by Suren Moodliar

Formerly upper middle-class, mostly white workers are coming to know the insecurity and even the economic desperation of low-income working people as architectural work, radiological second opinions, and information-technology jobs are outsourced abroad. In the 1980s it was industrial jobs that were lost. Now it is both low– and high-wage, service–sector jobs as well.

But workers are also finding ways to organize, and many organizations are seeking them out. The North American Alliance for Fair Employment (NAFFE) is a network of such groups concerned about the growth of contingent work and outsourcing and their impact. Our network includes unions (including many AFSCME and SEIU chapters), community organizations (such as ACORN) and workers’ rights groups (like 9 to 5 National Association of Working Women and Jobs with Justice).

A key challenge to confronting job loss is the complexity of the global economy. The answer to the question, “Who stole my job?” is not a simple one. The scale of decision making which results in workers in one place losing their jobs while others, elsewhere gain jobs (albeit at lower wages) is global and so far removed from the day-to-day lives of workers.

As reported by New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse (“IBM Explores Shift of Some Jobs Overseas,” July 22, 2003) several million high-tech, high-wage jobs are expected to be lost over the next decade to offshore outsourcing. In an economy based on some 140 million workers, this may not seem a big deal. But it prompts a sense of job insecurity nonetheless, and affects an important subset of workers. “My job could be outsourced!” This insecurity may lead workers to lower their expectations, which in turn reduces their bargaining power with employers.
Employers have been able to outsource work with relative impunity in part because workers in these largely service and skilled jobs are not organized into trade unions—although even unions have not provided strong protection. Still there are innovative attempts to organize workers. For example, the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers (affiliated with NAFFE) has tried to unionize hi-tech workers while waging a broad public education campaign to pressure employers. It also offers courses and skills-upgrading programs for workers. And many US-based organizations are doing careful tactical research to examine which enterprises are merely threatening to outsource work as ploy to reduce wages and benefits. While this works at the micro-economic level, it does little to protect jobs overall.

Leads for new approaches may be available abroad. In the UK, for example, where outsourcing has caused losses in already job-poor north England, the Communications Workers Union has focused its attention on fighting privatization, expanding public services and closing the domestic information gap within Britain as a way to grow the number of jobs. At the same time, it has called attention to global economic inequality and their own country’s colonial history in order to understand why some economies (like that in its former colony, India) are being organized as super-scale service economies for the economically wealthy countries.

NAFFE has helped organize meetings between US- and UK-based unions and insurgent Indian unions to deepen cooperation. We have used the European and World Social Forums (held in Paris, London, Mumbai, Porto Alegre, and Caracas) as platforms for these activities.
International cooperation is a challenge. The Indian trade unions acknowledge the right and duty of workers everywhere to protect their jobs. At the same time, they will fight to organize those jobs when and if they are outsourced to India. They also propose that unions seek international solidarity not through work across individual industries but as allies in the fight for new international trade and development policies at the global level. This would be a major shift for unions in the US and UK. For example, US workers would need to actively challenge US-sponsored “Free Trade” policies and corporate subsidies that make it easier for companies to outsource jobs.

Learning from this challenge, NAFFE has borrowed the notion of “fair globalization” from the International Labor Organization. Fair globalization recognizes that there is an international scarcity of jobs as well as enormous global inequalities. And to challenge these problems, we need to go beyond supporting fair trade since trade is only one form of capital flow. We also need to put our weight behind fair investment, borrowing and lending. By promoting government and other investment in the Global South, we can increase the buying power of folks in the South and expand jobs everywhere. It is like a global “New Deal.”

This “big picture” approach competes directly with right-wing political entrepreneurs who offer their own big picture vision of a fortress America. The progressive movement and funders have not yet caught on to the importance of organizing in middle-class white America to drain the right wing project of its base as it connects outsourcing to immigration to national security and the rest of their big picture.

As organizers across the United States get more familiar with the “fair globalization” approach, they can take the global dimension of the outsourcing debate into account and have a basis for rejecting the right-wing, immigrant-bashing approaches to outsourcing of jobs.
For most campaign organizers, out-sourcing is a difficult, almost intractable issue because it cuts across so many sectors and geographic boundaries. There are no single targets, no lead corporations or governments that can single-handedly reverse the trend. At the same time, fostering international cooperation between unions and civil society organizations concerned about the global economy, together with forming cross-industry and cross-issue partnerships with the United States, will help build the kind of social movement needed to rewrite the rules of the game when it comes to international trade and development.

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Suren Moodliar is a coordinator of the North American Alliance for Fair Employment. For more information, contact NAFFE, 33 Harrison Ave. 3rd Floor, Boston, MA 02111; www.FairJobs.org.