Re: [Fwd: Trade union statement to IMF/World Bank Spring meetings (ICFTU

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeffrey L. Beatty <Beatty.4@osu.edu>
To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK <wsn@csf.colorado.edu>
Date: March 27, 2000 11:36 AM
Subject: Re: [Fwd: Trade union statement to IMF/World Bank Spring meetings
(ICFTU Website)]


>
>My thanks to Professor Chase-Dunn for posting the most informative
>declaration by the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions
>(ICFTU), International Trade Secretariats (ITS), and the Trade Union
>Advisory Committee to the OECD (TUAC).
>

.....>snip

>
>In any event, my questions is, considering that evidently 100 percent of
>TUAC's members and some 55 percent of ICFTU members come from advanced
>countries, to what extent can these organizations be considered to
>represent the workers of developing countries, as opposed to the trade
>unionists of Western countries?  Are we looking at the views of labor
>aristocracies, North and South?
>
>Provocatively yours,
>
>Jeff
>


COMMENT:
These are interesting questions. However, when examining the statement by
ICFTU I did not get the sense that its demands were biased toward First
World Labour. For example, there is no provision in the statement which
would call for First World protectionism. The statement may not articulate
specific local demands of workers in 200 different countries but, as a
world-level statement, it seems very well crafted as a critique of, and
demands directed toward, IMF/World Bank from the viewpoint of organized
labour.

Gert Kohler
Oakville, Canada