The Question Isn't Why We Went to China -- It's Why Wouldn't We?

http://www.changetowin.org/connect/2007/06/the_question_isnt_why_we_went.html

The Question Isn't Why We Went to China -- It's Why Wouldn't We?

There’s no question as to why the modern labor movement would need to pay attention to China. Every major U.S. and foreign transnational corporation has growing operations there, meaning Chinese workers are one of the main hammers that global capital uses to drive down wages and conditions for workers in advanced capitalist countries like the United States.

That’s why a leadership delegation from Change to Win went to China to see if we could expand the front in our mission to Restore the American Dream, to follow the jobs and to find out for ourselves whether we there is a realistic prospect of uniting with Chinese workers that face the same challenges, working for the same global corporations that employ workers in the U.S.

I’m going to be discussing what we learned and observed in other posts, but let me start with why we went, because all the buzz in both the Chinese and American press was not that Change to Win went overseas. Rather, our visit was historic for two interrelated reasons: First, it marked the first time that a U.S. labor federation met with the Chinese labor federation on equal footing. Second, it generated new thinking on how to tackle the challenges of globalization and the downward pressure on wages and living conditions in the United States.

Simply put, we began a dialogue with the “communist dominated” All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) – which has been shunned by the American labor movement for more than fifty years – because, as the Wall Street Journal reported, Change to Win is “taking a new approach to the challenges of globalization, plan to work more closely with their Chinese counterparts in hopes of raising wages and working standards in the country and thereby easing the competitive pressure on American workers.”

It’s a huge shift from the days of the Cold War, when the American labor movement adopted a no-contact policy with the ACFTU. The argument was that the Chinese federation acted as a transmission belt for the government – not an independent union that U.S. labor should legitimize.

But in the middle of last century, there were no U.S. or other multinational corporations in China. The country was closed to the world economy, and all Chinese workers worked for state enterprises or on the land. Fast forward to the 21st century – our world has changed, China has changed in even more dramatic ways, and it is impacting every U.S. worker hoping to achieve the American Dream, and every worker who worries about losing it in this new global economy.

FULL article at link.