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Global Village or Global Pillage
How People Around the World Are Challenging Corporate Globalization
Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello, and Brendan Smith; Edward Asner (Narrator)
Edition: 30 minutesISBN: 0-89608-621-1
Format: video
Release Date: 1998-01-01
Featuring: Ralph Nader, Charles Kerneghan, Thea Lee, Loretta Ross, Dennis Brutus
Global Village or Global Pillage? shows constructive ways ordinary people around the world are addressing the impact of globalization on their communities, workplaces, and environments. It weaves together video of local and transnational activities, interviews, music, and original video comics to show that, through grassroots organizing combined with mutual support around the world, ordinary people can empower themselves to deal with the global economy.
THE
RACE TO THE BOTTOM: Today's global economy lets corporations pit workers
and communities against each other to see who will provide the lowest wages,
most abusable workers, cheapest environmental costs, and biggest subsidies for
corporations.
The result: "RACE TO THE BOTTOM" in which conditions for all tend to fall toward the poorest and most desperate. But that gives people around the world a common interest in opposing the race to the bottom. This movie shows how they are doing so.
COMBATTING
SWEATSHOPS: The campaigns to pressure corporations to establish basic standards
in their workplaces around the world.
The campaign which led the Gap to establish a code of conduct with independent monitoring. The 1999 student sit-ins for a livable wage for those who make university licensed clothing.
WORKERS
HELPING WORKERS: As corporations go global, workers in different parts of
the world are increasingly giving support to each other.
Workers in Japan, Latin America, and Europe pressured Bridgestone/Firestone to rehire locked out workers in the United States.
RESISTING
GLOBAL OPPRESSION: The global economy is largely governed by highly undemocratic
international institutions, but people are learning new ways to control them.
Local people in India, with support from environmentalists around the world, blocked a huge dam that would destroy their homes and livelihood. Religious groups around the world have forced governments to start canceling the crushing debt of the poorest countries. Activists in 70 countries joined to block a new "Multilateral Agreement on Investment" that would have given global corporations power over national governments. Unions and allies are campaigning to include basic human and labor rights in international trade agreements.
REVERSING THE RACE TO THE BOTTOM: Through grassroots organizing combined with mutual support around the world, ordinary people are beginning to find ways to counter the race to the bottom.
Based on
the book Global Village or Global Pillage by Jeremy
Brecher and Tim Costello
Illustrations
by Mike Konopacki
Supervising
producing: Andrea Hubbell
This video is not currently in stock.
Jeremy Brecher
Click here to view Jeremy Brecher's full Author PageJeremy Brecher is a historian and the author of numerous books on labor and social movements, including Strike!, Brass Valley, History from Below, Building Bridges, Global Visions, Global Village or Global Pillage, and Globalization from Below.
Brecher serves as Humanities Scholar-in-Residence at Connecticut Public Television and Radio, a position supported by the Connecticut Humanities Council. He has written the scripts for the documentaries The Roots of Roe, Schools in Black and White, Rust Valley, The Amistad Revolt, Electronic Road Film, Brass City Music, and Dance on the Wind, the last two of which he co-produced. He won two Emmy Awards and the Edgar Dale Screenwriting Award for The Roots of Roe.
Brecher is writer and host of Connecticut Public Radio’s Remembering Connecticut, which the Oral History Review called “One of the most ambitious, and certainly the longest-running, radio history series in the United States.… Historically grounded to a degree rare in programming of this sort.… Accessible, engaging, and far ranging.”
Tim Costello
Click here to view Tim Costello's full Author PageTim Costello, an architect of innovative strategies for the labor movement and the author of numerous articles and books on labor and globalization, died at home on December 4, 2009.
Costello was born in Boston on June 13, 1945 to Thomas and Claire (MacPhee) Costello, and raised in Dedham, MA. As a teenager he worked with his father as a construction laborer and learned from him the value of worker organization, often typing the correspondence of the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen, the union for which his father served as president for many years.
As a young man, Costello went to work as a fuel oil delivery driver and became active in the Teamster’s union and the union reform movement. Always an avid reader and writer, he set up an office in the back of his truck where he spent many hours in self-education. He also studied at Goddard College in Vermont, the New School in New York, and the University of Massachusetts-Boston, from which he graduated. He gradually came to be recognized in the Boston area as an unusual combination of worker and intellectual. In his book Taking History to Heart, James Green described Costello as “`Cosmic’ Tim, who seemed to have trucked everywhere and read everything.”
In 1973 Costello took a research trip across the country studying the impact of the current recession on young workers. The result was the book Common Sense for Hard Times, co-authored with labor historian Jeremy Brecher. Costello and Brecher continued to collaborate for the next forty years.
Costello’s lifelong work in the labor movement included work as a union representative for Local 285 of the Service Employees International Union, as well as positions with the Commonwealth Institute and Campaign for Contingent Work. He became convinced of the importance of labor cooperation with other social movements, and edited with Brecher the book Building Bridges: The Emerging Coalition of Labor and Community.
In the 1990s, Costello became acutely aware of the growth of contingent work and the elimination of the secure jobs that had been the mainstay of working class lives and communities. In response he helped organize and served as Coordinator of the North American Alliance for Fair Employment, a network of 65 unions and community-based organizations in the US and Canada, including groups as diverse as college teachers and day laborers.
Costello also became increasingly concerned with the impact of globalization on workers and the labor movement. He authored two books on the subject, Global Village or Global Pillage with Brecher and Globalization from Below with Brecher and Brendan Smith, a policy analyst and labor activist. He also co-produced the Emmy-nominated documentary Global Village or Global Pillage?
In 2005, Costello left the North American Alliance for Fair Employment to found the international network-building organization Global Labor Strategies, which he ran in collaboration with Brecher and Smith. He travelled extensively to Europe, Latin America, India, and China, helping link labor movements and their allies to better address the problems they faced in a globalizing economy.
Long a committed environmentalist, Costello was a founder of the organization Save Open Spaces on Cape Ann, where he lived for many years and worked intermittently as a lobsterman. In 2009 he helped found the Labor Network for Sustainability.
A lifelong resident of the Boston area, Costello was a well-known figure in the Boston labor movement, including not only the Teamsters and Service Employees, but also such venues as Jobs with Justice, the Harvard Trade Union Program, and the College of Public and Community Service at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.
Brendan Smith
Click here to view Brendan Smith's full Author PageBrendan Smith is co-director of Global Labor Strategies and UCLA Law School's Globalization and Labor Standards Project, and has worked previously for Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and a broad range of unions and grassroots groups. His commentary has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, CBS News.com, YahooNews and the Baltimore Sun.