A Movement in the Making
On the first stop of Bill
Clinton’s trade-and-invest-
ment tour of South America
last month, he congratulated his
Venezuelan hosts for finally (he
hoped) opening their economy to
U.S. investors. There is, he told the
assembled Venezuelans, a “new
world in the making,” characterized
by free elections, free markets and
an easing of all sorts of government
regulation of the money-making
process. Leaving things to money-
making, of course, has left an
increasing number of people with
neither full-time work nor social
supports. So as the President’s “new
world” attracts U.S. investment
southward, displaced Latin Amer-
ican workers, too desperate to await
its touted benefits, are flowing
northward, available for all kinds of
difficult, off-the-books, low-paying
work.
If this “new world in the making”
has a capital city, it is surely New
York, a city of corporate headquar-
ters and workers from everywhere.
New York is home to more transna-
tional companies, attracts more
immigrant workers, and sells more
of the output of global production
than any other city in the world. So
if this “new world” finally allows
labor an international footing on
which to confront capital, we are
likely to see early signs of it here.
On two successive weekends this
fall, we may have seen such signs in
two very different kinds of marches
through midtown Manhattan-one
very well oiled, deliberately fo-
cused and “achievable” in its
demands, the other a bit disorga-
nized and much more disparate and
radical. Both were responding to the
disciplining and uprooting of work-
ers in Clinton’s new world. Both
offered us a glimpse of the nascent
resistance to that “savage” free-
market world.
On Saturday, October 4, about
1,500 people-including several
large clusters of Asian and Latin
American garment workers–
marched through the city’s historic
garment district, from the Disney
Store at Times Square to Macy’s, a
few blocks south. The march was
called to protest sweatshop labor, and was organized by the indepen-
dent National Labor Committee,
with support from several New
York-based unions and locals. The
day was billed as a “day of con-
science,” and consumer awareness
was a major goal.
Just as the recent Teamsters vic-
tory against UPS was helped along
by customer support for the drivers,
organizers hope that once parents
know that those 101-Dalmatians
pajamas are made by Third World
sweatshop workers-very likely
children-earning 30 or 40 cents an
hour, they will shop elsewhere,
pressuring CEOs and investors to
rethink their global practices. The
idea, as one speaker after another
put it from the demonstration’s
Times Square podium, was to ask
consumers to “shop with their con-
science,” especially when consider-
ing the products of Disney, Guess
and Nike. “People are working as
slaves to fill stores such as this,”
said the pastor of a Brooklyn
church, pointing at the Disney Store
from the podium. “If you sell it,” he
shouted across the avenue to
Disney-and through the window
to Disney customers, “you are
responsible.”
week later, several hundred
enthusiastic demonstrators
wended their way from
Columbus Circle across Manhattan
to a rally at the United Nations.
There, the crowd swelled a bit, and
was joined by celebrities like the
Rev. Al Sharpton and the legendary
Puerto Rican nationalist, Lolita
Lebr6n. The demonstrators were
mostly young and predominantly
Latin American, with a particularly
strong contingent of Salvadorans
who work on Long Island. Their
banners announced wide-ranging
demands, including amnesty for all
undocumented people, the right of
immigrant workers to organize, a
higher minimum wage and an end
to police brutality. Unlike the previ-
ous week’s march against sweat-
shops, this one had no single short-
term goal. The idea was rather to
show strength and resolve-to build
confidence.
By New York standards, these
marches were small, but they spoke
to the concrete demands of a rapidly
growing part of the global labor
force-working people buffeted
about by the easy movement of cap-
ital across borders. In the global
labor market “in the making,” as
countries and regions (in First and
Third worlds alike) compete with
one another for that scarce transna-
tional investment, labor-market
conditions are losing their national
character, and wages are beginning
to equalize across borders. For a
majority of the workforce, the
direction of that equalization is
downward.
It was members of this buffeted-
about workforce, part-time UPS
workers, who came away victorious
in the Teamsters strike last summer.
In the wake of that encouraging vic-
tory, we may be seeing the begin-
nings of a more powerful movement
for international labor rights, the
raising of global wages and an end
to corporate impunity in labor mar-
kets. In midtown Manhattan, over
two sunny weekends in October,
these two small marches gave us a
glimpse of the rank and file of that
movement in the making.
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