By James B. Parks

Tens of thousands of union members and student, environmental, religious and community activists will gather in Washington, D.C., Sept. 26–Oct. 1 for a Global Justice Week during the annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Through rallies, marches, teach-ins and street actions, the demonstrators will focus their protests on the indiscriminate privatization of jobs in the global economy, the fight to stop Fast Track trade authorization, the need for debt relief for poor countries and the high cost of drugs to treat HIV/AIDS.

	Where it began: In 1999, more than 30,000 union members and other activists brought globalization issues to light during protests outside WTO meetings in Seattle.

“By building a broad international network of labor and citizen groups, we will confront the serious moral issues created by the current global economic system. And we will fight against global and financial policies that benefit investors and corporations at the expense of the world’s working families and workers’ rights,” says Communications Workers of America President morton Bahr, chairman of the AFL-CIO Executive Council international affairs committee.

Two years after protesters outside WTO meetings in Seattle succeeded in bringing to light the need for open trade talks that include workers’ and human rights and protections for the environment, the architects of globalization have changed their rhetoric, but not their policies, says Hal Leyshon. Leyshon, president of the Washington and Orange Counties Labor Council in Montpelier, Vt., will join a contingent of New England trade unionists traveling to Washington to take part in the six-day series of mass mobilization events known as “S30.”

“Globalization is not about free trade at all,” he says. “It really means deregulation of the world economy and an attack on the things we have fought for, such as workers’ rights and environmental protection.”

The truth behind privatization

The World Bank and IMF routinely require developing countries to privatize state-owned industries as a condition of receiving loans. The privatization usually benefits wealthy corporations, often at the expense of working families and their unions.

When a public service is turned over to private companies, unions that represent workers often are disbanded or broken, says Beatrice Edwards, international financial institutions coordinator for Public Services International. PSI is the worldwide trade union federation representing public-sector unions. After the collective bargaining process is dismantled, the new owners often ignore workers’ rights and drive down wages while raising the price of the goods produced, she says.

The global rush to privatization of public jobs primarily benefits the wealthy and has cost good-paying jobs in the United States and in developing countries. Increasingly, a full-fledged shift from publicly to privately managed public services is being used to boost profits and break unions, driving down workers’ living standards, Edwards says.

	Special honor: AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson presents the 2000 Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award to Oscar Olivera on behalf of the Institute for Policy Studies.

The consequences of privatization can be brutal: In Cochabamba, Bolivia, privatization of water in 1999 resulted in rate hikes of 200 percent to 300 percent for some Cochabamban families. Households with $100 in monthly income were paying $25 to $30 monthly for their water, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, a nonprofit think tank. Union leader Oscar Olivera led a coalition of unions, peasant groups, farmer organizations and neighborhood associations that successfully fought back a water privatization scheme mandated by the World Bank.

“Oscar and his sisters and brothers in Cochabamba are showing all of us just how important it is to stand up to the World Bank and other global financial institutions,” says AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson. “The message out of Cochabamba is: No more free-market schemes and no more privatization scams that run like a bulldozer over workers’ rights.”

Fast Track is the wrong track

Modeled after the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Free Trade Area of the Americas would eliminate tariffs in every country in the Western Hemisphere except Cuba—and its passage by 2005 is a top priority of the Bush administration.

Pressuring for quick passage of FTAA, President George W. Bush has asked Congress for Fast Track authority, which Congress rejected in 1997 and 1998. Fast Track would give the president excessive power by eliminating Congress’s ability to improve trade deals—and would mean more American jobs moving overseas and more pollution at home and abroad. The current version of Fast Track is worse than previous bills because it bars including workers’ rights or environmental protections in any Fast Tracked agreement.

The FTAA would spread the flaws of NAFTA to the entire hemisphere: NAFTA eliminated 766,030 actual and potential U.S. jobs between 1994 and 2000, says Robert Scott, an international economist with the Economic Policy Institute, and lowered wages in Mexico. In fact, he says, NAFTA also has contributed to rising income inequality, suppressed real wages for production workers and weakened collective bargaining. Manufacturing jobs have been particularly hard hit, with 470,000 jobs lost since the beginning of the year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

		From America@work, September 2001.

Debt relief and AIDS

To repay loans from the World Bank and the IMF, developing nations often are required to cut funds for health care, education and other vital services.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, where 70 percent of the 36 million people infected with HIV/AIDS live, countries spend approximately $13.5 billion per year repaying debts, just under the $15 billion the Global AIDS Alliance estimates the region needs to combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic each year. The United Nations reports African governments now are spending four times as much repaying international creditors as they spend on basic education and health.

“The pandemic of HIV/AIDS is a threat to the world’s economy and to the social structure of many developing countries,” says AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer William Lucy, who is vice chairman of the AFL-CIO Executive Council’s international affairs committee.

Protests such as Global Justice Week and demonstrations at the FTAA summit in Quebec and at the recent Group of Eight meeting in Genoa, Italy, help build public support for a global economy that works for working people. “The global economy raises fundamental moral issues veiled under the label of free trade,” says The Rev. William Monroe Campbell, co-chair of the Ministers Against Global Injustice, an AFL-CIO coalition partner in the fight to stop Fast Track. “If you breathe the air, drink the water, work for a living or care about your family, you have a stake in making the global economy more fair.”