0. For many of us older folks,
the concept of the university has
meant independence, commitment to truth,
and a skeptical
attention to existing ways of thinking and
doing--and a source of
creativity, analysis, and alternatives.
However, the reality
today is quite different. Many forces
operate on the colleges
and universities to induce them to trade
independence and
skepticism for financial support and business
accolades. I will
consider the implications of international
trade agreements for
the pervasive corporate influences on higher
education.
Basic Beliefs
1.1. First, let's consider some basic beliefs
which underlie
these international trade agreements that
accompany and promote
globalization. For many years, trade
negotiators of the United
States have been pursuing policies which
reflect particular
economic and political doctrines about free
enterprise, how
markets work, and the claimed benefits of
competition in all
aspects of life. This dedication--of
many members of the
elites--to promoting the power of corporations
over more and more
aspects of life has produced colleges and
universities which
dedicate resources to the kind of cost/benefit
analyses that
assign dollar values to human lives and catastrophes,
ignoring
tremendous human and material costs which
are transferred to
individuals and the community.
1.2. Maude Barlow, a Canadian who has been
fighting so-called
"Free Trade" since the 1980s, wrote in an
article which appeared
in the National Post on August 31,
1999:
The dominant development model of
our time is economic
globalization, a system fuelled by the belief
that a single
global economy with universal rules set by
global corporations and financial markets is inevitable. Everything
is for sale, even those areas of life once considered sacred. Increasingly,
these services and resources are controlled by a handful of transnational
corporations that shape national and international law to suit their interests.
At the heart of this transformation is an all-out assault on virtually
every public sphere of life,including the democratic underpinning of our
legal systems.
The most important tool in this assault has
been the creation of international trade agreements whose tribunals and
enforcement measures supersede the legal systems of nation-states and supplant
their judicial processes by setting up independent dispute resolution systems
that exist outside the confines of their courts and their laws.
For instance, the North American Free Trade
Agreement gave American corporations Chapter 11, the first "investor state
clause" in any international agreement. For the first time, a corporation
can sue a foreign government if that government enacts any law, practice
or measure that negatively affects the company's profits or reputation,
even if that law, practice or measure has been enacted by a democratic
legislature for legitimate environmental, social, health or safety reasons.
Agreement Consequences
2.1. To give Maude Barlow's language the life
of actual events,
here are some examples of disputes which
corporations have
brought under that chapter of NAFTA.
2.1.1. The Ethyl corporation sued Canada for
proposing to ban the
gasoline additive which Ethyl manufactures,
even though Canadian
authorities had determined it was toxic.
Ethyl prevailed.
2.1.2. Interestingly,a Canadian corporation
manufactures MTBE,
another gasoline additive, which California
has used for a number
of years because it reduces air pollution.
It also contaminates
underground water. The California governor
issued an executive
order ending its use in a couple of years.
The Canadian
corporation sued.
2.1.3. A Mississippi court fined a Canadian
funeral home chain
for business practices against a local funeral
businessman, which
practices the jury considered very bad.
The corporation has sued
the U.S., claiming it had been discriminated
against.
2.1.4. A U.S. corporation sued Mexico after
it stopped the
corporation from operating a waste disposal
plant over a
sensitive alluvial stream. The corporation
won in WTO tribunals.
2.1.5. Under other international agreements,
there are additional
examples of their impact on issues of importance
to many
Americans.
2.1.6. Guatemala passed a law in 1983, based
on World Health
Organization policy, to control the way corporations
marketed
infant formula. The regulations were
intended to protect babies
of parents who could not read and understand
the necessity of
sterilization or who had no facilities for
it. The law prevented
using pictures of healthy babies on products.
After the Uruguay
Round was completed in 1994, the Gerber corporation
threatened to
use the Trade Related Intellectual Property
agreement (TRIPS) to
claim that it had the right to use its baby
symbol. Guatemala
concluded it did not have the resources to
fight the case and
dropped the requirement. So babies
in Guatemala may be at more
risk.
2.1.7. Take clean air. Venezuela sued
the U.S. when the EPA
issued regulations intended to reduce the
amount of pollutants in
gasoline. The claim was that those
regulations discriminated
against foreign corporations, even though
the regulations applied
to all sources.
2.1.8. Lori Wallach, in her book, Whose
Trade Organization?,
claims that a trade tribunal made a ruling
in 1991 that any law
which was based on how a product was produced
was in violation of
GATT's rules. A U.S. law was intended
to protect marine
mammals--namely turtles--by requiring tuna
to be caught in nets
that exclude turtles. Mexico and other
countries successfully
challenged this law.
2.2. These examples illustrate that international
trade
agreements reach right down into our communities,
and that they
take away local, state, and national authority--in
a truly
democratic country, the authority of the
people. The U.S.
Constitution states that "We the people ..."
formed the
government.
Potential Impacts on Education
3.1. Now let's turn to those agreements most
relevant to
education. During the Uruguay
Round of negotiations, which
brought the World Trade Organization into
being in 1994, an
agreement was made in regard to services
and is called the
General Agreement on Trade in Services, or
GATS. Agnes Bertrand
and Laurence Kalafatides, in an article in
the Ecologist,
October, 1999, wrote: "The service sector
... is as vast as it is
undefined. It covers everything from
telecommunications to
transport, distribution, postal services,
insurance, the
construction industry, environment and real
estate, as well as
tourism and entertainment industries of all
sorts, from the
McDonald's in Moscow to the brothels of Bangkok."
3.2. And more specifically about education,
Abid Aslam in
Washington, D.C., wrote for the IPS news
network on November 3,
1999: "Question: Why is education like a
side of beef? Answer:
Both are commodities ... Schooling,
along with health care,
telecommunications and finance, falls under
the 1994 General
Agreement on Trade in Services...."
Aslam quotes a report from
two groups, Education International and Public
Services
International. The report, "The WTO
and the Millennium Round:
What Is at Stake for Public Education," states:
"An opening-up of
the education sector would give a free hand
to a small number of
transnational corporations specialising in
education, who could
establish subsidiaries wherever they pleased
by using ...
standardised teaching modules ... based on
a single system of
values and projecting a single outlook on
reality."
3.3. International trade agreements, which
are built around
so-called "free trade" ideas, have certain
provisions which take
power from the people and their elected governments,
local,
state, and national, and give rights to transnational
corporations. Here are some examples.
3.3.1. National Treatment. A government
(in democracies the
people) cannot "discriminate between foreign
and domestic
suppliers of services." It has to provide
foreign corporations
"treatment no less favourable than that it
accords to its own
like services and service suppliers."
For example, governments
cannot "discriminate" against a foreign corporation
by requiring
that it hire locally or establish a local
presence or do anything
else that "modifies the conditions of competition"
between
domestic and foreign corporations.
3.3.2. Government grants and subsidies.
The GATS covers
subsidies, and commits members to negotiate
to eliminate any
"trade distortive effects." Governments
could not require
corporations to be local in order to qualify
for a grant. E.g.,
governments could be obliged to give loans
to students attending
foreign-owned institutions.
3.3.3. Application to all levels of government
(Article I, 3a).
The measures covered are those taken by "central,
regional or
local governments and authorities; and (ii)
non-governmental
bodies in the exercise of powers delegated
by central, regional
or local governments or authorities ..."
3.3.4. Domestic regulation. Governments
have to ensure that
their licensing requirements both for facilities
and for service
workers, "are not more burdensome than necessary
to ensure the
quality of the service."
3.3.5. Weak exemption for public services
(Article I, 3b, 3c).
The agreement does have an exemption for
"services supplied in
the exercise of governmental authority."
But to qualify, a
public service has to be a) the sole supplier
of the service and
b) not operate on a commercial basis.
Once there is a private
competitor--and the GATS guarantees the right
of private
providers to set up one--public providers
may lose the protection
of this exemption.
3.4. Thus, the international trade agreements
cut the heart out
of methods by which the people in a local
community can promote
the development of enterprises which will
be responsive to their
concerns, reflect their culture, and provide
income and services
for the people.
3.5. It is instructive to see how the World
Bank deals with
education. Adriana Puiggros, a professor
at the University of
Buenos Aires, wrote in an article titled
"World Bank Education
Policy" (NACLA Report on the Americas,
May/June 1996):
the World Bank ... recommends drastically
reducing public
investment in education through privatizing
and breaking up school systems, and nullifying teachers' contracts.
Such a restructuring of the education system is part of a larger effort
to wipe out the remnants of the region's so-called "paternalistic" states.
The Bank's education policy has an exclusively
economic logic ... A researcher ... affiliated with Argentina's Minister
of Economics, Domingo Cavallo put it recently, "What we try to measure
is how well the training provided by each school fits the needs of production
and the labor market." The World Bank advocates reducing all investment
in education that does not generate direct income or cannot be recouped
right away ...
The Bank's education policy is part and parcel
of a larger
neoliberal economic program whose overarching
goal is to reduce state spending so that governments are able to continue
making payments on their foreign debt ...
One of the principal recommendations of the
World Bank's
education policy is that governments focus
on improving primary education. To achieve this goal, the Bank does
not recommend increasing public spending on education; rather, it proposes
diverting money that used to go toward financing high schools and universities
in order to expand access to primary schooling....
Far from acknowledging the need for more teachers,
the Bank recommends cutting back the number of primary school teachers
as well as government-funded teacher-training and education programs.
In the 1990s--the age of neoliberalism--education
levels across the region have declined. Illiteracy is making a comeback
in countries such as Argentina and Uruguay whose literacy rates were traditionally
as high as those of developed countries ...
National exam results in many countries have
declined
significantly since the application of neoliberal
policies.
3.6. It is clear to me that the implementation
of international
trade agreements by international agencies,
such as the WTO, the
IMF, and the World Bank, is a significant
part of the problems
being experienced by people whose jobs and
property have been
taken or devalued, whose opportunities are
now limited, and whose
hopes are now dashed.
3.7. The elites like Margaret Thatcher's acronym,
TINA: There Is
No Alternative. They are dead wrong.
But we have to convince
the peoples around the world that democracy
means that the elites
cannot steamroller, discount, or bamboozle
them. We must promote
alternative views that advocate ways people
can stop the actions
that cheat them. We must build programs
and governing processes
which are of the people, by the people, and
for the people.
3.8. How shall we do this? I think we
may have to live a
different expression of the word, democracy.
We will have to do
the task ourselves, not avoid the responsibilities
which the term
implies and vote occasionally. We can
change the membership of
our legislatures. We can get laws and
policies which benefit
people. We can change or end the international
trade agreements
which solidify corporate control.
3.9. It can be done. We must do it.
Frank Neff (nefffw@umkc.edu)
is a retired professor, Institute
for Human Development, University of Missouri,
Kansas City. This
essay was first published in The Faculty
Advocate 1.4 (April
2001), newsletter of the AAUP chapter at
UMKC (online
http://iml.umkc.edu/aaup/facadv4.htm)
and appears in Workplace
by permission of The Faculty Advocate. |
