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Send in the clowns
George W. Bush's presidential debate debut turns into a genuine snoozefest.
By Jake Tapper
[12/03/99]

The great straddler
Free trader President Clinton veers left in Seattle. But will his finesse be enough to keep Al Gore's Democratic Party intact?
By Todd Gitlin
[12/03/99]

The three horsemen of globalization
Critics fear increased cooperation between the World Trade Organization, World Bank and International Monetary Fund will spawn an 800-pound gorilla.
By Monte Paulsen
[12/02/99]

What's really at stake in Seattle
Economists speak out on the issues behind the World Trade Organization summit and the street protests.
By Alicia Montgomery, Daryl Lindsey and Fiona Morgan
[12/02/99]

And then there were four ...
Ralph Nader will announce his campaign for president on the Green Party ticket in January, joining those on the Republican, Democrat and Reform tickets in next year's race for the White House.
By Micah L.Sifry
[12/02/99]

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At the same time, most also recognize that free trade is a risky proposition for countries that have long relied on protectionism to nurture fragile local businesses. Malawi education minister Ken Lipenga, intently following the WTO crisis from Malawi, explains how free trade can enter such an economy like a wrecking ball. Malawi, a southern African country so poor that even construction workers go barefoot, recently lowered tariffs in order to comply with a regional agreement. The result: Several British companies who had long maintained subsidiaries there, like soap manufacturer Lever Brothers, closed up shop and started bringing products in from its larger operation in nearby Zimbabwe.

Lipenga and others worry that a similar phenomenon will occur on a larger scale with the WTO. Local businesses (even subsidiaries of Western multinationals) will die as markets are flooded with cheap goods made by companies that enjoy access to capital and economies of scale. Thus, in the weeks leading up to WTO, a Ford subsidiary in India held a press conference to warn against removing tariffs in the automobile industry.

Yet the protest movement, which gives the impression that Western companies have no business in developing countries, focuses less on this basic dynamic than on the specter of Third World "sweatshops" run by greedy, environment-wrecking multinationals. And indeed, they exist. El Salvadorian union leader Manuel Vasquez came to protest events in Seattle to speak about Western-owned factories that pay workers less than $8 a day and that have doled out beatings so severe that some pregnant workers have lost their babies. The American oil industry’s savaging of the Nigerian countryside is well known.

But particularly on the question of working conditions, the picture is not so simple. Probably far more typical than sweatshops are Western-owned companies offering salaries that are high by local standards but abysmally low by American ones. While this imbalance seems inherently offensive, especially when American companies lay off workers here to chase after cheap labor, these companies provide decent jobs in countries where unemployment rates run at 30, 40, even 50 percent, and where unemployment sometimes means going back to subsistence farming. In the very best of cases, it brings technology, energy and a new market that will attract local entrepreneurs. A shining example is India’s billion-dollar high-tech industry that emerged after Microsoft, IBM and other American firms laid a foundation there. That’s why Lipenga and others say, "We want foreign investment. We need it."

To get it, developing countries recognize that what they offer is cheap labor. "That is our only weapon and we have to use it," says Senegalese Minister of Planning Ibrahim Sall. "They [Western countries] have high-technology, we have cheap labor."

Developing countries fear that labor and environmental standards could raise the bar to unrealistic Western expectations as a way to slow foreign investment (and save jobs in the West), as well as blocking imports from struggling Third World entrepreneurs (eliminating competition for Western entrepreneurs in the same market). Hence India’s Commerce Minister Murasloi Maran labels such standards a "Trojan horse for proctectionism."

How is it that a protest movement preaching international solidarity has brought about this conflict? It seems to have been blinded by sloganeering over easy-to-hate sweatshops, as well as factions with agendas that don’t necessarily coincide with Third World development.

Most crucially, the unions that poured the vast majority of people onto the streets last week have an obvious challenge in dealing with the issue of cheap labor. Their cruel dilemma is that what’s good for American workers is not always good for the poorest workers overseas, a dilemma that organized labor does not seem to have fully faced.

AFL-CIO international affairs director Barbara Shailor, who also spoke at last weekend’s teach-in, used her platform to refute charges of protectionism. The country’s biggest union, she says, merely wants to ensure that workers overseas have the right to organize. As if to prove her point, she shared the stage with union leaders from Africa and Brazil.

But after her speech, I asked her if that meant she would be okay with jobs going overseas if they were going to union workers who would inevitably still earn far less than their American counterparts. She answered vaguely that she was not "technically equipped" to answer, but that she was sure there was a way to create a "virtuous circle" with plenty of jobs to go around for everyone.

And maybe there is. Maybe, as one Indian here suggests, workers all over the world could somehow meet and discuss solutions to their different needs. But I wonder, is such a dialogue more or less likely to happen after this week’s events in Seattle?
salon.com | Dec. 3, 1999

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