
Issue No 72		06 October 2000

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Away For The Games

The Peace Makers

By Peter Lewis

The streets of Geneva may be calmer than those of Seattle, Melbourne or Prague, but it is here where the questions posed by Globalisation will inevitably be answered.

The surprising thing about Geneva is that it is so relaxed. Dominated by the huge glacial Lac Leman and ringed by mountain ranges, it feels more like a holiday camp than the centre of the world. With fewer than 200,000 citizens there's a sense of containment, that bigger cities lose in the traffic jams. In the warmer months people swim in the clean waters, or take the free bicycles provided by the International Red Cross for long rides around the Lake. Of course the winter is harsher, but the Swiss and diplomats foreigners, who make up 40 per cent of the city's population, have learnt to take the good with the bad.

Geneva owes its place in international affairs to its neutrality. In war and peace it has stood apart from conflict, avoiding the heartbreak of armed conflict and reaping the benefits of secure bank vaults. Refusing to be German, French or Italians, the Helvetica tribes that comprise the Swiss Republic have used their mountain havens to stay out of trouble. Right now, that history of neutrality is being tested by a global debate that goes to the very heart of the 21st century - what rules should apply to Globalisation? While the guns won't be firing between the World Trade Organisation, International Monetary Fund and the International Labour Organisation, the war of ideas is gathering heat.

It is ironic that these international bodies that have managed affairs between the nation state, are now being asked to impose rules on its assault. But that's what's happening. Faced with growing insecurity about globalisation, people are taking to the streets, calling for rules. And it is ILO, the sole remaining body established in 1919, when US President Woodrow Wilson convinced the world to form the League of Nations but couldn't get his own Congress to do the same, that is seen as the saviour for the little people. Its being asked to come up with rules to place fairness into global trade - and then its being given the even harder job of convincing the world to respect them.

The first part of the equation has largely been fulfilled. Two years ago, all ILO member nations signed up to a Declaration on Core Labour Standards that condemns slave labour, child labour, discrimination and the right to organise. Taking a softly softly approach, the ILO has begun assisting member countries comply, through education and on the ground training. But it wasn't carrots they' were calling for on the streets of Seattle.

The real question is how do you give an organisation like the ILO the teeth to match the fangs of the big corporations that now dominate the world economy. If it comes down to a clash between corporate law and international law, then it's going to be a mismatch. While Multi National Corporations represent the triumph of black-letter law - which actually gives directors a legal duty to maximise profits, international law has always been more of a gentlemen's club. International law must be agreed to, and then it is up to individual countries whether to enforce it, there are no mechanisms to force the issue. In this context, how do you force a government, let alone a company, to act morally?

Within the walls of the ILO, up in the hills overlooking Lake Geneva, there are attempts to thread the needle and make core labour standards bite. One idea is to integrate with the World Trade Organisation - not through the type of social tarrifs that would be anathema to trade liberalisation - but do denying nations in breach of labour standards access to the WTO's complaints mechnism. This is where one country can complain to the WTO about the anti-competitive practices of another, and win approval to impose retaliatory measures of their own. It may sound bureaucratic, but there. An ILO official describes it to me using a football analogy - 'what this would mean is if you foul repeatedly, we allow the other team to kick the shit out of you'.

Eyes are also closely watching the outcome of a groundbreaking action against the Burmese Government, targeted by the ICFTU for allowing bonded or slave labour. The complaint has passed through a formal inquiry process, every stage of which the Burmese regime has refused to cooperate. The ILO has now invoked an obscure article that gives it the power to call for the withdrawal of cooperation by all member states. The issue is at a sensitive stage, when the article was about to be invoked earlier this year, Burma made moves to comply and was given a six month extension. The issue will be revisited in November, when a full ILO Conference will decide whether to call for action.

Whatever the outcome, the relevance of the Burma complaint is that provisions to impose global labour standards may already exist. It is an admittedly extreme case - an international pariah State approving slave labour and won't give much tangible comfort to Australian workers seeing their jobs go offshore because of lower labour costs, but it is something. Apply the same provisions to assert the right for trade unions to organise in developing and you're starting to see a bit of daylight, because this will actually close the gap in labour costs, not by holding Australian wages down, but by pushing developing workers wages up. Like the best in international diplomacy, it's all about little steps.

There's one big misconception about the Swiss and that's that they are pacifist.- While they are neutral, they are fiercely militaristic. The Swiss Army Knife is no misnomer: national service is compulsory and all adult males are members of the Army Reserve, keeping a rifle at home. I'm told the main bridges over the Rhone are permanently mined in case of invasion - the hedgehog strategy: If attacked curl up into a ball and impose the maximum pain. It's early days, but the ILO might be using very Swiss tactics to promote its objectives of globalisation with a social face. The Seattle crowd may not get their social tarrifs, but a bit of hedgehog diplomacy could give their cause a tangible boost.

Away for the Games in Athens

Rings of Desire

As I lie on a hill overlooking the stadium of ancient Olympia as another busload of German tourists slipping on the togas and doing a victory lap I feel like I understand, at last, what the Games are all about.

I had turned my back on the Sydney circus in the hope of finding something more substantial by looking at my home city from beyond, rather than under the spotlight. But watching the tourists perform their own ritualistic war dance, walking over the ancient ruins as they receive their Level One indoctrination in the Olympic myth, I realise for the first time the depth of my own folly. Here I was thinking that the Games were a farce because they were so hyped, the reverence, the triumphalism, the placing of the physical above all other qualities.

But here, watching the myths of Olympia being subverted by modern tourism, I realise the opposite is true: the Games resonate for the very reason that they are so fake, so showy, so downright camp. Historians would tell you that the Olympics have always been about diverting attnetion from the grubby realities of existence. Things were getting way too intense, Ancient Greece was in an almost constant state of war. The Athenians versus the Sparts; the Sparts against the Argons, the Macedonians and the Catheginians at each others throats.

When Iphitos, the King of Elis, went to the Delphic Oracle, a sort of ancient Greek Agony Aunt to ask what could be done to end this cycle of war and plague, the enigmatic reply was to revive a religious festival at Olympia to honour the battle for leadership of the Gods which saw Zeus take gold from Kronos. The date was about 800 BC and for the next 1000 years, all war would cease for a month as the armies of the various city-states swapped weapons of destruction for a hastily despatched loincloth and a 100 metre dash. Not even Roman occupation dented the festivities, although the Emperor Sulla's decision to pillage the site to plug a budget shortfall in 85 BC stretched the friendship, as did Nero's decision to comptete in new events that he created such as artisitic contests for tragic actors and musicians, which he, not surprisingly, won.

So to the Ancients the Olympics were a chance to do battle without risking death, to triumph without spilling blood. According to the modern mythology, the point of the Ancient Games was not just to run fast, but to perform with honour, and in doing so, worship the vast array of Gods who presided over the ancient soul. Much of the site was given over to the worshipping of religious figures like Zeus, various kings and even a goddess called Nike. The strict rules including no bribery and the exclusion of all those who had committed a crime. Penalties were strict and included fines, disqualification or public flogging. The most severe penalty was reserved for married women who entered the Game site to watch the blokes perform in the buff. They were thrown to their death off a cliff. Through this mixture of the carrot and the stick the Olympics myth evolved around the image of youthful virility and the purity of competition.

It was a myth ripe for the 20th Century, where the nation states of the world again locked themselves into battle. Despite two horrendous world wars, athletes from around the globe would compete for trinkets rather than their live. Ignore the fact that many athletes represent the colonial powers that ravaged their homelands for economic reasons, or that the spoils of victory became so high that many attempted to cheat by pumping themselves full of horse steroids. Ignore also the abject corruption of the official Olympics body who roam the world like some statelss monarchy; and ignore the way huge global corporations have appropriated the myth in order to turn a buck. If you cut through all the ugliness, the Games have fulfilled the very primal urge for one nation the boot the boot into another. At the dawn of a new, more globally connected millenia the question remains whether this is a myth that will continue to resonate.

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As for the modern Greeks, despite the fact that Athens, has won the honour of hosting the 2004 Olympics and are being talked of as the perpetual home of the Games, there is an indifference to the proceedings in Sydney that might come as a shock to the 'sports-mad' Sydney public - as the US correspondents on CNN repeatedly refer to. In the fishing villages that dot the Peloppensian coast, locals converge on the bars in the evenings to watch TV sport, but it is the progress of the Greek team in the European Cup soccer that has them rapt, rather than the work of the Thorpedo. There was some excitement when a local bookend won weightlifting gold, but for the most part, life goes on as if it was just a sports event. Mention the 2004 Games, Athenians only roll their eyes: everyone knows the Bid is in disarray and as you look out over the city clothed in a brown veil of smog from the Acropolis, its hard to imagine a city less suitable for the job of accommodating 20,000 visitors for a two-week 'international event'.

The streets of Athens may be lined by marble, but it is almost totally obscured by the grime of smog and sweat. The Minister responsible for the Games is so concerned he cancelled his trip to Sydney in a bid to distance himself from the Bid Committee. He's warned that the timetable is so tight that the Games are now "at the mercy of the unpredictable", such as the discovery of antiquity relics during construction. Similar discoveries have halted work on the Athens metro for more than two years. But the thing that strikes me is that if the 2004 Games are an absolute disaster, it won't be the national shame that Australia feared, just something else that didn't turn out right. You get the feeling the Greeks will just shrug their shoulders and carry on regardeless. Which is one way in which Sydney seems to have set itself apart from other host nations.

Commentators in the international papers seem fixated (a) on the prevalence of venomous wildlife and (b) on the people's desperate need to be reassured things are going all right. As one commentator observed, Australians may say 'no worries' a lot, but that they are a long way away from being comfortable and relaxed. From a distance this has ensured the Games have gone off smoothly, that Sydney has not - even despite the efforts of the Daily Telegraph - disgraced itself. But it also betrays a sad truth - that we can't summon the same passion for things more complex than cheering for someone who can stick their heads underwater and paddle fast. Or getting tears in our eyes when Cathy Freeman wins Gold, but being unable to open our hearts to reconciliation. When the Sydney Games were first mooted, some of us rued the money that was going into stadia rather than, say, the development of high-tech industry. Eight years on, we have stadia, but no high-tech industry, an economy judged to be 'old' and a dollar that seems to be in free fall.

The sad postscript to the Games is that what has created the buzz is the sense that Sydney, for a few short weeks, has been at the centre of the world. It seems that Sydeny has been revelling in this, deluding itself that it has won something of substance. But the real Olympioc ideal has always been that there is no need for a centre of the earth - that the war's that go into asserting that space are just too costly. Somewhere along the way, this has got mixed up in a sick triumphalism of which Sydney could well be remembred as the high point. Because being at the centre is the thing the 2000 host city has yearned for more than anything else.

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Issue 72 contents

Interview: Taking It To The Union Busters
ACTU Assistant Secretary Richard Marles talks to Workers Online about turning back the anti-union sentiment growing in the business community, responsible unionism and the sense of fun to be found at the ACTU.

International: The White Knights
The International Labour Organisation has become the great hope for those fighting to give globalisation a human face. Australian Bob Kyloh is one of those working with trade unions within the ILO to make it happen.

Politics: Industrial Democracy for Australia
Glenn Patmore argues we need new forms of employee representation in the workplace to broaden employee participation.

Unions: Behind The Scenes
In a small office at Homebush Bay, as the world focused on all that was positive about our games, Unions 2000 and SOCOG officials worked tirelessly to ensure that no worker was ripped off. Chris Christoudoulou reports.

Satire: Parade of Icons �Could Have Included Even More Ex-Aussies� Say Critics
The selection of Greg Norman, Paul Hogan and Elle Macpherson to represent Australia in the �Parade of Icons� during the Closing Ceremony of the Sydney Games last night has prompted a storm of complaints from other famous former Australians.

Review: Elliott Smiths Figure 8
Smith is basically the secret love child of the fab four and it�s so blatantly obvious. That�s not a bad thing because one thing Lennon and McCartney were reknown for was there ability to pen catchy tunes.

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