
Issue No 70		07 September 2000

LaborNET	Ask Neale	Tool of the Week

Education

The WEF -Why Should We Care?

By Rob Durbridge

An event like the World Economic Forum attracts all the spin doctors for every interest, often obscuring real issues. For educators the issues may seem remote but a closer look shows that services like public education could be dramatically affected by the unfolding agenda of global trade liberalisation says Rob Durbridge.

We should protest the secretive and elitist agenda of the WEF and expose the policies and laws they are implementing. Education is not a commodity and should be excluded from commercial agreements along with other cultural, land, health and social rights.

The WEF is a meeting of the Chief Executives of the world's biggest 1,000 corporations. Unlike other global bodies the WEF is not established by governments. It has no legal obligations to the environment, culture or the democratic processes of anybody other than to shareholders in rich countries. It has been crucial in driving trade and investment liberalisation, privatisation and anti-unionism in recent decades. The key reason for the Melbourne meeting (apart from a convenient all-expenses paid ramp to the Olympics) is to deal with the crisis caused in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) by the abandonment of the "new millennium" trade liberalisation round in Seattle last November and to discuss the Asian economic woes.

We are told that the WEF is meeting to discuss global unfairness and poverty and that there is no alternative to globalisation. But we expect to have a say in these matters through our elected governments on how this is to occur. Do we really believe the WEF will discuss how to make the world a nicer place? The job of the CEO is to increase the profit of the firm, and often their packages are linked to just that. The world economy is profitable, but it is increasingly unequal.

At the invitation of the Business Council of Australia representing the 100 biggest Australian firms, the WEF meeting is, in effect, a selective and closed body which exerts enormous economic and political influence in the world. It is the face of the new world order. As such the WEF operates to influence the policies and programs of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), World Bank and International Monetary Fund which can ignore, override and punish democratic governments using international treaties with trade and penalties for teeth.

GATs and Teachers, Students, Allied Educators, Parents, Grandparents...Half the Population

What has all this to do with educators, students and their families...all up half the population?

We know that WTO deals with tariffs and trade in goods, so we are used to manufacturing workers and farmers being upset. They were joined in Seattle by environmentalists and labour rights activists. But it is only now that we learn that the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) also applies to education. The WTO has made decisions which could have the effect of mandating global education corporations to compete with government and private education institutions, and to demand the same subsidies we give private bodies, on pain of penalties and trade retribution.

While the GATS principle of "national treatment" can mean that public systems are outside the scope of the agreement, even if privatised, competition from subsidised global corporations could effectively residualise and marginalise these systems. This is a consequence of secondary, higher and other education services being included in the list of GATS in Marrakesh in 1994 and further negotiations conducted in February 2000. Did the governments of the day know or think to ask about the implications? Did they tell us? What is the current or alternative government policy? The answers are all unknown.

The New Zealand government mistakenly argued that GATS had no impact on national education policies, believing that GATS meant global opportunities for their education entrepreneurs, but then adopted privatisation and deregulation policies which are the prerequisites for loss of control in favour of transnational corporations. When the unions in NZ tried to get information about it, they were met with the Official Information Act which prevented access to details until it was too late for public scrutiny.

If GATS continues down the pash being urged on it by the WEF, Australian public schools, colleges and universities could well face competition from transnational education providers that Australian taxpayers are forced to subsidise.

Some will see all of this as far-fetched radical rhetoric. But at the behest of international financial bodies many developing countries have already been forced to cut back and privatise their education systems. Australia is an exporter and importer of education services which brings us into the scope of the GATS, and the potential is also there for corporations to compete for a slice of the $30 billion per year spent by the Commonwealth, states and private fee-payers on pre-school, school, TAFE and higher education.

As if we did not have enough problems with the Enrolment Benchmark Adjustment (EBA) and the new Kemp funding agenda of fund-shifting to the private sector at the public sector's expense! These policies can now be seen as a key element in opening up the national "market" in education as a precursor to building a vast privatised international market in the provision of education services.

"Rollback" to the "New Millennium" of Global Education Markets

Article XIX of GATS spells out that the agreement is not static but is a process of successive negotiations directed to "achieving a progressively higher level of liberalisation." Under the "standstill rule" GATS prevents limits being imposed (read regulation of standards) without compensation to affected provider countries and under the "rollback rule" the progressive lifting of restrictions on trade in education services is projected.

The prize of course is bigger than Australia...it amounts to what Education International (the world's largest non-government body representing 60 million education unionists including the AEU) calculates to be a thousand billion (US) dollars worth of services, more than 50 million teachers and a billion students. Suddenly education is a commodity in a market and a huge prize for predators looking for opportunities...and that satellite dish on the outback school (worthwhile in itself) represents an access point for exploitation.

We are familiar with the UN and International Labor Organisation Conventions to which Australia is a signatory and which provide us with a framework for international good citizenship. However, the UN is a body of worthwhile policies with little or no capacity to enforce them.

In an era where new communications and information technologies will provide huge opportunities for distance delivery of education these policies may be even more far-reaching. For example, a company called World School has been floated which will employ English-speaking teachers on-line 24 hours a day in five different countries to be accessed by those who can afford them. University of California UCLA Extension School caters for students in 44 US states and eight other countries. Let us not be sanguine about the potential for global education corporations delivering on-line without regard to the needs, decisions or culture of the countries concerned.

The Australian Education Union is making a submission to the Senate Enquiry on the WTO to argue that the Australian government must limit the scope of the WTO. Further, the AEU will be asking the ALP and other political parties to define their views in the lead-up to the next Federal election. Strategies to deal with the threat posed by global corporations to a wide range of community interests cannot develop unless public knowledge of the issues becomes more widespread. The protests against the WEF should be directed to achieve that.

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Issue 70 contents

Interview: New Internationalism
In its battle with Rio Tinto the CFMEU has pioneered global campaigning. National Secretary John Maitland talks to Workers Online about globalisation, a union response and using new technologies to organise .

History: Pickets and Police
S11 protestors would do well to be wary. Fred Paterson, CPA member of the Qld Parliament, was bashed by the Queensland police on St Patrick's Day 1948, when a Labor Government was in power in that state.

Education: The WEF -Why Should We Care?
An event like the World Economic Forum attracts all the spin doctors for every interest, often obscuring real issues. For educators the issues may seem remote but a closer look shows that services like public education could be dramatically affected by the unfolding agenda of global trade liberalisation says Rob Durbridge.

Economics: A Vandalised Economy
Since New Zealand was opened up to the forces of globalisation, it has performed dismally, both economically and socially. NZCTU Economist Peter Conway reports.

Unions: Our Vital Role in Society
Eight months into his new role as ACTU Secretary Greg Combet reflects on the challenges facing Australian unions.

International: Turning Up The Heat
John Sweeney of the AFL-CIO says the union movement can and will reform the global economy, for as Dr Martin Luther King taught us, the moral arc of history is long but it bends towards justice.

Satire: Threat to withhold pocket money derails S11 protest
MELBOURNE, Tuesday: Members of the activist collective S11 announced today that they had decided to cancel their protest at the upcoming World Economic Forum meeting at Crown Casino.

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