Do Union Internationals also Favour UN Rights Controls on TNCs?

This is an appeal for enlightenment. From trade union researchers, international labour-oriented research and support centres, from investigative journalists.

I have been concerning myself, for some decades now, with international trade unions and labour internationalism.

Also quite specifically with international labour rights, and even more specifically with the so-called 'social clause' - a 15-year-long campaign of the ICFTU and its international union allies to get trade union rights from the World Trade Organisation and its predecessors (i.e. those bodies dominated by TNCs and states that have been taking labour rights away from workers and unions).

This campaign, costing zillions of unrecorded $$$ and XXX hours of similarly unrecorded time of the union officers concerned, was, I argued, wrong in principle. (Waterman 2001) Oh. It has also failed. And is being quietly buried. No funeral announcement. No flowers...

More recently, I have been viewing, with puzzlement and concern (and reviewing somewhat critically) international union attempts to obtain from TNCs 'codes of conduct', 'framework agreements'. And the deep involvement of the same or related inter/national unions in the UN's 'global compacts' (UN, TNCs, TUs).

The underlying moral principle, or political aspiration, here seems to have been a restoration of the national 'social partnership' (evidently a junior partnership with capital and capitalist states). This has been so undermined by globalisation, that the inter/national union leaderships have now decided to reproduce it - on the global level. (Waterman 2003).

The assumption here seems to be:

'Well, social partnership worked with national capitalists and the nation state before the Big G. Now that playing field has moved upwards to global level. The Big G is the only show in town (just like the national welfare capitalist state was). We are practical union leaders. We have to accept Globalisation and try to make it more socially sensitive. So now, obviously, we need to reproduce on the global level the success we had on the national one. This is why now we now seek partnership with the TNCs and the relevant inter-states organisations'.

I won't go into ALL the problematic assumptions here. But they do include the following ones:

1. that 'social partnership' on a national scale was good for ALL workers, in ALL countries;
2. that since national capital and the nation state were willing to business with STRONG unions, international capital, international financial institutions and other interstate organisations, are now both willing to, and capable of, doing this with very much WEAKENED unions, operating in an arena within which they have only marginal power.

Now, a couple of days ago, I was made aware, via the BBC World Service, and then on the South African Debate List, that some United Nations human rights sub-committee, had proposed 'Draft Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights' (see the press release from Human Rights Watch):

"(Geneva, August 13, 2003) -- The United Nations has taken an important step forward in developing human rights standards for corporations, Human Rights Watch said today.

The U.N. Sub-Commission for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights today approved the "Draft Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights." The document sets out the responsibilities of companies for human rights and labor rights, and provides guidelines for companies operating in conflict zones. The Draft Norms also prohibit bribery and activities that harm consumers, including polluting the environment."

This seemed to me a surprising, admirable, and indeed courageous, position by a UN, which has more commonly been seen (as in the Global Compact, and with regard to the war against Iraq), in a position of self-subordination, or ineffectivity, in the face of the world's one remaining Power, the US, and to those who exercise power over both the world and the US, the TNCs.

Searching the web, however, I can find no major campaign by the ICFTU and Global Unions in favour of this resolution.

Nor any major international labour support group, or labour rights NGO, involved.

My impression is, rather, that such campaigning and such signatures have rather come from what the international trade unions, with 150-200 million members, commonly call, 'unrepresentative' human rights NGOs, and other such self-appointed 'transnational advocacy networks', that have no major labour constituency or trade union linkages: Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International...

On one or two such sites I have come across three or four NATIONAL trade union signatures... Nothing from the ICFTU, the Global Unions, the International Labour Organisation.

So, since I am currently tied up with matters more related to the World Social Forum than to inter/national unionism and labour rights, I am seeking, somewhat anxiously, for information indicating that, despite immediate appearances, and a rapid and superficial web search, the inter/national trade union organisations have, in fact, been deeply involved in this campaign.

Or that, if they haven't so far, they are now going to celebrate this initiative and put such weight as they evidently retain, behind this. Since, I fear, that otherwise, the UN will back off from it.

If the international unions haven't and they won't, can someone explain to me why not?

Please?

I would be delighted to find out that my impressions are misleading. And that TNCs and interstate institutions (particularly the financial ones) are seen by the Global Unions not as part of the solution but as the source of the problem.

Peter Waterman

PS. About the only world power: After the worldwide anti-war demonstrations on February 15-16 this year, a New York Times columnist said, and it should be a thought-provoking idea for the Global Unions: 'there may still be in our planet, two super-powers: the United States and world public opinion'.

• Waterman, Peter (Guest Ed). 2001. 'Labour Rights in the Global Economy', WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labour and Society, Summer 2001. www.workingusa.org.
• Waterman, Peter. 2003. 'International Labour Studies 2000+: The International Labour Movement between Geneva, Brussels, Seattle/Porto Alegre and Utopia'. Unpublished.
  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GloSoDia/files/WATERMANIA/