Introduction: The Challenges of Globalization for Workers: Trans? national and Transborder Issues

THE PROTESTS AGAINST THE INTERNATIONAL. MONETARY FUND (IMF) AND WORLD Bank (WB) meetings in Washington, D.C., in September 2002, and the protests a year later at the meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Cancun, Mexico, are powerful testimony of the increasing challenge economic globalization poses in our lives. The increasing integration of the world economy promotes an agenda in which profits increase by depreciating labor. Globalization places the producers of labor at risk; people stand to lose their economic value in a system that races toward the bottom to produce products as inexpensively as possible. For example, the Mayan peasants protesting in Cancun against the WTO sought to draw world attention to their plight--how the importation of cheaper foreign grains from the United States via NAFTA was driving them into starvation and forcing them to relocate to urban centers in Mexico to work in foreign-owned factories or to seek low-wage jobs in the U.S. With economic globalization, international labor migration is promoted to reduce labor costs, increasingly pervasive multinational corporations outsource manufacturing to low-cost enterprise zones, direct investment of foreign capital in Underdeveloped and developing nations fosters economic dependency, crossborder production and marketing lessen the threat from labor unions, and international trade, coupled with international banks, hides the expansion of private and corporate capital. Under the rubric of globalization, the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO have used international treaties and labor agreements to promote the drive for immediate profits by private and corporate capital. At the WTO meeting in Cancun, representatives from the wealthiest countries --the United States, Japan, and Britain--pushed for the expansion of trade agreements, such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas, to open countries like Brazil to imported foreign products (Greider, 2003). Brazil's representatives at the meeting argued that importing cheaper products from wealthier nations threatened the country's economy and would, in turn, make Brazilian products more expensive. The WTO's use of trade legislation and treaties highlights the problems developing countries face in the global economy, which for centuries has been profoundly unequal and dominated by the most powerful economic actors and nations. As recently as 1997, the United States, Western Europe, and East Asia controlled 85% of world trade and were the headquarters for all but a few of the top 100 multinational companies. Unsurprisingly, the dominant states within these three regions dominate the global economy as well as the IMF, the WB, and the WTO (Mann, 1997). (1) Although global capitalism and its inequities are not new, the scope of economic globalization has increased remarkably in the past 50 years. In the 20th century, economic globalization spread due to a wave of decolonization that began in the 1950s, the collapse of the Communist bloc in Eastern Europe after 1989, and the spread of free market reforms across the globe that opened up new territories for capital investment and markets. At the same time, improvements in transportation and communication reduced space-time barriers to the spread of global capital (Harris and Seid, 2000; Mann, 1997). As global capital spread to poor nations to reap greater profits, however, economic inequality between poor and rich nations has intensified, with wealth becoming concentrated in the hands of a few persons. Mazur (2000: 80) cautions that such concentration of wealth due to globalization should give everyone pause, since "the assets of the 200 richest people are greater than the combined income of the more than two billion people at the other end of the economic ladder." The study of the global economy raises the question: "Is economic globalization leading an international race to the bottom in terms of wages and working conditions, or has it led to greater prosperity for all as its proponents suggest? …