August 23, 2001 | Read Time: 6 minutes
If globalization is to be rescued from itself, it will be rescued by a stronger dose of human rights. Many big Western companies will soon have more employees in poor countries than in rich ones. Over the past two decades at least 6 percent of U.S. manufacturing jobs have been lost as corporations moved overseas in search of better labor markets. In 1998 and 1999 alone, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates, the United States lost 483,000 manufacturing jobs, and even where jobs are not lost, wages may well decline.
Not all wage depressions or factory closings can be blamed on cheaper labor supplies by any means. But when it comes to low-skilled work forces, it’s hard for American companies to resist average hourly wages of $.43 in Honduras, $.23 in China, $.10 in Indonesia, and $.01 in Bangladesh. Do corporations get as much productivity out of a $.01-an-hour worker in Bangladesh as they do an $8.31-an-hour unionized worker in New York? Probably not, but you can sacrifice a lot of productivity at $.01 an hour before the differential starts to catch up with you.
What everyone can understand, regardless of which side of the Great Globalization Debate they are on, is that if workers are laid off or wages depressed because an industry cannot keep up with changing times or workers’ skills become obsolete, that at least is a problem that can be addressed through economic conversions, retraining, and safety nets. But if some workers are asked to endure economic hardship because children are being put to work at age 8, or workers in developing lands are consistently being denied even the most elementary labor rights, thus undercutting the labor market, that is not “fair trade.” The anger such actions generate is entirely justified.
All the esoteric arguments about statistics are less important than the simple fact that children and poor people are being exploited, and they are not the only ones paying the consequences. It almost doesn’t matter exactly how many American jobs have been lost to the maquiladoras of Latin America or the sweatshops of Asia, or whether they have been offset by lower consumer prices or whether foreign workers give as much quality product. If human rights represent a vision of what we want our common life to look like, we certainly ought to be able to agree that we don’t want to live in a world in which one group of people is not paid enough to buy milk for their children and that penury contributes to the loss of hope, pride, and wherewithal for another group.
Yet, the relationship between business and civil and political rights is an extraordinarily complicated one.
It is not enough, for example, for human-rights activists to shame or bully one company into compliance with human-rights standards if an entire industry is going to keep on violating them.
It is downright counterproductive to cut a cooperative company no slack and let intransigent companies go free from criticism.
It is not enough for one country to place economic sanctions on an offensive regime if, by restricting the access of its own companies, it is simply making it easier for other countries’ businesses to fill the trade vacuum with that oppressive customer.
It is not enough to put an end to child labor if the child and her family then starve or are forced into sexual slavery.
If we protect the jobs of American workers at the expense of Salvadoran or Chinese, we have accomplished worse than nothing, because the safety nets in the United States are far superior to those in El Salvador or China.
Perhaps nothing is more damaging to productive dialogue between the business and human-rights communities than the assumption on both sides that the only way to use economic power to further human rights is to apply economic sanctions, be those in the form of divestment, denial of most-favored-nation trade status, closing off membership in the World Trade Organization, or making loans from the World Bank conditional on specified improvements. Social-justice advocates often leap to this conclusion because it seems the simplest. Business leaders often leap to it because it seems the most frightening.
Sometimes, of course, coercive sanctions are indeed the most effective strategy. But economic sanctions are usually a zero-sum game and, when it comes to the complexity of international relations, zero-sum games, paradoxically, often create two losers. That has been the case, for instance, in relationship to Cuba, where U.S. embargoes have merely kept average Cubans impoverished while failing to accomplish their ostensible goal of weakening Fidel Castro’s hold on power.
That leads us to the question of the relationship between globalization and human-rights violations. Much has been written and even more has been shouted from both the right and the left of the political spectrum about the evils of globalization, and its sacrifice of labor and the environment.
To dismiss globalization so cavalierly, however, is not only chimerical but it is to ignore the ways in which a more technologically integrated world (which globalization both depends on and feeds) has wrought a revolution in the struggle for human rights.
It is virtually impossible today for human-rights crimes to be committed in even the most remote corners of the globe without the rest of the world knowing about them almost instantaneously. Any country that would be a part of the world’s economy must be hooked into it electronically, and that means into information systems the content of which is almost impossible to control.
With China having 8.9 million Internet users today (up from two million in 1999), it will eventually be impossible, hard as the government is currently trying, to regulate that burgeoning use.
As more and more business is done online, as growing numbers of individuals become invested in the international bond market, either directly or through pension funds, as corporations move their investments faster and faster from one country to another, the stability of those countries, their willingness to provide accurate financial information, to crack down on corruption, to regulate the market squarely, to respond creatively to economic shocks — in short, to respect human rights — becomes the hard-core, bottom-line financial concern of more people, corporations, and international financial institutions. That has to be good for human rights.
But they and every other globalized investment are put at risk not just by the fact that the vast majority of the world still has no access whatsoever to the Internet or by the forces of reaction to modernization, but by the human dynamics of inequity. Globalization can work immense hardship on vast numbers of people if it becomes a pawn of repression and purveyor of even greater poverty.
Just as the market reforms, labor agreements, and safety nets of the turn of the 20th century salvaged the United States, and with it U.S. capitalism, from class warfare that might have split apart the country, so those who promote a globalized economy would be wise to match their enthusiasm for earnings with a corresponding commitment to free minds and fair play.
If you want economic growth, you had best pay heed to human rights. Indeed, it is not too strong to say that just as the solution to imperfect democracy is more democracy, if globalization is to be rescued from itself, it will be rescued by a stronger dose of human rights.
Mr. Schulz is executive director of Amnesty International USA. This article is adapted from his book In Our Own Best Interest: How Defending Human Rights Benefits Us All. Copyright © 2001 by William F. Schulz. By permission of Beacon Press, http://www.beacon.org.
