists initially reacted with a
protectionist line. In the early 1990s, many American organizations publicized
bad labor conditions in the South and called for consumers to buy only products
made in the United States. Recently, their attitudes and tactics have been
changing as it appears almost impossible to make these jobs come back to the
United States. Some of these organizations are starting to recognize that, even
if factories will not come back to the United States, their support for workers
in the South could improve labor conditions in both the North and the South.
However, it is likely that some Northern activists will continue a protectionist
stance, since organizations based in the North have their own political
interests. On March 9, 2002, the Salvadoran newspaper La Prensa Gráfica quoted a
U.S. union representative who argued that, since NAFTA was signed, the U.S. textile and apparel industry had
lost 450,000 jobs. The U.S. unionist predicted that her union would work to stop
more jobs from leaving the United States.
American activists like this one are willing to contribute to the cause of
workers in the South only when it suits their own needs. This can be problematic
when workers in the South want to launch a campaign around issues that are not
in the direct interests of Northern activists. (Activists in the United States
often target a couple of brand-name companies for abuses committed by their
suppliers but abuses that occur in the factories of other brands are
overlooked.) In this transnational movement, where solidarity is still possible,
activists in the South are not the ones defining the agenda.
Another change in the labor movement is the participation of national and
foreign NGOs who typically have not been involved in labor-related activities.
Among these NGOs, women’s rights organizations and human rights groups are the
most active. Women’s organizations have begun to defend labor rights using
alternative strategies for organizing women maquila workers. Emphasis has
been placed on women’s rights and situations that are not traditional labor
union grievances such as maternity benefits, sexual harassment, child labor,
women’s empowerment within the organizations, and double shifts of female
workers. Human rights groups put labor violations into the framework of human
rights and translate those abuses into a more provocative language that
identifies workers as victims of human rights violations in order to bring more
attention to their problems.
The relationships between these actors are often rather contentious. Unions
complain that NGOs are infringing upon their work and trying to replace the
union as the workers’ representative. Some unions emphasize that unlike union
leaders, these organizations are not elected by the workers. NGOs, especially
women’s NGOs, maintain that they highlight demands specific to their
constituencies—usually demands the unions have not taken into account.
Since the mid-1990s, the consuming public has become involved in the struggle
for workers’ rights— a shift that has been both positive and problematic.
Campaigns that connect brand names to labor rights grant a political value to
the act of purchasing and demonstrate the power that consumers can have in
defending workers in the South. The problem with this type of advocacy is that
the consuming public only gets information about brand-name companies that are
targeted by labor rights groups. Many other companies that commit abuses are
never targeted and their abuses go unnoticed.
The mobility of capital and the many transnational strategies that are now
undertaken to defend workers’ rights do not necessarily target the state. Cases
are more quickly resolved through the intervention of brand-name companies that
contract the factory than through direct state action. While this model manages
to endow transnational companies with responsibilities and pressures them to
guarantee the conditions of the workers who make their products (an important
breakthrough), this model provides little opportunity for workers who are not
employed by the production chains of multinational corporations and it has
little effect on the other factories operating within the country that are
oriented to the local or regional market.
Developing countries lack institutional frameworks and our governments lack
seriousness in confronting the challenges their people face. This does not leave
many alternatives to the type of vulnerable advocacy arrangements described
above. Even if some transnational actions are successful, the challenge
continues to be the same for labor organizations in the South: to strengthen the
state in such a way that it can safeguard working citizens’ rights.
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