EVERYBODY'S BUSINESS : Unions & globalization.

The prestigious World Economic Forum welcomed a special group of VIPs to its 2002 annual meeting, held from January 31 to February 4 in New York City, rather than in its usual site, the Alpine resort of Davos, Switzerland. Thirty union leaders, representing every major component of the world labor movement, joined more than three thousand top corporate executives and other members of the world's elite at Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. What on earth were the union leaders doing there?

In a joint statement titled "Globalizing Social Justice," they explained: "In order to be relevant to our members, we must be willing to engage in dialogue with employers for which workers toil, just as we are ready to negotiate with them...to advance and defend the interests of workers." The platform of the New York forum wasn't the only place unions pursued that goal early this month. Outside the Waldorf-Astoria, thousands from U.S. and foreign unions and human-rights groups protested peacefully against sweatshops and other global ills. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney and labor colleagues from the forum showed their solidarity by marching with these protesters and addressing them on several occasions. Simultaneously, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, forty thousand people from around the world, including the United States, attended the World Social Forum, a colorful counterpoint to the World Economic Forum in New York. By satellite, Sweeney sent warm greetings to the Porto Alegre gathering.

These various activities throw light on a multifaceted campaign by organized labor to have a say in the global economic arena. It's an uphill struggle. Of the thirty international labor leaders at this year's forum in Manhattan, many have positions of influence in their own countries. Those from Europe, for example, have seats at the table in the policy structure of the European Union. But that's not so at the level of the global economy. In sharp contrast to the influence that organized business exerts--directly or, more often, through national governments--they remain outsiders in the intergovernmental organizations that increasingly govern globalization.

In explaining why global institutions need a broader range of input from labor, union chiefs point to the flaws and failures of globalization, much the way certain Nobel Prize winners and bishops do. None of them attacks globalization as such, just its current version and how it excludes the people who ought to be heard. Still, labor and its allies continue to get stigmatized as "antiglobalizers."

If the labor movement were actually opposed to globalization, it would reject invitations from the World Economic Forum. It would fight the United Nations "Global Compact" on human rights, worker rights, and environmental standards now signed by leaders of 200 multinational corporations. It would campaign to close down powerful agencies such as the World Bank, instead of seeking their reform.

Unfortunately, the mindless application of the negative "antiglobalization" label has gone far to inhibit much-needed open discussion of global issues that are everybody's business. In this context, the greater openness shown by the New York forum is a plus. As a private international organization, the World Economic Forum should serve as an example for intergovernmental organizations, particularly the World Trade Organization.

Despite the key role the WTO plays in global governance and its ambitions to expand that role, it resists openness. It has remained resolutely distant to a sister international organization and neighbor in Geneva--the UN's International Labor Organization--which, alone among UN bodies, includes representatives from labor, employment, and government. After discussions with labor leaders at the New York forum, however, WTO Director General Mike Moore did announce that official contacts with the ILO are to begin soon. Not headline-grabbing news, perhaps, but a small step toward overcoming some bureaucratic inertia.

Cynics are not alone in wondering about the real progress achieved from meeting with corporate bigwigs at the economic forum. And since there are no shortcuts, unions are taking many other initiatives at the global level, including reaching global agreements directly with individual multinational corporations. Still, the key test is what difference these efforts make in the lives of ordinary people, millions and millions of them, especially women and children, who share very little of the global economy's benefits. The results are not yet in.

Peter Wasserman, a European journalist who covered the World Social Forum in Brazil, differentiates two basic union approaches to labor's international struggle for improving the lives of workers. At one pole are those he describes as the "fixers"; at the other, the "nixers." Wasserman claims that the nixers--leaders and activists pushing certain causes, such as shutting down the World Bank instead of reforming it--are gaining ground in radicalizing some unions and allied organizations, especially in Latin America. Wasserman, out of his own leftist sympathies, is probably exaggerating.

Still, there are an unknown number of dedicated nixers around the world and their cross-border network could easily grow to dangerous proportions in uncertain times, particularly if international policy leaders fail to heed the concerns expressed by the fixers.

Robert A. Senser, a former labor attache in the U.S. Foreign Service, edits Human Rights for Workers (www.senser.com).