1.The idea of a Global Labour Charter Movement (GLC) is to develop a charter, declaration or manifesto on labour, relevant to all working people, under the conditions of a 21st century, globalised, networked, informatised, financial and services capitalism (a GNC).
2. The notion of such a charter has been provoked by a couple of recent international labour declarations, Labour’s Platform for the Americas (2006) and the labour chapter of the Bamako Appeal (2006). A limitation of these otherwise very different documents is that each was produced and issued for acceptance or endorsement, by a leadership or (would-be) elite, without discussion by workers, shopfloor or community activists themselves. The GLC notion is, however, also inspired by a recent feminist one (“Women’s Global Charter for Humanity,” 2004), produced after wide discussion by a new mobilising social movement.
3. In so far as this project is addressed to emancipation from work (i.e. labour for capital and state, empire and patriarchy), it implies articulating (both joining and expressing) labour struggles with those of other alienated social categories, people and peoples – particularly that majority of workers, women. The existence of a growing global justice and solidarity movement (GJ&SM), best known through the World Social Forum (WSF) process, makes such articulation increasingly possible.
4. The broad inspiration and motivation for such a dialogue could be such notions as “the emancipation of labour” (Plekhanov 1883), “the liberation of life from work”, (Gorz 1999), recognition of the generalisation of proletarianisation, the radically new conditions of labour, types of labourer, and the understanding that these can “refuse the rule of capital” (Hardt and Negri, 2004). Its title could be the “Global Labour Charter Movement” (GLCM21). “Charter” reminds us of one of the earliest radical-democratic labour-popular movements of industrial capitalism, the British Chartists. “Movement” suggests that the formulation of such a declaration requires self-mobilisation and implies a process.
5. Such a process needs to reveal its origins and debts. These are to: the changing nature of labour under a globalised, networked, financial and services capitalism; to the new kinds of workers and worklessness created by such, to the new forms of labour self-articulation (within and beyond unions), to the shop floor, urban and rural labour networks (local, national, international), to the labour NGOs (labour service organisations), and to the growing wave of labour education, communication and research responding to this.
6. The novel principle of such a charter should be its iterative nature – that it be conceived not as a correct and final declaration, which workers, peoples and other people simply endorse (though endorsement could be allowed for), as for its processal, dialogical and developing nature.
7. This process should be a virtuous spiral, which can be begun, paused and joined (or left) at any point, but anyway involving the following elements: information/communication, education, dialogue, (re-)formulation, action, evaluation, information.
8. It is the existence of cyberspace (the internet, the web, computerised multimedia) that makes such a Global Labour Charter for the first time conceivable. We have here not simply a new communications technology but the possibility for developing post-capitalist, post-statist relations. Our process must be computer-based because of the web’s built-in characteristics of feedback or dialogue, its worldwide reach, its low cost. An increasing number of workers and activists are in computerised work, are familiar with information and communication technology and have web skills. Given, however, uneven worker computer access, such a process must also be intensely local, imply and empower outreach, using communication methods appropriate to particular kinds of labour and each specific locale.
9. Networking can and must ensure that any initiators or coordinators do not become permanent leaders or controllers. There is a growing international body of full time organisers and volunteer activists, both within and beyond the traditional inter/national unions, experienced in the GJ&SM, who could provide the initial nodes in such a network. Networking also, however, allows for there to be various such charters, in dialogue with each other. Such dialogue should be considered a necessary part of the process and avoid the authority/iconisation associated with traditional manifestos.
10. If this proposal assumes the crisis of the traditional trade unions, it should be clear that it simultaneously represents an opportunity for them. This is for a reinvention of the form of labour self-articulation, as has occurred more than once in the history of capitalism (from guilds to craft unions, from craft to inter/national industrial unions). By abandoning an increasingly notional power, centrality or privilege, unions could simultaneously reinvent themselves and become a necessary and significant part of a movement for social emancipation worldwide. The form or forms of such a reinvention will emerge precisely out of a continuing dialogue, the dialectic between organizational and networking activities.
11. Starting with the first edition of any GLC, there could be a list of globally-agreed demands and campaigns, with these having emancipatory (demonstrably socially-transformatory, empowering) implications for those involved. Such demands must increase the autonomy of those benefited. They must increase their solidarity with other popular and radically-democratic sectors/movements (rather than increasing their dependence on capital, state, patriarchy, empire).
12. Any such campaigns must, however, be seen as collective experiments, to be collectively evaluated. They should therefore be dependent on collective self-activity, implying global solidarity, as with the 200-year-old, but never completed, campaign for the eight-hour day. There is a wide range of imaginable issues (of which the following are hypothetical examples, in no necessary order of priority):
o A Six Hour Day, A Five Day Week, A 48 Week Year, thus distributing available work more widely, reducing overwork;
o Global Labour Rights, including the right to strike and inter/national solidarity action, but first consulting workers, including migrants, precarious workers, unpaid carers (“housewives”), unemployed, on their priorities; and secondly by prioritising collective struggles and creative activity over leadership lobbying;
o A Global Basic Income Grant, in the interests of women, of the unemployed, etc;
Ï A Centennial Reinvention of the ILO in 1919, raising labour representation from 25 to 50 percent, and simultaneously sharing the raised percentage with non-unionised workers;
o A Global Campaign for Useful Work, reaching beyond conditions of, or at work (“Decent Work”) to deal with useful production, socially-responsible consumption;
o All in Common, a campaign for the defence and extension of forms of common ownership and control (thus challenging both the privatisation process and capitalist ownership in general);
o A reinvention of Mayday as a Global Labour and Social Movements Solidarity Day (as being done by precarious workers in Europe and by immigrant labour in the USA);
o Support to the principle of Solidarity Economics and the practice of the Solidarity Economy, i.e. production, distribution, exchange that surpasses the competitive, divisory, hierarchical, growth-fixated, wasteful, polluting, destructive principles of capitalism;
o A Global Labour Forum, as part of, or complementing, the World Social Forum, an assembly autonomous of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), and the Global Unions, whilst open to all);
o This proposal is issued under the principle of CopyLeft. It can be adapted, replaced, challenged, rejected and, obviously, ignored. The author would, however, appreciate acknowledgement and copies of any use or response.
Resources
Aguiton, Christophe et Dominique Cardon, 2005-6, “Militants et TIC (Activists and ICT)”. Email attachment received April 2006.
Arruda, Marcos, 2002, “Seminar on a Solidarity Economy, Porto Alegre, February 3”, http://www.tni.org/archives/arruda/solidarity.htm
Bamako Appeal, 2006, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/bamako.html
Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), http://www.etes.ucl.ac.be/BIEN/Index.html
British Chartists, 2006, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartism#External_links
Eight Hour Day, 2006, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_hour_day
Escobar, Arturo, 2004, “Other Worlds are (Already) Possible: Self-Organisation, Complexity and Post-Capitalist Cultures”, in Jai Sen et.al. (ed), World Social Forum: Challenging Empires, New Delhi, Viveka, pp. 349-58.
Gallin, Dan, 2006, “Organising: Means and Ends”, Global Unions, Global Justice Conference, Cornell University/Global Labor Institute, New York, February 9, 2006, http://www.global-labour.org/means_and_ends.htm.
Gorz, Andre,1999, A New Task for the Unions: The Liberation of Time from Work, in Ronaldo Munck and Peter Waterman (eds), “Labour Worldwide in the Era of Globalisation: Alternative Union Models in the New World Order”, 2004, The Economics of Solidarity – Practical Socialism of the Local, http://print.indymedia.org/news/2004/11/1856_comment.php.
Hardt and Negri, 2004, The Becoming Common of Labour, in “Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire”, Penguin, New York, pp. 103-15.
Hepburn, John, 2005, “Reclaiming Commons – Old and New”, Presentation to the ‘Other Worlds Conference’, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=8739
Hyman, Richard, 2004, “Agitation, Organisation, Diplomacy, Bureaucracy: Trends and Dilemmas in International Trade Unionism”, Labor History, 45(3).
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 2006, “Join the Fight for a Shorter Working Week”, http://www.iww.org/projects/4-Hours
Juris, Jeffrey, 2005, “The New Digital Media and Activist Networking within Anti–Corporate Globalisation Movements”, Annals: American Academy of Political and Social Science.
Ledwith, Sue, 2006, The Future as Female? Gender, Diversity and Global Labour Solidarity, in Craig Phelan (ed), “The Future of Organised Labour: Global Perspectives”, Peter Lang, Oxford, pp. 91-134.
Martin, Brendan, 1993, “In the Public Interest? Privatisation and Public Sector Reform”, Public World, London.
“Labour’s Platform for the Americas”, 2006< http://www.gpn.org/research/orit2005/index.html.
Plekhanov, Georgi, 1883, “Programme of the Social-Democratic Emancipation of Labour Group”, http://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1883/xx/sdelg1.htm
Waterman, Peter, 2006a “The Bamako Appeal: A Post-Modern Janus?”, http://www.choike.org/documentos/bamako_appeal_janus.pdf
Waterman, Peter, 2006b, “Toward a Global Labour Charter for the 21st Century”, http://www.choike.org/nuevo_eng/informes/4278.html
“Women’s Global Charter for Humanity”, 2004, http://www.worldmarchofwomen.org/qui_nous_sommes/charte/en
Peter Waterman (London 1936-2016??), began his working life with international Communist organisations in Prague (1955-8, 1966-9). In the 1980s he published the Newsletter of International Labour Studies. Since 1984 he has specialised on the new labour and other internationalisms, and on (electronic) communications in relation to such. Most recently he has focused on the relationship of the traditional union internationals to the global justice and solidarity movement.