A Path to International Labor Standards?

In Andrew Leonard's "How the World Works" column in Salon.com a few days back there was an excellent little piece describing a paper by Jennifer Gordon called Transnational Labor Citizenship to be published in the Southern California Law Review. From the column:

To imagine that we can roll back the status quo to some yesteryear where the border between the U.S. and Mexico stands firm is, argues Gordon, "pure fantasy." It denies the very nature of an ever more globalized world, in which the movement of capital, information and people only becomes more fluid, not less. So we must go forward, not back. Gordon's proposal, "transnational labor citizenship," would create a new immigration status allowing free movement and freedom to work, as long as one pledged solidarity with a non-governmental, transnational labor organization. Such citizenship would be revoked if workers failed to abide by the rules, which would include a refusal to work for employers who did not maintain basic minimum workplace labor standards.

"Transnational labor citizenship is based on the theory that the only way to create a genuine floor on working conditions in a context of heavy competition is to link worker self-organization with the enforcement power of the state in a way that crosses borders just as workers do," writes Gordon. It's a bold assertion, and a blog post does little justice to the subtlety, complexity and sheer thoroughgoing detail that Gordon marshals in support of her ideas. But it is, above all, a progressive approach, one that sees greater inclusiveness and openness as the path to improved working conditions for everyone, instead of a "fortress mentality" of exclusion that tries, vainly, to privilege one group at the expense of another.

This is the kind of thinking that we are going to need to engage in if we are going to find a sensible solution to problems concerning international labor standards and on the influx of illegal aliens who are simultanously the subject of pity (because of the conditions they have and do endure) and demonized (because they drive down wages for other workers). The nation-state based economy is long gone and will not be making a comeback, which has hampered domestic unions to a great extent. I have not read the entire paper, but I would like to register one disagreement with the paragraph quoted above--Gordon argues that worker self-organization must be linked to the enforcement power of the state, but many (and probably, most) states do not have the will to enforce labor standards that are uniform with the standards seen across Europe or in the United States. Self-organized labor will have to impose those standards on states by vigorous organization and international solidarity. This argument isn't exactly new--Industrial Workers of the World, anyone?--but in a globalized society, it is, as far as I can see, the only plausible tactic to counter the race to the bottom that has been triggered by the advent of capital that can freely move anywhere in the world.

Maybe this paper can be the beginning of that conversation for the left.