4A - The Michigan Daily - Wednesday, September 5, 2001 OP/ED ixbe £ridigrn :&ait 420 MAYNARD STREET ANN ARBOR, MI 48109 daily.letters@umich.edu EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN SINCE 1890 GEOFFREY GAGNON Editor in Chief MICHAEL GRASS NICHOLAS WOOMER Editorial Page Editors NOTABLE QUOTABLE ( Our government's secret police, with its allies, put a heav fist upon the scales. There was to be only one story: one man of incredible innate evil wanted to destroy innocent lives for ., . C tvLL' ~. b ~LvK zh.l'-A L -.- . L Unless otherwise noted, unsigned editorials reflect the opinion of the majority ofthe Daily's editorial board. All other articles, letters and cartoons do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Michigan Daily. _ 'Y ,.,, - t ":1 . , ,1 , ! ? L't9{Lt, ' rt . z . Yhq, pl' no reason other than a r spontaneous joy in evildoing." - Gore Vidal, in this month's edition of Vanity Fair, on how the US. government overlooked key facts and leads in the Oklahoma City bombing investigation. The real Labor Day was May 1 10 NICK WOOMER BACK TO THE WOOM The place is a con- struction site. The time is somewhere in the labor movements' darker days, when the mob wielded significant influ- ence in some major unions. A contractor has hired skilled trade unionists to do jobs no one else can do. However, in order to keep costs down, he has foolishly decided to hire unskilled workers who are not affiliated with the union to do most of the less demanding jobs that would otherwise have been performed by highly-paid, highly- skilled union members. It's Friday morning, and work has been progressing for about an hour. All of the sud- den, three huge, well-dressed guys carrying blunt objects pull up to the site in a Cadillac. Everyone falls silent as the three approach the worker unlucky enough to be closest to them. "Aye, are you in the union?" The worker shakes his head apologetically and the thugs deliver unto him a proverbial "beat down." That finished, the three men turn their atten- tion to someone else. "Are you in the union?" The worker nods, breathing a sigh of relief. "Alright, go over there." The men approach a third worker. "You in the union?" He nods. The men turn towards the union member they've just spared. "Is this guy in the union?" He shakes his head, and the three men proceed to beat the liar within an inch of his life. After this process has been repeated a few times, the three men find the contractor. "It looks like none of the non-union guys can work any more." The contractor - utterly terrified - nods his head. "So you're only gonna hire our guys now, right?" "Right." "And our guys can get the day off; they can come back to work on Monday. Right?" "Uh huh." "Good." Then a truck full of cold beer pulls up and the union members start enjoying an unexpected three-day weekend. This story might be apocryphal, but it does illustrate the basic way some unions operated back when the mob called a lot of shots in the labor movement. In this particular story the gangsters almost come across as "benevolent muscle" looking out for a few hard working guys - they "resolve" a conflict between the union and an employer, secure "their guys" a well deserved three day weekend and a round of beer. Of course, all of this "benevolence" is real- ly just an insidious smoke screen meant to pre- vent rank and file union members from noticing that they're actually getting stabbed in the back (with their pensions being raided and so on). This technique is tried and true. In the Mid- dle Ages, it was common for landowners to throw parties for their serfs - get them drunk once in awhile, try to look conciliatory and gen- erous, and they'll tolerate quite a bit of cruelty. In keeping with this noble tradition, the United States has "Labor Day," where America sup- posedly pauses on the first Monday of Septem- ber to honor all of the men and women who keep our nation running. Of course, in this country, Labor Day has almost nothing to do with honoring working people and everything to do with enjoying a three-day weekend. That's not the case in the rest of the world where people really do honor working people by celebrating "May Day" on May 1. May Day probably began as a spring festival in pre-Christian Europe, but the labor movement latched onto it in the 1800s and it has since become a militant workers holiday celebrating class consciousness and the struggle for eco- nomic justice. Needless to say, it stands as a vir- tual photographic negative to the "let's say good bye to summer with barbecue, beer and boating" charade Americans celebrated last Monday. This year, May Day was celebrated: ... in Vienna, Austria by 100,000 marchers who demanded greater job security. ... in Seoul, Korea by 20,000 demonstrators protesting their government's economic poli- cies. The demonstrators smashed through a police barricade to take their message to the main government district in the Korean capital. ... in Istanbul, Turkey by 20,000 protesters calling for the government to negotiate with left wing political prisoners staging a hunger strike that had already left 20 dead. ... in Havana, Cuba by hundreds of thou- sands of people who followed President Fidei Castro in a march past the United States' mis- sion there to protest (among other things) the U.S.'s embargo on Cuba. ... and that's just a smattering of genuinely pro-worker events that happened this past May 1 all over the world. Ironically, the U.S. does have an official holiday on May Day - In 1961, Congress. passed a joint resolution declaring May 1 "Law Day." The purpose of Law Day, according to the American Bar Association, is to celebrate (this is an actual quote) "the American heritage of liberty, justice and equality under the law." Let's not get ahead of ourselves ABA, Americans will have to start celebrating the real Labor Day in earnest before "Law Day" means anything. Nick Woomer can be reached via e-mail at nwoomer@umich.edu. IV ANALYSIS ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION: PART I INTRODUCING THE ISSUE A movement long masked, now makes global waves With Washington protests less than a month away, time is now to act By SCOTT TRUDEAU The anti (corporate) globalization move- ment "landed" in the United States in November 1999 when more than 50,000 people from hundreds of grassroots organiza- tions and from around the world converged in Seattle to protest and disrupt a meeting of the World Trade Organization. "Seattle" put the anti-globalization movement on the radar of the corporate media in the United States for the first time. For more than 20 years, the U.S. media ignored the mass resistance against the exploita- tion resulting from the policies of global institu- tions like the WTO when those protests occurred in far away lands. When the movement awak- ened in the belly of the beast, the media could no longer ignore it. At first, the media attempted to portray the protests in Seattle as simply a "riot." Showing dramatic footage of a small number of black-clad figures smashing the windows of a Starbucks, the media characterized the protesters as unin- formed hooligans bent on property destruction, while doing little to report the true reason thou- sands gathered in primarily peaceful resistance. They decried the "violence" of the protesters while turning a blind eye to the only violence against people that occurred during the protests: the liberal use of pepper spray, tear gas and rub- ber bullets against almost entirely peaceful pro- testers attempting to exercise their right to assemble. Most importantly, they turned a blind eye to the violence of the system of global exploitation that was the subject of the protest. When tens of thousands of protesters con- verged last April to protest the policies of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington, D.C. and no windows were smashed, the media simply reported that the protests were "unfocused" and characterized them as focusing on a "grab bag" of issues. The media have failed to delve below the superficial sea of acronyms ton ethe findamental ises COUNTDOWN TO WASHINGTON EADTHG UEDNESDAYS INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND/ WORLD TRADE ORGA- NIZATION ECONOMIC SUMMIT IN WASHINGTON AT THE END OF THE MONTH, THE DAILY'S EDITORIAL PAGE WILL FEATURE VIEWPOINTS ON DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION. I .i i s a W . BELOW: rowestrs anu pOwe Wa this summer. I @ u: r xY: . F > . .z., human rights and those working for a sustainable environment. But this diverse coalition does- n't converge simply so they can all protest their particular issue in one place. They are converging on the institutions that are the instru- ments of corporate globalization, because they have come to real- ize that their issues are intercon- nected. The same corporations that are exploiting workers in developing coun- tries are trashing the environment in the name of profit. The policies of the institutions of global- ization like the WTO, IMF and World Bank are enabling these corporations to spread their destruction further. Despite what they might tell you in economics class, globalization in the inter- ests of global capital is not globalization in the interests of the workers or the environment. This is demonstrated h the track recnrd of these insti- globalization protest against the Group of 8, the police are willing to use even more Draconian tactics in order to suppress protest - including lethal violence. Though mainstream, corporate media does a) abysmal job covering the details of these protests, a rapidly growing grassroots movement of inde. pendent media activists are providing unfiltered coverage. Check out the Independent Media Ceti- ter online at www.indymedia.org for coverage of o-rar;fiPr A/-1 1 nm~"am attarlrc -will not hi- mail at atlithnma odimrc limirh ntlij t .pttprc P_