The treaty, however, was a watered down version of the International Labor Organization's Convention 138, which bans most labor by children under age 18, a treaty that the US refuses to sign. Finally there is the right of workers to organize, bargain collectively and strike. Since the 1980s there have been hundreds of strikes where major US employers have hired professional strikebreaking firms, paramilitary guards and scabs to terrorize, physically attack and even kill striking workers. The strikers were blacklisted, leading to the break-up of families and a number of suicides. To this day, Clinton has refused to declare a general amnesty for the former strikers.
Employers have enormous latitude to victimize or fire workers who seek to organize a union.
And those workers who are members of the AFL-CIO and other officially recognized unions find themselves inside organizations that are wedded to the employers and the government, hostile to any genuine internal democracy, and concerned with defending the interests, not of the rank and file, but of the labor bureaucrats who control the unions. No assessment of America's real attitude toward workers' rights would be complete without an examination of how US foreign policy affects the lives of workers around the world. Clinton and the media suggest that the brutal treatment of workers in Third World countries is entirely due to local conditions. But the US has cultivated these regions as cheap labor havens, and the super-exploitation of these workers has been built into the very structure of US business, from the construction of cars and computer components, to the harvesting of coffee beans, to the production of toys and apparel for US retailers. Through the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, the US has imposed austerity policies, requiring countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America to eliminate subsidies for food and other necessities, pare back social welfare benefits, rip up legal protections, privatize state-owned enterprises and shut down noncompetitive industries.