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How do unions help? Aren't some union shops as abusive as non-union
shops? What's wrong with corporate monitors?
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, unions, like all democratic forms
of governance, are the worst systems conceivable, except for all the
alternatives. Some unions (like some corporations) are dominated by
greedy thugs. Some are led by incredibly committed people who have
staked their lives (in the developing world, quite literally) to fight
for the legitimate rights of working people. One of our company's
jobs is to find the unions true to the cause and support them by flooding
their shops with orders.
We look at the history of our sources, their track record, their
leadership and their rank and file. For example, this issue of the
NoSweatZine has an interview with Nazma Akhtar, one of the founders
of the Bangladeshi Independent Garment Workers Federation. We hope
you'll read it. We also encourage you to take a second look at the
critical historic role unions played in the developed world in passing
the workplace legislation (child labor laws, minimum wage, job safety,
overtime, etc.) that we now take for granted but would sorely miss
if it wasn't there. If you study the history closely you will discover
that there was a coalition of trade unions AND manufacturers, motivated
by enlightened self interest, that made common cause, passed the
labor laws, unionized the industry and created the wealth of the
West. It is their successful model that we seek to apply to the
developing world.
Corporate sponsored workplace monitoring is a top down solution.
Independent trade unions are a bottom up solution. We favor both--what
the British call a belt and braces approach. A binding union contract
turns the workers themselves into a monitoring presence that's hard
to fool. And many of the corporate monitoring outfits are divisions
of the same accounting firms that have proven themselves unable
to protect even the investors' rights.
Independent trade unions have an additional advantage over monitors;
the ability to spread to other manufacturers that are less supportive
of humane working conditions. Check out this link to
an article written by a former workplace monitor that exposes
some of the problems inherent in the for-profit monitoring regimes
implemented by the Nike/Reebok dominated "Fair Labor Association".
Sounds like the monitors could use a union for their own working conditions!
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