Discussion with AFL-CIO Solidarity Center in Nairobi

Nairobi Our annual check-in with the AFL-CIO’s Nairobi based Solidarity Center working in various eastern African countries like Uganda and Tanzania in addition to Kenya underscored my belief that the future of organizing has to be among the growing numbers of informal workers. Talking with director, Rick Hall, the real organizing excitement and accomplishment seems to be found in collective agreements won for floral agricultural workers and important new drives with informal fisherman around Lake Victoria among all of the water-sharing countries.

More worrisome was hearing the continued difficulty in implementing the important improvements in standards that had been established for urban and rural minimum wage rates and in other critical areas like the measures protecting domestic workers. The potential impacts of these measures are huge. As we all talked (the ACORN Kenyan organizers, Paladin Partners, and Solidarity Center staff) it was hard not to think about how door-to-door campaigns might work. When Rick mentioned that he wished they could canvass the middle and upper income neighborhoods distributing the standards and getting signed recognitions from householders to actually pay the minimums and provide the benefits, I found myself telling about the 1978 campaign when I moved back to New Orleans with the Household Workers Organizing Committee when we were forcing compliance with for domestic workers who were just gaining coverage under the Fair Labor Standards Act in the USA in that year and trying to make examples out of employers (the Gambino bakery family in city was our big “shame” target) who were paying way below and not paying the required social security payments. Now more than 30 years later Kenya is ahead of much of the world, and certainly Africa, but still has to move a campaign to make the law come alive.

The other story that was disappointing was hearing the ineffective enforcement program by the Labor Department in Kenya of minimum wage violations. Rick and his team were delicate, but it sounded too often like the act of making complaints by workers and unions was seen too frequently as an opportunity by inspectors to cash in from the companies by looking the other way. Seemed like another situation where the “crowdsourcing” tools we were talking about this week in Nairobi might also be effective for our friends and allies in labor unions.

Nonetheless, the story in eastern Africa is still encouraging as a bright light for organizing and organizers fearlessly putting together new and effective strategies and breaking ground for informal worker union. A story from Uganda of a terrible problem in a fish processing center that was the springboard to the fisherman’s organizing where a lockout pushed 400 workers out on the street with 40 active committee members fired when the plant reopened and hundreds of police working for the state and the company against the workers, also reminded all of us why this work is both so hard, and so important.

Mexico City

In Egypt part of the story finally bursting through the popular high-tech Facebook narrative is the role of workers and their unions that struck repeatedly across the country to force the military and government’s hands. Partially it cannot be ignored because the strikes and worker protests continued unabated throughout the week since President Mubark finally stepped down. Reports linked to the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center operation indicate the strong role played in developing infrastructure and capacity. A critical driver here is the union demands to build an independent formation launched earlier this year as an alternative to the state connected labor federation. This is huge! The real lesson in Egypt may be the power that is built and unleashed when a social change movement is linked so concretely with the labor movement.

In Wisconsin the state AFL-CIO, individual unions, students, and others have mobilized reportedly up to 35,000 to protest the new Republican governor and the Republican legislative majority attempt to eviscerate collective bargaining protections for public employees and teachers. There has been a three-day sit-in at the Capitol. The Governor in best-Mubarak style has stated that he will wait out the protests in order to work his will claiming that the state’s fiscal crises driven by the on-going recession gives him no choice. The test will be whether or not this is simply organized “engineering” or the birth of a new understanding and movement to resit anti-worker anti-people legislation in the United States that is now erupting coast to coast.

In Britian as the new conservative government announces a wholesale slashing of the existing welfare program for the unemployed and poor, the loudest opposition and the clearest voice also seems to be labor, understanding that the unemployed victims are not to be blamed, when the economy is not producing the jobs. There is no real sign of a permanent and powerful coalition being built in the UK, but the ruling government may force the time for this idea to have to come.

For all of the rocks thrown at the house of labor and the continued questioning of whether or not it has a heart to go with its hands, events bursting out every day in headlines and back stories around the globe, underscore the critical role that workers and their organizations play in both creating change and defending against repression and reaction everywhere. That is another lesson being relearned today that should not be ignored.

Johannesburg

We started slowly with another fast moving series of matatu rides which amazingly got us to Trinity Catholic Church right outside of Korogocho in record time of hardly a half-hour. It’s impossible not to like Father John. He seems young, but is probably 40, and wearing a white Kenya soccer jersey, there would have been no way to ID him as a priest, if we were not in the rectory meeting with him in a side room. He was a kindred spirit in the “cultural” wars of overturning the NGO and donor dependency that created false consensus in meetings where local people now thought they simply were supposed to ask that something be done and learn to accept whatever the NGOs offered. Unions are so unknown to poor people in Nairobi that it was easier to talk about the comparisons between the Church as a gather of believers and our community organization as similar with dues instead of a collection plate. Father John agreed that we could work out of his school when needed and would always be welcome to a desk, and we walked out feeling we had a true friend here for our work in Korogocho.

Much of the rest of the day was spent in housekeeping around the sundry administrative details we needed to move the work forward from our registration to simple bookkeeping to work on the internet, websites, Facebook, and even a fundraising program for the organizers to move forward around Citizen Wealth. All good stuff, but the heart and soul of the afternoon was doing campaign planning for the next steps we needed to take to develop action and progress on the “slum upgrading” commitment on housing, forcing the promised hospital to be built, and moving on education both to deliver “bursary scholarships” as they are called and see if we could develop a plan to force the building of a public, primary school in the slum. It’s a pleasure to be able to sit down for 6-7 hours with organizers and come out of it with a full list of things to be done and, importantly, a feeling that tasks are clear and problems are being solved. We have a good, talented, raw team in Kenya, so now we have to ensure that they succeed.

I managed to top off the day at dinner with old comrade, Rick Hall, from the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center. We celebrated the fact that having gotten me to ferry Jameson’s to him a year ago, he had converted me in that direction. He had exciting plans that also found me a quick volunteer to build an “organizing institute” in the countries he works with in East Africa. Rwanda for example has no unions and no collective bargaining now and is virtually what Brother Hall called a “US client state” where even commercial institutions are willing to encourage the building of unions (though it may be temporary of course) to help bring stability and restore some measure of strength in civil society. Spending some time helping him there would be worth the climb. Our conversation also reminded me of my blog a year ago about enforcing the new wage and benefit standards for domestic workers. Nothing has changed in a year, but perhaps its high time.

It was nice to be in Kenya doing real work with our organizers, members, and leaders finally after the long trips over several years to pave the way so that we could now see the path forward.

New Orleans              

            On unions Silverstein writes:  “Labor unions are abundant, but most are funded and controlled by employers or the government, and independent activists have been fired, suspended, sued, and otherwise targeted for repression.” 

            On pay Silverstein writes two things:  first, that based on a 2008 survey pay has “stagnated…at 33 cents an hour, lower than anywhere but Bangladesh,” and, secondly, that the monthly minimum wage was $45 USD in 2000 and is now $56 while buying power has been cut by 37% due to inflation.

            On monitoring and the sham that corporate social irresponsibility is foisting off on the consumer:  “Since then, an entire monitoring industry has emerged:  a profusion of auditing firms, consulting companies, NGOs…that apparel makers pay handsomely to develop monitoring tools, offer advice, and write up countless glossy reports.  For workers at apparel plants, though, the benefits have proved elusive.  A recent study…reviewed Nike’s own data and found that conditions had ‘stagnated or deteriorated’ at 78% of company’s supplier factories between 1998 and 2005.”  He adds, “…since the apparel companies’ dues pay for the monitoring firms that inspect their plants, they tend to get the lax policing that they want.”

            The article is scathing in its criticism of the International Labor Organization and its so-called “Better Factories” program labeling it a “whitewash.”

            By the end of the article I was willing to take a vow never to read Nicholas Kristof and his neo-liberal proselytizing again, which I have largely done already, since his paternalistic, hectoring tone tends to obscure his concerns anyway.  I was also encouraged to find a lengthy quote from Jeff Ballinger as well saying that today unfortunately there is “no fundamental difference in the way factories are run, because you still have the same predatory model of outsourcing.”

            A proposal that apparel workers receive nothing less than $5 USD per day and then go up by $1 USD per day is interesting, but given that the results of a huge, powerful, and seemingly effective social movement to end sweatshops and their goods in the US market has been so compromised, diluted, and now rendered impotent, by the end of the article, that seemed only a curiosity insisted on by some Harper’s editor hoping to have something in this long piece that was marginally upbeat, rather than debilitating and depressing.