Unionize Scabs: Organizing around the Global Supply Chain
By: Greg Chung
Tags: International, Bangladesh, Fight For 15, Organizing, Labor

5000 Bangladeshi garment workers on strike, 1/12/2019. Rajib Dhar/Dhaka Tribune

My dad and I visited Korea over the summer. While shopping for clothes in Lotte Mall, he told me to look at the tags. What I saw was “CHUNG JAE CHUL…INSEPPLUS…MADE IN VIETNAM.” That was his name, his factory, and the country where he works. Think about that, a Korean clothing brand, sold in a Japanese based company, manufactured in Vietnam. What I’m describing here is the global supply chain. While trade and even multiple countries of origin are nothing new, how ingrained globalization is in our economy is really unprecedented. The idea that a company in America would increase their employment abroad, while jobs dropped back home was unheard of back in the 50s. Yet according to a study by American Progress that is now the norm.

The reason for this change was explained to me by my father in 12th grade. His original job was selling garments from his hometown of Daegu to distributors in New York. But as independent labor unions started to gain more power, Korean exports became less valuable to investors. Luckily for him, around the same time, the Doi Moi reforms happened, which liberalized the long state-run economy of Vietnam, a state that has conveniently banned independent labor unions. Instead of selling clothes from Korea, where the share of profits was starting to trickle down, why not build a factory in Vietnam, where you don’t have to worry about those pesky unions. Right now, labor in Vietnam is on average about 30 percent cheaper than in China, another country notorious for sweatshop conditions.

Not my dad’s company, but as you can see it’s from Korean brand, but has MADE IN VIETNAM typed below

What my dad was describing is called offshoring, the process of moving jobs from one country to another. It’s also the dominant version of strike breaking.

Back in the early 20th century, labor unions were still organized around certain jobs or “crafts,” think of pipefitters and metal workers. But what workers and labor organizers discovered was whenever those unions went on strike to demand higher wages or benefits, bosses responded by having workers from other fields or even out of town scab. Most absurdly, many of these scabs came from other craft unions, in a practice known as “union scabbing.” The solution? Organize all the workers in the entire industry.

The union would organize workers wall to wall, from cars to mines. It did not matter whether you were a coal miner or a coal digger, all that mattered was you worked in the same shop floor. It was hard to scab if you were part of the union. This was known as industrial organizing, as opposed to the previous craft-based organizing. Through this radical style of organizing, entire industries were unionized, including the powerful auto and steel markets.

But in the late 70s, capital responded by what I discussed above, moving the whole damn shop floor to another state or country, where they had no unions or the unions were weak. A global supply chain was created, where a single product was not only mined, manufactured, and sold in different countries, but within each were then labored on in many more in order to divide labor as much as possible.

For example, one iPhone is manufactured in four countries and three continents: the accelerometer in Germany, the battery in China, the wifi chip in the US, and the camera in Japan.

With the crisis explained, what is labor to do? My take: organize the global supply chain. When bosses sent scabs, we offered the scabs to join the union. The most powerful labor actions were general strikes, when we organized all workers, regardless of their trade or workplace. The great strike waves of 1946 did not just shut down one car company or one steel plant, but the whole auto, steel, and oil industries.

Protectionism or gatekeeping has only divided labor at the benefit of capital. It wasn’t Mexican workers laboring in asbestos ridden assembly plants that moved factories from Detroit, it was the bosses. Korean clothes were competitive because wages back then were three dollars an hour, that is not a time to be nostalgic of. More qualified people have written about why protectionism as a response to offshoring only hurts labor, so I will not go too in-depth. But the point is, labor has only succeeded when we organize more ambitious targets, not consolidate into smaller numbers.

Just as the CIO went from organizing skills to industry, we need to organize from industry to supply chains. A strike in garment factories in Bangladesh will do more to Amazon than a strike in Apple, a fellow tech company. When we launch organizing drives we must see where they fit in the supply chain, from the mines in the Congo to the smartphone factories in China.

What will these post-industrial unions look like? They will not necessarily replace industrial unions, but be superseded by cross labor and community coalitions. The best example I can give would be the Fight for 15 campaign.

In Iowa, Fight for 15 started as a coalition between SEIU and Iowa CCI (the largest coalition of community organizers in Iowa) to organize a series of strikes against McDonald’s, coordinated during the politically sensitive presidential caucus season. While Iowa Fight for 15 technically had only one organizing drive, McDonald’s workers, the actions were led by a diverse front of community members, adjuncts from Faculty Forward, nurses, Iowa City DSA, and the CCI Movement Politics division. You had neighbors walk back striking workers to nurses calling out politicians who turned their backs on labor. Because a living wage will not only affect McDonald’s workers or even just fast-food workers but for anyone who lives paycheck to paycheck.

The nature of global supply chains gives consumers, states, and business partners levers of power previously unprecedented. Garment factories are being set up in Vietnam with the explicit purpose to sell to a Korean consumer base. The consumer market in Korea has just as much, if not more, to influence the anti-labor conditions in Vietnam than the local Vietnamese neighborhoods. An example of this cross-market power being wielded is Equal Exchange, a US-based company which takes advantage of the large demand for imported coffee, to influence American consumers to buy from ecologically and economically sustainable farming cooperatives in Latin America. The community in the United States is used to influence workplaces in South America. A much darker equivalent was when the drop in Chinese spending in 2018 led to a recession in South Korea.

Now imagine that we take that community-labor strategy and base it around multinational corporations. Let’s say the workers in Amazon, with the support of the community, were to go on strike. Say the workers at a large garment factory whose clients so happen to sell large volumes through Amazon were to go on strike around the same time. Say consumers across the globe who use Amazon were to all of a sudden decide to boycott Amazon. Say this all happened on a financially important day for Amazon’s investors, like a major sale of stocks or Prime Day. Say all of this was coordinated and planned in a coalition of diverse groups who organize around related but different bases.

This sounds ambitious… because it is. But each action has been done before. The Uber and Amazon strikes relied just as much on consumer boycotts during financial milestones for the company. Both strikes, while dealing with a single employer, had internationalist elements. The Uber strikes even reached Britain.

Even the idea of workers bargaining with multiple employers has successfully been achieved by worker centers, which have organized against temp agencies that are used to exploit loopholes in the NLRA (the union-friendly National Labor Relations Act of 1935, also called the Wagner Act).

We should recall how solidarity strikes, workers striking to protest exploitation by bosses in another business, were so feared that they were banned by the federal government in 1947. Right now the Teamsters are on strike to prevent any trucks from breaking the historical UAW picket line. Organizing across global supply chains has an even greater power to shut down national economies, yet this has been untapped by the labor movement.

The One Big Union of the 21st century will not be one union, but many unions, worker centers, parties, and community organizations in a united front. It will also be borderless

Fight for 15 (and the second coming of Debs) striking at the Democratic Hall of Fame banquet in Cedar Rapids

Citations

7. https://www.ft.com/content/6366dde4-1d43-11e9-b126-46fc3ad87c65

Korean American, Expat, Student Organizer, Socialist, Living in the Heartland View all posts by Spammunard

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