by Kevin Danaher

Labor Day is more than barbeques and softball games. It's also a time to reconsider the state of working people in America and around the world.

Some people think that the recent success of the UPS workers is a sign that workers in this country are on the rebound following 25 years of shrinking unions and declining wages.

During the 1970s and 1980s corporations were so effective at holding down wage increases that by 1992, average weekly earnings in the private, non-agricultural part of the U.S. economy were 19 percent below their peak in the early 1970s. Nearly one-fourth of the U.S. workforce now earns less, in real spending power, than the 1968 minimum wage.

While workers wages have stagnated, corporate executive salaries have been skyrocketing. CEOs of the big corporations reap millions of dollars in salary but they are increasingly paid in large amounts of shares in their companies. As the stock market boomed, this produced a windfall for the executives as the value of their stock rose. The compensation of CEOs in the United States today averages more than 200 times the pay of the average worker.

New technologies and the expansion of U.S. corporate power abroad allowed companies to increase their assets and profits while reducing their workforces. Between 1980 and 1992, the 500 biggest U.S. corporations increased their assets 227 percent (from $1.18 trillion to $2.68 trillion) but during that same time their jobs fell 28 percent from 15.9 million to 11.5 million. The world's top 200 corporations control 28 percent of all sales in the global economy but they employ less than one percent of the world's workforce.

And if these developments weren't bad enough, they are about to get much worse. The corporations are writing a global constitution: NAFTA, GATT, the World Trade Organization, and now the Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI) are laying down laws for the global economy. These laws increasingly allow corporations to go anywhere and do anything they like, and prohibit workers and the governments that supposedly represent them from doing much about it.

But there is some hope on the horizon. More and more working people are realizing that the globalization of the economy has linked their interests to the interests of workers in other countries. Workers here are beginning to understand that jobs here will not be secure and wages will not rise if corporations are free to exploit foreign workers living under dictatorships, unable to organize free trade unions. This explains why more sectors of the trade union movement are building alliances with worker organizations around the world.

If you look closely you can see the very early stages of a global movement for economic democracy which operates under a straightforward assumption: if democracy is a good thing, then it should be expanded rather than reduced. Human rights groups are pressuring companies such as Disney and Nike to pay their foreign workers a livable wage; women's organizations are forming international alliances and asking why women do most of the world's work and own just one percent of the property; environmental groups are forming cross-border alliances to prevent the corporations from turning every living thing into the almighty dollar; human rights organizations are pointing out that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which celebrates its 50th anniversary next year includes the right to a job, food, housing, healthcare and education.

If trade unions build international links and also hook up with the many human rights organizations struggling for the enforcement of all human rights, then the labor movement may just be able to withstand the downward pressure on workers' living standards. On the other hand, if working people allow nationalist thinking to blind them, their lack of transnational unity will allow the corporations to carry out a global coup d'etat with a global consitution that will protect property rights at the expense of human rights.

Kevin Danaher is a co-founder of Global Exchange in San Francisco, and editor of Corporations Are Gonna Get Your Mama: Globalization and the Downsizing of the American Dream.