Lance A Compa

Chile: Report from the field, September 1972

Lance Compa — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:33:49 PST

[Excerpt] "El pais es pobre." Sooner or later any Chilean, whichever side he or she is on, makes the point explicit. You know it from the beginning, though; it's the premise for any dialogue about social and political affairs.

Labor Law and the Legal Way: Collective Bargaining in the Chilean Textile Industry under the Unidad Popular

Lance A. Compa — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:43:10 PDT

[Excerpt] This study describes the legal creation of an industry-wide, tripartite collective bargaining structure in the private sector of the Chilean textile industry. The former structure limited collective bargaining to employers and employees within the confines of a single plant. The reform established a central bargaining organism where representatives of employers, employees and the government negotiated a single labor agreement for the nation's entire private sector.

Still Unjaded: Jim Atleson's Twenty-first Century Turn to International Labor Law

Lance A. Compa — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:42:46 PDT

[Excerpt] I came late to the academy and am still more of a trade unionist than a scholar, so I am going to start my remarks from this perspective. When Jim wrote Values and Assumptions I was in my earlier life as a union staffer with the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), a great, democratic, independent left-wing union. Like everyone else on the union staff, I was a generalist and an itinerant. I received organizing and bargaining assignments in New England, the Carolinas, and Baltimore, corporate campaign assignments in South Dakota, Pennsylvania, and California, political and legislative assignments in Washington, and a dozen other projects. It was nonstop action from the time I started working for the UE after finishing law school in 1973.

Trade's Hidden Costs: Worker Rights in a Changing World Economy

John Cavanagh — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 07:27:41 PDT

[Excerpt] For decades, the U.S. foreign assistance program has sought with limited results to further economic development and growth in Third World countries. We have witnessed some countries making real progress toward development through industrialization, only to find more of their people trapped in hunger and poverty. Hopefully, it is apparent that for development to be effective, it must benefit the broadest sectors of the population within any society. Why are worker rights crucial to the development process? The capacity to form unions and to bargain collectively to achieve higher wages and safer working conditions is essential to the overall struggle of working people everywhere to achieve minimally decent living standards and to overcome hunger and poverty. The denial of worker rights, especially in Third World countries, tends to perpetuate poverty, to limit the benefits of economic development and growth to narrow, privileged elites and to sow the seeds of social instability and political rebellion.

Labor Rights in Haiti

Lance Compa — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 07:27:35 PDT

[Excerpt] This study of labor rights in Haiti was conducted on behalf of the International Labor Rights Education and Research Fund by Lance Compa, Washington Representative of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), who is the principal author of this report. It includes findings from a field investigation in Haiti in July 1988, and from interviews and further information supplied by Haitian trade unionists throughout 1988 and early 1989. This report also draws on information developed by a delegation of U.S. unionists and labor educators who visited Haiti July 24-31, 1988, under the sponsorship of the Washington Office on Haiti.

More Thoughts on the Worker-Student Alliance: A Response to Steve Early

Lance A. Compa — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 07:26:58 PDT

[Excerpt] My comments here reflect ten degrees of difference. While I mostly agree with him, I think Early takes a valid critique a step too far with jibes about red carpet treatment, Mormon missionaries, the best and the brightest, mobile organizers, self- sacrificing souls, and the like, suggesting that any reliance on graduates is a mistake, and only indigenous staffers should build the labor movement. His only exception, it appears, is for graduates going into workplaces where Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU)-style dissident groups take on their national union leadership, replicating the "colonizing" of the late 1960s worker-student alliance. As Early says, students' entry into trade union work then was mostly "in opposition to the labor establishment of that era." I take him to argue that students now aspiring to trade union work should follow the same dissident path rather than seek union staff positions.

Should Labor Defend Worker Rights as Human Rights? A Debate

Jay Youngdahl — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 11:53:17 PDT

The authors debate the relative merits and drawbacks of defining the labor movement under the umbrella of human rights, and the virtues of the rights of the individual versus the solidarity of the community.

Ensuring a Decent Global Workplace: Labor Rights Belong in Trade Agreements

Lance A. Compa — Thu, 14 May 2009 11:57:49 PDT

[Excerpt] Linking workers' rights to international trade is an idea whose time has come and stayed, despite the best efforts of free trade ideologues to chase it away. In looming congressional debates about "fast track" negotiating authority, the Bush administration and Congress confront powerful demands from workers, trade unionists and a wider public for rules protecting human rights and labor rights, not just corporate investments, in trade agreements.

A Human Rights Problem on Campus

Lance A. Compa — Thu, 14 May 2009 11:57:48 PDT

[Excerpt] Standing for tolerance, diversity, and dialogue in an otherwise "my-way" society, Yale, Brown, UMass and Columbia should lake the lead in honoring workers' rights, not frustrating them: in reversing violations of labor rights, not reversing government/action that protects workers. When many U.S. universities call for human rights and labor rights for workers in foreign countries producing goods with (he school's logo, they should show equal concern for the rights of their own employees.

Stop Sending Mixed Signals to General Pinochet

Lance A. Compa — Thu, 14 May 2009 11:57:01 PDT

[Excerpt] We should not apologize for U.S. enforcement of the new labor rights laws against Chile. Critics have attacked them as "backdoor protectionism" aimed at keeping out foreign products. U.S. unionists, though, report a genuine enthusiasm among their rank-and-file members, not for the prospect of shutting out foreign goods but the hope of better pay and working conditions for their foreign counterparts.