Chapter 2 - Support for Campaigns – International Solidarity and Research

Robin Alexander, director of international affairs for United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, Lynda Yanz, of the Maquila Solidarity Network in Canada and Lorraine Clewer of the Workers Rights Consortium elaborated on the theme of international solidarity and the work their groups have done. 

One of Enlace’s most valuable functions is to provide timely and strategic research assistance to affiliates, and the critical nature of doing this type of research was cited often in the discussion.

We have to learn as much as we possibly can about the company we are facing, understand its political power in the various countries in which it operates, particularly in the country where its headquarters are located, its strengths and vulnerabilities and how decisions are made within the company,” said Jeff Fiedler, president of the Food and Allied Trade Services department of the AFL-CIO. As one of the original architects of labor’s corporate campaigns, Fiedler looks back on decades of struggle against transnationals and sees at least one significant pattern. “When we start fights, we win more often. We’ve been on the defensive for a long time, and more often we lose fights that we don’t start. We need to go on the offensive.”

“We are dealing with the tentacles of an octopus and have to figure out how to get to its head,” says Edna Bonacich of the University of California, Riverside of the struggle against transnational corporations.

For workers and activists who spend so much time campaigning on the ground, the meeting provided an opportunity to step back and get a wider perspective of the forces arrayed in this process of globalization that shapes their daily reality. “We are dealing with the tentacles of an octopus and have to figure out how to get to its head,” said Edna Bonacich of the University of California and the author of several insightful studies of workers and the globalization process. “The way goods are produced and distributed has been undergoing a major shift over the last 30 years, and while most of the discussion has focused on production, we also need to take a careful look at the new systems of distribution, or logistics.” Bonacich suggested that port workers and truckers had potentially tremendous leverage by virtue of their strategic position in the new global supply lines and urged the labor movement to pay greater attention to this sector.

Aspects of this analysis were further developed in a workshop led by Professor Andres Barreda of the Universidad Autonoma Nacional de Mexico (UNAM) on the transnational flows of capital and people and the creation of new distribution networks, and in another workshop on the effects of NAFTA conducted by Gabriela Rangel of the Mexican Action Network Against Free Trade and Leonore Palladino of the United Students Against Sweatshops. The effects of NAFTA in Mexico are well documented and have been disastrous. “The central objective of these flows of capital and labor is to increase the rate of exploitation of workers, to dominate and discipline all of us within the process of production controlled by the transnationals.”

Again, the question was raised: How was it possible to overcome the tremendous power of these entrenched corporations and their allies in governments throughout the world? On one level was the need to develop a strategic approach to these employers, identifying where the points of vulnerability are in their supply, production and marketing functions. But there is another and equally important level. The series of workshops and panels on the second day of the convention was an opportunity to review and discuss many of the lessons that have been learned by workers’ organizations looking at the strengths and weaknesses of their own structures.