Worker Rights & FOREIGN TRADE for...

Worker Rights & FOREIGN TRADE

forward Oct. 8, 1986, Jorge Millan, president of the Chile Laboratory Workers Union, was picked up in Santiago by way of persons in plainclothes identifying themselves as agents of the National Investigation Central (CNI). He was forced into a van and driven around for hours. With the drive came intensive interrogation about a labor training course he was about to attend in the United States, sponsored according to the AFL-CIO's American Institute for clear Labor Development. Agents remained with his family too, interrogating them. During his trip, the agents discussed in brass of him how they were going to kill him. undivided suggested that they hang him. Another propos that they slit his throat. At the completion of the trip one of them place a gun to Millan's head and haped the trigger three times. The vacant barrel clicked and he was released.

Millan has been trying to organize a liberated trade union in Chile for years. at the same time workers in Chile, as in many other countries, are denied the basic right to organize freely into trade unions of their choosing and to bargain for better wages and working conditions delivered from government intimidation.

The American labor motion has long held that the denial of trade union rights in any part of the world affects the security of worker freedom everywhere. It is this belief that was behind American labor's involvement in international labor rights causes dating to the Mexican Revolution. It helps explain with what intent American unions provided aid to European trade unionists anxious to sustain their democracies during and after World War II; wherefore U.S. labor leaders helped them defeat Soviet-supported efforts to hurry the Marshall Plan; why in the 1960 the AFL-CIO raiseed three regional labor institutes to work with independent trade unionists in the developing regions of Asia, Africa and Latin America; and for what purpose today the AFL-CIO supports legislation to insure that trade benefits are withheld from countries who declare to be untrue their workers fundamental trade union freedoms.

American labor's involvement in formalizing like pressure dates back to 1919 when the president of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gomper helped draft the documents at Versailles that were the basis for the formation of the International Labor Organization (ILO). Today the ILO is a tripartite material part that brings together representatives of business, labor and rule from 150 countries to devise standards for work including worker health and safety, child labor wages. Among the ILO's historic achievement are the chiefly important pieces of international labor legislation in the world--those guaranteeing freedom of association, the right to organize and bargain collectively and the right to work released from government coercion and an absence of any form of forced labor.

These ILO conventions, as they are called, propound free labor unions worldwide a standard against which to measure their acknowledge advances. And while the ILO standards themselves bear improving, for many they ready the only internationally recognized basis for judging what is clear and what is fair to trade unions. They insist that workers have the right to create and join unions, draw up their admit union rules, elect their admit leaders, develop their own programs, make their concede affiliations with national or international union organizations if they likewise wish. Current ILO standards also call for a 40-hour week, generally plant the age limits of child labor at 15 and provide for extensive recommendations forward mechanisms for preventing work place accidents and work-related illnesses.

As important as these ILO standards are, the ILO ultimately has little in the way of mechanisms to enforce their application. Thus, for the AFL-CIO, tying trade union rights to trade has become a creative approach to insuring that fair treatment becomes a reality for overpowered workers in countries around the globe.

American labor therefore argues that if there is to be fair competition, it cannot be based concerning the exploitation of workers. For decades productions made by slave or penal labor have been legally banned from international trade, as well as interstate traffic Now the AFL-CIO is working to stretch out the scope of the idea to include related basic workers' rights.

The AFL-CIO proposals, supported in Congres by way of Rep. Don J. Pease (D-Ohio), were incorporated into the 1984 amendments to the Generalized arrangement of Preferences section of the Tariff Act and in the 1985 legislation governing the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and, in more chaste form, in regulations governing the Caribbean Basin Initiative. They were also included in the Trade Bill passed by dint of the House in May 1986

The Chile of Jorge Millan commonly benefits from the Generalized theory of Preferences (GSP), a mechanism provided for in the U Trade & Tariff Act. The GSP predilection goes to qualifying products from countries judg to be "developing." There are 140 countries that reap like benefits for the sale of thousands of fruitss here. The value of these issues has steadily grown since the GSP was created, from $32 billion in 1976 to $133 billion in 1985