People Out of Place

Globalization, Human Rights and the Citizenship Gap

Alison Brysk, Gershon Shafir

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415935845
• eBook ISBN: 9781135950682
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Globalization pushes people "out of place"--across borders, out of traditions, into markets, and away from the rights of national citizenship. But globalization also contributes to the spread of international human rights ideas and institutions. This book analyzes the impact of these contradictory trends, with a focus on vulnerable groups such as migrants, laborers, women, and children. Theoretical essays by Richard Falk, Ronnie Lipschutz, Aihwa Ong, and Saskia Sassen rethink the shifting nature of citizenship. This collection advances the debate on globalization, human rights, and the meaning of citizenship.

IV
Globalizing the Citizenship Gap

7
Deflated Citizenship
Labor Rights in a Global Era

GAY W. SEIDMAN

The tensions among globalization, national states, and the protection of individuals are perhaps nowhere more evident than in struggles to protect workers in developing countries. For the past century, labor rights have been defined through workers’ localized struggles, in conflicts that have almost invariably been resolved through state regulation at the workplace. True, labor rights are increasingly discussed in universalistic terms: at the tail end of the twentieth century, there was broad international agreement about a core set of labor rights—freedom of association, freedom from bonded and child labor, freedom from discrimination—but the actual protection of those rights has been through mechanisms linked to citizenship, with more limited scope. In recent decades, however, globalization seems to have undermined the ability of national states to protect those rights, and weakened organized labor; many unions, especially in developing countries, seek new strategies to deal with newly mobile capital, in ways that highlight potential tensions between a language of universal rights and citizenship claims within the nation-state.

Since the industrial revolution, political citizenship has proved an essential component of workers’ gains. Although militant labor movements generally focus on employers, for the past century labor’s organizing strategies have almost invariably also targeted the state. Repeatedly, labor has used members’ political clout to push democratic states to create social security nets, but even authoritarian states have sometimes regulated working conditions (Przeworski 1985; Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992). While unions certainly negotiate with business, most labor movements have long viewed the political arena as crucial: national states set ground rules for collective bargaining, and state intervention is a critical factor in workplace conflicts. Around the world, militant labor movements have used the language of citizenship, often citing T. H. Marshall, to argue that full inclusion requires that states set a floor under citizens’ living and working conditions, and to demand that states regulate the workplace in ways that grant greater dignity to workers and their families (Seidman 1994; Koo 2000).

Since the early 1990s, however, the discourse linking citizenship to labor rights has been steadily delegitimized: the neoliberal strategies pursued throughout the developing world have altered the relationship between states, business, and labor, in ways that often undermine states’ willingness to regulate business or intervene in the workplace—and, increasingly, may reduce unions’ willingness to call on states to intervene. An increased emphasis on global competitiveness has transformed relationships at work, raising new questions about how unions can or should defend their members’ interests.

Globalization poses new challenges for organized labor: confronting a neoliberal state in a highly competitive global environment requires new strategies, each of which carries its own dilemmas. In this chapter, I first look briefly at how global market integration has reduced the likelihood that states, especially in developing countries, can protect workers’ rights. Then I examine two very different responses on the part of organized labor to the dilemmas posed by capital mobility. In response to increased volatility and competition, many unions have sought a “high road” growth strategy, trying to raise skill levels and productivity in the effort to help their members compete in a global labor market. Many unionists hope that offering workers training and education will help attract high-wage jobs, but I suggest that these strategies create new dilemmas for unions, since they may undermine the bases of collective action.

A completely different approach seeks to avoid these dilemmas by completely bypassing what Gershon Shafir (in this volume) calls the “thinned” national state: many unionists seek to strengthen international labor links, looking for transnational mechanisms that might regulate transnational capital. In the penultimate section of the chapter, I argue that while this strategy may avoid the dilemmas of the first approach, most available mechanisms for international labor solidarity are limited at best, and at worst could exacerbate existing international inequalities. In conclusion, I suggest that unless international mechanisms are thoroughly reconstructed, organized labor will, almost inevitably, return to strategies that emphasize strengthening workers’ citizenship rights and strengthening local states rather than looking to global institutions for enforcement and protection.

A Changing Global Context

Generally, discussions of globalization emphasize technological and institutional changes that create new possibilities for production, allowing greater flexibility in geography, design, and work organization. Many of these discussions mention, at least in passing, the way these changes alter workplace labor processes, suggesting that new patterns of production may realign the relationships between workers, unions, management, and states. An increasingly open international economy—in which trade, production, and financial processes increasingly operate on a global level, and capital moves around the world at will—is said to undermine national control over economic processes, reducing states’ abilities to manage the domestic economy and complicating labor movements’ relationships with states.

These views are not simply academic: they are expressed daily around the world, as policy-makers and activists confront what appear to be dramatic and rapid changes in the organization of the international political economy. Throughout the 1990s, aging social democrats like Nelson Mandela, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and Kim Dae Jung promised fundamental reform of authoritarian, inegalitarian developmentalism; but in the face of global pressures, in an era when state-centered developmentalist options have been discredited by the collapse of Eastern European–style socialism, their reforms have followed the neoliberal pattern, removing tariff barriers, privatizing state enterprises, encouraging exports. Once, militant labor movements expected that democratization would bring to power governments sympathetic to workers’ concerns, and through the 1980s labor movements tried to build strong ties to democratic oppositions, articulating class-based demands for better wages, social services, and full citizenship. In the late 1990s, however, unionists’ conversations took on a slightly confused tone: the militant union strategies that seemed appropriate as a challenge to authoritarian rule now seem to threaten economic growth.

Throughout the developing world, former unionists who are now cabinet members entreat former colleagues to moderate their demands in the face of globalization, and union leaders express concern that their own members’ militance will frighten away the international capital on which their jobs depend. Workers seem to accept that globalization brings a new precariousness: attempts to engage in the kind of general strikes that marked militant unionism in the 1980s have repeatedly failed in the more complicated climate of the 1990s, as many workers seem reluctant to risk their jobs for a larger struggle. Where once labor federations framed members’ demands in terms of “full citizenship,” they are likely now to speak instead of the need to maintain productivity and employment in the face of ruthless international competition (see Koo 2001; Webster and Adler 2000).

This shift is of course consistent with what Bierstecker (1995) has called “the triumph of neoliberalism” in the last two decades. Generally, discussions of globalization treat labor more as a factor of production than in terms of living workers, individually or collectively, and view unions’ demands as threatening the very basis of economic growth (see World Bank 1996). Although business leaders frequently overstate the likelihood of capital flight, and underestimate the ability of states to intervene in labor relations in a globalized era, there is a great deal of evidence that threats of capital flight and job loss have undermined European social democratic coalitions, and led governments to back away from labor-friendly efforts to regulate business (Kapstein 1999, Golden and Pontussen 1992). In the United States, Human Rights Watch concluded in 2000 that “workers’ freedom of association is under sustained attack in the United States, and the government is often failing its responsibility under international human rights standards … to protect workers’ rights” (Human Rights Watch 2000).

In developing countries, where organized labor must be as concerned about creating new jobs as about preventing capital flight, and where infrastructure and social services are often woefully undeveloped, those global pressures loom even larger: business and political leaders alike warn that investors will avoid countries with high labor costs or high tax rates, going instead to places where workers are paid even less, and where states are even more willing to reduce tax rates or environmental standards. In fact, it was largely at the insistence of developing-country government representatives— who feared that efforts to police global labor standards could complicate low-wage countries’ ability to attract investors and to export their products to advanced industrial economies—that the 1996 Singapore Declaration of the WTO ministerial meeting concluded, “We reject the use of labour standards for protectionist purposes, and agree that the comparative advantage of countries, particularly low-wage developing countries, must in no way be put into question” (WTO 1996).

What does globalization mean for labor in developing countries? The optimistic view focuses on job and skill creation: by spreading industrial growth around the world, globalization’s new possibilities for far-flung industrial siting is expected to give historically undeveloped countries a new basis for integration into the world economy. From this perspective, an increasingly liberalized trade regime will push countries to more efficient, cheaper production processes; the combined effects of the GATT and of new production possibilities will stimulate countries to be more productive, seeking niches in which they may have a comparative advantage—and leading to greater economic growth around the globe. Countries that manage to attract new industrial investment may gain jobs for more skilled workers, with new opportunities for high-wage industrial employment and job creation (World Bank 1996).

In this view, globalization promises new factories, new jobs, and new skills to workers in far-flung parts of the world; new technologies offer new possibilities for economic growth and productivity, and workers should be grateful for the chance to participate. By working together with management to find new productive niches—new efficient production processes, new products, or new international markets—this perspective suggests that workers and unions can help find a “high-skill, high-wage” route to prosperity and development. Workers’ skills will provide the basis for future negotiations with employers: skilled and efficient workforces, cooperating with management to raise productivity, will be able to demand higher wages, since employers will be more dependent on their workers’ participation in production; gradually, the benefits will trickle out to the entire economy, and all boats will float in a rising tide (World Bank 1996).

More skeptical analysts, however, suggest that international competition narrows workers’ options. First, economic restructuring—particularly the pressure on developing countries to open their markets and increase exports— has routinely involved massive layoffs in the large, often state-owned companies that served as the basis of industrial expansion for most late industrializers, undermining the relatively privileged core of many developing-country labor movements (Candland and Sil 2001; Webster and Adler 2000). But even beyond the cold shock of restructuring entailed in the shift from import-substitution to export-oriented development strategies, many analysts suggest that globalization could lead to a “race to the bottom,” as developing countries competing for new investments are forced to offer low wages and a stable cheap workforce in order to attract multinational capital (Greider 1997; Lipietz 1987; Ong, in this volume). Industrialized countries may be able to draw on historical assets to retain high-wage jobs—educated workforces, developed infrastructures and labor markets, and easy access to the world’s wealthier consumers; but most analysts assume that developing countries—even those with relatively skilled workers—find low wages, low taxes, and limited regulation the easiest incentive to offer potential investors (Moody 1997).

Both of these perspectives probably hold some truth. New technologies have reorganized the physical location of industrial production, may involve new skill requirements for industrial production, and certainly permit new managerial strategies. New technologies have allowed the spread of industrial production to new sites, stimulated the production of nontraditional commodities and products for export, and promoted increasing international competition. And some analysts suggest that these technological innovations increase the possibilities for migratory labor, as workers and their families travel to new work sites, remit wages, and send information about labor markets back to their homes (Sassen 1998).

But this process of geographic expansion is far more uneven than a seamless vision of globalization often implies, and not all jobs are equally good ones. Regional differences in infrastructure and sectoral differences in the applicability of new technologies combine with managers’ historical and racial prejudices (Kaplinsky 1995; Posthuma 1995). Many parts of the world have been left completely out of the new wave of private investment, or have found that their new “niche” is limited to producing primary commodities—minerals or nontraditional crops for export to consumers in industrialized regions (Stallings 1995). Much foreign investment does not involve sophisticated new technology or require skilled workers: many export-processing zones simply bring old equipment to new, cheaper workers, especially in labor-intensive areas like apparel, export-oriented agriculture, the lower end of the electronics industry, or even pink-collar call centers and data processing (Bonacich and Appelbaum 2000; Cowie 1999; Freeman 2000; Kaplinsky 1993).

Even when sophisticated technologies are brought to developing-country locations, the change has not always strengthened the workers’ position on the shopfloor. Workplaces may be organized to reduce the possibility that even skilled workers could disrupt production; technologies that seem linked to greater trust and cooperation in advanced industrial contexts—in what is often called “post-Fordism”—may look meaner, rather than leaner, when embedded in the more authoritarian and hierarchical workplaces that persist in postcolonial settings (Juarez and Babson 1998; Kaplinsky 1995; Shaiken 1995; MacKay 2001; Posthuma 1995).

Moreover, labor is often denied much support from its strongest potential ally in the neoliberal world, where states are severely constrained by the fear of capital flight. High tax rates could chase away investments, while higher wage bills undermine international competitiveness. Globalization may thus further erode state revenues in countries that already lack social services or infrastructures—a prospect that undermines the possibility that developing-country states will be able to educate workers to give them skills that might increase their bargaining power with employers, or create the social security net that historically strengthened labor’s ability to organize in advanced industrial countries.

This tension is most clearly reflected, perhaps, in the proliferation of export-processing zones—sites in which states often agree not to enforce existing labor law, as part of a subsidy package offered to foreign investors. As a development fashion, these zones create new dilemmas, involving a complicated tradeoff between investment, job creation, and the enforcement (much less improvement) of existing labor law. Indeed, in the effort to attract new jobs to their countries, many developing-country governments have proved more likely to provide services to new export-processing zones than to their own citizens. Governments are more likely to publish brochures advertising the “nimble fingers” of their willing workers (Ong 1987; Lee 1998) than to insist that investors provide health and safety protections, more likely to call migrant workers who remit needed foreign exchange “national heroes” (Parreñas 2001) than to solve unemployment by funding public works or infrastructural development. From this perspective, globalization will inevitably intensify inequities, further weakening already poor nations, and making workers who are already unskilled and poor increasingly vulnerable to the demands of international capital.

Unions and Economic Restructuring

What do these constraints on development strategies mean for labor? As international financial analysts regularly remind developing-country policy-makers, workers who threaten labor militance to gain higher wages or better conditions could frighten away investment, losing union members’ jobs. In this climate, labor unions from Australia to Zambia have found themselves cooperating in “social pacts,” accepting constant or even reduced wages and benefits in order to sustain investment (Lambert 2000). Elected governments may have replaced authoritarian regimes, but economies have been hammered by the multiple processes that are often lumped together under the term globalization—reintegrated into the world economy under neoliberal economic policies. Again and again, democratically elected governments have found themselves unable to pursue any alternatives to private investment and the market as the sole engine of economic growth. In the era of neoliberalism, democracy has regularly coincided with privatization, restructuring, and the opening up of national economies— undermining (sometimes quite literally, as in the case of South Africa’s mining unions) the main stronghold of organized labor.

Faced with the perceived threat that they are engaged in a global “race to the bottom,” many union strategists have shifted their focus: instead of seeking to strengthen workers’ claims on employers and the state through collective action and political strength, many unions have begun to look at improving members’ skills, hoping to attract and retain investment by offering increased productivity and competitiveness. The “high road” vision generally demands cooperation between labor, management, and the state, all trying to attract and retain jobs at the higher-value-added, higher-paid ends of global commodity chains, generally by making workers more productive. At the enterprise level, unionists have often found themselves cooperating actively in employer-initiated efforts to restructure the workplace, to raise producti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• I. Framework
• II. Producing Citizenship
• III. Constructing Rights
• IV. Globalizing the Citizenship Gap
• V. Reconstructing Citizenship
• Bibliography
• Contributors