anti-WTO


 * BEYOND THE GOLDEN PARACHUTE **

From a lecture delivered in August to 150 participants of a textiles conference at Tampere University of Technology in Finland. The talk was given by "Hank Hardy Unruh," an impostor posing as a representative of the World Trade Organization. "Unruh" is a member of the Yes Men, an activist group that maintains a website at [|www.gatt.org] that parodies the website of the World Trade Organization. The group received an email message inviting the WTO to send a speaker to the conference, which was attended by international business leaders and academics. The speech was well received, and the master of ceremonies praised it three times during the day.

It's an honor to be here in Tampere, addressing this audience of the most outstanding textilians in the world today.

[Slide: Company logos, human faces]

Looking around at this diverse sea of faces, I see representatives of outstanding corporations like Dow, Denkendorf, Lenzing--all at the forefront of consumer satisfaction in textiles. I see members of the European Commission, Euratex, and other important political bodies that aim to ease rules for corporate citizens. I also see professors from great universities walking into a prosperous future hand in hand with industrial partners, using citizen funds to develop great textilic solutions to be sold to consumers for profit and progress.

I see on all of your faces a touching, childlike eagerness to tackle the biggest textiles questions today. At the same time I see a deep understanding that some of these solutions may not be easy but that come what may we have to press on into a future that few of us understand, except in terms of its dollar results.

[Slide: Helping hand]

How do we at the WTO fit in? Well, that's easy: We want to help you achieve those dollar results. We want to help make sure that nothing--protectionism, worry, even violence against physical property--stands in the way of your dollar results. What do we want? A free and open global economy that will best serve corporate owners and stockholders alike. When do we want it? Now.

WHAT WE ARE DOING

[Slide: Charles Darwin]

It's like Darwin said: if you look at nature, one thing is clear, and that's that things go well--and just like nature, the market sorts itself out. But like all of us, even wild animals, the market can use some help. And we at the WTO are committed to helping the market help those who need it the most. We're using a variety of techniques to do so--lobbying, for example; "guerrilla marketing" and other corporate techniques to cleverly show teenagers the value of liberalization; and so on. And the WTO is working to resolve two of the biggest problems for management: maintaining rapport with a distant workforce and maintaining healthful amounts of leisure.

FROM INVOLUNTARILY IMPORTED WORKFORCE (IIW) TO REMOTELY LOCATED WORKFORCE (RLW)

But first, how did the workers ever get to be a problem? Before unveiling the solution, I'd like to talk a bit about the history of theworker/ management problem.

[Slide: Civil War]

The first leg of our journey is back to 1860s America. We all know about the U.S. Civil War--the bloodiest, least profitable war in the history of America, a war in which unbelievably huge amounts of money went right down the drain. And all for textiles!

[Slide: Paradigm shift]

Of course, this war is most famous for having effected a mighty change in the management paradigm from a central-owner hierarchical model to a much more decentralized, fluid model--a real "hippie revolution" kind of paradigm shift! But what caused the Civil War?

CAUSES OF THE CIVIL WAR: PROTECTIONISM [Slide: Freedom]

Why did people fight and die and lose money? It comes down to one word: FREEDOM.

[Slide: Southern happiness]

By the 1860s, the South was utterly flush with cash. It had recently benefited from the cotton gin, an invention that took the seeds out of cotton and the South out of its preindustrial past. Hundreds, of thousands of workers, previously unemployed in their countries of origin, were given useful jobs in textiles. Into this rosy picture of freedom and boom stepped ... you guessed it: the NORTH.

[Slide: North]

The South, of course, wanted to buy industrial equipment where it was cheapest and to sell raw cotton where it fetched the highest price—in Britain. The North, however, decided the South should NOT have the FREEDOM to do this but instead should HAVE to do business with the North, and only with the North.

The North used its majority stake in the country's governance to exploit the Southern landowners and deny them their freedom to choose the cheapest prices; this of course made them very angry. You'd be angry too if you were denied your freedom of choice! And so the North's abusive tariff practices basically caused what otherwise was a perfectly good market to spiral into a hideously unprofitable war.

CIVIL WAR RESPONSIBLE FOR ELIMINATING IIW? A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT [Slide: No excuse for war]

Some Civil War apologists have said that the Civil War, for all its faults, at least had the effect of outlawing an Involuntarily Imported Workforce. Now, such a labor model is of course a terrible thing. I myself am an abolitionist. But in fact there is no doubt that left to their own devices markets would have eventually replaced slavery with "cleaner" sources of labor anyhow.

[Slide: Thought experiment]

To prove my point, come join me in what Albert Einstein used to call a "thought experiment."

Here: Suppose Involuntarily Imported Labor had never been outlawed, that slaves still existed, and that it were easy to own one. What do you think it would cost today to profitably maintain a slave--say, here in Tampere?

[Slide: Finland]

Let's see...A Finnish clothing set costs $50 at the very least. Two meals from McDonald's cost $10 or so. The cheapest small room probably runs $250 per month. To function well, you have to pay for your slave's health care--if its country of origin was polluted, this could get very expensive. And of course, what with child-labor laws, much of the youth market is simply not available. [Slide: Gabon]

Now, leave the same slave back at home--in Gabon, let's say. In Gabon, $10 pays for two weeks of food, not just one day; $250 pays for two years' housing, not a month's; $50 pays for a lifetime of budget clothing! Health care is likewise much cheaper. On top of it all, youth can be gainfully employed without restriction.

The biggest benefit of the remote-labor system, though, is to the slave--because in Gabon there is no need for the slave not to be free. This is primarily because there are no one-time slave-transport costs to recoup, and so the potential losses from fleeing are limited to the slave's rudimentary training. Since the slave can be free, he or she suddenly becomes a "worker." Also terrific for morale is that slaves--workers!--have the luxury of remaining in their native habitat and don't have to relocate to places where they might be subject to such unpleasantries as homesickness and racism. Is there any competition between these two models of life, for either side?

[Slide: Paid/unpaid]

I think it is clear from this little thought experiment that if the North and South had simply let the market sort itself out they would have quickly given up slavery for something more efficient anyway. By forcing the issue, the North not only committed a terrible injustice against the freedom of the South but also deprived slavery of its natural development into remote labor.

PROBLEMS WITH THE RLW MODEL: A CASE STUDY

Now, the "modem" remote-labor model, though much better than the imported-workforce model, is decentralized and therefore much more complicated from a management perspective.

[Slide: Home office]

When the headquarters of a company are in New York, Hong Kong, or Espoo and the workers are in Gabon, Rangoon, or Estonia, how does a manager maintain proper rapport with the workers, and how does he or she ensure from a distance that workers perform their work in an ethical fashion?

[Slide: Remote work]

Let's look at a counterexample--a case in which managers remained out of touch with remote workers, leading to extreme worker dissatisfaction and the eventual total loss of the worker base. Perhaps we can learn from this case and avoid such catastrophes in the future.

[Slide: Britain]

In nineteenth-century Britain, just like in the South, things had never looked better. The country had abundant cash and potential and freedom, thanks to new technology that turned usable cotton into finished textiles, so the British could suddenly mass-produce clothing. All that was needed was a workforce to produce the raw materials that these new tools required. The British, being more advanced, took a modern approach: instead of expensively importing workers, they located their employment opportunities where workers already lived--India.

[Slide: India]

There were problems right from the start. For thousands of years India had made the finest cotton garments in the world--so Indian workers were humiliated by simply providing raw materials to British industry.

[Slide: Gandhi sewing]

The main rabble-rouser was Mohandas Gandhi, a likable, well-meaning guy who wanted to help his fellow workers along but did not understand the benefits of open markets and free trade. Gandhi thought that through "self-reliance"--protectionism against textile trade with Britain—India could become strong and relearn its own ancient ways of textiles.

[Slide: India rioting]

These rather naive ideas became extremely popular, and a big proportion of the citizenry rose up against the British management system. The British eventually had to leave!

LESSONS LEARNED

So what are the lessons for management here? The big problem in India was clearly a grave lack of management rapport with workers. By making only small adjustments, British management could have kept India on the path to modernity.

[Slide: A lack of vision]

For example, one of the things Gandhi and his anti-globalization followers did was make their own clothing at home, to symbolize their independence from the cotton trade that they perceived as oppressive. Now, as any student can tell you, if management in England had been properly in touch with worker concerns, they could have responded in a timely way--e.g., by making available clothes in the homespun style that the Indians craved. Today you can see clothes like that in many catalogues, like the Whole Earth Catalogue, for example.

FROM REMOTELY LOCATED WORKFORCE (RLW) TO EFFICIENT REMOTELY LOCATED WORKFORCE (ERLW)

Now, although the British may be excused for losing India because of a want of technology, we have no such excuse. In these sensitive times, when a large percentage of the world's population is nearing the boiling point over problems they imagine are caused by globalization, we need to use all resources at our disposal to help the market help corporations, to assure that things go well--in society just as in nature. To avoid another India, we must ensure that management is constantly in touch with workers--and not just intellectually but viscerally.

[Slide: Clip of guy walking around]

Before I show you an actual prototype of the WTO's solution to the major management problems of today, I just want to say that sometimes things don't turn out quite as you imagined they would--sometimes you give something to an agency and it comes back a little different than you'd mexpected. And this design isn't necessarily to be taken literally. This is more important as a direction, really--to get you thinking outside the box for solutions to management problems, so you can start imagining a more holistic way of meeting the challenges of management.

[Slide: Clip of guy in panopticon]

Now, we all know that not even the best workplace design can help even the most astute manager keep track of his staff. But our solution enables a lot more rapport with remote workers.

Mike, would you please?

[Unruh steps out from behind the podium to a drum roll. An assistant grabs him by the tie and belt and rips off his suit to reveal a golden spandex unitard underneath.]

Ah! That's better! This is the Management Leisure Suit. This is the WTO's answer to the problems of maintaining rapport with distant workers and maintaining one's own mental health as a manager with the proper amount of leisure. How does the MLS work, besides being comfortable? Allow me to describe the suit's core features.

[Unruh unzips the front of the suit, then pulls on a rip cord that inflates a three-foot-long golden phallus. The audience claps.]

This is the Employee Visualization Appendage--an instantly deployable hip-mounted device with hands-free operation that allows the manager to see his employees directly and to receive all relevant data about them. Signals communicating exact amounts and quality of physical labor are transmitted to the manager not only visually but also through electronic channels implanted directly into the manager. The workers are fitted with small unobtrusive chips that transmit all relevant data directly into the manager.

The MLS allows the corporation to be a corpus, by permitting total communication within the corporate body on a scale never before possible. This is important, but so is leisure.

[Slide: Leisure activities]

In the United States, leisure--another word for freedom, really—has been decreasing steadily since the 1970s. The MLS permits the manager to reverse this trend by letting him do his work anywhere.

[Slide: Protest]

The MLS provides a number of noncorporate solutions as well. With the MLS, officials of the WTO will be able not only to see protests but to feel what's going on in the hot spots of the world. What will the danger level be when the first protester is beheaded? I'm against beheading, but they do that in Qatar, where we're holding our next meeting.

CONCLUSION

[Repeat slide: Corporate logos, human faces]

Is this suit a science-fiction scenario? No--everything we've been talking about is possible with technologies we have available today. And even more interesting solutions are being developed: interactive textile materials, adaptable materials for smart clothing, living shirts that monitor the wearer's vital signs and motion ... The prime movers pioneering these remarkable tools will be telling us about them in the next few days.

Also here are the regulators, trade officials, and others who make the world go round--including my colleague at the European Commission, whom will show us tomorrow the importance of always looking forward on the highways of progress toward ever new horizons, with cooperation and mutual delight in the fruits of prosperity.

I am very excited to be here. Thank you.

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