Demystifying global economics: making the local/global connection.

Five years ago those educators who saw the necessity of helping people make the connections between local economic issues and the global economy were fighting an uphill battle. Most people had either never heard of the World Trade Organization or the International Monetary Fund/World Bank, or they did not see how something so distant could have relevance to their lives as they dealt with cuts in welfare, or lack of affordable housing. However, after high profile demonstrations in Seattle, Quebec City and Washington DC, people are more curious about what "globalization" means and how the increasing trend toward corporate control of the economy affects their lives. Most people are still concerned with survival issues, but they are starting to suspect that there might be a connection to what the protests are all about. The growing movement for global economic justice has provided educators with a framework through which people of all ages can learn about how local economic issues are connected to the global econ omy.

The Praxis/Economic Justice Project of the Chicago Office of the American Friends Service Committee has been working since 1994 to develop leaders from within labor, community and student groups while focusing on local and global economic justice issues. Our work utilizes the principles of popular education and is focused on helping groups link their local economic issues to the larger picture of globalization through analysis and action. We strive to develop long-term relationships with groups, and one of our most successful collaborations was a three and a half year experience with a public sector union local. During our years with the union local we helped the members to connect their personal knowledge of economics and the local fight against privatization to a larger analysis of globalization, which will be described in some detail below.

WHO WE ARE

Our facilitation team consists of myself, program co-director Darlene Gramigna and University of Illinois at Chicago economist Dave Ranney. The three of us have worked together for the last four years, doing workshops with community groups, church groups, youth, and unions. We have all come to this work through a long-term engagement with social justice movements. Darlene worked for many years on Central American solidarity and the with sanctuary movement, Dave has worked with the labor movement since the sixties, and I am an artist who came to this work through community art education and producing documentaries on the labor movement. The three of us bring different strengths to the work and we function best as a team. Darlene and I bring knowledge of popular education gained through our respective experiences in Nicaragua and Brazil; Dave brings analytical skills honed by his work as an economist as well as the invaluable experience of his labor background.

Because our long-term goal is to build leadership to help strengthen the movement for economic justice, we prefer to work with groups over several years, instead of doing single workshops or presentations (although, we still do strategic one-time workshops for some groups, especially when we are organizing around a campaign). Working with a group over the long haul allows us all to work toward a deeper growth of critical consciousness, to see and assess development, and to find our place within the larger movement. Working long-term also gives facilitators the luxury of extreme flexibility when building an agenda. While working long-term, if an exciting argument or discussion pops up, a facilitator can relax and let it play out instead of trying to stick to every bit of the agenda, knowing that there will be plenty of sessions in the future.

We choose to work with groups, such as community organizations and unions, and not individuals. Working with groups that are already organized around a neighborhood, a workplace or an issue allows leadership to develop from within and creates more opportunity to put analysis into action. Our focus on economic justice work leads us to work with groups that have been marginalized under the current economic system: women, youth, people of color, and workers.

AN EXPERIENCE IN LINKING LOCAL ISSUES TO GLOBAL ECONOMICS

In the Fall of 1997 we were invited to design and facilitate a series of workshops for a public sector union local whose members included public school janitors, teachers' aides, park district workers, and county hospital workers. The primarily African-American and Latino participants were mostly stewards, although a few staff participated as well. Although all stewards were invited and encouraged to attend, we had a fluctuating group of around thirty each session, with a core group of fifteen that were always there. The first year we created a series of workshops that provided an overview of global economic trends. We started by talking about personal history and then NAFTA, because most union members are familiar with this trade agreement. However, we expanded our discussion to cover a broader spectrum of global economic concepts and issues, including other trade agreements, international debt, international financial institutions, and neoliberalism. (1) It quickly became clear that the most significant glo bal trend for the members in this particular union local was privatization. Over the next couple of years we concentrated on a careful analysis of local privatization while linking it to the broader global economic picture. We also helped to develop materials and strategies for an anti-privatization campaign.

A series of methodological principles will help illustrate our experience concretely. Most of these are rooted in the political principles we've learned from our reading of Freire, Gramsci and the example of the Highlander Center in Tennessee. These are methodologies that we use within every workshop series, and they work very well as a framework for making the local/global connection. (2)

* Develop an assessment tool. We always try to start with some kind of an exercise that will help us determine the level of knowledge and analysis in the group. In our work with the union local, we used an exercise developed by the Resource Center of the Americas. (3) We asked the group to split into smaller groups of three or four and spend 15 minutes "drawing yourself in the global economy." We them that they were allowed to define "yourself" either individually, as a union, or any other way they appropriate. Sometimes people complain that they do not have information to complete this task, but we just ask them to come up with something and to be assured that there are no wrong answers. The whole point is to find out what they know and what they do not know. The drawings the union stewards made that day revealed that they had experienced the growing gap between the rich and poor: many of the drawings showed the middle class being squeezed or phrases such as "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer." Though this demonstrated an intuitive knowledge that the growing gap in the United States was connected to global economics somehow, there were no specific analyses of those links and no specific references to global institutions or agreements. It wa s then our goal to deepen this analysis, which is a process we measured by asking them to make other drawings throughout the process.

* Start from personal experience. One of the principal tenets of popular education is to start from the participants' personal experience. We find this to be particularly important when dealing with economics, because people are generally intimidated by the whole subject. However, everyone has plenty of life experience with economics, and when they realize that this knowledge has value they generally feel less threatened. To connect with the participants' personal knowledge, we almost always start with a classic popular education tool that we have adapted for our purposes. The tool is called "The Tree of Life," and it uses the metaphor of a tree to look at family history. We have adapted it to draw out the participants' economic family histories. It is also a wonderful exercise to begin to build trust and relationships within the group. We start by drawing a large picture of a tree on the blackboard or on butcher-block paper and labeling the leaves "yourself," the trunk "your parents," and the roots "your grandparents." Then, we pass out a smaller drawing of the tree that has questions written on it. The questions ask what the participants' parents and grandparents did for a living, whether or nor the mother's labor in the home was valued, how the family's experience shaped their attitudes toward work and education, and other things related to the family economic history. We ask each person to take fifteen minutes to fill out the questionnaire and then to spend thirty minutes or so sharing their storie s in small groups. Then we ask each small group to report to the large group on similarities and differences that they discovered, and we write these up on the large tree in the front of the room. People generally enjoy beginning to think about these questions and the exercise gives the facilitator an opportunity to connect the personal stories to larger economic trends or historical events. For example in the workshop with the union local (as with almost any group) we learned that many families had been forced to migrate or emigrate due to economic conditions. Some families came to Chicago from the South during the Great Black Migration, while others came from Mexico during the Mexican Bracero program. Almost every person had a story of migration or immigration in their family, which led to a very diverse group feeling somewhat connected to each other and also to global economics. (4)

This exercise also works well with youth and can be used as a homework assignment, giving the young people a chance to go home and discuss the questions with a family member or guardian. Quite often, young people in Chicago will report that a family member lost a factory job because the factory moved to Mexico, providing an opportunity to talk about global trade agreements.

* Develop a group analysis. Group analysis is particularly important in popular economics education because the facilitator has technical information about economics that the rest of the group will not have learned through lived experience. Group analysis helps to avoid an authoritarian relationship between the facilitator with "expert" information and the participants by providing an opportunity for participants to attain a new understanding based upon the facilitator's information combined with their own knowledge and experiences.

At the Praxis/Economic Justice Project we have worked for several years with a process that we have developed based on some of Antonio Gramsci's ideas, as well as work done in Latin America and Canada. (5) The process is called coyuntural analysis and it is a way for groups to analyze the current historical moment. Over the years, we have used a couple of exercises with the union local to develop group analysis. We repeated these exercises because of the somewhat fluctuating participation and also because the situation being analyzed changes all the time. One exercise called "The Matrix" is a way of beginning to organize information about the current historical moment. By looking at the political, economic, ideological, race and gender-based trends and events that have occurred recently, you'll have a solid base of information that will inform your analysis for the rest of the workshop series. This exercise has worked well for us with youth as well as adults. It is also a great way to begin to understand the way that the economy is intertwined with other forces in our society, and the links between local and global. We start by breaking up into five smaller groups. Each group is given a category: political, ideological, economics, race or gender. (6) The groups are then asked to brainstorm about current trends and events in their category locally, nationally, and internationally. We have each group write their answers on colored paper (each category gets a different color), then tape them to the wall with each category starting with the local, then putting national underneath, and lastly international. This way, the papers on the wall create a grid, or matrix. The large group can look at the grid vertically and see all of the local, national, and international trends and events in one category, or can read the grid horizontally and see all the local trends and events in each of the categories and so on. Often groups initially have difficulty filling out the international trends and events, but a facilitator within the group asking questions can often solve this problem, and as one continues to work and repeat the exercise this stops being a problem. Some people are intimidated by the concept of ideology, but often the discussion of this category can be the most revealing and rich. In our work with the union, the ideology group pointed out that there were local, national and global ideological trends tow ard always viewing the private sector as better than the public sector. Over the years, the ideological dimension of privatization has become an important part of our analysis, culminating in an anti-privatization strategy that included a public awareness campaign about the myths concerning privatization.

* Look at historical trends. We emphasize that we are living within a particular historical moment that is a convergence of political, economic and social trends. Identifying that moment, as well as knowing our history, helps us form our analysis and determine our course of action. One of our favorite tools to achieve this objective is a group time line. (7) With a general group, we sometimes put a big blank piece of paper on the wall with a few key dates for reference, and ask people to fill in the paper with dates that are important to the economy. Lots of times people will know an event, but not the exact dates. That is fine. People can also post personal events, such as "1975: Got my first union job." In this way people start to see that they are part of history too. With a group that is working on something more specific, we'll develop a special time line.

With the union local we developed a "Key Privatization Events" time line. We put it up on the wall and talked through some of the main points, including Pinochet's widespread privatization of Chile in 1974, and the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. At this point we asked everyone to come up with some dates of their own. The group came up with events such as the 1989 election of Mayor Richard Daley (ushering in a new era of privatization in Chicago) and 1996 job cuts at the Board of Education. This whole process helps people to see that their personal and local events are connected to national and international events, all of them becoming part of the flow of history. We also ask the group to read the time line carefully and to see if they notice trends.

We often ask the group to develop a concurrent time line of Popular Movements so that we can look at how movements grow and change in relation to other events. Feeling that they are part of a movement and that popular struggle has had victories can be an important part of maintaining the group's feeling of empowerment.

In this case, the union stewards added dates that reflected their involvement in the Black Panthers, and the labor and civil rights movements.

* Focus on global connections to a local issue. Whenever possible, we try to connect concepts in the global economy to local issues with which most people have experience and by which they are motivated. For instance, whenever approaching the issue of international debt, we start with exercises and discussions about credit card debt. People immediately relate to this topic, and their experience of being buried under credit card debt provides an apt analogy to the situation of many developing countries. In our workshops with the union local we developed an exercise to compare and contrast privatization in other countries to the situation in the United States. In this exercise we break the group into five smaller groups. Each group gets a case study of a different country: South Africa, Puerto Rico, Nigeria and Chile. Each case study gives a little background and history on the country and its privatization, and talks about the rationale being used to privatize. Each also details what resistance to privatizatio n there has been. The groups must answer the following questions: Who are the actors in this situation? Who will benefit and who will suffer? Who works together? What strategies have the workers in this country developed? What can we learn from this situation? Through the discussions that followed, the group became very interested in the work that the South African Municipal Worker's Union had done on public education about privatization. This later became part of our anti-privatization campaign. There were also very helpful discussions about the allies that workers in other countries had in their fight against privatization, and whether or not those strategies would work in Chicago. On a related note, our work with this union local and work done by Chicago Jobs with Justice made privatization a big issue within the progressive Chicago labor community. This has provided an opportunity to get labor interested in other aspects of the global economy. For instance, last winter we held a screening of "It's Our Wat er Damn It!," a video which derails the resistance to the privatization of water in Bolivia. This privatization is the result of World Bank policies and we were trying to drum up support for a national World Bank Bond Boycott. At the screening, organizers from Bolivia spoke along with a local union member speaking about the local privatization situation. This worked well in interesting the local labor community on issues of international debt.

Focus on alternatives and strategies. One thing we have consistently found is that learning about global economics can be pretty depressing. We try hard not to leave the groups that we work with feeling defeated and overwhelmed at the end of a workshop. One way to work against this feeling is to focus on alternatives to our current economic system as well as strategies for attaining them. This may sometimes involve giving people information about ongoing anti-globalization campaigns such as the World Bank Bond Boycott or the campaign against Fast-Track for the Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement. Sometimes our efforts include helping people organize local demonstrations or rake part in larger nationwide demonstrations. We have worked with local groups to send buses to demonstrations in Washington DC and Quebec City. Often we spend time connecting the group to alternative policy projects such as the Alternatives for the Americas, a collaborative document developed by the Hemispheric Social Alliance. Each of these strategies has the added benefit of helping people feel connected to a larger movement. We helped the union local to form an anti-privatization committee that met regularly to plan strategies for a camp aign. The campaign was the result of the anti-privatization committee's hard work, and of brainstorming strategies and research projects that were part of our workshops. The strategies included lots of noisy demonstrations at City Hall, as well as public education that included meetings with community and church groups, as well as a comic book that we produced called "The Mythbusters Fight Privatization!."

* Develop a qualitative evaluation toot When we have had the luxury of working with a group for more than one or two workshops, we use evaluation to go deeper than finding our what participants did and didn't like. Although we still ask quantitative questions, we are always trying to come up with qualitative evaluation tools as well. Early on in our work with the union we realized that there was a low level of literacy, so trying to measure understanding with writing would not work. We eventually decided that repeating the drawing exercise detailed above would be a good way to measure the development of analysis, since that is what we used to get an initial reading. As you will recall, the initial drawings the group made in answering "Draw Yourself in the Global Economy" reflected a sense that there was a growing gap between the rich and poor, but nor much else. Midway through the process we asked the group to do a drawing that reflected the relationships between local forces involved in privatization. This drawing showed a much more specific local analysis of how privatization was connected to the growing gap, revealing a step toward a deeper analysis. For instance, one drawing showed the connection between the Mayor of Chicago, big business, and certai n aldermen. These forces were shown driving a big train that puffed dollar signs our of its chimney. The train was running over community and union members who were being left out of the decision making process, and felt their economic status threatened. At the conclusion of our second year with the union local, we asked them to repeat our initial "Draw Yourself in the Global Economy" exercise. The drawings revealed a deeper analysis, one that included both a local analysis as well as its connections to global actors and institutions. One of the drawings showed a pyramid that included the words: Philippines, Ghana, United States, Mexico--We Are All the Same. Surrounding the pyramid were the phrases: low wages, cuts in welfare, privatization, no health care, all representing economic policies that are experienced in these countries either because of the IMF/World Bank or the United Stares' domestic policy.

ONE MORE STEP TOWARD BUILDING THE MOVEMENT

Our work with the union local taught us much about the way people learn and the way learning can promote change. When we attempted to train the stewards in the principles of popular education, we learned how hard it is for people who have been organizing for years to think of themselves as educators. And we also learned some tough lessons about the limitations of working within the constraints of organized labor. While the union local invited us in and wholeheartedly supported the educational sessions, it became clear at a certain point that our work with the stewards would always be limited by internal union politics. About a year ago, this particular local was absorbed by a larger local as part of a large reorganization. This was a frustrating moment for all of us, as our education sessions were put on hold indefinitely, the anti-privatization campaign was stalled and an important democratic institution, the Steward's Council, was nullified by this new arrangement.

Around the same time as these events, an outside evaluator interviewed some of the stewards who had attended our workshops. The stewards felt that they had definitely expanded their knowledge of both local and global economics and that the formation of the antiprivatization committee had been an important result of this work They felt personally empowered and more able to articulate global economic concepts. But to our surprise, the stewards also Felt that the development of the Steward's Council could be attributed to our work as well. While we were happy and supportive when they took this step, we did not really think that it ]had anything to do with us. But the stewards interviewed felt that the education sessions had worked as a catalyst For positive change within the group. 'These sessions brought isolated workers together to analyze and strategize and in the process created a strong and bonded group that felt empowered to work for change.

We have a good relationship with the new union local, have worked on several coalitions and demonstrations together, and we hope to do some work together in the future.

Meanwhile, although we will all be struggling to protect public services from privatization for years to come, several of the stewards have emerged as leaders and have expanded their activism to other issues as well. One steward started an underground newsletter called "Privatize This!," and organized demonstrations against the death penalty. Another steward traveled to Tucson with us to help facilitate a workshop on privatization. Stewards have attended local coalition meetings and have been a visible force at the very large May Day March in Chicago each year. Several of the stewards attended a recent training of trainers held by a coalition against the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and many of them have participated in local demonstrations against the FTAA, the World Trade Organization, and the IMF/World Bank. Each time we see each other at the sit-in at the congressman's office or the march down Michigan Avenue, we have the knowledge that our experience together was just one step on the road that we are all building, learning from each other along the way.

NOTES:

(1.) Though the term "globalization" is often used to describe the current global economic situation, we prefer the term neoliberalism. Neoliberal economic policy has been implemented around the world using these strategies: I. Cheapen the cost of production by driving down living and environmental standards and the quality of social services; 2. Accomplish this through total capital mobility, making the national base of corporations and the products and services they produce of decreasing significance ; 3. Undermine the ability of national governments to regulate big business; 4. Create powerful global institutions accountable only to big business

(2.) Most of the exercises that follow can be found in two manuals that the Praxis/Economic Justice Project has produced. Economics Education: Building a Movement for Global Economic Justice ($15, shipping included) and Coynmural Analysis: Critical Thinking for Meaningful Action ($10, shipping included) can be ordered by contacting [e-mail] or by calling 312-427-2533.

(3.) This exercise is part of a great simulation game called The New Global Economy Game: A View from the Bottom Up. It is available from the Resource Center of the Americas website or by calling 612-276-0788.

(4.) This exercise can sometimes be difficult for people, if their history has been painful, but we always ask for confidentiality in the room and tell people to only share what they are comfortable with sharing.

(5.) See Antonio Gramsci , Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoff rey Nowell Smith (New York International Publishers, 1971), and Deborah Barndt, Naming the Moment (Toronto: The Jesuit Centre for Social Faith and Justice, 1989).

(6.) It is usually a good idea to clarify definitions together before beginning this exercise. Here are the definitions we use: Event--a single historical incident or fact. Trend--a series of events that can be seen as a pattern. Political--the power relations between peoples and groups. Ideology--the realm of ideas; all the mechanisms and processes that influence the consciousness of people, their ideas and values, tastes and feelings. Economic--that which relates to the production, distribution and consumption of commodities and wealth. Gender-socially imposed dichotomy of masculine and feminine roles; in this category we will also consider sexual identity. Race--a sociopolitical construct that connects persons by common descent and origin, in this category we will also consider culture and ethnicity.

(7.) Project South has developed several interesting time lines and ways of using them. See their book, Popular Education for Movement Building, available by calling 404-622-0602. Our Economics Education manual (see above) also contains time lines on international debt, free trade and privatization.

Mary Zerkel is the co-director of the Praxis/Economic Justice Project of the Chicago Office of the American Friends Service Committee. She is the author of "Coyuntural Analysis: Critical Thinking for Meaningful Action" and the editor of "Economics Education: Building a Movement for Global Economic Justice."