May Day Fails Its Promise to Workers

Published on Sunday, May 3, 2009 by Foreign Policy in Focus
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6094

May Day Fails Its Promise to Workers

by Bama Athreya


Virtually no one in the United States celebrates May Day. Yet International Workers' Day all started here, and we continue to export the violence faced by the workers it commemorates. Workers who sew our clothes, grow our flowers, and mine the metals used in our cars and cell phones are still experiencing the same problems confronted by U.S. workers a century ago.

May Day grew out of protests in Haymarket Square in May 1886 around the push for an eight-hour workday. Chicago police violently dispersed the protesters. An anonymous bomb sparked a police riot and resulted in the shooting of several people. The U.S. government then used the incident as an excuse to quell further labor dissent.

Organizing in support of decent labor laws was once a life-threatening proposition in the United States. It still is, in places like Colombia, the Philippines, Zimbabwe, and Pakistan. Where civilian governments fail to exercise effective control over military and paramilitary groups, it's the law of the jungle for workers — but just business as usual for investors.

Colombia and Philippines
On April 19, while President Barack Obama was shaking hands with Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe, Colombia’s National Guard were violently assaulting mine workers for a U.S. coal company. The workers were engaged in a peaceful demonstration in solidarity with a worker who had died on the job on March 23, and to demand enforcement of better safety and health protections in the workplace. National Guardsmen surrounded the meeting with tanks, injured several workers, and detained the union leaders.

In the meantime, on the same weekend halfway around the world in the Philippines, courageous Filipino workers in the country’s export-processing zones held a sympathy strike in support of 33 garment factory union leaders. These organizers have been in hiding since March 17, when the government issued a warrant for their arrest, posting criminal charges against mainly women workers for defending themselves from a violent assault by police on their picket-line. Masked men in military uniforms wielding guns and other lethal weapons violently dispersed the striking workers and threatened to kill them. Yet it's the workers who face criminal charges by the Philippine government.

Our trade agreements with these countries could help, but they don’t. Agreements like the proposed U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement fail to tackle the political realities in countries where violence is the norm. It’s time that countries meet certain labor preconditions before trade agreements are even considered to make sure that the Haymarket Square riots aren't repeated around the world.

Conditioning Trade
First, as a precondition to signing a trade pact, the United States needs to apply a means test to determine who really controls the governments of our trade partners — the civilian authorities or the military.

To stop companies and militaries or paramilitaries from acting in collusion with one another, transparency of payments measures and other anti-corruption laws in place must be enforced. The United States must, as Human Rights Watch has urged, investigate the links between U.S. companies and the paramilitaries, and punish those with such links.

Finally, and only if the other preconditions are in effect, human rights norms need to be in place to provide final and uncompromising safeguards to those who face violence and to ensure that the perpetrators can be brought to justice.

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