APEC versus Leaders of states responsible for 50 per cent of the world's population, half the world's gross national product and 70 per cent of world trade come together in Vancouver next month for the APEC Economic Leaders Summit. APEC opponents will also converge in the city to mobilise, protest and make their voices heard — "Against APEC and For Humanity" Harold Lavender APEC achieved global renown in 1993, when the United States hosted a well publicised "economic leaders meeting" in Seattle. Since then, APEC has been moving towards the creation of an open regional free-trade bloc The goal has been set to achieve full free trade or tariff liberalisation in the developed countries by 2010 and in the so called *developing countries' by 2020.
APEC is not as tight a grouping as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or the European Union. Each APEC member economy is only required to produce an action plan towards compliance with APEC's goals. Commitments are described as "non-binding". ". This is formally true - APEC has no enforcement powers or dispute resolution process. However, it does apply enormous pressure on members to open up their economies and speed up the removal of restrictions. New members are accepted only if they fully comply with the APEC agenda. This includes:
• minimal controls on big business
• unrestricted foreign investment
• unlimited export of profits
• privatisation of state assets, utilities and infrastructure
• competitive (i.e. low cost and de-unionised) and flexible (i.e. temporary, part time contract-based) labour markets • destruction of sustainable community- based production in favour of costly and ecologically unsound cash crops for exports • rampant exploitation of natural resources
Such economic policies have anti-people, anti-social consequences. They deepen inequality around the world, increase poverty for women and indigenous peoples, cut real and social wages, intensify unemployment and attacks on workers rights and sharply reduce the quality and access to public services, health care, and education.
Not surprisingly, many of the region's non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are critical of APEC. Parallel summits have been
part-time work in the Midwest, while Eastern locals including Ron Carey's struck over the issue. By 1982 UPS used part-timers everywhere, there was a national UPS-Teamsters contract, and it wasn't too hard to get International officers to agree to a second-tier wage for part-timers.
UPS part-timers do the behind-the-scenes work of sorting packages and loading them on the little brown trucks for delivery. It's intense, dangerous work, lifting and placing thousands of parcels of wildly varying size and weight.
A high proportion of sorters and loaders only last a few days or weeks. Those who stick it out, and avoid injury, may get trained to drive the delivery trucks — where they're still pushed to run through the workday.
From there they have a chance at the less-draining intercity tractor-trailer runs (called "feeders" in UPS parlance). But it's a pyramid with a huge base relative to the number of full-time driver jobs.
The Teamsters fought to slow or reverse the sharp expansion at the bottom. Even though the UPS sorter and loader jobs are fairly good on the pitiful scale of part-time pay — around $9 an hour plus health benefits — the call for full-timing struck a cord. The union also wanted good raises, including the first increase in the part-timer starting rate in over fourteen years.
The Teamsters put their case for "decent full-time jobs" to a public increasingly sensitised to the growing problem of part-time, contingent work. Every young worker and every parent of a twenty-something knows that it is hard to find full-time, decent-paying work that will last. (Recent strikes at General Motors, too, have focused on turning contract work into regular jobs.)
Meanwhile, in demanding control of UPS workers' pensions from the Teamsters multi-employer benefit funds, the company aimed to differentiate its treatment of feeder drivers, who tend to be older and have sometimes organised for higher pensions, from the rest. And handling the investment of several billions of the workers' dollars would surely be a handy thing for management, even it they couldn't keep all the dividends.
The point of multi-employer pension funds is mutual protection. When the freight industry consolidated in the eighties, the contributions paid by UPS and other successful companies helped ensure retirement income for thousands whose companies closed and left a debt to the pension fund. Now UPS asked its union employees to turn their backs on other Teamsters, and bet that Big Brown will stay just as healthy over the next thirty years as over the last.
Teamsters retorted that since UPS has had problems getting their paycheques right; why trust them with a pension fund? why trust them with a pension tuna!
Events showed how deeply strike senti-
TDU comment
The new deal
• Jobs
10,000 new full-time jobs created by combining (and thus eliminating) part- time jobs. This is in addition to normal job growth due to attrition and expansion. This tracks the union pre-strike proposal. The company offered 200 per year in their "Last, Best and Final." Five full time jobs will be created from every six full-time equivalents of part time work. This was the union's proposal. The company had demanded that four jobs be created from five equivalents. • Pensions
The company was defeated in its attempted take-over of pension moneys. Increased money into our union pension plans, and health & welfare plans, will provide pension hikes as indicated earlier in union and TDU bulletins. This tracks the union pre-strike proposal. • Subcontracting
Limits on subcontracting along the lines of the union pre-strike proposal. • Wages
Five annual increases of 62c/hour for full timers and 82c/hour for existing part ment and union consciousness ran among UPS Teamsters. Fewer than three percent broke ranks in the first week.
By holding strong, with widespread public support on their side, strikers shut down the company's only profitable operation. A business which it couldn't possibly move overseas. Even in America today, fifteen days on strike proved to be enough. * UPS health and safety
UPS has a rate of occupational injury three times higher than the transportation industry as a whole. The company is one of the most persistant violators of hazardous materials regulations.
A class action lawsuit has even been filed against UPS for violating the rights of disabled workers. Workers who suffer eye injury are entitled to be transferred to other jobs, but UPS has refused or failed to accommodate their disabilities.
Unlike its competition in the package delivery business, UPS has even retused to invest the $55 per vehicle it would cost to equip their fleet with articulated mirrors at the rear of the trucks. As a consequence, children have been injured and killed because drivers were unable to see them behind their vehicles.
UPS has consistently stonewalled union demands for appropriate satety equipment such as decent seat belts, seats, and tires, and has refused to seals, ana lires, ana nas relusea lo timers. This is more than twice as high as the company's "Last, Best and Final" proposal of tive annual increases of 30c/hour and two bonuses. The union's pre-strike proposal was 65c/hour. • Safety
The new agreement follows the lines of the union pre-strike proposal. In particular, the company cannot increase the weight limit without first bargaining with the union. A solid victory
The union's main concession was to agree to a five, rather than four year deal. The company's 163 page "Last, Best and Final" offer of July 30th turned out to be "First, Worst and Bogus."
Among the take-aways and concessions which the company was unable to introduce were: reducing picket line rights; expanding use of part-time labour to deliver ground packages; institutionalising the "team concept"; gutting innocent-till-proven-guilty rights; and increasing ways to subcontract jobs. * Source: TDU Press release, August 19, 1997. For more information: see the July issue of Labor Notes, and Alexander Cockburn's article from the August 11th issue of The Nation/ This article reprinted from issue #67 of Against the Current. Note 1. Teamsters for a Democratic Union was formed in 1976, to fight for "reform of our union, decent contracts and an activated membership." TDU supported the Ron Carey election campaign, and many TDUers are on the union's executive board. The current is a "sandwich." with a militant presence in the Teamsters leadership, and a rank-and-file movement. Unfortunately, the union has a lot of old guard still left in the middle hierarchy. record retire from their fleet trucks that have only single cylinder brakes.
Packages presently can weigh up to 150 pounds (68kg). The company has refused to bargain over weight limits, reserving the right to require drivers to unload, alone, packages that sometimes exceed 200 pounds (90kg). When challenged, management told the union that if the driver needed help, s/he could ask the customer to assist. Young, inexperienced workers are becoming disabled for life from injuries received at UPS, often their first real job.
One UPS employee is killed on the job every month. In Chicago a new employee serving his 30 day probation died of heat exhaustion while unloading a truck during a Chicago heat waves. The company was fined $5,000. * Source: Carolyn Robinson, the first (and only) woman to serve on the national UPS negotiating team for the Teamsters. She chairs the sub-committee on safety & health.
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humanity used to criticise APEC's agenda and advocate policy alternatives. And last year, for the first time, there was strong mass opposition to the APEC summit in the Philippines. This opposition was fuelled by the Ramos government, which decided to open up the Philippines on a very fast schedule, well ahead of suggested APEC target dates, with all the resulting consequences.
There were different perspectives as to how respond. In the end, five different counter-conferences were held. This year in vancouver, there will de only two. Vancouver, there will be "only" two.
The People's Summit is a larger, much better funded and more politically moderate parallel conference organised by the Canadian Labour Congress and a coalition of NGOs * a kind of official opposition. This draws on the legacy of previous NGO conferences, including the Manila People's Forum and its plan of action, which details the responsibilities of APEC governments to uphold commitments made in other fora and provides possible alternatives to the current APEC agenda.
No! to APEC will host a more radical anti-imperialist conference, which rejects APEC in its entirety and sees itself as continuing the resistance begun at the People's Conference Against Imperialist Globalisation in Manila last year.
Not every one is happy with the holding of two parallel "alternative" conferences. Some groups involved in the People's Summit favour saying openly No to APEC (which, if you read the fine print is not at all the position of the People's Summit organisers). Some people who agree with the No! to APEC position either want to participate in both, or favour a dialogue where feasible to build the necessary unity to defeat APEC's agenda.
But political differences over ways of organising the roots of the problem and whether to push reform or organise in direct opposition to imperialism mean that the two conferences will be quite different. In fact, they face opposite political problems. What will the People's Summit do with its critique of APEC? It is one thing to use this critique to organise to struggle against APEC. But is quite another thing to lobby the Canadian government to change the character of APEC. As if APEC could ever become democratic and accountable! On the other hand, what does it means to say No to APEC? How can we build mass support for this position. And what kind of alternative is really being posed? Who "wants in" on APEC?
The direction of the People's Summit is towards critical engagement with or reform of APEC. This direction explicitly expressed in a paper submitted to Canada's foreign affairs department and being circulated on e- affairs department and being circulated on e-
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WE & UNLEADED CONSCIENCES mail by the policy working group of the Canadian Organising Network for the 1997 People's Summit on APEC.
After critiquing the current globalisation process, the paper states that NGOs recognise that for globalisation to be a positive process, an effective system of global governance is required. It argues that the creation of adequate governance mechanisms must be more inclusive and participatory that is more democratic than in the past. This involves reforming and strengthening the existing system of intergovernmental institutions and improving collaboration with private and independent groups. It will foster global citizenship and work to include poorer marginalised and alienated segments of national and international society. Finally, it will work to subject the rule of arbitrary power ' economic, political or military 1 ' to the rule of law within global society.
The paper argues that the input of civil society is necessary to make APEC accountable. It calls on the Canadian government, along with its partners in APEC, to show an openness and willingness to engage the people of their countries in all facets of the APEC process. It argues political commitment and structural reform are required as an evaluation and reorientation of APEC's limited agenda. Later, the paper makes a series of policy suggestions as to what the Canadian government can do to meet the challenge of civil society and change the APEC agenda. What about the union?
Many Canadian trade unionists say they are opposed to APEC. Unfortunately, the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) a sponsor of the People's Summit, only criticises APEC with the aim of reforming it. Within the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), the Canadian Labour Congress is part of the Asia-Pacific Labour Network (APLN) of ICFTU affiliates which meets prior to APEC leaders meetings.
Al Is 1990 meeung In Manila, AFLN At its 1996 meeting in Manila, APLN issued a statement, 'A Trade Union Vision for APEC,' that announced its desire to "harness the APEC objective of the internationalisation of markets to the improvement of the conditions of work and the life of citizens of our populous regions."
While recognising the reality of globalisation and perceiving APEC as a means of enlarging markets, the APLN statement warns that increased competition can drive down wages and living conditions if economic change is not managed with the involvement of trade unions. It goes on to say that unions have a significant role in the development of best practice/high-performance industries and enterprises and calls for an equal partnership with socially responsible employers on the basis of ILO principles of tripartism and respect for union rights.
The declaration calls for sustainable development through increased employment, education and training for improvements in the quality and remuneration of employment It also calls for progressive human resource development measures and measures to eliminate commercial exploitation of children. It concludes by stressing that the APLN wants representation on selected APEC committees, continuation of annual meetings with the host of the APEC leaders summit and the creation of an APEC Labour Forum as part of the official APEC. * For more information contact: No! to APEC, 451 Powell Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada tel. (+1 604) 215-9190. e-mail <notoapec@ ven.bc.ca> The 1997 People's Summit, 910-207 West Hastings Street, Vancouver BC V6B 1H7, tel. (+1 604) 682-1952; Fax 682-1931, e-mail <[email protected].> Notes 1. APEC started out as a consultative body. The first ministerial meeting was held in Australia in 1989. The grouping includes 18 member economies (political leader are referred to as economic leaders, a clear indication of the APE's contempt for any democratic control): Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Australia, New Zealand, Papa New Guinea, Canada, the US, Mexico and Chile. A moratorium has been placed on new memberships, but a whole series of states have applied to join, including India, Russia, Vietnam and Peru.
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* Canada