red bantu part II

    
UNDER CONSTRUCTION 

Comrades and friends,

The international context for this type of national and
regional effort in the South has certainly become more
complicated in the past four years. The undermining of
multilateralism and the use of brute force by the current
gun-toting US government certainly has not helped. We only
hope that American workers have the strength to put an end to
this rampage in a few weeks.

The world labour movement must engage with globalisation on
many levels. Certainly we need to keep up the workplace
struggles, which in this context mean confronting
multinationals through cross-border struggles. But we also
need to develop a broader vision of development. On that
basis, we can engage more strongly at the multilateral
institutions as well as with our own states.

The fact remains that the countries of the North, led by the
United States, have tended to play double standards and
generally to be inconsistent in applying the rules of the
trade game. In particular, the North's protection of local
agriculture, steel and clothing industries against
competition from the South is a case in point. At the same
time, the North has insisted that developing countries open
their economies at all costs, losing jobs and, perhaps even
more important, the power to support new industries that
could create employment in the future.

These issues have sometimes led to sharp differences within
the international trade union family. Genuine solidarity
means a deliberate, coherent and systematic strategy to close
the huge gap between the rich and the poor nations. Trade
policies must play a role in this task. But trade policies
alone can never address all problems of underdevelopment in
the South. That is why we believe local action by the state
and generally state-led development is key to addressing
problems associated with globalisation.

The contradiction is that even a fair and equitable free-
trade strategy may mean that workers in the developed nations
lose jobs to worse-off workers in the South. Real
redistribution of the world resources must mean a level of
pain by the developed nations in favour of the developing
countries. But no country is homogenous: the question is
always which class will win and which will lose in this
process. The debate we should have in the unions and amongst
all progressive forces is how we manage this situation so
that workers and the poor do not bear the burden of change.
If we simply increase unemployment and poverty in the North,
our gains would cancel each other out. Such a scenario is not
sustainable. Real redistribution should mean race to the top
and not to the bottom.

Refusal to engage with this debate will worsen the current
race to the bottom. Many developing countries, led by China,
would continue to trample on workers' rights, including use
of child, slave and prison labour. They will continue to cut
taxes to corporations and generally liberalise their
economies and cut government services to the poor so as to
attract investments from multinational companies from the
North. This will trend will put pressure on governments in
the North to compete in the same way.

The only winners of this race to the bottom will be the
multinational companies from the North. The casualties will
be workers rights,protection of environment and developmental
goals.This is the real imperative for international
solidarity. In the absence of a vision for how we can achieve
employment creation for all of us, we end up with a zero- sum
game, in which the gains for the South can only come at the
cost of the North. That approach would simply divide us
further in the longer run.

For this reason, COSATU is proposing that the ICFTU adopt a
resolution calling for a broader discussion on development
issues. We hope to start with regional processes, which would
culminate in the adoption of some basic shared principles.
The coming ICFTU congress is an important platform to take
these debates forward. Equally important is engagement with
the World Social Forum and democratic and progressive
political parties and governments across the world. We need a
new development path and a new world consensus on how it will
be achieved. To just list global targets and hope that poor
countries will achieve these in 2015 is unrealistic.

 oh by the way 
the retention of the axe-wielding warmonger
 in the White House
will be a serious setback 
          to this type of vision.