More than ninety million customers come every week, Wal-Mart. More than 900 thousand employees are prohibited membership in any union. When one thinks of the idea, has become another unemployed. The successful company openly refuses a human rights proclaimed by the United Nations: freedom of association. The Wal-Mart founder, Sam Walton, in 1992 he received the Medal of Freedom, one of the highest decorations of the United States. One in four American adults, and nine out of ten children gobble up at McDonald's plastic food that makes you fat. The McDonald's workers are as disposable as the food they serve: the pike the same machine. Nor do they have the right to unionize.
In Malaysia, where labor unions still exist and act, companies Intel, Motorola, Texas Instruments and Hewlett Packard were able to avoid that hassle. The government of Malaysia declared free union, union-free, the electronics sector.
not have any possibility to unionize the 190 workers who were burned in Thailand in 1993, seized up in the house where they made dolls out of Sesame Street, Bart Simpson and the Muppets.
Bush and Gore agreed, during their election campaigns on the need to continue to impose on the world the American model of industrial relations. "Our style of work," as both called it, is what is setting the pace globalization proceeds with seven-league boots and come up in the most remote corners of the globe.
The technology, which has abolished the distance, now allows a Nike worker in Indonesia have to work a hundred thousand years to earn what they earn in a year, an executive at Nike in the U.S., and that a worker IBM computers manufactured in the Philippines that he can not buy.
is the continuation of the colonial era, on a scale never known. The world's poor continue to play its traditional role: they provide cheap labor and cheap products, but now produce dolls, shoes, computers or high-tech instruments, in addition to producing, as before, rubber, rice, coffee, sugar and other evil things for the world market.
Since 1919, 183 have signed international conventions governing relations in the world. According to the International Labour Office in France ratified these agreements 183 115, Norway 106, Germany 76 and USA ... 14. The country leads the globalization process obeys only his own orders. This ensures sufficient impunity to large corporations, launched a hunt for cheap labor and the conquest of territories that dirty industries can pollute at will. Paradoxically, this country that no longer recognizes law than the law of work outside the law is now said that there will be no choice but to include "social clauses" and "environmental protection" in free trade agreements. What would become reality without the publicity which the masks? Such clauses are mere
taxes that vice pays to virtue under the heading public relations, but the mere mention of workers' rights puts the willies the most fervent advocates of starvation wages, hours and firing rubber free. Since Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico left the presidency he joined the boards of the Union Pacific Corporation and Procter & Gamble consortium, which operates in 140 countries. He leads a United Nations commission and broadcast his thoughts on the Forbes magazine: language technocrats, is indignant against "the imposition of uniform labor standards in new trade agreements." Translated, that means once and thrown to the garbage all international laws that protect workers yet. The retired president slavery charges for preaching. But the chief executive of General Electric says it more clearly: "To compete, you have to squeeze the lemons." The facts are the facts. Before
complaints and protests, companies wash their hands: I was not. In the post-modern industry, the work is no longer concentrate. So everywhere, not just in private. The contractors made three-quarters of Toyota cars. In five Volkswagen workers in Brazil, only one is employed by the company. Of the 81 Petrobras workers killed in accidents in the past three years, 66 were in the service of contractors who do not meet safety standards. Over 300 contractors, China produces half of all Barbie dolls for girls in the world. In China itself there are unions, but obey a state in the name of socialism is concerned with the discipline of the workforce: "We fight agitation working and social instability, to ensure a favorable climate for investors, "said Bo Xilai, secretary general of the Communist Party in one of the largest ports in the country.
The monopolized economic power is more than ever, but the countries and people compete in what they can: to see who offers more for less, to see who works twice in exchange for half. At the edge of the road are the remains of the conquests torn by two centuries of workers' struggles in the world.
maquiladora plants in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, for something called sweat shops, sweatshops, growing at a rate much faster than industry as a whole. Eight out of ten new jobs in Argentina are "black" without any legal protection. Nine out of ten new jobs in Latin America under the "informal sector", a euphemism to say that workers are left to the mercy of God. Job security and other rights of workers, will they be a little while a topic for archaeologists? No more than memories of an extinct species?
In the world upside down, press freedom: the freedom of workers' money requires prisoners of this jail, which is the prison of all prisons. The market god threatens and punishes, and well as know any worker, anywhere. The fear of unemployment, which serves employers to reduce labor costs and boost productivity, is currently the most universal source of anxiety. Who is safe from the panic of being thrown into the long lines of job seekers? Who is not afraid to become an "internal obstacle" to speak the words of the president of the Coca-Cola, one and a half ago said the dismissal of thousands of workers saying "we have eliminated internal obstacles? And
train of questions, the last one: with the globalization of money, which divides the world into trainers and tamed, Would it be possible to internationalize the struggle for the dignity of work? What a challenge. By Eduardo Galeano
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