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NEWS & LETTERS, OCTOBER 2003Workshop TalksLife or death at WTOby Htun Lin At the latest World Trade Organization talks in Cancun, Mexico, Lee Kyang Hae of South Korea, with fist in the air and a sign reading “WTO kills farmers,” committed suicide as a protest against WTO’s agricultural policies. He wanted to bring to the world’s attention the plight of small farmers in his country. His suicide so moved the anti-WTO activists who came from all over the world that an intersection near the site was spontaneously renamed “Plaza Lee.” All over Cancun, graffiti appeared which read “Todos somos Kyang” (We are all Kyang). Lee himself was a small farmer, leader of South Korea’s union of farmers, and a three time member of the provincial assembly. South Korea’s rural communities saw Mr. Lee as a heroic figure, a defender of debt-ridden farmers struggling to maintain an age-old agrarian tradition. Lee’s South Korean compatriots are not alone. From India to Africa, Japan to Nicaragua, and even here in the U.S., small farmers are facing the destruction of their family farms on a scale far more devastating than a locust infestation. The WTO talks at Cancun collapsed because the poorer countries of the world confronted the developed nations over their unfair farm subsidies, totaling over $300 billion in the U.S. alone. Before he died, Lee told his compatriots, “I have failed you.” His last act expressed his own frustration as well as the despair of small farmers everywhere being swallowed up by huge international capital. As if to say there is no way out from the pull of the vortex, for Lee, international capital is an overwhelming force that he could no longer fight, like Hurricane Isabel. We workers may be more accustomed to facing this “storm” right within our everyday activity. A chorus of voices--from our bosses to our own union officials--presents the imperatives of capital to us workers as an irresistible force. We’re told constantly the economy has changed and that we must adapt. We have seen one concessionary contract after another, and unions such as mine even entered into labor-management partnerships. FARMERS AND WORKERS There’s a parallel between the deals made in agriculture and the deals made by our union bureaucracies with capital. Small farmers like Lee and those industrial workers on the second tier of the economy are the ones bearing the brunt of economic change. Subsidies to American agribusiness are a form of bribery which robs from the livelihood of small farmers everywhere. In my own shop, they tried to bribe us with “bonuses” to get us to pass two-tier contracts. Our own union officials ended our own strikes against management’s two-tier contract demands. Some officials even deluded themselves to claim victory when management allowed the union jurisdiction over any jobs to be created, as if automation “creates” jobs. In the latest UAW contract, the union gave GM the right to close factories and even stick new workers with lower health benefits and higher co-pays in the name of keeping the company viable enough to continue paying its pensions. The union traded away future job security for existing workers, in order to hang on to what they already had from past contracts. Keeping U.S. companies afloat, and funding their huge pension liabilities that don’t apply to foreign auto makers transplanted in the U.S. with non-union American labor, will amplify the demand to get more out of the existing UAW workforce, with more speed-ups and more cuts to follow. REAL CONFLICT ON THE LINE Taking the view that there’s a mutual dependence between company and union is no solution for workers on the production line, where the real conflict between labor and management resides. To do so only reduces a labor organization to the role of production foreman. Every worker has felt this force, this commodity fetish that operates behind the backs of producers like farmers and auto workers who are robbed of their livelihood. Even for us healthcare workers, we go to work every day to focus on taking care of patients. Yet healthcare is treated as yet another form of commodity, which must be rationed according to the dictates of capital. Under capitalism, we organize ourselves where things we have created have a life and force of their own outside us that dominates us humans, forcing us to relate to each other through these things. This, in essence, is capitalist alienation. It drives many of us to end our own lives. There is nothing natural about it. |
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