In the wake of the labor scandal that struck China a couple of weeks ago, the Chinese government just passed a new labor law that strengthens labor protections. The law will restrict the use of temporary and migrant workers and allow unions to bargain with employers over salaries, training, benefits, etc.
Four points are worth stressing: (1) The increasing risk of labor unrest is pushing the Chinese government to make pro-labor reforms regardless of foreign demands and pressures.
(2) Although Western consumers can pressure multinational corporations investing in China to abide by core labor standards, foreign investors actually lobbied to water down the new law on grounds that it would make the Chinese labor force less competitive.
(3) The new law allows collective bargaining for wages and benefits but still forbids independent unions that would challenge the Communist Party’s monopoly; insofar as official unions have generally protected managers rather workers, one may wonder about the actual effects of the reform.
And (4) it remains to be seen whether the law will actually be enforced; several observers have pointed out that many previous labor laws were strict on paper but not enforced.
Following the model of the British, the French Socialist Party (PS) announced the creation of a “shadow cabinet” at the National Assembly to track and respond to the new government. Composed of 22 members, this new cabinet will theoretically play the role of an alternative government. However, insofar as it includes all currents of the PS there are good chances that it will reproduce the internal disagreements and tensions that have been undermining the PS for a while. Moreover, some members of the shadow cabinet (Jean-Marc Ayrault and Arnaud Montebourg) will be responding to… former socialists that are now members of the Fillon government (Bernard Kouchner and Eric Besson). Hopefully, socialist deputies will spend more time arguing with the Right than with themselves.
Following up on a recent post about the PlayFair 2008 campaign denouncing the violation of core labor standards in China, I would like to point out an article that just came out in Business Week (BW). It explains how the multinational corporations–General Electric, Kodak, Samsung, Johnson & Johnson, McDonald’s, Visa, etc.–that are sponsoring the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games are being increasingly targeted by activists. According to BW, the sponsors are caught between a rock and a hard place:
“If companies ignore activists such as Darfur groups—who have already branded next summer’s games the Genocide Olympics, in reference to what they say is China’s complicity with mass killings in Sudan—they risk angering consumers back home. But if they criticize Beijing, they could run afoul of the Chinese government and jeopardize their future in the world’s most promising market.”
Companies respond with some spin, trying to please everyone:
What I find really interesting in these developments is that civil society organizations no longer target exclusively governments and international institutions but also private actors such as multinational corporations. Replicating the anti-sweatshop campaigns of the 1990s, they attempt to undermine the reputation of brands in consumer markets. Insofar as in advanced industrial economies corporations increasingly concentrate their activities on product definition, design, and marketing–while offshoring manufacturing–brand reputation has become one of their major weak points. Hence the apparent effectiveness of this brand-targeting strategy.
It is no secret that labor conditions are often very hard in China. I recently pointed out an international campaign called PlayFair2008 that denounces such conditions as they relate to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. The issue is now becoming a public debate in China, in the wake of the discovery of illegal brick factories and mines in Shanxi (north) and Henan (center) that relied on slave labor. Chinese TV showed images that shocked the Chinese public:
Simultaneously, a moving letter written by the fathers of 400 abducted children working as slaves was published online and relayed to top authorities. The public outcry that followed this TV report and the online letter forced the government to react. According to the China Labour Bulletin (CLB):
By June 17, 45,000 police officers had raided some 8,000 mines and kilns in Shanxi and Henan, freeing 591 slave labourers including 51 children. The official All China Federation of Trade Unions has vowed to bring rural labourers under the protection of grassroots unions. Local governments have agreed to pay compensation to all freed labourers, and Premier Wen Jiabao has personally ordered an in-depth investigation into the use of slave labour, promising that all perpetrators will be punished. As of June 17, 168 suspects had been detained.
According to CLB, such abuses are the product of a “widespread corruption and collusion between local government officials and mine owners.” Perhaps the Beijing central government will manage to crack down on corruption, but several problems are likely to remain.
First, the crack down and the promised investigation target only slave labor. What about working conditions and labor rights in booming regions and sectors related to foreign investment? Second, in such situations independent monitoring mechanisms are crucial. In a country with no independent trade unions and no free press, how will the relevant information circulate and reach the proper authorities? The question of labor conditions directly raises not only the issue of labor rights but also of democratic liberties.
Yesterday Ségolène Royal (SR), socialist candidate in the last French presidential election,explained on a radio show that she never approved several measures (increase of minimal wage [SMIC] to 1,500 euros, extension of 35-hour-week) for which she campaigned during the election.
Now let’s put this in context: In the fall 2006, SR won the socialist primaries by campaigning against her own party, the Socialist Party (PS). In the winter 2007, she set up her own campaign headquarter and staff separate from that of her party. In between the two ballots of the presidential election, in early May, she suggested without consulting her party that centrist leader François Bayrou, of the MoDem, could be her Prime Minister if she got elected. Then again, in between the two ballots of the legislative election a couple of weeks ago, she personally called Bayrou to ask for his support while her own party was rejecting any potential alliance with the MoDem. On the night of the second ballot of the legislative election, SR announced that her partner, PS first secretary François Hollande, and she were separating. The news overshadowed the small gains of the PS at the National Assembly. The next day, she announced that she would run to replace her former partner as first secretary of the PS, thereby suggesting that in spite of all her differences of opinion she wanted to lead the organization. And, finally, came yesterday’s news about her not believing in the measures for which she campaigned.
I really would like to understand what is SR’s strategy. She keeps saying that politicians have to restore trust in politics and public institutions. I don’t see how her zig-zags and opportunism will contribute to this goal. She confirms instead the common suspicion that politicians are simply driven by personal ambition and interests. SR complained that during the campaign she “suffered from a deficit of political clarification.” Perhaps she should just join the MoDem and let the socialists pick up the pieces and reconstruct their party. At least it would be a step toward a clarification.
According to some American journalists, something like this would not have happened in the United States, or at least not in the same way, simply because journalists would have looked into the personal life of SR so early in the campaign that she would have had to clarify several things, beginning with the status of her relationship with François Hollande. So a lack of consideration for private life would have allegedly helped democracy…
A little while ago, I pointed out an article saying that China would soon surpass the United States as the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. Well, some claim that it already did. The Guardian Unlimited reports that:
“according to the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, soaring demand for coal to generate electricity and a surge in cement production have helped to push China’s recorded emissions for 2006 beyond those from the US already. It says China produced 6,200m tonnes of CO2 last year, compared with 5,800m tonnes from the US. Britain produced about 600m tonnes. Jos Olivier, a senior scientist at the government agency who compiled the figures, said: “There will still be some uncertainty about the exact numbers, but this is the best and most up to date estimate available. China relies very heavily on coal and all of the recent trends show their emissions going up very quickly.” China’s emissions were 2% below those of the US in 2005. Per head of population, China’s pollution remains relatively low – about a quarter of that in the US and half that of the UK.”
UPDATE: Some people pointed out that the level of emissions per capita were still quite different in the US and China. That’s entirely right. Here’s a nice map illustrating the level of CO2 emissions per capita around the world:
From this standpoint, the US, Canada, Australia, and Saudi Arabia are the main problem. But this point doesn’t rule out the fact that China needs to anticipate the level of emissions per capita it will reach in the next 20 or 50 years if nothing is done.
In terms of potential solutions, there’s an interesting discussion on The Atlantic Community website (where I found the map above) about the potential of the “polluter pays” principle. You may also want to check former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich’s proposal of a “carbon auction.”
I just saw an interesting video on the website of The Nation showing a street-theater performance of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) in which US veterans that served in Irak act in the middle of Times Square, in New York City, as if they were in a combat situation. The performance, that took place in late May 2007 during Memorial Day, aimed at bringing the war home and influencing the public debate. In case you thought soldiers could not be activists…
In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, economists Kenneth Scheve and Matthew Slaughter propose a new deal for globalization. While their argument is cogent, their premise is more questionable. They assume that people’s opposition to globalization is simply driven by economic motives: the individual skill level determines whether one benefits or not from globalization and, thereby, one’s position toward it; hence the solution they propose: reforming fiscal policy so as to distribute the gains of globalization more evenly and, thereby, make it more politically viable. Building on this logic, they claim that “there is greater support for engagement with the world economy in countries that spend more on programs for dislocated workers.”
While countries that trade more do have larger social programs, we should be careful when drawing conclusions about the best way to solve the globalization debate. For example, even though France spends considerable amounts in helping workers affected by layoffs, has a relatively generous welfare state, and the European Union recently established a Globalization Fund to target workers affected by trade liberalization, it is among the countries where people have the most negative opinion of globalization. Therefore, something else is necessarily at work. In a recent post on his blog, Dani Rodrik pointed out that values and ethics also mattered: “There is plenty of evidence that suggests that people are concerned about globalization not (just) because their pocketbooks are adversely affected but because they do not think its outcomes are right or fair.” Hence the need to make the rules of globalization fairer.
I share these two policy recommendations. A more distributive fiscal policy and fairer rules will undoubtedly make globalization more politically viable and sustainable. However, these economists neglect politics. Many people blame globalization for their situation in great part because government officials often say that globalization is to blame for the unpopular policies that they implement. Similarly, corporations regularly say that they have no choice but to cut wages or offshore their operations to make it in today’s global economy. Put briefly, pinpointing globalization has become a great blame-avoidance strategy. Furthermore, as I have shown in my own research on the French antiglobalization movement, many old leftist organizations have found in antiglobalization mobilizations a way to renew their discourse and alliances and, thereby, prevent their decline. Again the reference to globalization is used strategically for political and organizational purposes. It is a resource.
Therefore, implementing a new fiscal policy and reforming the rules of globalization will not necessarily be enough to make globalization politically viable in all countries. Globalization is the perfect scapegoat for people trying to avoid taking responsibility for their actions and for actors looking for a second life. Perhaps globalization will never be completely politically viable, feeding a constant tension requiring periodic adjustments.
The Socialists are not the only ones that did better than expected in yesterday’s French legislative election. Women did too. There will be 107 women seating in the National Assembly out of 577 deputies (the previous Assembly included 76 women). That’s 18.5%. France is still very far from parity but at least it’s moving up the ranking: it went from 86th to 58th in the world in terms of female parliamentary representation, now standing between Venezuela and Nicaragua. In the European Union, France is 15th, lagging behind Latvia, Poland, Portugal, and Estonia.
Next week, from June 22 to June 24, the Allied Media Conference will take place in Detroit, MI. This year this annual gathering of alternative media-makers will focus on the “participatory media that empowers the producer and receiver” so as to create new networks and build social movements. As Sabrina Ford explained in The Nation last month, this conference partakes in a wider trend in which activists build virtual mobilization networks not just through email but through interactive websites in the logic of the Web 2.0.
Following the example of MySpace.com, a group of young activists got together to create myBLOC.net, a collaborative website where progressive youth organizations can operate web pages and share information. The initiative was initially funded by the Surdna Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and CTFC, and supported by the Movement Strategy Center and Future 5000, two broker organizations that support American grassroots youth activism. One of the first large-scale events benefiting from this initiative, in addition to the Allied Media Conference next week, is the first-ever US Social Forum to be held in Atlanta, GA, from June 27 to July 1.
Although the actual effect of this trend on American activism can only be assessed in the long run, such collaborative virtual networks have the merit of increasing the leverage of resource-deprived organizations and fostering transversal relations between socio-political actors. The challenge will be to avoid reproducing on the web the inequality between organizations that exists in the real world.
In the wake of the labor scandal that struck China a couple of weeks ago, the Chinese government just passed a new labor law that strengthens labor protections. The law will restrict the use of temporary and migrant workers and allow unions to bargain with employers over salaries, training, benefits, etc.
