U.S. Export: Union-Busting - tompaine.com

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/10/17/us_export_unionbusting.php


U.S. Export: Union-Busting
Beth Shulman
October 17, 2006


Beth Shulman, a lawyer and former labor union vice president, is the author of The Betrayal of Work (The New Press, 2003) and a spokesperson for the Russell Sage Foundation's Future of Work program.

China, that bastion of cheap labor, announced last week that it will soon pass laws to empower real unions. China’s leaders said its millions of workers need genuine labor unions to help bridge the growing gap between rich and poor, to prevent social unrest and to curtail the country’s notorious worker abuses.

So where is the thunderous applause from the global community? Isn’t this extraordinary announcement just what globalization is supposed to produce? We have been told for years that open markets would better the lives of workers in less-developed countries. And didn’t Poland’s Solidarity movement prove that freedom of association would lead to democratization?

Well, yes. But American corporations are not cheering China’s move. In fact, they are vehemently opposing it. They are even threatening to build fewer factories in China if the idea goes forward.

We should not be surprised. American corporations take the very same position here at home every day. According to a 2000 Human Rights Watch report, “Workers who try to form and join trade unions to bargain with their employers are spied on, harassed, pressured, threatened, suspended, fired, deported or otherwise victimized in reprisal for their exercise of the right to freedom of association.”

When faced with union organizing drives, 30 percent of U.S. employers fire pro-union workers, 49 percent threaten to close the plant if the union prevails and 51 percent offer bribes or favors to coerce negative votes, according to a 2005 study by the Center for Urban Economic Development.

FULL article at link above.

[kenny blankenship]

1. you gotta go with what you're good at. We do labor rights suppression.

Other countries make things.