The myth of the self-made man is American culture's own special heart of darkness, helping to explain both its infectious optimism and ruthless greed.

The idea holds enough truth and seductiveness to make it easy to forget its delusional dangers. To reprise Marx's famous formulation, individuals, like humankind, do make their own personal history, but not under conditions they choose. But in America, we choose to ignore the caveat about conditions at our peril.

The myth, or belief, that people are solely what they make of themselves is useful to keep in mind while reading two ongoing series: the New York Times' on class and the Wall Street Journal's on social mobility. Both focus attention on a truth about American society that runs counter to most people's deep-seated beliefs: There is less social mobility in the United States now than in the '80s (and less then than in the '70s) and less mobility than in many other industrial countries, including Canada, Finland, Sweden and Germany.

Yet 40 percent of respondents to a Times poll said that there was a greater chance to move up from one class to another now than 30 years ago, and 46 percent said it was easier to do so in the United States than in Europe.

Although the news about social mobility has not been widely reported, it is generally recognized that inequality has grown over the past thirty years. The Times series highlights how much the super-rich have made out like, well, bandits.

While the real income of the bottom 90 percent of Americans fell from 1980 to 2002, the income of the top 0.1 percent--making $1.6 million or more--went up two and a half times in real terms before taxes. With the help of the Bush tax cuts, the gap between the super-rich and everyone else grew even larger.

The American people accept this, it is argued, because they think not only that there's more social mobility than there is, but also that they'll personally get rich. Indeed, a poll in 2000 indicated that 39 percent of Americans thought they were either in the wealthiest one percent or would be "soon." The Times poll was slightly less exuberant: 11 percent thought it was very likely they would become wealthy, another 34 percent somewhat likely.

"It is okay to have ever-greater differences between rich and poor, [Americans] seem to believe," David Wessel wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "as long as their children have a good chance of grasping the brass ring."

This view is problematic. First, the greater the inequality, the less likely the possibility of mobility. Increased inequality worsens the large disparities in resources that families can devote to education -- resources that are increasingly important for both entering many careers and for social mobility. A college degree, it should be stressed, is important not just because of the knowledge acquired, but because college serves as a class-biased sorting mechanism for entry to certain jobs. In contrast, the record suggests that countries with greater equality also have greater mobility. Substantive equality creates more equality of opportunity.

But even if there were mobility, such inequality would be problematic. Is it fair that society's wealth be divided so unevenly? Isn't there a decent standard of living -- rising as economies become wealthier -- to which everyone who "works hard and plays by the rules," in the Clintonian formulation, should be entitled? Great social disparity means that the financially well-off use their money and greater political leverage to protect their privilege rather than to design policies for the common good.

In defense of the rich getting richer, former Bush economic advisor Gregory Mankiw wrote in response to the Times series that the richest increased their share when the economy boomed; so if we want prosperity, let the plutocrats prosper. But the economy grew faster in the first three decades after World War II when equality was increasing than in the next three decades when equality was decreasing. In any case, if the income from growth is captured by the very rich, as it largely has been for a couple decades, this path to prosperity offers little to most people.

Also, with high inequality, even the pretense of community declines, social conflict increases and society functions more poorly. Individual mobility is not the only way to improve one's lot. Social solidarity and working together can improve everyone's lot.

This brings us back to the self-made man. It becomes clear, as the Times series is titled, that "class matters," just as race, gender and other accidents of history matter. The social class into which someone is born largely defines one's class as an adult, and both make a difference in how healthy or how long-lived the person will be, especially in the absence of universal health insurance. It influences access to education and to jobs.

The myth of the self-made person, however, encourages the person who succeeds to think his good fortune is due entirely to his work and genius. For this reason businessmen in the United States have historically been more anti-union and hostile to government than their counterparts in Europe. And the myth makes those who fail blame themselves.

According to recent polls, American workers -- worried more about job insecurity, rising costs of education, health care expenses, the availability of insurance, pension failures and social security privatization -- are increasingly looking for stronger social action to provide security. They are deeply skeptical about the globalization that has increased inequality and insecurity. Like the French vote on the European Union constitution, a U.S. referendum on globalization might well divide along class lines. The irony is that taking responsibility as a society to guarantee more stability and equality -- by regulating the global economy and establishing universal guarantees of health care, education, and retirement security -- can provide citizens with more individual freedom.

For now, the realm of freedom for most Americans remains constricted to the shopping mall, where they can buy their identities. Both the Journal and Times point to the rapid growth of personal credit as one way that Americans have continued to buy while earnings have stagnated. Former United Auto Workers official Frank Joyce even sees the rise of credit cards as undermining workers' interest in unions. Income, earned or borrowed, obviously greatly differentiates people's lives, even if a working class consumer can only indulge in a box of luxury chocolates or sub-luxury car. And the growing differences in income are exacerbated by growing but unmeasured differences in health insurance, as well as various business perks such as free cars or expense accounts.

But the focus on income ignores the even greater inequalities of wealth. Wealth provides security. As the Times series points out, the better-off consistently talk of making choices while working class individuals talk about feeling trapped. Kids from wealthy families can take unpaid internships, spend a year abroad or experiment with careers; kids from working class families are likely to stick with a summer job that pays the bills and provides health insurance, thus failing to finish college.

More important, wealth and class are issues of power. Aaron Kemp, who lost his job when Maytag shifted production from Illinois to Mexico and Korea (see "Maytag Moves to Mexico," January 17), remarked, "I never remember even thinking about what class I was in until after the plant closing announcement and layoff. And then you begin to think about what class you're in." Rather than manners or fashion, class ultimately has more to do with who has the power to make such decisions and the powerlessness of the majority. These crucial aspects of class--social, political and economic power--have been missing from the series.

It might have been good for the Times to run an excerpt of Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro's new book, Death by a Thousand Cuts. It recounts how the super-rich worked with ultra-conservatives to demonize and possibly eliminate the estate tax, which they renamed the "death tax." As William Gates, Sr., father of Microsoft Bill, often argued on behalf of the tax, the very rich accumulate their wealth not simply because of what they did but because of the society in which they lived, and they have a debt to that society. And the heirs of such wealth are the antithesis of self-made men.

The rich used their political power, their money and the right's shameless, mendacious hucksters to protect their riches, at the expense of society. But belief in the myth of the self-made man--abetted by the feckless incompetence of Democratic opposition--made many ordinary people suckers for the right-wing pitch. Class matters, but so does consciousness of class. That's another, longer story.

Many Americans dream of getting rich. Aaron Kemp had more modest ambitions. "I wanted to work at a decent job and earn a decent wage, with decent benefits, so I can raise my kids, give them a decent education and maybe take them out to Pizza Hut on a Friday night. I don't need a Mercedes, just a ho-hum existence, and now," he says, with sadness and anger in his voice, "it seems hard to even do that."

Eight years ago, Kemp began working at the factory of Maytag Corporation, the largest employer in Galesburg, a western Illinois town of 34,000 and the birthplace of poet Carl Sandburg. In September, Maytag finally closed the plant, after sending a large part of the work that 1,600 people had recently been performing to a new Maytag factory in Reynosa, Mexico; another large part to Daewoo, a Korean multinational subcontractor that is expected to build a plant in Mexico; and a few dozen jobs to a plant in Iowa. Now Kemp, a 31-year-old union safety and education official with a muscular build and a small goatee, has a temporary job as a counselor to laid-off workers at two-thirds his old pay.

The local Machinists union fought the shutdown, taking their case to the streets, to the press, to politicians and to Maytag shareholders, even winning national attention when senator-elect Barack Obama mentioned their cause in his Democratic convention keynote speech. But the union could not stop the Maytag jobs from being added to the tally of 2.7 million manufacturing jobs lost since 2000. Those several million jobs were eliminated for many reasons – including declining demand, rising efficiency and increased imports – but a significant portion are the result of U.S. multinational corporations, like Maytag, moving production out of the country.

Although the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics concluded that during the first three months of this year only 4,633 workers lost jobs because of investment shifts overseas, a study for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission by Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University and Stephanie Luce of the University of Massachusetts found that at least more than five times that number of jobs were lost in the same period. They also estimate that in 2004 more than 400,000 jobs will be shifted from the United States to other countries. That's nearly twice the rate in 2001, and it represents about one-fourth of all mass layoffs in 2004.

Despite the trend toward outsourcing white-collar jobs, Bronfenbrenner and Luce found that more than four-fifths of job shifts were still in manufacturing industries and more than one-third of the estimated 400,000 jobs shifted went to Mexico. But China is in second place, and rapidly rising in popularity. They also found that companies disproportionately target unionized jobs, which represent 39 percent of all jobs shifted out of the United States but only 8.2 percent of the private workforce. The Midwest has been hardest hit, most of all Illinois, which in the first three months of 2004 lost at least 7,555 jobs – almost all to Mexico.

Local Losses Cut Deep

The loss of 1,600 jobs with the Maytag closing is hard on Galesburg, where 5 percent of the town's workforce lost jobs, as well as the small surrounding towns. But the ripple effects – from lost jobs at nearby suppliers (including a workshop for the disabled that employed 100 people working on Maytag subassemblies) to indirect effects of declining consumption and reduced tax revenues – will raise the total job loss in the region to roughly 4,166, according to a Western Illinois University study.

That's only a part of the region's woes. In January, the new Australian owners of Butler Manufacturing, which makes steel buildings, will close their Galesburg plant – dumping both 270 manufacturing employees and the only unionized Butler facility. In the past few years, other area factories have closed or greatly cut back on their workforce, including a rubber hose manufacturer, a ceramics manufacturer, and several small industrial parts and equipment makers.

Some, but not all, of these other job losses involve shifts out of the country. They become part of the national problem posed by the growing trade deficit that may approach a record $600 billion this year. As more governments and financial market players have perceived this deficit – and the federal budget deficit – as unsustainable, the value of the dollar has fallen. The deficit increase partly reflects rising oil prices and a growing trade imbalance with China, whose currency, the yuan, is pegged to the dollar and, according to critics, undervalued. But the deficit is also a result of the shift in jobs manufacturing tradable goods.

A declining dollar should reduce this trade deficit. But changes in the American economy may blunt its effect. With the decline in its manufacturing base, the United States has fewer producers of tradable goods for export and relies more on imports for essential goods, even if their price in dollars rises sharply. The United States even runs deficits in agricultural commodities and advanced technology, while the small trade surplus in services has been shrinking. The surge in offshoring of white-collar work undercuts the traditional expectation that the United States would simply shift to theoretically higher skilled jobs as it lost manufacturing.

The attention focused on offshoring call-center or software jobs has reinforced the assumption, at least in elite political circles, that manufacturing is a lost cause, especially if the product can be made in China.

Maytag Workers Argue for Quality, Morality

But Maytag workers had a strategy for saving their jobs. David Bevard, the articulate and thoughtful local union president, wanted Maytag to continue to position itself as a high-quality, premium-priced, made-in-America classic; he argued that the company was damaging itself by undermining workers at the Galesburg plant who wanted to maintain high standards of quality and by accepting "junk" from offshore suppliers. Union members also wanted their protests to make other employers think twice about shifting jobs overseas. And they saw themselves in a global battle for justice.

Workers losing their $15-an-hour jobs in Galesburg have a surprising empathy for the Mexican maquiladora workers who would be doing the same work for roughly one-sixth the wage. "The only people being done more a disservice than the people in Galesburg are the people who are going to have our jobs," Kemp says, sitting around the union hall before the shutdown occurred. "They're the only ones more exploited. It shouldn't be American workers against Chinese or Mexican workers, but working people against greed."

"We represent 1,600 in the Galesburg plant, but as a union representative, I feel I'm representing all workers everywhere and try to speak for all those workers," union vice president Doug Dennison says. "This is so much bigger than a union issue. It's almost accepted what's happening in Galesburg is OK, that it's OK to do that."

"It's exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few," says Kemp. "Sometimes there's a fine line between what's legal and what's right."

"Morality," Dennison adds. They clearly think that is missing, as well as their power to do much about their situation. While most workers blamed "corporate greed" for the plant closing, they also blamed the government for enabling or encouraging that greed. And among an otherwise strongly Democratic crowd, people remember that it was Bill Clinton who pushed through NAFTA. "People in both parties are allowing this to happen," Toby Ladendorf laments on closing day. "Who's going to defend us?"

Concessions Can't Compete with Bottom Line

Over the decades, Galesburg workers had grown accustomed both to the security of the Maytag jobs and to intimations of insecurity, especially as the industry consolidated into a handful of domestic appliance makers. When Maytag bought the plant in 1986, workers were encouraged by its reputation for quality. But by 1992, as a precondition to making an investment of $180 million, Maytag was demanding concessions from the union and public assistance to keep the plant open, including $7.5 million in state grants and loans, a $3 million city grant paid through increased sales taxes, and local tax abatements through 2004 worth about $4 million. (After the closing, the state passed new legislation to make expected public benefits of such aid clear and to recover money if the goals are not met. And the Knox County state's attorney is trying to recover excess tax abatements.)

The union tried to cooperate to increase productivity, says Bevard, but management was only interested in cutting jobs. Union business agent Mike Patrick suggested that management adopt the "high performance work organization" model that worked well at companies like Harley-Davidson, giving workers responsibility and authority to use their knowledge at work. "Maytag had no intention of giving employees any control," Patrick says. "They wanted to stay with the command and control model." Indeed, Maytag tried to tighten control further and force more concessions, provoking workers to the brink of a strike in 2002.

Then on Oct. 12, 2002, Maytag announced that the plant would close beginning in 2003. Managers told the union that the plant was "not competitively viable."

Maytag was profitable, but revenue and profits have been stagnant or declining and the company's stock price has dropped. Big box retailers like Home Depot were taking a larger share of the market and demanding lower prices from manufacturers. Also, other refrigerator makers had begun producing in Mexico, and Maytag already had subassembly operations in Reynosa. About three hours of direct labor are needed to build the cheaper refrigerators, and with cheaper Mexican labor that can make a difference of $50 on a $350 refrigerator, not counting the savings accrued from lower social and environmental regulations. Maytag will save money eventually, but there was speculation in Galesburg that Maytag was simply following the crowd offshore or trying to please Wall Street to boost its stock price.

Galesburg Struggles to Retool

In October, the unemployment rate in Galesburg was 9.1 percent. Knox County is on the state's youth poverty warning list. Galesburg recovered from major workplace closings in the 1980s partly through expansion of factories like Maytag, as well as accepting a state prison that residents previously opposed.

Now, to survive, laid-off workers must retrain as welders, nurses, office managers and computer technicians. But even in these growing occupations, there are far more trainees than available local jobs. Many look to long commutes or relocations in order to find jobs, or they prepare to compete with their kids for $7-$8 Wal-Mart jobs. Meanwhile, economic development officials try to attract investment but rarely mention manufacturing, except to convert the region's abundant corn and soybeans into marketable products. The town has a new logistics park, entrepreneurial centers, and business incubators, and there's some talk about Galesburg becoming an education laboratory, a tourist center or an "ag-urb" retirement center for upscale refugees from cities like Chicago, a three-and-a-half-hour drive away.

The town is playing up its historic – and rebounding – strength as a railroad center and its interstate highway connections in the search for warehouses and distribution facilities. Last summer a delegation went to China, looking for investors and Chinese companies seeking distribution centers for the kinds of goods once manufactured in towns like Galesburg. It was a sign, local citizens thought, of how globalized the town was becoming.

"Globalization is such a fraud," says Bevard. "It's just a rush to the bottom for cheap labor. Instead of reducing the United States to the Third World, we should be elevating the standards of those countries." Then, perhaps, the Aaron Kemps of this country could hope once again for a ho-hum but decent life for themselves and their kids.

The presidential election this fall may hinge on what happens to people like John Mahoney and Robert Daems. Both are in their 50s, lost their jobs in December 2002 and still haven't found work. If President Bush continues to oppose renewing federal extended unemployment benefits, their compensation soon will run out.

"I don't think the Republican Party even cares," says Daems, who worked for Intel as a systems analyst in Phoenix. "I even feel the Democratic candidates don't have an understanding of what's happening out there."

A Democrat could win in November, however, if he can prove to Daems and other voters that he understands and can manage the economy better than Bush. Polls show that the economy is now the top issue with voters, roughly half of who rank unemployment as their major economic concern.

Both parties show strengths -- the Democrats on Social Security, healthcare and the federal budget and Republicans on national security and terrorism -- according to a review of polls by Democracy Corps, a Democratic strategy group.

But there is no clear advantage for either party on jobs and prosperity.

Despite signs of growth and a stock market rebound, this has been the weakest economic recovery since World War II. Even though the Bush recession officially ended in November 2001, the economy continued to lose about 700,000 jobs through last September. Jobs have grown by an average of 76,000 a month since then, but that's still half the number needed to account for new workers. It's also a far cry from what Bush promised his tax cuts would deliver. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) calculates that Bush has fallen short by 1.85 million jobs.

Rigged Numbers

The traditional signal of distress -- the unemployment rate -- has been surprisingly low, dropping by one-tenth of a percent in January to 5.6. But the figure is misleading. Many discouraged workers have simply dropped out of the labor force. The percentage of men in the workforce, for instance, dropped by about as much in the last three years as it did over the previous 20. At the same time, workers like Daems and Mahoney -- an auto parts factory worker in Battle Creek, Michigan -- are remaining out of work much longer than normal and long-term unemployment, more than 27 weeks, has increased most rapidly for workers with at least a college degree. As a result, a record number of unemployed workers in January lost unemployment benefits, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, plunging roughly half into poverty.

But the problem isn't simply the loss of 2.4 million jobs since the recession started -- the greatest sustained job loss since the Great Depression, according to EPI -- and anemic jobs creation. There's also a shift for the worse in the kinds of jobs available. On average, the jobs being lost pay 21 percent more than those in growth industries, say EPI researchers Michael Ettlinger and Jeff Chapman.

The long period of job loss also is taking its toll on people who are still employed: Real hourly wages fell for middle- and low-wage workers last year even as economic output grew, say Jared Bernstein and Lawrence Mishel of EPI. But not everyone lost out. Profits have grown dramatically, claiming a share of the growth in the corporate sector more than double the average of past recoveries.

Skewed Stimulus

This reprises a familiar theme for the Bush regime: Most workers are worse off whether they have a job or are unemployed, and big corporations are profiting. But it should be no surprise. It was designed that way.

"When they passed the tax cuts, every economist argued this is not how you structure a stimulus," Bernstein says. "You can't expect to stimulate job growth by cutting taxes on dividends and capital gains and failing to implement direct spending on job creation, fiscal assistance to the states and other spending."

There were several fatal flaws in Bush's plan, but it was not the swing from a big budgetary surplus to deep deficits. It makes sense for the federal government to run a deficit in a recession to provide economic demand that sustains employment. But the Bush tax cuts were skewed to the rich, not low- and moderate-income workers and the unemployed, who needed the aid and would immediately spend it. Bush was simply determined to cut taxes for the rich. First he justified it as returning the surplus to taxpayers. When the recession deepened, he justified the same policy as a stimulus.

Instead of tax cuts, the government should have directly aided the states more and invested in public needs that build economic strength. Finally, the stimulus should have been immediate and short-term. Even during a hoped-for recovery, creating endless huge budget deficits solves nothing.

Bush's disastrous policies are largely responsible for the long jobless recovery, but some analysts recently have argued that fewer jobs have been created because productivity has grown so fast. But Bernstein notes that productivity has been growing only slightly faster than normal. The problem is not productivity, he argues, but a demand for goods and services that is far below the average.

Certainly, productivity increases do not adequately account for the 42 consecutive months of manufacturing job losses -- 2.6 million gone since Bush took office. Global economic forces play a role. For example, some stimulus leaks to other countries as Americans buy imports. The trade deficit has grown sharply since 2000, from 3 percent to 5 percent of gross domestic product, reflecting a loss of potential jobs in the United States.

Dan Luria, vice president of the Michigan Manufacturing Technology Consortium, argues that there have been real productivity increases, even in the service sector, but some of that reflects improperly measured use of cheap inputs from abroad.

In addition, nobody accurately measures how many jobs are lost to offshoring. But even as demand grows, multinationals are shipping jobs out. In January, for example, Electrolux announced that it would move most of the 2,700 jobs at its Greenville, Michigan, refrigerator factory to Mexico. More than 8,000 jobs in the Greenville area are likely to be lost as a result.

Mounting Debt

Several indicators suggest there may not be the turnaround in job creation Bush wants for his reelection campaign. The administration continues to rely on tax cuts for the rich that already have proved ineffective. Investors also are wary that persistent deficits and a declining dollar will lead to inflation and higher interest rates, which would slow growth.

With real wages declining for many, workers won't be able to spend more and stimulate job growth. Already many households are dangerously deep in debt, since home refinancing and other debts have been major props to the economy in recent years. These debt-ridden families will be vulnerable to rising interest rates and any bursting of the housing bubble.

Even with continued growth, Bush almost certainly will be running as the first president since Herbert Hoover to finish a term with a job deficit.

Democratic alternatives have had their own flaws. John Kerry relies too heavily on tax cuts, such as his proposals to cut business taxes for creating new jobs rather than direct public spending to stimulate the economy.

But a modestly populist economic alternative is emerging from the Democratic presidential contest, including proposals for creating fairer trade, supporting unions, aiding small businesses and manufacturing, restructuring taxes more progressively, spending more for education and research, investing in energy efficiency and alternative energy, budgeting more responsibly, improving infrastructure and moving toward universal health care.

It's not adequate, by any means. But it beats Bush's policy, both in fairness and economic effectiveness, and it may politically beat Bush as well.

David Moberg is a senior editor of In These Times.

Military victory in Iraq has inflated the Beltway Rambos' fantasies of using American firepower to remake the world. This new imperial hubris could propel the United States into far riskier adventures than the war against Saddam Hussein, including one not far from home in violence-torn Colombia. Here, a militarily toughened but politically degraded guerrilla movement faces a hard-line, right-wing government aided by brutal paramilitary forces. Caught in the middle is a small, embattled progressive movement that rejects armed struggle but demands social justice and democratic reforms.

The conflict has roots in widespread political violence dating back more than 50 years, but the United States has made matters worse by encouraging military solutions, pursuing a failed drug policy and promoting "Washington consensus" economic policies. In 2000, President Clinton's "Plan Colombia" provided $765 million in aid to Colombia's military to fight cocaine production. Aid declined sharply the next year, but the "war on terror" has greased the path for President Bush to broaden the commitment, including $105 million for Colombia (on top of nearly $500 million appropriated earlier) that was tacked on to funding the Iraq war, partly as thanks to Alvaro Uribe for being the only South American leader to support the United States in Iraq.

How much further will it go? "I'm now predicting American intervention in Colombia," says Doug Cassel, director of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University. "If you'd asked two to three years ago, I would have said, 'No way, it's not in the cards.' I can't say that anymore."

Unlike other countries on the terrorism hit list, the Colombian government itself is not the target, though even the State Department acknowledges that elements of the Colombian armed forces collaborate closely with an estimated 15,000 right-wing paramilitaries, mainly organized through the United Self-Defense Forces (AUC). The United States has certified the AUC and the two main guerrilla groups -- the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), with about 17,000 fighters, and the National Liberation Army (ELN), with 4,000 fighters -- as terrorist groups. Both the FARC and AUC now finance much of their military activity through the drug trade.

The social development promised as part of Plan Colombia has been minimal, and Washington largely ignored the human rights conditions in the law (though aid was denied to one notorious Air Force unit). Last year, while escalating military aid to Colombia, the third-largest package after Israel and Egypt, Congress explicitly expanded the use of U.S. military trainers and equipment to fight guerrillas and protect an oil pipeline. This year, three planes carrying U.S. civilian contractors have gone down in FARC territory; guerrillas killed six and took three hostages.

The Uribe government wants the United States to send troops to stomp out the conflict, which has killed roughly 5,000 civilians annually in recent years. "We'll get drawn in," says Adam Isaacson, a Colombia expert at the Center for International Policy in Washington. "After a three-week success in Iraq, we'll think we can take on all the bad guys everywhere. All we need is provocation."

The main victims of the decades-long violence have been Colombian civilians, including more than 2 million displaced from their rural homes to urban slums. The paramilitaries, with varying degrees of government complicity, have been responsible for 85 percent of the civilian killings, according to the Colombian Commission of Jurists, a human rights organization. During the past few years, most human rights observers believe that the military has essentially subcontracted much of the dirty work to its paramilitary allies. But recently the guerrillas have been blamed for a growing share of offenses.

Labor union leaders and members have been especially hard hit. From 1991 to 2002, according to the National Union School (ENS), 1,925 union members were assassinated in Colombia, including 421 union leaders. In 2002, 184 unionists were killed, and another 400 suffered serious human rights abuses. Public sector workers, especially teachers, were the most common targets. The ENS says nearly 80 percent of unionists were attacked because of their labor activity. AUC leader Carlos Castaño, whom the United States seeks to extradite on drug charges (but not for his murderous human rights violations), admitted, "We kill trade unionists because they interfere with people working."

Indeed, paramilitaries often collaborate closely with employers. In two high-profile cases, lawsuits filed in the United States charge that Coca-Cola and Drummond Company, an Alabama-based coal-mining company, used paramilitary forces to kill union leaders. In 1996, paramilitary gunmen assassinated a union leader at a Coca-Cola plant in Carepa where the manager had threatened to use paramilitaries "to sweep away the union." Later the same night, the gunmen burned down the union office; they returned the next day to tell workers to quit the union or be killed. On March 31, a federal judge ruled that under the Alien Tort Claims Act the case could go forward against Coca-Cola, and Colombian unions are calling for an international boycott.

Union researchers have found that the paramilitaries were responsible for the vast majority of killings of unionists. Yet in the 30 percent of assassinations during 2002 where there was a suspect, paramilitaries were responsible for only about 60 percent, reflecting a disturbing surge in the assassinations attributable to guerrillas. Equally serious, there has not been a single conviction in a trade union assassination since 1995 -- and not even a single arrest for the killings in 2002.

Workers and the labor movement are under assault on the legal and economic front as well. In the early '90s, on the recommendation of the International Monetary Fund, the government initiated a program of economic deregulation. After an initial moderate growth spurt, the economy collapsed, and it's still sputtering. Manufacturing's share of the economy shrank by 22 percent over the decade as thousands of firms, especially in industries such as textiles, closed their doors. Many are still occupied by workers hoping to get back their jobs or at least severance pay. Subsidized agricultural exports from countries like the United States, followed later by a depression in global coffee prices, devastated the rural economy.

As a result, there were sharp increases in unemployment (now 18 percent officially), underemployment (60 percent of the work force is in the "informal sector," such as street peddling) and poverty (60 percent of the population). Per capita income plummeted by 30 percent from 1997 to 2001, and income inequality rose sharply -- with the poorest 10 percent of the population receiving 1 percent of national income, and the richest 10 percent receiving 44 percent. Attacks by paramilitaries on peasants in contested areas often clears land for takeover by the rural elite. Three percent of landowners now own over 70 percent of arable land.

At the same time, Colombia's foreign debt -- which this strategy was supposed to reduce -- grew from $22 billion in 1994 to $37 billion last year, with government payments on foreign debt now consuming 41 percent of the budget. During the '90s, the government slashed social services and more than 100,000 public jobs. But when the free-market austerity policies failed, the IMF demanded further budget cuts, wage freezes and reductions in pensions, as well as accelerated privatization of public utilities, health care and education. This economic assault -- backed up by deadly force -- partly accounts for the decline of unions, which represented 15 percent of workers in the '80s but represent less than 5 percent now. In addition, new labor laws reduce worker protections and benefits, and help employers use individual contracts and "cooperatives" to thwart unions and to evade legal responsibilities.

Though diminished, the labor movement has played a key role in creating a new progressive political opposition. Two years ago, Luis Eduardo "Lucho" Garzon, a founder of the Unitary Workers Confederation (CUT), which represents more than 60 percent of union members, created the Social Political Front, a center-left coalition of unions and other progressive groups. Last year, under the banner of the Democratic Pole, he ran for president with the support of 12 minor parties, the three labor federations, and two major indigenous organizations. Though he won only about 6 percent of the vote (and the Democratic Pole has similarly tiny legislative representation), he has become the principal opposition leader, arguing for temporary relief from foreign debt to invest in social needs, negotiations to resolve the armed conflict, and political reform.

As Uribe adopts a tougher strategy of military attack and legal repression, the Democratic Pole has become more constrained. "Our plans and areas of action will be reduced," Garzon says. "The Democratic Pole feeds on union and popular movements and the democratic sector. You're beginning to see the stigmatization of any alternative proposals on the pretext of confronting terrorism."

But when Uribe's strategy eventually fails, Garzon thinks the Democratic Pole can seize a political opportunity. "The labor movement has to change," he argues. "The union movement has to speak to the entire society, not just organized workers," by pushing for jobs, education, health care and women's rights.

In one seven-year struggle, unions at the Emcali telephone, electricity and water utility in Cali have tried to fight against privatization of the municipally owned services. In January 2002, hundreds of workers and supporters occupied the utility headquarters for 36 days. Now the Uribe government wants to overturn an agreement that was reached then not to privatize. The union blames the utility's problems on massive debts incurred for shady deals, such as a 20-year contract to buy electricity at three times the market rate from a power plant built by Intergen, a joint venture of the Bechtel Corporation and Shell Oil.

There have been similar scandals at other utilities, which have typically raised rates -- as the government proposes to do at Emcali -- and reduced services to poor communities after usually corrupt, publicly subsidized privatization deals. While workers voluntarily take on extra tasks to save Emcali, paramilitaries kill unionists who resist privatization. Last February, shortly after the end of the Emcali occupation, Julio Enrique Galiano left home at 5:55 a.m. to go to work. Two burly men approached him and quickly fired four bullets, killing him. Today his young widow, Viviana Villamil, spends her work breaks in the basement of the Emcali headquarters, volunteering with other workers to prepare bills to save the company money and prevent privatization.

As social needs grow, economic policies are undermining services. Colombia is now trying to earn foreign exchange by luring wealthy Latin Americans to expanded private health care centers. But cutbacks in government spending, as well as the exclusion of the growing informal work force from the nation's social security system, mean that fewer poor Colombians can obtain health care. San Juan de Dios, one of the oldest hospitals in Bogotá, was until four years ago a center for advanced research and medical training. Now the 700-bed, relatively modern facility is empty, except for workers who show up every day in hopes of the hospital reopening or the government providing them severance pay. Periodically, the hospital unions invite poor people to come for a day of free care. Meanwhile, women in the labor movement are organizing workers in the informal sector, like custodians or day care workers, into union-affiliated cooperatives that can qualify the workers for health care and pension coverage.

Uribe seems just as determined to tighten the economic screws as to press the military attack against the guerrillas. He is calling for a referendum that will freeze most wages and further reduce workers rights. The labor movement is urging abstention to deny Uribe the share of registered voters necessary for approval, but AUC leader Castaño has menacingly warned that urging abstention is tantamount to aiding the guerrillas.

The most immediate threat is posed by Uribe's plan for "democratic security." Taking a page from John Ashcroft's book, Uribe wants to establish a network of 1 million -- later expanded to 5 million -- citizen informers in a country of 42 million, and to incorporate peasants as part-time soldiers, making them likely guerrilla targets. "That means militarization of daily life in the countryside," argues Gustavo Gallon, director of the Colombian Commission of Jurists, "increasing citizen involvement in armed conflict and exposing their wives and families to armed conflict."

At the same time, the government is negotiating with some of the paramilitaries to reach cease-fires (while rejecting recent overtures from the FARC to re-establish talks that ended last year). The strategy may be intended to give amnesty to paramilitary human rights abusers and effectively legalize the paramilitaries again, as they were until 1989. Uribe has also established "rehabilitation zones," where the military has greater control over daily life, even though the establishment El Tiempo newspaper reported that the zones repressed civilians but did not reduce armed conflict. Meanwhile, around the rest of the country, Uribe is eliminating local human rights investigators and limiting civil liberties.

Some strategists hold out hope that aerial spraying of coca fields will destroy the drug trade and undermine the guerrillas and paramilitaries. Bush administration officials have signaled that the United States hopes to pull back in a couple of years, when it unrealistically predicts that aerial spraying will have eliminated coca production. Although the United States claims that record spraying reduced coca production by 15 percent last year in the principal drug-growing areas, coca production has simply spread to many more parts of Colombia and into neighboring countries. Also, more potent, herbicide-resistant coca strains have been developed.

At the same time, spraying destroys peasants' food crops and, according to a forthcoming Witness for Peace report, increases the number of ready recruits for the guerrillas or paramilitaries. There is growing conviction among progressives in Colombia, including Lucho Garzon, that the solution to Colombia's drug-trafficking problems lies in legalizing cocaine to remove criminal profits. Much as the drug trade fuels the conflict, suppression of the drug trade will not end it, given the growing inequalities and hardships in Colombia.

With the end of government negotiations with the guerrillas and the arrival of Uribe, backed by a newly triumphalist Bush administration, advocates of peace and progressive reforms are glum. "The pendulum, unfortunately, is swinging, in my mind, the furthest to the right it's ever been," says Daniel Garcia-Pena, director of Planeta Paz, a reform-oriented non-governmental organization. "It's very frightening, to tell the truth, and the pendulum has further to the right to swing."

Among the guerrillas, the pendulum has swung to favor the military faction, especially after many of the most political insurgents and other leftists tried to enter electoral politics in the late '80s by forming the Patriotic Union Party. Nearly 3,000 candidates and activists were assassinated. Garcia-Pena criticizes the guerrillas, especially the FARC, for increasing violence against civilians and failing to make persuasive political arguments to build popular support. "They're as crazy as Uribe," he says. "This moment is like being between Bush and bin Laden, two loonies."

Even if the guerrillas were defeated, which seems unlikely, the clashes over rights to land, jobs and basic necessities of life will continue. The decades-long struggle does not stem from victimization of the government by narco-traffickers, guerrillas or paramilitaries, according to Gustavo Gallon, but rather from a longstanding failure of the state to make broad human rights the basis of its security strategy. "We need security," Gallon says. "But real security is based on human rights and basic levels of social and economic rights."

If the Bush regime charges into Colombia with more military aid or troops under the guise of fighting terrorism, it will simply be an escalating force behind a fundamentally flawed policy. It would be unlikely to bring peace and security, even after a tremendous cost in lives. It most certainly will not bring justice. But in the aftermath of Iraq, such considerations are even further than usual from the minds of the Washington warriors.

David Moberg is a senior editor of In These Times.

When members of a 21,000-member Teamsters local in Chicago proposed taking a stand against war in Iraq in mid-October, Local 705 Secretary-Treasurer Jerry Zero thought "it sounded like a good resolution we could have some debate over."

But the results surprised even Zero, as Teamsters took the floor, many identifying themselves as veterans of wars from Vietnam to Desert Storm. "We had 400 members [at the meeting] and all of the debate was one-sided against the war," Zero says. "There was only one vote against the resolution. I was amazed. I expected an even split."

Zero himself argued that there's no need for war. "We're looking at the oil there," he says. "Maybe Bush is using it as an excuse to cover up other shortcomings of the administration. We're looking at an Iraq that has no ties I can see with bin Laden or other terrorist groups and letting other countries like Saudi Arabia, that do have ties, slide on by."

All unions should take a stand, Zero says, since the prospect of war "affects your members, their families, their kids. They talk about this costing $200 billion, and who knows how long we'll have to stay there and how many more billions. Where will they get that money? They just gave it away with tax cuts to wealthy people."

Zero's outspoken public stance is still rare in the labor movement. But privately many union leaders express deep reservations or personal opposition to a war in Iraq. Although there was initially strong labor support after the 9/11 attacks for the war on terrorism and bombing of Afghanistan, union distrust of Bush has grown dramatically with the administration's relentless attacks on the labor movement and civil liberties under the guise of national security, as well as its use of the president's wartime popularity to push an extremely pro-business legislative agenda.

However, many union leaders fear that opposing the war will divert scarce resources to an effort that may ultimately divide their members. Although some limited polling suggests that union members roughly mirror general public opinion on war against Iraq, there are also anecdotal indications -- like Zero's experience -- that union members may be receptive to educational efforts against a unilateral U.S. war. But so far few labor unions have even taken the simple step of providing alternative views -- the labor equivalent of campus teach-ins -- that would help members better understand what's at stake.

On October 7, as Congress was nearing a vote on Bush's power to act militarily against Iraq, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney sent a letter to Congress that expressed concerns about Bush's Iraq policy but did not urge a vote against the legislation. Sweeney argued that U.S. policies on Iraq should not distract from pursuit of al-Qaeda terrorists, and that they should reinforce international law, the United Nations and broader, multilateral alliances against terrorism. Sweeney also said that the fight against terrorism was not simply military, but required more global attention to basic human rights.

He criticized the politicization of the prospective war -- such as Republican claims that Democrats were unpatriotic for trying to protect the rights of workers in the new Homeland Security department -- and suggested that the timing of the campaign against Iraq was itself politically motivated. Urging a full debate about the possible costs and casualties, he concluded, "We must assure [the sons and daughters of working families] that war is the last option, not the first, used to resolve this conflict before we ask them to put themselves in harm's way to protect the rest of us."

Sweeney's letter reflected support from the AFL-CIO Executive Council's international affairs committee, which had invited former Clinton administration officials Sandy Berger and John Podesta to discuss national security and political issues related to Iraq. It circulated among the whole executive council, without dissent, before being sent to Congress. The AFL-CIO insists that it is not an "anti-war" position, even though it is a much more skeptical view of presidential war-making than the AFL-CIO has historically taken.

There has been almost no explicit labor support for war in Iraq, although Teamsters President James Hoffa did join the White House-orchestrated Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. "You cannot have a conversation with anyone inside the labor movement who thinks we should have a war," says veteran union organizer Bob Muehlenkamp, who is trying to mobilize labor opposition. "Two things that come out particularly strong are the focus on economic consequences and whose kids fight this war."

Despite their opposition to terrorism, he said, "people feel that Bush has not made a case" for invading Iraq. Muehlenkamp hopes that unions will feel comfortable joining with a newly formed Keep America Safe/Win Without War campaign, which includes the National Council of Churches, Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, the Rainbow/Push Coalition and other groups.

Since last summer there has been steady growth in labor opposition to a war from local unions, central labor councils, state federations and other groups, and a few high-ranking labor leaders have also spoken out individually. "Personally, I'm extremely disturbed about it," says Hotel and Restaurant Employees (HERE) President John Wilhelm. "I thought that post-9/11, the focus was on terrorism and al-Qaeda. I don't know where this Iraq venture came from. I'm also very concerned about what I think will be a real disaster for our members, just in terms of their jobs."

Gloria Johnson, president of the Coalition of Labor Union Women and a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Council, shares skepticism about the abrupt shift from terrorism to Iraq. "I have not read or seen anything that in my opinion at this point justifies the war," she says. "I sincerely hope that reports that come out from Iraq with the searching going on will demonstrate that a war will not be needed. I'm concerned about the loss of lives of our kids. I'm concerned about the tremendous focus of money, especially since we're going pretty much alone."

"We think the rush to attack Iraq is a mistake," adds Bruce Raynor, president of UNITE, the union of apparel and textile workers. "I think the president ought to grab a gun and lead the charge if he wants to do that. But he's proposing to send our kids. But Saddam Hussein is a bad guy. If the United Nations supports an intervention against Saddam because he has weapons of mass destruction, we would be supportive of that."

Shortly after Sweeney's letter to Congress, Local 1199, the 220,000-member New York health care union, took out a full-page ad in the New York Times opposing war in Iraq. California SEIU Local 250 launched an extensive educational campaign among its 85,000 members after coming out against war. "I think it's our fundamental responsibility to take a stand and lead on it," says Local 250 President Sal Roselli. "Some people see it as a risk, but risk is how we accomplish change and justice for workers."

Union members and leaders often see Bush's war strategies as linked to his "war on labor." Gene Bruskin, secretary-treasurer of the Food and Allied Service Trades division of the AFL-CIO, wrote to Sweeney in October that Bush's policies were "a Trojan horse for his pro-corporate domestic and international agenda." Both his domestic and foreign policy are designed, Bruskin argued, to make "the world safe for U.S. multinationals," and "the labor movement must take the lead in opposing Bush's war policies if we are going to succeed at advancing our own goals."

Similarly, after the Seattle Central Labor Council voted to join October demonstrations against the war, Secretary-Treasurer Steve Williamson received broad support for his comments linking Bush's war plans to anti-worker policies, from intervening against the West Coast dockworkers in their contract negotiations and taking away the rights of Homeland Security workers to planning to privatize half of the federal work force and cutting taxes for the rich. "My premise was very simple," says Williamson, a former bricklayer. "Bush has two unilateral wars he's embarking on. One is war on Iraq. The other is war on working families."

So far, service and white-collar workers have taken the lead, but the opposition to war comes from many quarters. There are active anti-war labor groups in New York, Washington, San Francisco, Detroit, Seattle, Portland and other cities, some of which opposed the war in Afghanistan as well -- a minority view that cost New York City anti-war labor leader Michael Letwin re-election as president of an Autoworkers local this fall.

But opposition to the Iraq war has drawn more mainstream labor backing, including the Washington State Labor Council, United Electrical Workers, New York state nurses, the Wisconsin SEIU, the California Federation of Teachers, Pride at Work (the AFL-CIO gay workers organization), New Mexico carpenters, and central labor councils from such cities as San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland, California; Albany, Troy and Rochester, New York; and Duluth, Minnesota.

But most labor leaders, despite their own misgivings or opposition, remain cautious -- preoccupied with other issues, seeking careful internal deliberations, fearful of dividing the labor movement, deferential to timid Democratic leaders, and reluctant to get far ahead of their members. They are also waiting to see what happens with inspections in Iraq and at the U.N. Security Council. Although labor movements in Europe are forcefully opposing war against Iraq, "the AFL-CIO is not going to get deeply involved in either the peace or war side because the divisions are too deep," one insider predicts.

But by raising doubts, encouraging debate and providing education about alternative strategies, the AFL-CIO could at least deny Bush some of his national security cover for the war at home and open the door for unions and leaders who want to more vigorously oppose the looming war in Iraq.

For more than a quarter century, corporate America has been on a roll, winning greater influence over both political parties, deregulating business, weakening unions, redistributing income to the elite and writing corporate-friendly rules for a more global economy. Despite protests and misgivings, there was widespread public acquiescence. Big business, or at least "the market," was good. Big government was bad.

But the tide has turned, at least in public opinion. Enron's collapse was the turning point, but the succession of scandals drove the lesson home. The opportunity -- and publicly perceived need -- for reforming the power and place of corporations in American life hasn't been as great since the 1930s. The big question is whether a social movement will emerge from this shift to turn the balance of power and make government an instrument for the public good, not the profit of the corporate elite.

Unfortunately, the current political line-up could hardly be less favorable. The country has the most pro-corporate president in history (and both the president and vice president personally profited from corporate abuses). The House is dominated by Republicans who are right-wing ideologues. The Senate is narrowly controlled by a Democratic Party that -- with some honorable exceptions -- has willingly sold its soul to corporate interests in a cynical, "me too" scramble for political gain that now leaves the party lacking both the credibility and the will to respond aggressively to popular demands to challenge corporate power and misdeeds.

As the political opportunities have opened over the past year, however, the labor movement has emerged as the single most important champion of corporate reform. Rev. Jesse Jackson and Ralph Nader, especially through his Citizen Works organization, have also played important roles, but their grassroots base of support is not as large. At the same time, there has been a burst of support for unions, even from workers who hadn't showed much interest before, and better prospects for the greatly expanded wave of organizing that unions desperately need.

The AFL-CIO has taken the lead, organizing actions to help victimized workers from Enron and WorldCom, educating union members and the public, pushing Congress and regulatory bodies for new rules, and pressing stockholder actions. Some individual unions -- like UNITE (the clothing and textile workers) -- also have been active, but responses have been uneven. To succeed with a long-term campaign, however, the labor movement needs a broader alliance with diverse constituencies, going beyond the usual suspects, and it also needs new strategies to take advantage of the new organizing opportunities.

Recent polls capture the dramatic shift in opinion. In July the Gallup Organization found that 38 percent of Americans consider big business to be the "biggest threat to the future of the country," the highest figure in 48 years of polling. In a survey for the AFL-CIO, Peter Hart Research found that 39 percent of Americans have a negative view of corporations (and 30 percent positive), compared with just a year earlier when 42 percent had a positive view (and 25 percent negative) -- a massive reversal.

At the same time, Hart found that 50 percent of nonunion workers say they would vote yes (with 43 percent voting no) in a union representation election in their workplace, a sharp increase from the 42 percent who said they would vote for a union a year ago. Even the pro-management Employment Law Alliance found that 58 percent of Americans surveyed supported unions organizing more workers, 73 percent favored mandatory representation of workers on corporate boards, and 84 percent wanted pension funds to hold corporations more accountable.

Ben Barile, 42, is part of that shifting public opinion. A middle manager at WorldCom, Barile was laid off in June, then denied his promised severance pay and health insurance when the company declared bankruptcy. He lost all of his 401(k) investment, and he was at great financial risk because of the cost of medicine for HIV. After a friend directed him to the AFL-CIO Web site, he left his e-mail address and was soon contacted and encouraged to join in legal action organized by the federation to win employee severance and health payments. He recalled how years earlier managers had told him that they had "cut away the cancer" in crushing an incipient union organizing effort. Now, recognizing that, as a group, workers are stronger and less afraid to speak up, he's ardently pro-union.

"I think the next job I'd like to get would be a union job," he says. "I'd like someone behind me and fighting for me, instead of me fighting by myself."

Earlier this summer, labor lobbying and public sentiment pushed through a first step in corporate and accounting reform sponsored by Sen. Paul Sarbanes (D-Maryland). In the weeks before its fall recess, Congress seemed likely to vote on at least two other initiatives that unions have pushed--reform of 401(k) employee savings plans and protection for workers in bankruptcy proceedings (giving priority to workers' claims for more back wages and recovering excessive executive pay, like the $100 million in "retention bonuses" given top Enron execs just before bankruptcy).

In another labor-backed bill, sponsored by Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), employers who do not provide a traditional pension with defined benefits would, if they establish 401(k) plans, have to protect workers from employer pressure to load up imprudently on company stock.

Equally important, the measure would require all plans to give elected employee representatives an equal voice with management in running the funds.

Although employer groups adamantly oppose both provisions and Democrats are divided -- with Sen. Max Baucus (D-Montana) allying with Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) to promote a weaker bill -- public pressure could force Republicans to protect employee retirement. Congress also might require or encourage companies to treat executive stock options as expenses, as many corporations have decided to do already, and close the loophole that encourages companies to reincorporate in Bermuda to avoid U.S. taxes.

The labor movement also has taken its fight to the courts, stockholder meetings, the campaign trail and the streets -- including Wall Street, where AFL-CIO President John Sweeney delivered a hard-hitting attack in late July on "21st century corporate pirates ... [who] plundered our companies by replacing long-term prosperity with short-run insincerity."

Having just succeeded in helping Enron workers win $34 million in severance in bankruptcy proceedings, Sweeney then pledged to pursue a similar lawsuit on behalf of WorldCom workers. By early September, WorldCom succumbed and asked its bankruptcy court to make full severance payments to workers.

AFL-CIO leaders, joining with Machinists who protested at the headquarters of Stanley Works, forced the company to reverse its plans to reincorporate in Bermuda. Joined by UNITE President Bruce Raynor, they also demanded that Fidelity Investments (a top shareholder in Enron, WorldCom, Halliburton and other corporate scofflaws, as well as the largest provider of employee 401(k) plans) regularly disclose how it votes on shareholder proposals.

In mid-September, the labor federation also launched television ads in targeted districts. One attacked members of Congress who voted to give big corporations -- including Enron, even as it was undergoing multiple investigations -- hundreds of millions in tax credits. The other attacked legislators who voted for the 1995 Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, "kicking open the door to corporate abuse." The AFL-CIO also has planned a range of corporate accountability protests for October 19, keeping the issue alive during the elections.

The labor movement demands public accountability for corporations, says Ron Blackwell, AFL-CIO corporate affairs director, and that means proper regulation, not just pleas for responsibility. Accountability must cover ever-widening concentric circles of corporate organization.

"Right in the middle of the picture is the chief executive officer," Blackwell argues, "with enormous conflicts of interest--doing good for me or good for the company."

Corporate pay and stock options give CEOs incentives to pump up the value of the company's stock and then dump their holdings for personal gain. Besides expensing stock options, Blackwell argues, grants of options should be linked to superior performance, and executives should be forced to hold their stock as long as they have the job. Better yet, they should be required to buy an equity stake and hold it, sharing in the risk that stockholders have.

The next ring of power, the board of directors should have a majority of independent directors (which the New York Stock Exchange will now demand of companies it lists). Executives shouldn't be able to use corporate money to elect directors, while leaving shareholders to raise their own funds to campaign for their representatives.

Then come the shareholders, whose votes should be binding on executives, not just advisory. In yet other circles are the auditors and security analysts, whose conflicts of interest proved so critical in the stock crash. Congress needs to reverse deregulation and restore the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act, which separated different sectors of the financial services industry.

Next there is the circle of product markets and financial markets, where deregulation (of the energy markets, for example) or lack of regulation (as in the financial derivatives market) also wreaked havoc.

Finally, there is the circle encompassing workers. According to Blackwell, there are ongoing discussions within the AFL-CIO about demanding some form of direct worker role on corporate boards. "American workers, as employees, have no required role in the governance of companies," he notes, "which makes it all the more important for them to have rights to organize as employees. Reformed labor law is important not just because it's a human right, but because it would be part of corporate accountability."

But beyond their roles as employees and, quite frequently, as shareholders, workers also have a stake as citizens. A grand public debate over the power and character of corporations could prove crucial in bringing about the "emerging Democratic majority" that political analysts John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira foresee in their valuable new book of the same name. But it could also make that majority a progressive force to tame corporations that have dominated American life for too long.

Judging from George W. Bush's "Wacko" economic forum, the fragile economy needs more tax cuts for the rich, more unfettered markets, more personal virtue -- and then everything will be all right. Give the Bush-Harken-Enron-Cheney-Halliburton team an A+ for consistency, but failing marks on all other counts. There are many lessons to be learned from the collapse of the bubble economy and the scandals of corporate financial skullduggery, but the White House hasn't learned any of them. Here are 10 for starters.


1. There is no new economy.

Remember endless growth? The Dow 30,000? Well, business cycles may vary in their details, but they go hand-in-hand with capitalism, and ultimately companies must make real profits if the system is going to work. "Irrational exuberance," as economists Robert Shiller and Charles Kindleberger most famously explained, is endemic to capitalism. And as Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz's work emphasizes, inevitable distortions and inadequacies of information create irrationality.


Despite novel conditions created by computer and telecommunications technologies, and by the expanded global markets, real-world capitalism remains an amalgamation of a narrow concept of rationality (based on the most efficient -- that is, most profitable -- use of capital) and some fundamental irrationalities. Left on its own, the market is not a perfectly self-regulating mechanism for universal good, but a limited, useful machine that can easily veer off on a destructive course.


2. The crisis is not the result of a few bad apples.

The entire barrel is rotten. In this case, the barrel is the framework of rules and regulations for business. Not every executive is a fraud or cheat, but if the system permits cooking the books, defrauding investors, overcompensating executives, rigging prices, polluting the environment, breaking unions and abusing workers, then it puts pressure on every business to move in those directions. The failures of the much-vaunted U.S. model of deregulated cowboy capitalism were already evident in growing inequality and insecurity and a declining quality of life. Now even much of the positive side -- growth, profits, new businesses, productivity, soaring stock markets -- has been called into question as an accounting chimera. It's time to question the whole model -- lock, stock and barrel.


3. Banish the cult of the invincible CEO.

The excesses of managers have helped destroy many corporations, millions of good jobs and the retirement security of tens of millions. CEOs have treated their posts as a license to loot their own corporations, workers and even investors. The problem is not just bad accounting, but no accountability. Every corporation needs at least a majority of independent directors (as well as directors selected directly by employees). Protection is also needed against self-serving actions (like CEO-appointed compensation committees and golden parachutes), greater power for shareholders, and guarantees of the right of all employees to organize. Ultimately, corporations must answer not just to their executives, or even their shareholders, but to society as a whole.


4. Regulation is good.

Indeed, regulation is necessary, both for the survival of the system and, more important, to make the system fairly deliver the goods. First, the financial system should serve the needs of the broader economy, not create speculative bubbles. Over the past two decades, old regulations of finance were dismantled -- like the separation of investment and commercial banking. The Federal Reserve failed to rein in the exuberance (as tougher requirements on lending for stock speculation might have done). Financial "innovations" sprang up without any control (like the special purpose entities used by Enron or a vast world of financial derivatives). And crony capitalism flourished.


Second, the market must be governed by certain rules of fair play to maintain competition and channel it in socially productive directions. While non-governmental groups, including unions, can play an important role, the government is the essential regulator, even if the mechanisms government uses and the way regulations are written are open to debate.


5. Regulation must go global.

The expanded global market has given corporate executives and financial speculators more freedom to escape regulation and to play off one country against another. But governments also have rushed unwisely to give away the power they still possess. Expanded "trade" agreements are locking in a worldwide order that makes it more difficult to regulate corporations in the public interest. And the exposure of more economies to the deregulated global financial markets has increased instability and hardship.


Take the example of American companies relocating to foreign locales to avoid taxes. Initially Bush was fighting European efforts to rein in tax havens, but the public temper has turned as a result of the corporate scandals and a heightened sense that escaping taxes during wartime is unpatriotic. Political and labor movement pressure recently stopped Stanley Works from leaving Connecticut for Bermuda, and Congress barred military contracts to companies that fled after January 1 (and may close the loophole entirely).


But there is still a big problem that hurts poor countries as much as the rich: One-third of total global gross domestic product is now held in financial havens, Oxfam reports, and the conservatively estimated $50 billion in revenue that poor countries lose every year to tax havens is equal to six times the cost of achieving universal primary education.


6. Let the sun shine in.

The International Monetary Fund and the U.S. government demand that poor countries be more financially transparent. That would be a good idea in the United States, too, especially for so-called public companies. Now the whole system is an insider's game, with stock analysts -- promoters, more accurately -- giving special access to stock offerings managed by their companies to favored executives (or insiders like Martha Stewart and George Bush getting tips to dump stocks before bad news is released publicly). Instead, there should be one set of books open to everyone.


Relationships among research, brokerage, banking, consulting and auditing businesses also should be kept at arm's-length. There should be tougher regulation of insider trading, full accounting of stock options as expenses, and prohibitions against short-term holding of options by executives. Institutional investors, like big mutual fund companies, should be open about and publicly accountable for how they vote their shares.


7. The economy should serve real people and real needs.

It's simply ludicrous to assume that bowing to the whims of the market is the best way to provide what most people need. Capitalism can be creatively productive, or it can be parasitic (as in the capitalist classes in so many undeveloped countries). Despite the technological innovations (and it's worth remembering that the Internet and much of the computer revolution would never have happened without government funding in the early stages), American capitalism has turned increasingly into a scheme for the powerful to plunder existing wealth through takeovers, corporate restructuring, privatization and other financial maneuvers.


This is reflected in growing inequality and the concentration of wealth and income at the very top -- a development exacerbated by tax cuts for the rich. The trend is shown most starkly in how the new "barons of bankruptcy," to borrow the Financial Times' phrase, enriched themselves while driving their companies into the ground. Meanwhile, in courtroom bankruptcy proceedings, workers are near the end of the line when it comes to claims on corporate assets.


Adding injury to insult, Congress is likely to approve new personal bankruptcy legislation when it returns in September. That bill greatly harms individuals, protecting the banks and credit card companies but not those losing their health insurance (though health-related financial problems are a leading cause of personal bankruptcy). This is precisely the inverse of the lesson that Congress should have learned.


8. Stop shifting risk.

In every sphere of life, the trend has been to shift increasing amounts of risk to the average American. Although sold under the attractive names of "choice," "freedom" and "flexibility," the typical result has been to threaten their livelihoods. For example, riskier defined-contribution pension plans -- like 401(k)s, which Congress still hasn't protected and regulated -- have been replacing defined-benefit pension plans. Growing numbers have no pension plan at all. And though Bush and the Republican leadership continue to push Social Security privatization, which would massively increase retirement insecurity, some Republican candidates are changing their positions -- or at least their rhetoric -- as public opinion swings against such schemes.


Safety nets are diminishing: While the boom economy in the late '90s reduced poverty somewhat, the numbers of people in "extreme poverty" actually increased, as welfare and other assistance was cut. Fewer families have health insurance, and the insurance they do have covers less.


Meanwhile, free trade exposes more workers to the risk of losing their jobs. Yet while a diminishing percentage of workers have union contracts to protect them, no CEO will take a job without a contract that pays him or her handsomely, even if the exec screws up and is forced out.


9. The corruption of politics by corporate money is bad for democracy -- and the economy.

The Democrats, who should be for government regulation of the economy to help working people, have lost any sense of conviction and direction. Much, though not all, of the blame for their submission to the market-fundamentalist, pro-corporate agenda lies with the current campaign-finance system. As a result, the range of political debate has been narrow, and working people have little voice. That means there is less ability to win the kinds of reforms that are needed to make the economy work well. The McCain-Feingold reforms are not likely to change that situation significantly, though public financing could.


10. It's the powerful versus the people.

For a brief moment, Al Gore had it half-right, even if he (and especially his running mate Joe Lieberman) didn't really believe it. For the past three decades, the powerful have waged a very successful but "one-sided class war" (in the words of former United Auto Workers President Doug Fraser). Of course, it has been fought in different terms -- against big government, taxes, regulations and inflation, but for free trade -- and it has hidden under many other banners (including a wide variety of social issues like gun control and abortion that obscured the economic agenda of the powerful).


There has been a much less vigorous effort to mobilize the people to curtail the powerful and keep them socially accountable. The final lesson is that the times and popular sentiment may be as ripe as any in decades for reviving that old populist message.

For both environmentalists and trade unionists, the Bush administration has been a disaster. A broad alliance between the two movements -- beyond individual campaigns, such as opposition to "fast track" trading authority -- has never seemed more essential. Yet when President Bush pushed drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) as part of a deficient energy plan and promoted an empty voluntary corporate response to global warming, environmentalists and unions were at odds.

The divisions clearly weaken green groups in their fight against anti-environmental policies. They also hurt the labor movement by alienating both important allies and large segments of the public (including strong majorities of union members) that oppose the administration's anti-environmental positions. These "blue-green" tensions further undermine prospects for progressive political victories and for building a broad, popular movement that challenges the power of corporations.

Six years ago, shortly after he took office as president of the AFL-CIO, John Sweeney hoped to head off these perils. He wanted to foster an alliance with greens and work out in advance a common labor position on thorny environmental issues. He asked Jane Perkins, formerly both a union official and head of Friends of the Earth, to work as the labor movement's liaison with environmentalists. Perkins pulled together a "blue-green working group" of top staff from several unions and environmental leaders to discuss global warming.

But the Mineworkers and some building trades resisted even talking about possible common ground. Instead, unions opposed to environmental protection policies have struck out on their own, claiming that pro-environment policies -- like limiting greenhouse gases or preserving wilderness -- will cost jobs. The Teamsters, United Mine Workers, and several building trades unions have openly endorsed Bush's energy policy and ANWR drilling.

Despite the failure thus far to cement a national blue-green alliance, significant progress has been made in building relationships and developing local alliances that could form the foundation for continuing work. More progress is likely to come mainly from grassroots and local initiatives as well as the actions of individual pro-environment unions and their leaders, not from the AFL-CIO. The blue-green working group, however, did prove that it is possible for unions and environmentalists to devise a package of policies that can promote clean energy and protect jobs.

In February, leaders of the Service Employees, Steelworkers, and UNITE (apparel and textile workers) joined with major environmental groups, such as the Sierra Club, Union of Concerned Scientists, and Natural Resources Defense Council, to endorse a study by economists James Barrett, recently with the Economic Policy Institute, and J. Andrew Hoerner of the Center for a Sustainable Economy. "We in the labor movement are not going to make a choice between good jobs and a safe environment," UNITE president Bruce Raynor said on the release of the report. "We're for both."

Barrett and Hoerner propose a modest, steadily increasing tax on the carbon content of energy. Such a plan would reduce use of the energy sources most responsible for global warming -- such as coal and oil -- by encouraging greater efficiency and switching to less harmful power sources, including renewables like solar and wind. But rather than rely solely on market price signals, Barrett and Hoerner propose that government directly encourage technologies that would increase energy efficiency and offset part of the cost of the carbon tax, such as energy-efficient buildings codes, higher vehicle fuel-efficiency standards, and tax incentives for super-efficient vehicles and renewable energy production.

Unlike many environmentalists, Barrett and Hoerner take seriously the potential for economic disruption to low-income families and workers in certain industries that would be caused by a shift in energy policy. They would phase in the carbon tax, rebating much of it to working families. To avoid unfair competition from countries that don't reduce global warming gases, they would require importers of energy or energy-intensive materials like steel to pay equivalent taxes or fees as U.S. producers, and they would provide generous income support and full-time education to displaced workers, like coal miners, and their communities. Overall, they conclude, the result of such a policy shift would be dramatic environmental progress, modest economic gains and much greater national energy security.

"I think that [this report] means that if folks with good intentions get together and stick with it, they can figure out solutions to problems that address everyone's concerns," says Perkins, who is leaving the AFL-CIO policy staff to work at the George Meany Center. She hopes the report will trigger a debate within the labor movement, and the blue-green working group has sponsored workshops in states from New Jersey to Montana to let local labor and environmental leaders discuss the issues. Perkins thinks that change will come by developing such links between the movements. "If we don't do that at the grassroots level," she says, "you're never going to change anything."

Although it may be too late for such a grassroots movement to push the ideas in the report in this year's congressional debate, there is growing receptivity in Washington to linking "just transition" adjustments to future energy legislation.

Even if big-picture agreement on issues like energy and climate change are elusive, there are plenty of other opportunities for blue-green cooperation. For example, Perkins says, a company is poised to open a 700-employee wind energy equipment manufacturing plant in Portland, Oregon, if wind energy production tax credits are included in the energy bill that comes out of the House and Senate conference, as is likely. UNITE and the Sierra Club are joining in a program to install solar rooftop panels in California. In a growing number of cities, labor and environmentalists are working together to fight sprawl as a threat both to unionization and the environment.

Steelworkers district director David Foster helped create a labor-environment alliance in the Northwest around a common fight against anti-labor and anti-environment polices of Maxxam Corporation. That experience led the union to advocate alternative energy sources for aluminum smelters in order to reduce reliance on hydropower that threatens salmon. "A healthy environment is essential to a healthy economy," he says.

Yet more unions need to turn to their allies for research and understanding of these issues, not to corporations and politicians that oppose them on nearly every other issue (as labor organizer Ray Rogers and educator Harry Kelber argue in a new effort to turn unions against ANWR exploration.) While Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao had nothing to offer labor on its key concerns when she met with the AFL-CIO executive council in late February, she did make clear that the administration's foremost request of labor was support for Bush's energy plan -- and pointedly thanked Teamsters President James Hoffa for his endorsement.

In their lobbying for Bush's plan, the Teamsters contended that ANWR drilling would have created nearly 750,000 new jobs. But an analysis of the decade-old, industry-sponsored research behind those figures by the Center for Economic and Policy Research shows that the assumptions are deeply flawed and oil from ANWR actually would have generated less than 50,000 jobs for the U.S. economy. The Teamsters may seem misguided to rely so heavily on industry research, but many labor insiders think that Hoffa's high-profile support for Bush's energy plan was largely part of the union's strategy to eliminate federal supervision, which was recently reduced.

Similarly, although the UAW has joined industry in resisting higher car and truck fuel efficiency standards, a Union of Concerned Scientists study concludes that increasing fuel economy to 55 miles per gallon would yield 100,000 new auto industry jobs by 2020, while saving consumers -- who obviously include workers who are union members -- $28 billion a year.

By adopting the perspective of industry and Republican strategists who have no concern for workers, unions, or preserving good domestic jobs, the labor unions that abandon environmental allies are also abandoning their own members. By nearly 2-to-1, union members oppose drilling in ANWR, according to a poll conducted late last year by the Wilderness Society. Over the past decade, workers and union members consistently have expressed strong support for environmental protection in opinion polls, according to sociologist Brian Obach, even when it poses risks to jobs.

Even UAW members support higher auto efficiency more strongly than the general public. In a January poll, 84 percent of UAW members in Michigan favored requiring all cars and light trucks to get 40 miles per gallon within 10 years. While the union organized rallies to oppose higher standards, UAW members overwhelmingly rejected the argument that environmental regulation would raise car prices and cost jobs. The choice between the environment and economic justice is a false one. Both are possible. Both are necessary. Both are threatened if the alliance of the labor and environmental movements fails.

David Moberg, a senior editor of In These Times, has been on the staff of the magazine since it began publishing. He recently received fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Nation Institute for research on the new global economy.

When the executive council of the AFL-CIO met in Los Angeles this past February, the news could hardly have been worse for president John Sweeney. The labor movement had bet the ranch on Al Gore, from early endorsement to yeoman election work, but Gore lost--partly because he wouldn't use labor's troops for a recount fight in Florida. As if Gore's spinelessness, incompetence and neglect of labor's populist themes hadn't been bad enough, Republican control of Congress exposed labor to untempered attacks by a Republican Party more right-wing and pro-corporate than under Reagan. During their first days in power, Bush and the Republicans were already rolling back belated pro-labor gestures by Clinton, such as new occupational safety and health regulations on ergonomics--to prevent injuries related to workplace design--that labor had fought ten years to enact.

And that wasn't all. After celebrating in the previous year that the union share of the work force hadn't declined, as it had during most of the previous two decades, Sweeney faced dismal news: The union share had dropped once again--to 13.5 percent of all workers and 9 percent of the private sector. Even by the AFL-CIO's generous counting, the number of new workers organized in 2000 had fallen by one-third, to 400,000. When Sweeney told the council that the figures reflected a real crisis for organized labor, John Wilhelm, president of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union (HERE), spontaneously rose and argued forcefully that the AFL-CIO had to focus its resources and programs much more on politics and organizing. Such a shift will be wrenching but necessary, he said, recounting how his union had forgone a much-needed health and safety department to put money into organizing. It was a surprising challenge from an ardent Sweeney supporter in a body notorious for the rarity of freewheeling debate. Sweeney bluntly replied that all federation activities were important to some union, and there was no more discussion, but over the following months nearly everyone at the AFL-CIO was busy explaining how his or her work contributed to either politics or organizing.

Then, in late March, Carpenters union president Doug McCarron withdrew his 500,000-member union, a key component of the interrelated building trades, from the AFL-CIO. A maverick who took little part in the federation and had contentious relationships with some other building trades unions, McCarron criticized Sweeney as he departed for not making "fundamental changes" in the federation to promote organizing, as he had done in his union. For many years McCarron had not paid AFL-CIO dues for all of his members, although he and the Sweeney administration had reached an agreement, later dropped after some executive council members objected, to ignore the union's past underpayments as it moved toward full payment of its obligations. Still, McCarron continued to ask what the union got for its money, and the Carpenters' departure accentuated growing questions about AFL-CIO spending. From 1995 to 2000, unions increased their payments to the federation by about one-fourth--not counting special political assessments--as the federation's staff increased by 10 percent (to 480) and the annual budget grew from $150 million to $190 million, with 22 percent attributed to organizing (scheduled to rise to 30 percent soon).

Nearly all union leaders chided McCarron for leaving (and for not participating in the AFL-CIO before he left), but some--like Wilhelm and Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees union (SEIU), which Sweeney used to head--felt that McCarron was raising legitimate issues about focus and priorities at the AFL-CIO. Sweeney "works so hard that he has multiple balls in the air at the same time," said AFSCME president Gerald McEntee, a key promoter of Sweeney's original candidacy. "A lot of us do that. Sometimes we don't pay enough attention to one of them, and it hits the floor," as organizing has for Sweeney.

Political losses, organizing declines, internal conflicts--does all this mean that Sweeney has failed as leader of the American labor movement? Not really. Over the six years since he was elected in an unusual challenge to the incumbent leadership, the American labor movement has stirred itself from somnambulent marginality to become noticeably more effective in giving workers a voice in American life. Sweeney's palace rebellion and rhetoric of change have inspired a more open and innovative spirit throughout much of the labor movement and stimulated a serious discussion about organizing.

While Sweeney has made mistakes, there's blame to share. The labor movement is suffering from broad strategic failures--limited commitment to organizing in many individual unions, fragmented organizational structure, inadequate involvement of members in union work and decision-making, and an excessively narrow and shortsighted social vision. Despite Sweeney's nominal position as the embodiment of "Big Labor," the AFL-CIO is a voluntary federation of affiliated unions with no members of its own and little power to compel affiliates to do anything. "I had more authority as president of a union than I do now," Sweeney recently lamented. The problem has been a lack of consensus within the labor movement, especially on organizing, not only between those unions that organize aggressively and those that don't but even among those that are leading the charge. "What would I do if I were John Sweeney?" mused Stern, who has dedicated half of SEIU's budget to organizing. "I don't know." At the same time, affiliated unions rightly expect the federation to deliver something for the money they spend on it. And notwithstanding its accomplishments, the AFL-CIO under Sweeney has not yet taken the drastic, systematic action required to lead labor out of its dire straits.

In 1995, when Sweeney came to power, labor was reeling from the Republican takeover of Congress, which occurred partly because so many potentially Democratic working-class voters were disillusioned with Clinton and stayed home. The loss at the polls crystallized swelling undercurrents of discontent with Lane Kirkland's aloof or absent leadership at the helm of the AFL-CIO. Sweeney's "new voices" campaign promised a more energetic federation, including leadership in mobilizing union voters and organizing a million new members a year.

In a dramatic contrast with the reclusive Kirkland style, Sweeney has worked hard, traveling the country, joining picket lines and delivering labor's message to union members, allies, politicians and even business opponents. Partly as a result, the AFL-CIO and the labor movement have a stronger public presence. Building on local initiatives that were already under way, he has tried to transform central labor councils and, more recently, state federations--the state and local AFL-CIO counterparts that one union official disparages as mere "excrescences" on organized labor--into real organizations that help member unions with organizing, politics, strikes and other needs. He has forged stronger alliances with community organizations, students, academics, religious activists and others. And he has begun reorienting labor's international operations away from its cold war legacy to a new emphasis on building international labor alliances. With AFL-CIO guidance, unions are using their pension-fund power more effectively, sometimes to help organizing. Sweeney has prodded affiliates to "change to organize," encouraged multi-union cooperation, urged unions to focus on core industries and tried to curtail employer anti-union actions through public and political pressure. He is clearly frustrated that he hasn't been able to do more but insists he's still optimistic. "We never said these were short-term goals," he said. "This was for the long term. We had to rebuild the culture of organizing."

Despite these successes, however, Sweeney has yet to carve out a clear role for the federation in organizing. Kirkland always maintained that the individual unions, not the federation, were responsible for organizing (although he did underwrite former textile union organizer Richard Bensinger's proposal for the autonomous Organizing Institute, a center for training and creating a culture of organizing). Sweeney, by contrast, believes that the AFL-CIO can--and must--play a part, but he is still attempting to figure out what exactly that should be.

One of Sweeney's first major efforts was the strawberry workers' campaign: The AFL-CIO prepared a sophisticated strategy with many pressure points, but the workers themselves hadn't been adequately mobilized, and it took years to win one small contract. Multi-union efforts in Seattle; New Orleans; Stamford, Connecticut; and Las Vegas (the last run by the building trades with some AFL-CIO money) ranged from near-total failure to modest success, although coordinated organizing at Los Angeles and San Francisco airports has gone well, boosted by AFL-CIO campaigns to assure that employers remain neutral in organizing drives. Sweeney expanded the valuable Organizing Institute six years ago, but it hasn't grown since then. And a task force of intermediate-level union officers that used to meet regularly to critique and encourage one another's organizing work has been inactive recently. Now the focus is less on changing to organize and more on each union's meeting its share of a targeted million new members a year. The Union Summer student recruitment paid off dramatically in a new pro-labor campus movement, but it has been scaled back sharply from around 1,000 students the first year to 200 in recent summers, joined by small summer efforts with retirees, seminarians and lawyers. An $11 million fund (smaller than projected) has helped underwrite important organizing, but it has also been plagued by political squabbling (although new guidelines may focus its grantmaking).

Sweeney has urged unions to target their core industries, so that organizing builds bargaining power, not just bigger membership. Some unions--SEIU, HERE, UNITE (textile and apparel) and a few others--have fully embraced the idea and even swapped locals to concentrate strength, but the majority of unions still insist on organizing anybody they can. For example, twenty unions, some with no healthcare experience, objected when SEIU's Stern wanted to establish exclusive jurisdiction for a $20 million campaign to organize upstate New York nursing homes and hospitals, where SEIU is already dominant.

The challenge for the AFL-CIO lies in effectively harnessing the affiliates to meet the movement's larger organizing goals. And the slow, uneven response of affiliates is a main reason the labor movement still is not growing. Sweeney's first organizing director, Richard Bensinger, was brutally frank with union presidents about their organizing inadequacies. (Bensinger's style clashed with that of other top aides, and he was pushed out of the job, a decision that most union organizing directors still regret.) Even well-intentioned union presidents have trouble getting many of their locals--which control half the labor movement's resources--to take organizing seriously.

Meanwhile, employers everywhere still doggedly fight unionization. The challenge is especially great in manufacturing, where businesses wield the credible threat that they'll move overseas if workers unionize. In response, the AFL-CIO has organized a "voice at work" strategy: Unions and central labor councils recruit community leaders, clergy, politicians and others to publicly criticize anti-union employers, encourage workers forming a union or urge governmental action, such as recent legislation in Milwaukee and California requiring private employers with public financing to be neutral or not use public funds to resist when workers try to organize [see David Glenn, "Labor of Love," page 30]. To take just one recent local example, in Kansas City, Missouri, American Federation of Teachers organizers at Health Midwest credit their central labor council with drumming up support from politicians, clergy and other labor leaders to limit the effectiveness of the hospital's anti-union campaign. But local campaigns for the right to organize have been spotty, and the national AFL-CIO efforts have been concentrated during a week in June each year, when they need to be year-round and unrelenting.

Given that many unions continue to compete for members and refuse to cooperate out of narrow institutional self-interest, it's not surprising that the affiliates have disparate views on what their common federation should do. Should the AFL-CIO become more directly involved in organizing, perhaps focusing help on the smaller or less aggressive unions? Or should it focus on changing the climate for organizing, especially through politics? Should it provide affiliates with services or with strategic direction? Some key organizers think the AFL-CIO should still push laggard unions to organize more and help to coordinate more strategic, coordinated campaigns. But others simply want the fed to help clear the path for unions already committed to such methods. "The problem is that the federation needs to decide to do a few things well rather than being everything to everybody," argues SEIU executive vice president and organizing director Tom Woodruff. "It's still true that workers don't fundamentally have a real right to organize in this country, and that's not the public perception. That's the right campaign for the federation to run. That's the one they haven't run effectively up to this point."

HERE's John Wilhelm believes that the federation "ought to put the same focus and dollars into organizing as into politics, and I think the AFL-CIO needs to have the same leadership role in organizing as in politics," rather than defer to the individual unions, as many other leaders prefer. But because of the lack of consensus at the AFL-CIO, the leadership on organizing has begun to shift informally to an increasingly tight circle of unions--most large, a few small--that already have good track records. Indeed, some even suggest that the US labor movement should follow the German model: consolidate into a few giant unions with a tiny and unimportant national federation.

If Sweeney manages to forge some agreement among member unions, on the other hand, the AFL-CIO could still play a major role in creating a more favorable climate for organizing, and in stimulating more and better efforts at rebuilding the ranks of the labor movement. So far many of the federation's organizing efforts have flopped or proved at most partial successes, but at least it has been trying new ideas on a larger canvas. The danger now is that those experiments will be quietly forgotten, not systematically analyzed, and that pessimists will conclude that nothing new and ambitious should be tried.

Whereas organizing has been a particularly divisive topic, "politics has always been the glue that's held the AFL-CIO together," as Wilhelm puts it. Notwithstanding the outcome of last fall's election, the federation under Sweeney can point to an impressive political record. Under political director Steve Rosenthal, AFL-CIO staff--along with representatives loaned from affiliates in key Congressional districts and states, as well as local union officials and activists--have coordinated an energetic campaign to educate, register and turn out union voters. While the number of nonunion voters shrank, labor boosted the union household share of the vote steadily from 19 percent of the electorate in 1992 to 23 percent in 1996 and 26 percent in 2000--with a growing percentage of those households voting for labor-backed candidates. The more messages workers received from their union, especially personal contacts at work, the more effectively unions won over their members. Labor's political operation has also prospered by educating members about issues rather than simply issuing endorsements.

The AFL-CIO will beef up and refine existing operations as it starts its political organizing this fall, even earlier than in past election cycles. Much of the work will initially focus on issues such as the minimum wage, a patients' bill of rights and fast track "trade promotion authority," as well as on educating politicians and organizations about the need to protect workers' currently thwarted right to organize. But the challenge is larger than that. Without much satisfaction, Rosenthal has tried during previous election cycles to build a seamless, full-time, grassroots political and legislative action operation, so that there would be just as much effort devoted to holding elected officials accountable as to electing them. If that had been in place, the AFL-CIO might have been able to mobilize members on a massive scale against overturning the ergonomics rules or the Bush tax plan.

Even though labor has persuaded Democrats to emphasize bread-and-butter "working families" issues more, there is still excessive deference to party leaders in defining policy battles. And the federation often seems peculiarly reluctant to employ the "street heat" tactics that it advocates for central labor councils. Calling for local hearings on its new immigration policy, which urges a broad amnesty for undocumented immigrants and an end to the punitive sanctions labor once supported, the AFL-CIO said it wanted only a few hundred people to attend each one. The Los Angeles County federation flouted the orders and turned out a huge crowd of 20,000 calling for "amnesty" and "union." Pressure from local leaders was also largely responsible for the AFL-CIO's vigorous presence during the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, where labor unions and environmentalists set a new standard in cooperative protest against corporate globalization. In both cases, however, Sweeney proved adaptable rather than trying to shut down the upstarts, as his predecessors might have done. Manufacturing unions have been frustrated that the AFL-CIO did not take issues of trade and deindustrialization seriously enough under Clinton, even though it was part of the coalition that twice blocked renewal of fast-track authority and tried, but failed, to deny permanent normal trading relationship status to China. But the AFL-CIO is mounting an aggressive effort this year to deny fast-track trade authority to Bush.

In the immediate future, the AFL-CIO will focus on forging closer links between politics and organizing, demanding that union-backed politicians at all levels of government fight for the right of workers to join unions freely--either by passing legislation or taking direct action to support workers. "There has to be a direct link of politics and organizing. If we're going to succeed in politics, we need more members. And a major reason to be involved in politics is to change the environment so that workers can organize," Rosenthal notes. "Our goal is to build power for working people. The only way to be more powerful is if more workers are in unions."

Sweeney in August deployed roughly twenty staff members from the field mobilization department to work on politics full time and another twenty to work on organizing, mainly the linkage with politics. While skeptics view the move as a bureaucratic shuffle, the AFL-CIO sees it as responding to the call for more focus on organizing and politics by its main field staff. The goal is to lay the groundwork for eventual reform of labor laws by making the public more conscious of how workers' rights are systematically violated. Federation officials believe that they opened Al Gore's eyes by exposing him to workers who had suffered reprisals from their bosses because they tried to form a union and consequently plan to "Algorize" every politician who seeks union support. If Democrats take up the challenge, they can strengthen and reorient their party toward working people--not only immigrant janitors, whose success in organizing and contract fights has now made new janitor organizing far faster and easier, but also highly educated workers, such as engineers, doctors, nurses, university faculty and teaching assistants, who are interested in unionization. But many emerging labor leaders who doubt that the Democrats will see the light argue that labor should seek out sympathetic Republican moderates. Others--like Rosenthal--believe unions should refuse to endorse or should mount primary challenges to Democrats who don't deliver.

Sweeney still hopes to bring back the Carpenters by the December convention, when he is likely to be the only candidate for a new four-year term as president. But to appease McCarron, he may have to resolve conflicts over organizing among the anachronistically fragmented building trades unions. Since the Carpenters left, Sweeney has welcomed into the AFL-CIO two new unions--one linked to the American Nursing Association and a California school employees' union. A railway union that had disaffiliated also returned through a merger with an old rival, one of eleven mergers since Sweeney took office. But he has not presided over the bottom-up changes in union culture that would allow for the kind of consolidation and strategic unity the labor movement needs.

Unions have made their greatest progress in recent years, both in politics and organizing, when they have engaged their members as active organizers and campaigners. They have also gained to the extent that they have projected a broad vision of social justice, democracy, economic fairness and worker rights on the job and in society that inspires members, allies and the public. If the labor movement can turn itself into a new civil rights movement, with a sizable number of the 16 million union members feeling that organized labor is truly their voice, the energy from below linked to a grander vision may help to resolve many of the internal conflicts that seem so intractable now. "In order for the movement to grow, we have to recognize that it's not simply a matter of will," argues former Sweeney assistant Bill Fletcher. "The equation is vision plus strategy plus organizing equals power. We need a compelling social vision, and organizing the unorganized is not sufficiently compelling."

Much to his credit, Sweeney got union and environmental representatives to talk about a common vision, but the effort was rudely undermined when the Teamsters and building trades backed Bush's plan to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a move that put labor at odds with vast majorities of Americans, offended key allies and represented retrograde thinking about the future of the American economy. The federation took refuge in an ambiguous earlier resolution favoring "exploration" with appropriate "environmental safeguards," which let each side in the internal debate save some face but really gave more aid to the drilling proponents. Also, the AFL-CIO followed the auto workers' misguided lead in accepting low fuel efficiency standards. And it has failed to project ambitious agendas with broad public appeal on other issues as well, such as public financing of elections and universal national health insurance.

There appear to be no rivals for Sweeney's job. The typical reaction is, Who would want a position with such big responsibilities and so little power? Despite the frustrations, especially about organizing, most union activists respect Sweeney's hard work in forcing debate on how unions must grow faster and smarter to wield power for their members. Yet Sweeney is a relatively cautious leader, inclined toward finding consensus, even if his rhetoric has often raised hopes that he would push for more radical changes. "When I first ran for office, I said many times it wasn't who headed the AFL-CIO that was important," Sweeney said recently, "it was where the AFL-CIO is headed." Indeed, Sweeney has helped turn the labor movement in the direction of doing--or at least talking about doing--more aggressive organizing, grassroots political mobilization, alliance-building and advocacy for all working people. In any case, Sweeney's mixed record is far better than the stagnation that preceded him. The test of coming years will be his ability to focus the AFL-CIO and the labor movement on organizing, making it both a political priority and a new civil rights movement, while expanding the social vision that gives meaning to that mission.

There's an old adage that trade negotiators think their work is like riding a bicycle: Either they keep pedaling forward or the bicycle -- the new global economy -- falls down. But after a decade marked by major steps in global economic "liberalization" -- more accurately described as "deregulation" or "corporate regulation" -- it is time to stop for a minute and ask which way this bicycle is headed and whether we want to go there.

The next big domestic political battle on globalization may come as early as this summer over a proposal to grant President Bush special "trade promotion authority" -- better known as "fast track" -- that would push trade deals through Congress with minimal debate. It will pit the fast-pedalers against a wide range of groups, especially the labor and environmental movements, who advocate what Economic Policy Institute President Jeff Faux calls a "strategic pause" in the current course of globalization.

Congress failed to renew fast track authority for President Clinton in 1997 and 1998. First it was withdrawn without a vote, then it was defeated. The vote united the majority of Democrats and a small bloc of Republicans, many of them conservative nationalists. Now, in a much different political climate, with a narrowly divided Congress and a Republican president, conservative Illinois Republican Rep. Phil Crane has introduced legislation for new fast track authority. Bush has staked his personal reputation on fast track, promising foreign leaders -- such as those at the Quebec Summit of the Americas -- that he would get it and claiming that the United States would be crippled in negotiating major deals, such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) or a new round of World Trade Organization agreements, without it.

Fast track proponents argue that the president needs such authority to conclude big trade deals. Otherwise factions within Congress will pick apart agreements that have been carefully crafted with a variety of trade-offs, and foreign government negotiators will not have confidence that U.S. negotiators can deliver on their promises. Of course, the first question should be what new global trade agreements, if any, are needed now? Setting that crucial issue aside, it is clear that fast track isn't necessary, even if it is convenient for negotiators to restrict democratic review of their handiwork. Presidents have only invoked fast track authority five times over a period in which hundreds of trade deals have been negotiated. Indeed, just before leaving office, Clinton trade representative Charlene Barshefsky admitted that fast track authority wasn't really necessary.

Critics repeatedly have argued that fast track is inherently undemocratic and that agreements like NAFTA and the WTO should be handled like treaties. Moreover, progressives insist that any legislated trade authority should require negotiators to include protections for labor rights and the environment, and that those protections should be enforced in the same manner as protections for intellectual property or other commercial goals -- including the option of trade sanctions.

The Crane legislation, however, specifically prohibits trade negotiators from including such enforceable labor and environmental provisions in the core of future trade agreements. This free market fundamentalism is out of touch with changing popular sentiment. Earlier this year, even major corporations in the Business Roundtable acknowledged that they could support some provisions for labor and environment in new fast track legislation. The hard line taken by Crane has, for the moment, stiffened Democratic opposition to trade promotion authority. Some influential Democrats with a history of voting as "free traders," such as Montana Sen. Max Baucus and California Rep. Robert Matsui, a leading proponent of fast track and NAFTA, have insisted the new legislation include strong labor and environmental protections.

The political prospects for Bush are also complicated by the slowing economy and the growing, record-breaking U.S. trade deficits. The buoyant growth of the late '90s temporarily masked the effects of globalization on jobs, but since the spring of 1998 -- while overall unemployment was low -- the U.S. manufacturing sector has lost about 750,000 jobs, with much of the loss a result of imports or investment shifts overseas.

The steel industry, faced with foreign producers dumping products in the U.S. market below their costs of production, has been in crisis for three years, during which time there have been nearly 18,000 layoffs and 18 company bankruptcies. With a growing number of Republicans joining Democrats in a call for action, Bush has agreed to ask the U.S. International Trade Commission to determine whether unfair trade practices have injured the industry enough to impose (within WTO guidelines) broad restrictions on steel imports.

The move, which Europeans and others have denounced as protectionism, was widely seen as a move (one that Clinton had rejected) to defuse a hot trade issue and win support for fast track. But the Steelworkers, despite administration pleas, continue to oppose fast track. In any case, simply undertaking an investigation does not guarantee action. And Bush is not supporting a bipartisan bill that would restrain imports for five years, tax all steel sold to share the pension costs of retired and displaced Steelworkers, guarantee loans for modernization, and encourage worldwide negotiations over reduction in global overcapacity.

The record on NAFTA, the model for Bush's high-priority negotiation of a new FTAA, also has increased public skepticism about the current direction of trade negotiations. While NAFTA may account for the net loss of as many as 766,000 jobs in the United States from 1994 to 2000, according to a recent EPI report, it has done very little to protect labor rights or improve the environment in Mexico, Canada or the United States.

This track record, along with the evolution of the movement against corporate globalization, has also forged greater unity among a larger number of labor, environmental and citizens groups. Now the coalition, which is being coordinated by the AFL-CIO, includes organizations like Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, feminist groups and new religious alliances that were not active in earlier fast track battles. Moderate environmental groups like World Wildlife Fund and Natural Resources Defense Council, which Clinton persuaded to support NAFTA, are now also on board. Many congressional Democrats and citizens groups are so angered by Bush's aggressive conservatism that they are even less inclined than usual to negotiate some compromise that would give Bush the appearance of a victory.

At the same time, citizens groups have raised the stakes. The AFL-CIO now demands that trade agreements "must not undermine public services or public health, nor allow individual investors to challenge state laws in secret," as NAFTA's infamous Chapter 11 protection of investor rights has permitted. Also, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says that "trade authority must delineate responsibilities for investors, not just rights, and must not require privatization and deregulation as a condition of market access."

Republican strategists are concentrating first on trying to consolidate their own party's support. Some -- but not all -- of the 40 or so Republicans who have voted against fast track or other globalization initiatives are likely to be persuaded that they must support their president (just as some wavering Democrats were loyal to Clinton when he was in office). Then the Republicans likely will offer the minimum possible concessions to win over a few Democrats. The pro-corporate Democratic Leadership Council, for instance, has praised Bush's trade principles as a "reasonable start," lauding him for not insisting on trade sanctions to enforce labor rights but chiding him for failing to support the International Labor Organization. There is a chance that Republicans might agree to language permitting negotiation of labor and environmental protections that would be enforced only with fines rather than trade sanctions. While this would be relatively ineffective as enforcement, it might give political cover to pro-corporate, free-trade Democrats to vote for fast track.

However fitfully, workers rights and the environment are becoming part of the mainstream debate over globalization, creating new problems for the Bush administration. The administration still has not submitted the completed free trade agreement with Jordan to Congress, partly because the Republican right-wing is so opposed to provisions in the treaty text that prohibit the countries from relaxing labor or environmental laws to gain trade or investment advantage. Some Republican strategists argue for adding a letter of understanding that only fines, not trade sanctions, will be used, even though most people read the treaty as permitting the use of sanctions. On another front, the proposed free trade agreement with Vietnam, which does not include protections of workers or the environment, threatens to undermine an innovative and apparently fairly successful agreement that permits Cambodia to increase its exports of garments and textiles to the United States as it improves protections of labor rights.
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Fast Track is Back but the Political Climate has CHanged
by David Moberg


Workers rights are more important in the fast track debate in part because globalization has created new problems. The ILO reports that forced labor, slavery and criminal trafficking in human beings, especially women and children, are rising and taking "new and insidious forms." Although it has no enforcement power, the ILO last fall asked all of its government, business and labor members to do whatever they could to avoid contributing to the widespread use of forced labor in Burma by the military government, often in support of foreign investors' projects. In response, the AFL-CIO and the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions (ICEM) protested this spring at shareholder meetings of Unocal and Halliburton (Dick Cheney's old firm) for their involvement in Burmese projects, and a bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation to ban all imports from Burma.

But without -- at a minimum -- strong and enforceable language in all global economic agreements, the process of globalization will continue to undermine workers everywhere. Labor, environmental and other citizens groups are likely to turn the debate over trade promotion authority into a symbolic battle over globalization itself. "The fast track debate becomes a proxy for globalization and a referendum on NAFTA, because FTAA is an extension of NAFTA and fast track's most immediate importance would be to facilitate FTAA," argues Mark Levinson, director of research and policy for UNITE, the garment and textile union. "On FTAA we're highlighting hemispheric-wide union opposition. This is an anti-worker approach to the global economy. It's bad for workers here and in developing countries, and that's what we're against."

QUEBEC -- The capital's old walled city on a rocky bluff above the St. Lawrence River has long been a magnet for tourists, but the tourist attraction this weekend was a new wall. It's a two-and-a-half-mile, 10-foot-high chain-link fence that slashes through the old city and surrounds the Summit of the Americas, a gathering of 34 heads of state in the Western Hemisphere (excluding only Fidel Castro of Cuba).

The leaders came here to negotiate the Free Trade Area of the Americas -- an agreement that would lift protections and tariffs on imports and exports among just about every country between Canada and Argentina, creating the world's largest free-trade zone. Wrapping up on Sunday a meeting that was more pomp than circumstance, they agreed to proceed with FTAA negotiations on schedule -- not at the accelerated pace President Bush had hoped for -- and to require that countries participating in future summits be democratic. But the real focus this weekend was on how well the anti-globalization movement has aged since its dramatic debut in Seattle less than two years ago.

The protesters, mainly from Canada but also from the United States and many Central and Latin American countries, streamed into Quebec by the thousands last week. They headed straight to the fence, demonstrating and posting signs, artwork and even bras on the fence with messages like "Solidarity," "Justice for everyone," "Act for a better earth," "Capital is violent" and "Prison for corrupt politicians." The protesters posed for pictures in front of the fence, making sure that some of the 6,000-man police force, attired in Darth Vader helmets, gas masks and other riot gear, were visible in the background. Greg Murphy, a 31-year-old English teacher who lives near the fence -- dubbed by many the "Wall of Shame" -- was out for a nightly stroll and observed, "When you see that wall up, it's a message that 'we don't care what you have to say.' It makes you feel unwanted. I'm against violent protest, but I'd rather have one or two skirmishes than this."

The wall itself became the focal point for ongoing skirmishes starting on Friday, the opening day, when about 7,500 protesters, mainly young people, marched from Laval University, divided into those going to the "green zone," where the risk of arrest would be low, and those heading for the "yellow" and "red" zone, where there would be a "diversity of tactics" and a higher chance of arrest. Within a few minutes of arriving at the yellow-red zone, a few protesters began lobbing objects across the fence, starting with toilet paper rolls, then moving on to plastic bottles and golf balls. Within 15 minutes, militants at the front had managed to pull down the hated wall, and about 100 people crossed over to the other side, breaching the police security lines. Ten minutes later, the police launched their first tear gas attacks, and the battle was on.

Protesters launched miscellaneous projectiles as police sought to immobilize them with the tear gas canisters, which the protesters in turn often threw back at the police. Most of the crowd seemed supportive of tearing down the wall, even confronting the police physically, but did not take part personally, simply ebbing back and forth as the stinging gas drove the majority who came without gas masks and goggles to retreat periodically. The police relied more on gas than beatings or arrests, but they also employed water cannons and plastic and rubber bullets.

To the critics of the FTAA, the battle is not over trade -- nearly everyone on both sides of the fence voices support for more trade -- but the terms of trade and, most important, the rules of investment that are increasingly at the heart of "trade" agreements. The real issue, according to the Peoples' Summit of the Americas, a shadow gathering of citizen, environmental, labor and peasant groups from the Americas that met during the week before the official summit, is whether democracy and human rights will be trampled as an FTAA protects the rights of corporations and the mobility of capital. "The primacy of human rights should be the signpost for any agreement," argued Nicole Filion, a spokeswoman for the Hemispheric Social Alliance that sponsored the Peoples' Summit.

The wall became a symbol of how the summit leaders are pushing ahead with negotiations, which are due to be completed by Jan. 1, 2005, without listening to the concerns of a vast number of citizens who have growing doubts about agreements like NAFTA. With the exception of a few mainstream nongovernmental organizations, the only guests behind the chain-link fence were corporate executives, who paid from $50,000 to $1.5 million to sponsor the event and hobnob with the political leaders. Corporate advisors are intimately involved in all aspects of the negotiations, but there isn't a single labor advisory group. The draft negotiating text has even been kept from most members of legislative bodies throughout the hemisphere as well as the public, but about 500 corporate executives have had security clearance to see it, according to the Toronto Globe and Mail. At Canada's urging, the summit finally voted to release the draft, but as the Peoples' Summit was meeting, a copy of the investment chapter was leaked, confirming that the FTAA was shaping up to be much like NAFTA, potentially granting even broader rights than NAFTA does to corporations.

Unlike the Seattle World Trade Organization protests of November 1999, where a disciplined group of nonviolent protesters used civil disobedience tactics to shut down the opening of the talks, the confrontation in Quebec was aimed at the fence and the police. The largely black-clad and masked militants, loosely identified as anarchists or the "black bloc," made very few attacks on property, though many businesses had prepared for them by covering windows with plywood. Indeed, many residents of the neighborhoods near the protest were openly sympathetic, offering protesters water to wash the tear gas out of their eyes.

Friday's protest was leavened with whimsy: Shortly after the anarchists tore down the wall, a medieval-themed faction rolled up its catapult and flung pink stuffed animals at the police. There was street theater, a Statue of Liberty on stilts (later damaged when police rubber bullets knocked it down), a group of "pagans" symbolizing a river and trying to heal the crowd, young men in suits with signs like "Trees or Bush: It's Your Choice" and a young man, dressed as the Easter Bunny, handing out chocolate eggs to people as they recovered from tear gas attacks.

On Saturday, the ranks of demonstrators mushroomed enormously as the labor movement, prominent citizen groups like the Council of Canadians and other opponents of the FTAA brought supporters to Quebec for a massive peaceful protest. The size of the crowd was estimated at anywhere from 25,000 (by the police) to as many as 68,000 (by an organizer); a good bet is that the real number came close to 45,000, not counting the several thousand militants who were at the heart of a second day of conflicts with the police near the wall. As the big march set off on a beautiful spring day, militants at a crucial turning point tried to divert the crowd to the wall -- "to the left, not to the right" became the logistical and political rallying cry -- but the vast majority followed the path away from the wall to a large rally.

"I say the real violence lies behind the wall," declared Council of Canadians chairwoman Maude Barlow, a veteran of Canada's campaigns against free trade, which have gone on longer and found stronger support than the parallel movement in the United States. Indeed, a poll conducted for the Canadian Labour Congress revealed that one-fifth of Canadians said they would have liked to come to Quebec to protest the FTAA, and other polls indicate a slight majority of Canadians either oppose the FTAA or have doubts about it.

As the march proceeded down the streets of Quebec, it revealed both the political discipline of the labor movement (members of which carried flags saying "Don't trade away my rights") and the spirit of a "Carnival Against Capitalism" that had been promised. There were giant puppets and groups like the Radical Cheerleaders and the Radical Cooks Contingent (critics of genetic engineering and corporate agribusiness who called for "Responsible Government" and implored summit leaders to "Fork the FTAA"). Although less dramatic than the street fights, the march was probably politically more threatening to politicians, because it represented a breadth of opposition, uniting doctors and farmers, steelworkers worried about job losses in Canada, Mexican "maquiladora" organizers distressed at the continued lack of labor rights under NAFTA, environmentalists and teachers worried about the potential threat of privatization of education posed by the investment language of NAFTA and the FTAA.

Indeed, the investor rights provision of NAFTA, which even critics did not fully understand when the agreement was signed, has become one of the main focal points of opposition to FTAA. NAFTA and the WTO greatly reduced the ability of member governments to regulate foreign investment and increased protection of intellectual property rights. Pharmaceutical companies (with backing from the United States) have attacked the efforts of developing countries -- like Brazil -- to provide cheap generic versions of AIDS drugs, and their intellectual property claims have greatly disturbed many people, who see the pursuit of profit leading directly to more and unnecessary deaths. (A group of pharmaceutical companies dropped its lawsuit against the South African government last week, but the U.S. challenge to Brazil continues in the WTO.)

NAFTA goes beyond the WTO and most trade agreements in permitting private corporations to sue governments and demand financial compensation or changes in laws if they can persuade a highly secretive panel of trade specialists that they have lost profits or potential profits because of a government policy. In the first case brought under NAFTA's Chapter 11 rules, America's Ethyl Corp. sued Canada for banning use of a fuel additive, MMT, that was already prohibited for health reasons in some U.S. states. The corporation claimed that Canada's legislative action treated it prejudicially, imposed unfair performance requirements and was "tantamount to expropriation" of its assets. The company won, and Canada settled by paying the company $13 million and rescinding its law.

Another U.S. corporation, Metalclad, similarly won a claim against the Mexican government when a municipal government refused to give it a permit to build a waste-transfer facility in the town. Canada's Methanex is suing the U.S. over California's prohibition of future use of the fuel additive MTBE, which is a serious groundwater pollutant. And in a recent case that has public workers and others in Canada and the United States concerned, the United Parcel Service has sued Canada for $160 million in damages, claiming that the Canadian postal service subsidizes its courier operation through the operation of its post offices and distribution system.

Some government officials, including Canadian trade minister Pierre Pettigrew, have expressed misgivings about the rights of investors to sue governments, but the leaked draft text of the FTAA -- which includes many bracketed sections indicating alternative wordings -- basically follows the NAFTA model. The Council of Canadians' Barlow said, "In some parts we think it is worse than NAFTA." There is special concern in Canada that a section bringing services under FTAA rules -- which has not yet been leaked -- combined with the investor section, will provide ammunition for U.S. corporations to undermine Canada's cherished national healthcare system, public education and other public services, and possibly force Canada to sell its water and energy to the United States, even when doing so is not in its national interest.

Critics find NAFTA a failure on many fronts. Human Rights Watch recently pronounced the side agreement on labor rights a flop. There has been virtually no cleanup of the maquiladora zone of factories along the U.S.-Mexico border. And the Economic Policy Institute in Washington reported that NAFTA workers in all three member countries have lost ground as a result of a "continent-wide pattern of stagnant worker incomes, increased insecurity, and rising inequality."

Even a few heads of state -- those from Brazil, Venezuela and the small Caribbean countries -- took note of the protests in Quebec and widespread doubts among their populations at home about the benefits of the new free-trade regimes. The summit obliquely responded to such popular protests by adopting a new democracy clause, which would exclude nonelected governments from future summits and, potentially, the FTAA. But Warren Allmand, director of the Canadian Center for Rights and Democracy, criticized the statement as too narrow, saying it ignores important components of democracy, ranging from an independent judiciary to equitable distribution of wealth -- and the language remains loose enough that governments that the United States doesn't like could be excluded while repressive governments that nevertheless have some sort of elections are included.

On Saturday, the day of the biggest march, there were reports of 57 serious injuries among protestors and about 300 arrests, including a Latin American-style seizure of a protest leader from a peaceful side street by a group of large men in street clothes who at first didn't even identify themselves as police.

The protesters did not manage to halt the summit, but their actions and the police tear gas -- which was often quite noticeable inside the fence and in the official summit hotels -- did disrupt the event. And though Seattle was more of a shock and surprise to the global elite and the mass media, the turnout in Quebec was larger, pushing the battle over globalization to a new level. The protests focused on an issue that has otherwise barely entered into the consciousness of most Americans, North and South, and more people are now aware of the proposed treaty. But they may wonder what it portends for them when government leaders and their corporate supporters secret themselves behind a chain-link fence to plot the future of the Americas.

The critics of the FTAA, while divided on protest tactics, are united more than ever on the idea that the entire NAFTA model must be drastically reworked to provide a new framework of hemispheric integration that puts human rights, democracy and reduction of inequality at the top of the agenda.

The progress of the movement, however, was most evident at the alternative Peoples' Summit. The prospect of economic integration under rules favorable to big corporations has brought together an unusual hemispheric alliance, linking rich, poor and newly industrialized countries far more intimately than in Seattle. Increasingly, neither labor nor environmental groups think that NAFTA-like agreements can be fixed with the simple addition of a clause protecting workers' rights or the environment, even though those are still prime demands. These groups not only are challenging the model of free-market fundamentalism more broadly but have taken new steps toward creating an alternative model of social and economic integration of the Americas, building on a document first hammered out two years ago during the first Peoples' Summit in Santiago, Chile. In the interim, governments have increasingly been forced to claim that they are really acting to reduce poverty, protect the environment and promote human rights and democracy.

Although critics see these promises as hollow window dressing designed to mute protest, they are also a sign that the terms of the debate are shifting: These global "trade" deals, which have for many years been vehicles for the imposition of a deregulatory political and economic model, now must be judged on more than whether they expand trade.

David Moberg is a senior editor at In These Times and a fellow at the Nation Institute.

Maybe it was the shock provoked by reports in 1995 that seventy-two immigrant Thai workers were held captive in a barbed-wire compound in El Monte, California, making brand-name garments for seventeen hours a day at about a dollar an hour. Or the TV tears from talk-show personality Kathie Lee Gifford when investigators revealed that 13-to-15-year-old Honduran girls were working fifteen-hour days making clothes under her label for Wal-Mart -- with tags pledging that part of the profits would go to help children. These were not the first public warning signs that the clothes, shoes, toys and electronic products Americans buy are increasingly made under appalling conditions -- extremely long work hours, physical or sexual abuse on the job, a pittance for pay (often 25 cents an hour or less) and sometimes with child or forced labor. But 1995 proved to be a turning point for a steadily growing campaign against global sweatshops that has exploded in the United States and is increasingly linked to campaigns in Europe and parts of Asia.Since then, argues Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee, "We have had more brilliant success than anyone could have dreamed." Kernaghan's NLC grew out of progressive union opposition to Reagan's Central America policies in the eighties and has made many of the dramatic public expos*s, including the Kathie Lee hypocrisy. "We're now at the beginning of a national movement," he says. Fewer than a dozen small labor rights groups and UNITE, the garment and textile union, have helped to inspire protests by church groups, local unions, politicians and students, as television and print stories spread the word. "The antisweatshop and labor rights movement is out of control," says Kernaghan. "There's this wild creativity of different organizations. The companies can't deal with it."No company wants to become the next Nike, which -- despite its elaborate public relations response -- has been dogged for most of the decade by well-documented charges that its closely controlled contractors pay subminimum wages, prefer countries with regimes that suppress labor organizing, expose workers to hazardous conditions, demand long working hours and even physically abuse employees at Nike's Southeast Asian factories. Other campaigns have erupted as well against companies like the Gap, Starbucks, Disney, Reebok, Phillips-Van Heusen and Wal-Mart, which cultivate a hip or wholesome image but dreadfully abuse their workers -- most often employed through contractors. In an address to the American Apparel Manufacturers Association, the incoming chairman, James Jacobsen, warned fellow business executives, according to Women's Wear Daily, that "the ongoing controversy about overseas sweatshops was causing anxiety on Wall Street," leaving investors "skittish" about industry prospects.Yet when Kernaghan talks about a national movement that has made a virtue out of disarray, he means more than the high-profile PR campaigns against the Nike swoosh and Wal-Mart's phony promises. The sweatshop issue breaks out, sometimes unpredictably, on many other fronts: shareholder battles, legislative debates, international regulations, lawsuits, purchasing guidelines, the creation of corporate codes of conduct and the monitoring of workplaces. Religious institutions and union-influenced pension funds, for example, now regularly offer stockholder resolutions demanding action against labor rights abuses. In January US unions and labor rights groups filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against several dozen big retailers and manufacturers on a wide range of labor-law and business-fraud violations, including involuntary servitude and selling as "Made in the USA" garments produced under sweatshop conditions in the Northern Mariana Islands in the Pacific.UNITE is pushing state and federal legislation to make retailers jointly liable for sweatshop violations by their contractors. Dozens of municipalities and school districts (private and parochial) have adopted purchasing policies to avoid goods made under sweatshop conditions. And the United States, Canada and Mexico may soon face a joint complaint, under NAFTA's side agreement on labor, that all three governments have failed to enforce their legislation against sweatshops.The latest phase -- and one of the most important -- of this multifaceted movement is the student campaign against the sweatshop manufacture of caps, sweatshirts and other clothing bearing the names and symbols of some of the nation's largest and most prestigious universities. Started by students at Duke and elsewhere who had spent a summer working with unions, the movement has spread to about 100 campuses. Students are demanding -- and winning at least some agreement -- that university administrations publicly disclose the locations of factories that make university-licensed clothing and that employers respect workers' rights and pay a living wage.Organizationally, the antisweatshop movement has made impressive gains and is poised to push for change in multiple arenas. Yet the frustrating truth is that, so far, it has won only modest, episodic victories for workers in poor countries, and sometimes even those are snatched away as contractors shut down and move or corporations find new contractors. Also, even when pressure brings progress, it is hard to trust the companies, who often revert to bad old ways quickly. It's a delicate time for the antisweatshop movement. Much-needed mainstream support is beginning to grow. Now it needs victories to inspire hope that a popular campaign can really change conditions. And it must keep people engaged and outraged, heading off dangerous illusions that corporate promises reduce the need for vigilance.The movement has largely grown through expos*s of flagrant abuses overseas by contractors for high-profile, image-conscious corporations. Many of them, like Nike, stoked the fires by making self-serving PR claims while refusing to take relatively cheap and easy steps to treat workers better. After years of paying its Indonesian workers less than the minimum wage, for example, Nike recently announced it was raising wages to 43 percent above the minimum wage and released a report by independent monitors of great improvements at a Vietnamese factory, where leaked findings by a corporate auditor last year revealed widespread violations of law and safety standards. Both moves are welcome, but Nike's wage increase left Indonesian workers earning about 20 cents an hour, one-fourth less in purchasing power than before the economic crisis, and the improvements at the Vietnamese factory have not yet been matched at other Nike contractors.Consumer power propels the drive against sweatshops today, but most organizers think that this alone will produce only limited advances. Some strategists, like Trim Bissell, who links a network of local activists through the Internet into the Campaign for Labor Rights (www.summersault.com/~agj/clr), and Stephen Coats, executive director of the USLabor Education in the Americas Project, argue that generating sympathy with tales of outrageous abuse isn't enough; antisweatshop groups should focus on solidarity with workers who are actively organizing unions. "If we organize around worker empowerment, if we make that the issue the person on the street accepts, we've got an issue with long legs," Bissell said. "It's one thing to clean up a factory and get the kids out, but it's a shift in the relation of capital and labor when workers can organize for their rights."It is easier, however, to generate widespread outrage over child labor or hazardous factories. Also, there are few global efforts under way to organize sweatshop workers, although the International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers' Federation has just begun to fund a new organizing drive in Central America. Even in the United States, it has proven exceedingly difficult to organize small shops one by one, especially when work can easily be moved out of the country. When UNITE tried to organize sweatshops in the Los Angeles area that were producing for Guess?, for example, the company moved most of its work to factories in Mexico.Other antisweatshop groups, while acknowledging the need for unions, think that NGOs can broker deals that improve conditions for workers. By negotiating codes of conduct that protect workers' rights, set minimum standards and provide monitors to make sure codes are observed, they argue, the worst abuses can be eliminated, and workers may win space to organize.Yet in most cases codes of conduct are unilateral corporate promises with limited value. In the early nineties, as attacks on mistreatment of workers overseas began to build, most companies denied responsibility, claiming that contractors were responsible. Then they adopted codes of conduct for contractors, using their own staff as monitors. As revelations of abuses continued and internal monitoring proved to be a sham, they brought in outside monitors, who themselves often proved useless in detecting or guarding against abuses. The Gap -- subjected to a pre-Christmas attack in 1995 -- agreed to the first independent monitoring of a factory by local NGOs, one of a few complicated but largely positive experiences with such independent watchdogs. In one celebrated case a Human Rights Watch inspection of Phillips-Van Heusen shirt factories in Guatemala helped citizen and labor groups in the United States and Guatemala win the first union contract in Guatemala's export-oriented maquiladora plants.In 1996 the Clinton Administration organized the Apparel Industry Partnership, bringing together big-name manufacturers, unions and labor and human rights groups to develop a voluntary industry code of conduct and enforcement system [see Alan Howard, "Partners in Sweat," December 28, 1998]. In the summer of 1998, negotiations between UNITE and the corporations broke down. Several of the rights groups continued negotiating and announced an agreement in November 1998, establishing the Fair Labor Association (FLA), which would review how well companies that voluntarily join the association enforce its code. UNITE, the RWDSU (retail workers union) and the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility rejected the agreement and withdrew from the partnership, citing the lack of worker-rights protections, a clear living-wage standard and adequate enforcement mechanisms.While not all critics see the FLA as a dangerous fig leaf giving cover to companies, labor's withdrawal greatly undermined the association's already flimsy legitimacy. Its credibility took another hit when, shortly after the agreement was announced, Phillips-Van Heusen shut down its unionized factory in Guatemala, concentrating its work in lower-paid, nonunion shops. If the FLA had set more modest goals by first undertaking a few pilot monitoring tests, as some European branches of the international Clean Clothes Campaign are now doing and the student movement is proposing, it might not have become such a sorely divisive issue for the antisweatshop movement. But the labor movement and most of the antisweatshop movement now see the code of conduct as too weak, the monitoring too compromised and the corporate influence too great.At best, well-enforced codes of conduct may help insure that the better employers do not suffer so much from competition with the less scrupulous. An international group of corporations, unions and human rights groups, under the auspices of the Council on Economic Priorities, has developed a stronger code than the FLA's and a thorough monitoring system. Its audits will certify individual factories, not entire companies, but this could still be a promising venture if it works closely with labor rights activists.Nonetheless, such negotiated agreements should always be viewed as steps toward stronger government regulation and union power, not as alternatives. "People have to understand that codes are a relatively minor part of the solution," says Alan Howard, special assistant to UNITE president Jay Mazur. Some unionists fear that codes will lead to a voluntaristic, privatized labor relations system, with monitors supplanting unions, instead of a system combining national laws with core labor rights, ratified by the International Labor Organization and enforced through global economic institutions, including the World Trade Organization.Although shifts in the industry require a more global regulatory reach, the answer to sweatshops remains what it always has been: tough government enforcement of workers' rights and labor standards, and high levels of unionization. Indeed, from the thirties to the seventies, the US sweatshop was largely eliminated by government enforcement of the New Deal's Fair Labor Standards Act, growing unionization and union contracts that made manufacturers responsible for conditions at the workplaces of their "jobbers." As the textile and garment business, always highly mobile, went global, imports soared from 4 percent of the US apparel market in 1961 to more than 60 percent in 1997. Global trade deals accelerated the shift of production to poor countries: Apparel job loss in the United States in the four years after NAFTA was more than quadruple the rate of the preceding four years. Global competition forced down wages and cut unionization from half of garment workers to less than 10 percent. This has made a coordinated global response to sweatshops all the more critical -- but there is no global authority enforcing workers' rights. And with poor countries desperate for highly mobile foreign investment, governments typically turn a blind eye toward workers' rights (or do not even recognize the right to organize independently, as in China).Codes and monitoring have thus emerged as solutions. The best codes incorporate core ILO principles; the worst -- like the American Apparel Manufacturers Association code -- include guidelines for security forces, guard dogs and two-way mirrors, hardly a step forward. The FLA experience suggests the dangers of well-meaning groups, often unaccountable to a popular constituency, negotiating on behalf of workers or citizens. Pharis Harvey, respected as director of the International Labor Rights Fund even though its union backers left when he endorsed the FLA, acknowledges that popular pressure is needed. "I want a good, healthy body of critics outside the association saying, ÎYou guys claim to be doing something. Show me,'" he said. "It won't work without that body of informed critics."Yet critics of the FLA do not completely agree on strategy. Kernaghan argues that the movement should stay loose and unpredictable as it roots itself even more deeply in the mainstream of labor, religious, student and other sympathetic communities. "Having all these different fires going on is enormously effective," he says, "and to bring them together you could almost weaken the movement." There is a price to pay for the scattershot approach and lack of cohesion, of course. The movement often lurches from one laudable campaign or target to another without sufficient follow-through. "I'd like to see us pick one conquerable target company and really go after it until we get a serious concession," said Larry Weiss, coordinator of the Labor, Globalization and Human Rights Project of the Resource Center of the Americas. Public disclosure of the locations of contracting factories is now a key demand, but it emerged as a leading strategy only a year ago. Even as the movement continues to press for monitoring corporate conduct, there is little agreement on what might work, partly because there's so little experience. In any case, who could independently monitor hundreds of thousands of factories? There aren't enough human rights groups, and they might better spend their time in rights campaigns. Financial auditors who also advise corporations, like Ernst & Young or PriceWaterhouseCoopers, are tainted and unreliable. Could enough reliable private social auditors be trained? Why not turn the task over to an expanded ILO instead?The technical solutions are less important than building a movement that can grow and sustain itself for the long haul, expanding its demands and alliances. Students, for example, could demand that universities purchase no supplies -- including uniforms, sporting goods and medical supplies -- from sweatshops, and they could strengthen existing alliances with organizers of campus workers, including graduate students. None of the sweatshop solutions, even global guarantees of workers' rights, will be effective without a citizen and consumer movement giving support to workers and their unions and keeping pressure on corporations and politicians here and abroad.REQUIRED TAG: This article originally appeared in The Nation.