A Movement in the Making On the first stop of Bill Clinton's trade-and-invest- ment tour of South America last month, he congratulated his Venezuelan hosts for finally (he hoped) opening their economy to U.S. investors. There is, he told the assembled Venezuelans, a "new world in the making," characterized by free elections, free markets and an easing of all sorts of government regulation of the money-making process. Leaving things to money- making, of course, has left an increasing number of people with neither full-time work nor social supports. So as the President's "new world" attracts U.S. investment southward, displaced Latin Amer- ican workers, too desperate to await its touted benefits, are flowing northward, available for all kinds of difficult, off-the-books, low-paying work. If this "new world in the making" has a capital city, it is surely New York, a city of corporate headquar- ters and workers from everywhere. New York is home to more transna- tional companies, attracts more immigrant workers, and sells more of the output of global production than any other city in the world. So if this "new world" finally allows labor an international footing on which to confront capital, we are likely to see early signs of it here. On two successive weekends this fall, we may have seen such signs in two very different kinds of marches through midtown Manhattan-one very well oiled, deliberately fo- cused and "achievable" in its demands, the other a bit disorga- nized and much more disparate and radical. Both were responding to the disciplining and uprooting of work- ers in Clinton's new world. Both offered us a glimpse of the nascent resistance to that "savage" free- market world. On Saturday, October 4, about 1,500 people-including several large clusters of Asian and Latin American garment workers-- marched through the city's historic garment district, from the Disney Store at Times Square to Macy's, a few blocks south. The march was called to protest sweatshop labor, and was organized by the indepen- dent National Labor Committee, with support from several New York-based unions and locals. The day was billed as a "day of con- science," and consumer awareness was a major goal. Just as the recent Teamsters vic- tory against UPS was helped along by customer support for the drivers, organizers hope that once parents know that those 101-Dalmatians pajamas are made by Third World sweatshop workers-very likely children-earning 30 or 40 cents an hour, they will shop elsewhere, pressuring CEOs and investors to rethink their global practices. The idea, as one speaker after another put it from the demonstration's Times Square podium, was to ask consumers to "shop with their con- science," especially when consider- ing the products of Disney, Guess and Nike. "People are working as slaves to fill stores such as this," said the pastor of a Brooklyn church, pointing at the Disney Store from the podium. "If you sell it," he shouted across the avenue to Disney-and through the window to Disney customers, "you are responsible." week later, several hundred enthusiastic demonstrators wended their way from Columbus Circle across Manhattan to a rally at the United Nations. There, the crowd swelled a bit, and was joined by celebrities like the Rev. Al Sharpton and the legendary Puerto Rican nationalist, Lolita Lebr6n. The demonstrators were mostly young and predominantly Latin American, with a particularly strong contingent of Salvadorans who work on Long Island. Their banners announced wide-ranging demands, including amnesty for all undocumented people, the right of immigrant workers to organize, a higher minimum wage and an end to police brutality. Unlike the previ- ous week's march against sweat- shops, this one had no single short- term goal. The idea was rather to show strength and resolve-to build confidence. By New York standards, these marches were small, but they spoke to the concrete demands of a rapidly growing part of the global labor force-working people buffeted about by the easy movement of cap- ital across borders. In the global labor market "in the making," as countries and regions (in First and Third worlds alike) compete with one another for that scarce transna- tional investment, labor-market conditions are losing their national character, and wages are beginning to equalize across borders. For a majority of the workforce, the direction of that equalization is downward. It was members of this buffeted- about workforce, part-time UPS workers, who came away victorious in the Teamsters strike last summer. In the wake of that encouraging vic- tory, we may be seeing the begin- nings of a more powerful movement for international labor rights, the raising of global wages and an end to corporate impunity in labor mar- kets. In midtown Manhattan, over two sunny weekends in October, these two small marches gave us a glimpse of the rank and file of that movement in the making.
