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Stop the WTO negotiations! Save jobs!
November 2005
The undersigned trade union and civil society organizations,
including KAIROS, call on WTO members to:
- put a moratorium on the present negotiations; and
- undertake full public assessments of the employment, social,
environmental and cultural impacts of existing trade and investment
rules.
The rules governing international trade and investment must be
judged according to a single criterion: do they generate progress
in the direction of socially and environmentally sustainable economic
growth, social progress and greater well-being for all? Or do they
take us in the opposite direction, towards social and environmental
destruction and massive migration and global insecurity? The verdict
is certainly in on the first ten years of the WTO. It is time to
change course.
Statement
The Doha Development Round: a recipe for the massive destruction
of livelihoods, mass unemployment and the degradation of work
When the world’s trade ministers put their signatures to
the founding document of the WTO in April 1994 in Marrakesh, their
very first sentence establishing the WTO committed them to raising
standards of living, ensuring full employment and a large and steadily
growing volume of real income…
Has the Marrakesh miracle materialized? Are employment and livelihoods
ensured and steadily growing? No. The WTO's trade and investment
rules have taken the world in the opposite direction, and the current
negotiations threaten to take us further still.
After ten years under the WTO, unemployment has climbed around
the world. The quality of existing employment has often fallen,
with an increase in dirty, dangerous and degrading work. Much of
that employment is precarious. In fact, many more people are being
driven into the informal, unprotected and unregulated economy from
both the formal economy and from the devastated livelihoods of peasant
and family farming. In transnational corporations (TNCs) many employees
increasingly find themselves in a casualised, precarious relationship
with the companies they produce for but no longer work for, as many
TNCs attempt to distance themselves from responsibility for labour
relations based on direct employment by, for example, outsourcing.
Many people around the world – workers, women, rural producers
– and even entire countries have been forced to give up hope
in employment as a means to development and empowerment.
Ten years later, we are in the middle of the so-called Doha Development
Round. Have the lessons been learned? Are the trade negotiators
offering solutions to address this massive failure? Not a chance.
Look at the three main areas of trade negotiations – agriculture,
non-agricultural goods and services.
Increased liberalization of trade in agricultural products over
the past decade was supposed to bring benefits to all. The only
winners were the global agri-food TNCs. These TNCs are driving the
overproduction and export of food crops from a handful of producer
countries, driving down prices and eliminating millions of jobs,
fueling the massive migration of agricultural workers, peasants
and family farmers from the countryside and sending waves of dispossessed
people into already overcrowded cities or abroad, where they lack
the most basic protection of their rights. The WTO’s systematic
promotion of intensive export-oriented agriculture through the forcing
open of markets has intensified reliance on the exploitation of
vulnerable seasonal and migrant workers in the world's richest countries
as family farming disappears, while the most socially and environmentally
destructive corporate production methods are encouraged and even
subsidized.
For developing countries, "diversification" into flowers
and "niche" products is being promoted as a solution to
the collapse of agricultural commodity prices. In the global countryside,
there is more unemployment, more hunger, more food insecurity. Those
who help to feed the world are increasingly unable to feed themselves.
Despite the urgent need for action on the systemic global crisis
in agriculture, the real issues are not on the WTO agenda. And the
proposed "breakthroughs" on offer in the preparations
for Hong Kong, in which agriculture is used as a bargaining chip
for corporate gains in services and the non-agricultural market
negotiations (NAMA), threaten to aggravate the situation, taking
us further from the rational management of agricultural resources
for the satisfaction of human needs rather than corporate profit.
The NAMA negotiations will have a similar effect in developing
countries for industrial, fisheries and forestry products. These
countries are being pressured to significantly reduce their tariffs
on these goods.. Whilst this may lower the costs for these goods,
it will often be at the expense of current and future employment.
Fisheries and forests provide livelihoods and essential nutrition
and medicines for millions of people across the world. Ninety percent
of fishers worldwide – nearly 40 million people – are
employed in small-scale artisanal fishing and these men and women
are overwhelmingly impoverished. A further 13 million are employed
in the formal forestry sector and more than 1.6 billion depend on
forests for their livelihoods (collecting fuel-wood, medicinal plants
and foods, for example). WTO proposals to fully eliminate tariffs
in both of these sectors could have extremely serious consequences
for these people, both through loss of access to and through the
destruction of the natural resources on which they traditionally
depend.
The proposed tariff reductions would increase incentives internationally,
especially for large commercial trawlers, to fish using highly destructive
methods, which would fuel the continued exploitation of an already
seriously depleted resource. Local fishers and poor fishing communities
would increasingly suffer the impact of dying seas, as large commercial
fleets take many of the highest quality fish. There is also a risk
of cheap fish imports being dumped in coastal nations with a strong
domestic market, making it impossible for fishers to sell their
catch locally. Similarly, in the forest sector, even an impact assessment
prepared for the European Commission states that developing countries
with forest industries protected by high tariffs could “incur
considerable environmental and social costs due to downsizing of
the industrial capacity and closing some industries entirely.”
If cheap imports flood countries with weak industrial sectors,
these industries will be wiped out, causing higher unemployment.
In countries where such industries are yet to be established, these
imports will prevent the development of the kinds of sustainable
industrial employment that is often the route to development. Current
negotiations will deliver neither decent employment nor development
and may cause massive unemployment and the destruction of existing
livelihoods, while depriving governments of much-needed tariff revenues.
If some employment does eventuate in a few developing countries
from this process, this will largely be at the expense of jobs in
the more expensive developed countries. But developing countries
as well are increasingly competing against each other (as in the
textiles sector). Most of these jobs will certainly be low-paid
and insecure.
Are services the magic recipe for employment creation? This is
the fastest-growing employment sector. The services negotiations
depend on governments privatising, outsourcing or otherwise liberalising
their services sectors as a basis for being able to make irreversible
commitments under the GATS. None of these measures has a good record
in terms of employment: people either lose jobs or have insecure,
lower quality and low-paid jobs. Many multinational enterprises
are footloose and have a history of quitting as soon as profits
slow down or dry up, leaving service workers stranded, competing
for more hamburger-flipper or call-centre jobs. Neo-liberals argue
that 100 jobs shifting from A to B are still 100 jobs but if they
go down by ten with each shift of operations and the security and
quality of the jobs go down a vicious spiral, then decent employment
goes down the plug-hole.
Jobs are also an integral part of the services negotiations. Under
the Mode 4 discussions on the movement of people from one country
to another to provide services on a temporary basis, not only will
many of those workers be subject to low wages and poor conditions,
but their home countries are often going to lose valuable skills
– the output of expensive local training programmes –
to the North in a brain drain that sees the South subsidise the
North for its own unwillingness to provide decent wages and conditions
that would keep Northern nurses and teachers in their health and
education systems. Mode 4 negotiations simply accept the ‘inevitability’
of mass unemployment in developing countries. The WTO has no mandate
to deal with the labour and migration issues raised by Mode 4 negotiations,
which should not be part of the GATS. Rather, we believe that longer-term,
more secure and rights-based migration programmes are essential.
The current trade->growth->development paradigm is a failure,
as even World Bank, IMF and OECD data is beginning to acknowledge.
More trade can, under certain circumstances, create growth. Yet
we must always ask: what kind of growth; growth for whom? Today
it is jobless growth, a phenomenon widely known across the globe.
Trade and domestic growth statistics today are meaningless indicators
of true national wealth (though they do indicate corporate wealth!),
the well being of the people of a country. What ultimately counts
is the kind of growth and the pattern of development these statistics
describe and whether that pattern tells us that farmers and workers
are on the way to obtaining decent incomes and decent working conditions
and livelihoods or whether, on the contrary, they can look forward
to the continued growth of poverty and insecurity.
The proposals to further liberalize agriculture, industrial production
and services will lead to an immense new wave of unemployment and
the worsening of existing jobs and livelihoods in developed as well
as developing countries at the expense of the profits of a few transnational
corporations.
This programme for the massive destruction of jobs needs to be
stopped.
The undersigned trade union and civil society organisations
call on WTO members to:
- put a moratorium on the present negotiations; and
- undertake full public assessments of the employment, social,
environmental and cultural impacts of existing trade and investment
rules.
The rules governing international trade and investment must be
judged according to a single criterion: do they generate progress
in the direction of socially and environmentally sustainable economic
growth, social progress and greater wellbeing for all? Or do they
take us in the opposite direction, towards social and environmental
destruction and massive migration and global insecurity? The verdict
is certainly in on the first ten years of the WTO. It is time to
change course.
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Signatories (as of 29/11/05)
Africa Europa Faith And Justice Network (AEFJN), Belgium
Africa Europe Faith Justice Network - Italian section
AFRIKA-EUROPA NETWERK, Netherland
Alliance for Democracy, USA
Alliance Sud (Swiss coalition of development organisations)
All-Russian Life-Support Workers' Union (ALSWU), Russia
Amigos de la Tierra, FoE, Argentina
Arbeidssøkerforbundet i Norge (AFO)
Asociación Ambientalista
Association internationale des techniciens, experts et chercheurs
(AITEC), France
ATALC-Amigos de la Tierra (FoE) América Latina y Caribe
ATTAC Norway
ATTAC, Austria
ATTAC, France
ATTAC, Germany
ATTAC, Hungary
ATTAC, Japan
ATTAC, Madrid, Spain
ATTAC, Sweden
ATTAC, Switzerland
Buendnis fuer Eine Welt /OeIE (Alliance for One World), Austria
BUND/FoE, Germany
BUPL (Danish National Federation of Early Childhood Teachers and
Youth Educators), Denmark
Campagna Riforma Banca Mondiale – Italy
Canadian Environmental Law Association (CELA), Canada
Campaign for the Welfare State, Norway
Canadian Health Coalition, Canada
Canadian Labour Congress, Canada
Canadian Union of Postal Workers, Canada
Canadian Union of Public Employees, Canada
Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions (CFNU)
CENSAT – FoE, Columbia
Centrale des syndicats du Québec (CSQ), Canada
Center for Encounters and Active Non-Violence, Austria
Center of Concern, USA
Centre for Social Justice, Canada
Centre National de Coopération Au Développement,
CNCD 11.11.11, Belgium
Centro de estudios Rurales y de Agricultura Internacional (CERAI-España)
COECOCEIBA-FoE, Costa Rica
Common Frontiers
Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada
Confédération paysanne, France
Council of Canadians
CPE: Coordination Paysanne Européenne/European Farmers
Coordination/Coordinadora Campesina Europea
Dachverband entwicklungspolitischer Organisationen in Kärnten
(Umbrella
Organization of Development Policy Organizations in Carinthia
/ Austria)
December 18, Belgium
Dundee Trades Union Council
EcoLaPaz- Federación Amigos de la Tierra Argentina
Ecologistas en Accion, Spain
Education International, Belgium
El Instituto de Relaciones Economicas Internacionales -IREI- Switzerland
FAIR (fair trade & sustainability consultants)- Italy
Federación Estatal de Comercio, Hostelería y Turismo
de Comisiones Obreras de España
Federation of State and Municipal Employees, Iceland
Fédération syndicale Unitaire (FSU), France
FOCO Foro Ciudadano de Participación por la Justicia y
los Derechos Humanos, Argentina
Focus on the Global South
Foro Ecologista de Paraná. Entre Ríos-Argentina
Foundation for Gaia, United Kingdom
Fire Brigades Union, United Kingdom
Friends of the Earth International (FOEI)
Friends of the Earth, Denmark
Friends of the Earth, England, Wales and Northern Ireland
Genel-Is, Turkey, Public Services Employees Union of Turkey
German Trade Union of Education (GEW), Germany
Global Exchange
Global Labour Institute, Geneva, Switzerland
Guyana Agricultural and General Workers’ Union (GAWU), Guyana
Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU), China
Hong Kong People’s Alliance
Hospital Employees’ Union, Canada
ICDA & K.U.L.U., Denmark
Informationsgruppe Lateinamerika (IGLA), Austria
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), USA
International Gender and Trade Network (IGTN)
International Metalworkers Federation, Switzerland
International Transport Workers Federation,UK
International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant,
Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Association. Switzerland
International Network on Labour and Development (IRENE), The Netherlands
KAIROS Canada
Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), Korea
Korean Federation of Transportation, Public & Social Servies
Workers' Union (KPSU), Korea
KPMP - Congress of Workers' Unity, Philippines
MacKillop Centre for Social Justice, Charlottetown, P.E.I. Canada
National Federation of Labour, Philippines
National Union of Public and General Employees, Canada
Nature & Progrès/Nature & Progress, international
federation of organics producers and consumers
NOAH – Friends of the Earth, Denmark
Polaris Institute
Public Services International, France
Rede Brasileira Pela Integração dos Povos (REBRIP),
Brazil
REDES-Amigos de la Tierra (FoE) Uruguay
Réseau Foi Justice Afrique Europe, France
Rete Lilliput (Italy)
Roba dell'Altro Mondo - Italy
Solidarity Group-Arenal (GRUDESA), Nicaragua
SOLIFONDS, Switzerland
South African Municipal Workers' Union
The Berne Declaration, Switzerland
The Free People's Movement
The Mexican Action Network on Free Trade (Red Mexicana de Accion
frente al Libre Comercio-RMALC)
Tradewatch - Italy
Unite Workers Union Aotearoa, New Zealand
UNI, Switzerland
UNISON, United Kingdom
Via Campesina
vpod-ngo/ssp-ong, Switzerland (section of the Swiss trade union
of public services (vpod/ssp) which organizes the employees of
Swiss NGO’s)
War on Want
WIDE (Network Women In Development Europe), Belgium
World Economy, Ecology & Development (WEED), Germany
XminusY Solidatity Fund, Netherlands
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