New global economy holds peril for American workers, Marshall warns

By DON McINTOSH, Staff Reporter

Former U.S. Labor Secretary Ray Marshall was in Portland April 5 to make a point: All is not well for workers in the new global economy.

"American workers fought long and hard to improve conditions in the U.S.," Marshall said, "and they are now subject to competition from workers who suffer conditions we would never tolerate in this country."

Marshall, a native Texan and professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin, headed the Department of Labor under President Jimmy Carter. Now retired from academia, he devotes himself to advocating economic justice as president emeritus of the International Labor Rights Fund, member of the Advisory Commission on Labor Diplomacy and board member at the Economic Policy Institute. To his mid-afternoon audience of about 70 at the downtown Portland First Unitarian Church, he outlined a global economy in crisis.

"Growing inequality of wealth and income is the Achilles heel of our system," he said. "It will destroy our government, our society, our economy."

"Market imperialism," Marshall said, "tends to erode other institutions. Everything comes to be for sale - justice, equity, the environment."

Marshall criticized an economic system that treats the safety and health of workers and the environment as "externalities," costs to be shifted to others. "In good neo-classical economics, a rational employer will pollute the environment."

To reverse the race to the bottom, he said he advocates core labor standards and environmental protections, and a global minimum wage of some kind, a floor below which wages aren't allowed to go.

"If you take away the ability to compete on wages around the world, you force people to compete in ways that benefit everybody," he said.

Marshall believes it's in Americans' interest for Mexican workers to improve their wages and productivity, not only so they don't exert downward pressure on American wages, but also because they'll be able to buy American-made products.

"As one trained in the mysteries of economics, I think this is too important an issue to leave to economists and financial experts," he said.

Marshall was followed at the microphone by Madelyn Elder, president of Communication Workers of America Local 7901; Marilyn Sewell, head pastor at the First Unitarian Church; Nancy Haque, staff member at Portland Jobs With Justice; and Beverly Stein, chair of the Multnomah County Commission.

Elder said there's a new mood in organized labor, based on internationalism as well as rootedness in local communities. Locally, labor organizing has become a much more community-oriented process. And across national borders, worker-to-worker discussions are breaking down barriers.

Elder spoke of how she was profoundly affected by meeting a Salvadoran telephone company worker whose union was busted when telephone service underwent privatization. "That could happen here to my union," Elder said.

Sewell, pastor at the First Unitarian Church, said churches have for too long confined themselves to involvement in charity; the time has come for people of faith to address structural causes. "It's like you're pulling people out of the river, pulling people out of the river; at some point you say 'Why don't we go upstream and see who's throwing them in?'"

"It's not just the poor who are oppressed in this culture; it's all of us," Sewell added. "Most of us are closer to the homeless man on the street than we are to Bill Gates."