| BUILDING
OUR PARTY |
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Globalization
& World
Trade
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After
Seattle ...
What's Possible,
What's Next
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BUILDING
OUR
PARTY
A
Column
by Tony Mazzocchi,
LP National Organizer
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Seattle during WTO week provided a glimpse of
what’s possible when indignation and organization come
together. Countless words have been written about the broad
coalition that halted WTO objectives that week. However,
keeping that coalition together and moving forward won’t be
easy.
Seattle was a glorious moment, but the work we
must do to carry on the fight is usually not so glorious.
There’s just no getting around it: We’ve got to organize
people at the bottom, and that’s a hard, day-to-day job. But
it’s what the Labor Party’s all about.
THE ANGRIEST OF ALL
Fortunately, we have some very powerful forces
working in our favor. And one of them is our direct connection
to workers who have every reason to be angry about what
corporations are doing to us.
Maybe the angriest people of all are those
workers — well represented in Seattle — who have been the
victims of layoffs and shutdowns. It’s one of the most
devastating and immediate threats we face from remote and
unaccountable organizations like the WTO. They agree on trade
rules that encourage companies to pack up and leave without
any regard for the lives of workers or the community. And we
are left behind in the wreckage.
DOING MORE THAN HOPE
Those who aren’t directly hit by a layoff
have to live in fear that they’ll be next. Even conservative
economists now acknowledge that this "fear factor"
is one reason wages have been so stagnant in our supposedly
booming economy. (That and the fact that corporations and
politicians have conspired to make it next to impossible to
organize or strike.)
We can hope that workers who are abandoned by
corporations this way will see who the real culprits are and
how politicians from both mainstream parties have egged them
on. But we in the Labor Party should do more than hope.
CONTACT ... EDUCATE
Here’s a proposal for one very concrete way
Labor Party unions and chapters can build public awareness
about the need for the Labor Party and for a broad movement to
challenge corporate power:
When you learn that a company in your area has
shut down its plant or laid off workers and is moving the work
to a place where it can be done more cheaply, contact those
workers. Offer them free membership in the Labor Party. And
develop an educational program for them that can help explain
why the company shut down and how it got away with it.
ECONOMIC CAPITAL
PUNISHMENT
We need people to know that in this country,
employers have the right to impose a kind of economic capital
punishment on workers in the form of shutdowns. Let’s let
people know that, by one recent estimate, we’ve lost about
500,000 jobs due to trade rules that actually encourage
companies to pick up and move at will. Let’s talk about the
injustice and unaccountability of entities like the WTO.
And let’s pose some solutions: Namely, we
want to be made whole. When a company pulls up stakes,
destroying jobs and communities, it should have to pay an exit
tax that will cover workers’ wages until they can find other
jobs and provide support to help the community rebuild.
Let’s channel anger into understanding and
action. Maybe we can help sustain a new movement that way.
– Tony Mazzocchi
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