TY - JOUR
T1 - Building bridges across a double divide
T2 - Alliances between US and Latin American labour and NGOs
AU - Anner, Mark
AU - Evans, Peter
N1 - Funding Information:
The American Center for International Labor Solidarity, known as the Solidarity Center, provides another organisational element, as it is an auxiliary to the trade union movement. The top leadership of the AFL-CIO dominates its board of trustees and the AFL-CIO also contributes small but crucial amounts of funding. At the same time, the Solidarity Center has substantial government funding. It competes for grants from USAID as an NGO and gets a yearly core grant from the National Endowment for Democracy. With an annual core project budget of over US $20 million, its resources exceed those of USAS, the WRC, and the smaller labour NGOs put together. It can afford to maintain a network of 28 offices, with a total full-time staff of about 160 people, in all regions of the global South (and transitional economies). While accepting US government money limits the ability of the Solidarity Center staff to work as international labour organisers,6 the Center adds a whole new level of organisational resources that ultimately redound to the benefit of the less politically encumbered actors in the basic rights complex. In the Kukdong case, for example, the Solidarity Center’s Mexico office was an invaluable resource.
Funding Information:
Brazil is also home to an innovative NGO–union alliance organised by the Social Observatory,18 which was formed in 1997 by CUT/Brazil in coordination with several Brazilian labour research institutes.19The purpose of the Observatory is to research and analyse the conduct of multinational and national companies with respect to core ILO labour rights standards. The Social Observatory has worked closely with foreign labour centres and received financial support from them, including the AFL-CIO, FNV of The Netherlands, DGB of Germany, LO-Norway, and SASK-Finland. It provides unions and companies with detailed studies on the conduct of multinationals. The unions and companies then discuss the findings and possible solutions. Should the company decline to cooperate, a union may use the findings to organise an international campaign to pressure it to rectify any problems that the research detects. This strategy has begun to show positive results in several cases. For example, at the Danish Hartmann/Mapol factory in Brazil, reports by the Social Observatory documenting labour rights violations led to a visit by Danish unionists, and then to productive collective bargaining between the local union and the company.
Funding Information:
6 The Solidarity Center’s largest source of funds is the US government, through core grants from the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID—with the unfortunate consequence of evoking memories of the political role of its predecessor, the American Institute of Free Labor Development. The Institute was accused, especially in Latin America, of playing an auxiliary role in repressing militant trade unionists that the US government considered too left wing, and it never escaped suspicions of historical ties to the CIA (cf. Ancel 2000; Carew 1998; Scipes 2000). This historical reputation is a burden that the new generation of Solidarity Center staff works hard to surmount.
Copyright:
Copyright 2018 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2004/2
Y1 - 2004/2
N2 - Trying to build alliances that span the divide between trade unions and NGOs as well as the divide between the North and the South might seem a utopian task. But this is exactly what an imaginative new generation of organisers from the Western hemisphere's labour movements and NGOs are trying to do. This paper analyses two very different efforts working to bridge this 'double divide'. The first is a combination of organisations, including unions and NGOs in both North and South, that are focusing on blatant violations of the dignity of workers in apparel export processing zones in the South. This 'basic rights complex' has resulted in important victories. A second complex of organisations, also involving unions and NGOs in both North and South, has raised broad macro issues of governance focusing particularly on the anti-democratic character of current proposals for a free trade area of the Americas. Neither of these complexes is without its weaknesses, but each makes it clear that bridging the double divide should be thought of not as a utopian dream but as work in progress.
AB - Trying to build alliances that span the divide between trade unions and NGOs as well as the divide between the North and the South might seem a utopian task. But this is exactly what an imaginative new generation of organisers from the Western hemisphere's labour movements and NGOs are trying to do. This paper analyses two very different efforts working to bridge this 'double divide'. The first is a combination of organisations, including unions and NGOs in both North and South, that are focusing on blatant violations of the dignity of workers in apparel export processing zones in the South. This 'basic rights complex' has resulted in important victories. A second complex of organisations, also involving unions and NGOs in both North and South, has raised broad macro issues of governance focusing particularly on the anti-democratic character of current proposals for a free trade area of the Americas. Neither of these complexes is without its weaknesses, but each makes it clear that bridging the double divide should be thought of not as a utopian dream but as work in progress.
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U2 - 10.1080/0961452032000170613
DO - 10.1080/0961452032000170613
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:1542347157
SN - 0961-4524
VL - 14
SP - 34
EP - 47
JO - Development in Practice
JF - Development in Practice
IS - 1-2
ER -
