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Globalisations, social movement unionism and newinternationalisms: the role of strategic learning inthe transformation of the Municipal Workers Union ofEMCALIMario Novelli aa University of Bristol, UKPublished online: 11 Oct 2010.

To cite this article: Mario Novelli (2004): Globalisations, social movement unionism and new internationalisms: the role ofstrategic learning in the transformation of the Municipal Workers Union of EMCALI , Globalisation, Societies and Education,2:2, 161-190

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Globalisation, Societies and EducationVol. 2, No. 2, July 2004

ISSN 1476–7724 (print)/ISSN 1476–7732 (online)/04/020161–30© 2004 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/14767720410001733638

Globalisations, social movement unionism and new internationalisms: the role of strategic learning in the transformation of the Municipal Workers Union of EMCALI

1

Mario Novelli

*

University of Bristol, UK

Taylor and Francis LtdCGSE020204.sgm10.1080/14767720410001733638Globalisation, Societies and Education1476-7724 (print)/1476-7732 (online)Original Article2004Taylor & Francis Ltd22000000July 2004MarioNovellimario.novelli@bristol.ac.uk

The paper explores processes of social movement learning within SINTRAEMCALI, a publicservice trade union in the South West of Colombia, which has successfully prevented a series ofattempts by the national government to privatise public utilities. The paper develops the concept of‘strategic learning’ and applies it to an exploration of the transformation of SINTRAEMCALI froma narrow ‘corporate’ trade union focused on the defence of members’ particular interests, to a ‘socialmovement union’ that linked workers and local communities in the defence of public services andoperated on a range of scales from the local to the global. It argues that a strategy based on a materialcritique of privatisation, mass mobilization and human rights defence, emerged out of a process of‘strategic learning’ firmly located in a detailed analysis of the complex military, political and socialrelations that exist in contemporary Colombia.

The CAM Tower occupation

On the 25 December 2001, hundreds of public service workers affiliated toSINTRAEMCALI, a public service union in the Colombian city of Cali, occupied theCAM Tower, their company’s 17-floor central administration building. Theyremained inside for 36 days. The occupation was triggered by the national govern-ment’s decision to once again attempt to privatise the company which provides elec-tricity, water and telecommunications to the city’s two million inhabitants, andabandon the worker/management ‘PARE’ plan (EMCALI Assistance and Recupera-tion Plan) which had been drawn up by the union and jointly administered withEMCALI management since May 2001.

*

GSOE, University of Bristol, 35 Berkeley Square, BS8 1JA.

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Upon entering the CAM Tower SINTRAEMCALI presented three maindemands: that plans for the privatisation and/or liquidation of EMCALI be stopped,that price increases for consumers for 2002 be frozen, and finally that a high level anti-corruption commission be set up to investigate and prosecute those who had embez-zled money out of the company over recent years, which the trade union argued wasthe main cause of the financial crisis that the company then faced.

During the course of the occupation, tens of thousands of people in Cali went tomeetings, joined marches, blocked off roads, and engaged in political protest in thedefence of EMCALI as a state-owned public utilities provider, with the vast majoritydrawn from the poorest neighbourhoods in the city.

This local trade union/community alliance was complemented by solidarity actionsboth in Bogotá, the capital, and in London, UK. In Bogotá, SINTRAEMCALI work-ers and supporters occupied the headquarters of the Superintendent of PublicServices for 14 hours while local trade unionists formed a protective cordon aroundthe building. In the United Kingdom pickets outside the Colombian embassy wereorganized on several occasions, and two live video link-ups were made between theBritish Trade Union Congress (TUC) and workers inside the Cali occupation.During key moments of the dispute interventions were made via letters and face-to-face meetings with Colombian diplomats by the British TUC, Amnesty International,Public Services International (PSI), the International Confederation of Free TradeUnions (ICFTU), UNISON, the FBU, ASLEF, War on Want, the UK basedColombia Solidarity Campaign and a range of other trade union and social organisa-tions. Furthermore, messages of support for the occupation were received by emailfrom as far a field as Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and the Philippines. After 36 daysthe Colombian government agreed to all the union’s demands, and the companyremains to date in state hands.

Given the considerable rhetoric around ‘hegemonic globalisation’ (see Boaventurade Sousa Santos in this issue) as both juggernaut and ideology that shapes all in itspath, it is important to see these events as offering a different way of understandingthe complex, contested and considerably more contingent nature of global-localdynamics. The SINTRAEMCALI case offers a concrete example of the possibilitiesof alternative ‘globalisations’ emerging, in this case, of new labour internationalisms.In mirroring the global architecture of ‘hegemonic globalisation’ alternative globali-sations operate on a range of spatial terrains from the local to the global in a processthat, in the abstract, is often referred to as ‘counter-hegemonic globalisation’. Thequestion that I ask in this paper is how did a small trade union with only 3000members spark off such a broad range of local, national and transnational support?And how did this small union manage to overturn a process of privatisation that hadthe full backing of local elites, the national government, the World Bank, the IMF,and several key multinational corporations with all the structural, political and mili-tary power that this entails?

What I will argue in this paper is that the CAM Tower Occupation, rather thanbeing understood as a spontaneous uprising against privatisation, can be seen as an‘educational outcome’ produced through several years of ‘strategic learning through

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social action’ which began internally within the trade union and spread out horizon-tally, linking local communities left out of the benefits of neoliberal globalisation, andtransnationally through a range of solidarity and human rights networks. This learn-ing process emerged in the complex and harsh conditions of a violent internal civilwar underpinned by a socio-economic crisis that had worsened since the beginning ofthe imposition of a neoliberal economic model in the early 1990s.

Prior to exploring the case of SINTRAEMCALI I first want to ground this researchin the literature relating to counter-hegemonic globalisation movements and the roleof trade unions within that process, and then explore the relationship between global-isation, these new movements and education, and offer an explanatory model of whatI understand to be strategic learning.

Counter-hegemonic globalisation movements

In recent years we have seen an upsurge in resistance to neo-liberal globalisation inmany parts of the world. There is also increased talk of a ‘movement of movements’,which encapsulates a spirit of resistance to neoliberal globalisation. From theZapatistas to the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, the demonstrations andcounter-summits/conferences, victorious struggles against privatisation in Bolivia,Peru, Cali,

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and the unprecedented global mobilizations against the US/UK led warof occupation against Iraq, observers argue that we are witnessing a re-emergence ofstruggle in a range of forms and shapes that locates itself against the homogenizingtendencies of global markets, and the political and military power that drives thatproject forward.

Much of the ‘critical’ literature of the 1980s and 1990s in the field of developmentstudies/international relations is focused either on the often devastating effects ofneoliberal policies on large parts of the world, on the working class and the poor as‘victims’ of globalisation (see Fröbel, 1979; Harvey, 1989; Amin, 1994; Chossudo-wsky, 1997; Hoogveldt, 1997; Amin, 1997; Dicken, 1998), or on ‘ruling class’agency, the supra national institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, and therole of US power (see Van der Pijl, 1984; George, 1990; Gill, 1990, 1993; Robinson,1996; Caufield, 1997; Sklair, 2001). Much of this literature emphasized the power ofcapital to shape the economic, social, political and geographical terrain, while under-playing the ability of oppositional movements and labour to challenge it. Thistendency to ‘reify’ the agency of capital and the ruling class has often reinforced,albeit unintentionally, the ‘globalisation as juggernaut’ thesis which implies that

thereis no alternative

to neoliberal globalisation (TINA).Now that resistance is more visible, there is a need to understand this phenomenon

and again see oppositional movements as ‘active agents’ and to learn from those prac-tices that have been, even if partially, successful in their objectives. A range of studieson counter hegemonic social movements is rapidly filling that gap in the research.Some studies have begun to do this through a focus on the activities and strategies ofthe transnational anti-capitalist/anti-capitalist movements (Escobar, 2000; Klein,2001; Callinicos, 2003; Sen

et al.,

2004), and others on particular social movements

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that have challenged the imperatives of hegemonic globalisation, such as the Zapatis-tas in Mexico (Holloway & Peláez, 1998), the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil(Branford & Rocha, 2002), and the anti-water privatisation movement in Bolivia(Olivera & Lewis, 2003). Much of this research takes as its focus ‘new social move-ments’ and the crucial role of indigenous, local communities, women, environmentaland other organisations that have come together and formed alliances over particularissues and struggles. These contingent alliances have more recently, particularly inLatin America, emerged as political coalitions which have sought to gain electoralsuccess at the national level.

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New labour internationalisms and social movement unionism

In the field of labour studies a crucial body of work has charted the re-emergence oftrade union struggles across the world (Moody, 1997; Herod, 1998; Waterman,2001; Munck, 2002) and sought to theorize this within the context of neoliberalglobalisation.

The literature documents two major interrelated processes occurring at a variety oflevels within the international trade union movement: new internationalism andsocial movement unionism. The first relates to trade union responses to the globali-sation of capital, and shows how trade unions and international trade secretariats arefinding new geographical terrains/spaces to wage their protests and push forward theinterests of their members (Herod, 1998, 2001; Waterman & Wills, 2001). Thisresearch highlights how trade unions are now acting across different geographical‘spaces’ and ‘scales’, mirroring capital’s newfound mobility, emphasizing that global-isation creates not only limitations but also new possibilities for social struggle. Thisprocess of ‘internationalism’, it is argued, has also been facilitated by the end of theCold War and thus the historic division between those trade unions allied to theSoviet Union, and those allied to the capitalist west (O’Brien, 2000; Munck, 2002).Some commentators argue that this presents opportunities for a new labour interna-tionalism based on principles of working class solidarity (Munck, 2002), while othersare rather more sceptical of how much the practices of the dominant InternationalConfederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) have changed (Waterman, 2001;Hodkinson, 2003).

While many authors recognize that the ‘internationalism’ of activity is important,they also assert that the question of trade union renewal is not only about new globalscales of operation, but also the internal re-organisation of trade unions into what hasbeen termed ‘social movement unionism’. This second body of research (see Moody,1997; Waterman, 2001) focuses on what I call the ‘

horizontalisation

’ of trade unionstructures, and has appeared to argue for a more rank and file democratic unionismthat can interact and ally with other social groups and movements that have beenmarginalized by processes of neoliberal globalisation. This literature stresses that the‘old social movements’ are not the only historical subject, but that there are a pluralityof resisting subjects: environmentalists, community activists, indigenous organisa-tions, women’s movements, non-unionised labour, and that trade union renewal

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takes the form of articulating union struggles in alliance with these different ‘resistingsubjects’.

Neoliberal globalisation fragments communities through processes of flexibilisa-tion of labour, underemployment and increases in unemployment. Therefore, a keytask for labour movement organizers is to reunite fragmented communities under neworganisational forms. It also recognizes that in the era of neoliberal globalisation andthe collapse of corporate social pacts between labour and capital across the world,labour unions no longer have ‘an automatic seat’ at the table in negotiations, and thatmobilization of members and allies, as a means of pressuring corporations and states,has now become much more important.

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In social movement union literature there is an explicit emphasis on the need toaddress the binary between economics and politics that has developed over thedecades during previous ‘social pacts’. Simply put, trade unions were perceived asresponsible for the day-to-day economic necessities of their members, while socialdemocratic parties were responsible for developing the political interests of the work-ing classes. The early literature on social movement unionism focused on SouthAfrica, Brazil and the Philippines, and it is important to note that in the absence oflegal political parties (the ANC in South Africa, for example, was banned) in author-itarian regimes or military dictatorships, the trade union movement was often forcedinto a more political role by virtue of it being the only legal expression of popularaspirations.

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Furthermore, these movements were also ‘pro-democracy movements’calling for the restoration or implementation of democratic regimes. More recentliterature has noted the emergence of similar tendencies towards more politicisedsocial movement unions in the United States and Europe (Moody, 1997; Johnston,2000).

These literatures challenge Castell’s (1997, p. 354) thesis that the labour move-ment would just ‘fade away’ under conditions of neoliberal globalisation. Instead,they highlight how ‘just like capitalism, trade unions as a social movement are capableof mutation, transformation and regeneration’ (Munck, 2002, p. 190). Despite this,far less intellectual inquiry has been devoted to exploring how these trade unionstransformed their activity, the nature of the specific processes through which tradeunions became aware of the need to change tactics, and how they developed thesenew strategies. In these processes, education and learning appear crucial, yet they arelargely absent in the literature.

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In the next section I will attempt to begin to bridgethat gap.

Education as foundation for social change

Bernard Cassen of ATTAC (Association pour la Taxe Tobin pour l’Aide aux Citoy-ens),

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one of the most important new movements to emerge in Europe against theeffects of neoliberal globalisation, and a founding partner of the World Social Forumprocess, sees his organisation as primarily an ‘action-oriented movement of populareducation’ (Cassen, 2003, p. 45). In essence he saw its function as equippingmembers with the necessary knowledge to deal with the contemporary globalising era.

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In his words, ‘militants must be well-informed, intellectually equipped for action’(2003, p. 45).

The importance of education in the contemporary era has not been lost on thoseengaged in processes of hegemonic globalisation, and it is common to hear corpora-tions talking of themselves as ‘learning organisations’, discussing the ‘learning soci-ety’, the ‘information society’ and recognizing the need to set up structures able tochange and adapt to new circumstances, (be that fast capitalism, lean production orflexible accumulation), which reflect the need for more mobile structures and a work-force skilled to adapt to a fast changing environment (Ranson, 1994; Jarvis, 2001). Inthis context it appears logical to examine in what ways counter hegemonic move-ments are taking seriously the necessity to rethink strategies through processes ofresearch, investigation and learning.

Beyond ‘instrumental’ understandings of education and learning as providing ‘newskills’, education plays a key role in raising political consciousness. In the battle ofhearts and minds it could be argued that education is a key process for contestationin the struggle to develop a counter-hegemonic movement and incorporate new alliesinto the political project. As Gramsci notes, every ‘revolution has been preceded byan intense labour of criticism’, and in reference to the French Revolution he arguesthat ‘The bayonets of Napoleon’s armies found their road already smoothed by aninvisible army of books and pamphlets that had swarmed out of Paris in the first halfof the eighteenth century and had prepared both men and institutions for the neces-sary renewal’ (Gramsci, 1977, p. 12). Within this process, Gramsci talked of theimportant role of ‘organic intellectuals’, committed to an alternative counter-hege-monic project and able to articulate, strategize and transmit this to broader publics(Gramsci, 1986, pp. 3–24). While Gramsci often portrayed this function rathermechanistically and unidirectional, another influential Marxist educator, PaoloFreire, would later provide a far more dialectical conceptualisation of this process.

Popular education in Latin America and counter-hegemony

In searching for models of education that can be deployed in the service of counterhegemony, Latin America provides a fertile ground. ‘Popular education’, initiallyproposed by Paolo Freire, has captured the imagination of many social movementsseeking to challenge elite structures of domination. In Nicaragua, the work of‘popular educators’ prepared the ground for the 1979 Sandinista revolution(Arnove, 1986), and one can see the legacy of Freire’s work being continuedthroughout the continent. According to Freire (2000), true education was notunidirectional but a ‘dialogical’ process between teachers and learners: leaderscannot merely tell activists what to do. If this occurs, then even a victory is ahollow achievement. Nor can education ever be understood as ‘neutral’—quite theopposite. It is a process riven with power differentials and placed at the service ofcompeting political projects.

Popular education is seen as one of the vehicles through which the process ofchallenging unequal structures can be achieved (Kane, 2001). It has at its centre a

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fundamental commitment to social change in the interests of the ‘popular’ classes.

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Furthermore, there is a direct relationship between this type of education, and theinstitutions and organisations that have historically emerged to defend the interestsof the poor, such as trade unions and social movements, and seeks explicitly tostrengthen these movements (Jara, 1989, cited in Kane, 2001, p. 9). This organicrelationship means that the ‘organisation’ becomes the ‘school’ in which populareducation takes place, and their ‘struggles and actions, their forms of organisation,their ‘culture’, in the broadest sense, constitute the starting point of popular educa-tion and its ongoing field of enquiry’ (Kane, 2001, p. 13).

In that sense ‘popular education’ needs to be seen as not only involving formaleducational events, but is part of much bigger processes which, though appearing‘informal’ and ‘arbitrary,’ are very deliberate. In this definition, both the ‘populareducation’ events that take place, and the actual practice of ‘strategy development’and ‘protest actions’ can be seen as examples of popular education whereby the‘school’ (the social movement) learns. The first occurs whereby people consciouslyengage in educational practices (schooling), and the second whereby people are learn-ing through social action. Foley (1999) suggests that a broad conception of educationand learning should include formal education (taking place in educational institu-tions), incidental learning (taking place as we live, work and engage in social action),informal education (where people teach and learn from each other in workplaces,families, communities, social movements) and non-formal education (structuredsystematic teaching and learning in a range of social settings).

If we are to capture these processes, then we need to cast our net beyond formaltraining courses for activists and develop an analytical framework that can be more‘open’ and allow for the rich diversity of ways that social movements (their activistsand supporters) engage in learning. In studying these different types of education andlearning Foley (1999, p. 10) suggests that this needs to be firmly grounded in an anal-ysis of the political economy, ideology and discourse of the focus of study andsuggests several key questions that can ground this:

●

What forms do education and learning take?

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What are the crucial features of the political and economic context? How do theseshape education and learning?

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What are the micro-politics of the situation?

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What are the ideological and discursive practices and struggles of social movementactors and their opponents? To what extent do these practices and struggles facil-itate or hinder emancipatory learning and action?

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What does this all mean for education? What interventions are possible and help-ful?

In order to address these questions and operationalise the notion of learning andeducation taking place within time and space through struggle and contestation, whatis needed is a dynamic model that can capture the dialectics of this process. Hay(1995) talks of ‘strategic learning’ and offers a useful diagram to highlight it as aprocess in motion:

Strategic learning

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Hay’s model provides a way of theorizing the process whereby a social movementengages in strategic analysis leading to strategic action, which in turn leads tointended and unintended consequences of action. This then leads to further reflec-tion/analysis and action. The agency of the social movement itself is immersed instructural constraints, which provide possibilities as well as limitations, and the stra-tegic action often changes the structures upon which it acts. Throughout these entireprocesses, incidental, formal, informal and non-formal education will be taking placeand influencing strategy and outcomes to differing degrees.

In the rest of the paper I want to apply the strategic learning framework to a casestudy of SINTRAEMCALI in order to highlight the dynamic development of theunion as it transformed itself in the early 1990s from a corporate trade union fightinglocally for its memberships particular interests to a social movement union leading atransnational movement in defence of public services in Cali.

SINTRAEMCALI and strategic learning

Before beginning my analysis of SINTRAEMCALI I want to lay out three key aspectsof the relationship between the state and social forces in Colombia which both under-pinned and in turn shaped the events that followed: these are the military, social andpolitical relations:

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●

Military relations

. Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world to be a tradeunionist. Trade union leaders and activists suffer from a systematic policy of assas-sination, intimidation and persecution carried out by paramilitary organisations

Figure 1. Strategic learning

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(‘death squads’) linked to the Colombian state.

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Over 4000 trade unionists havebeen assassinated since 1986 (CUT, 2004). There are, on average, between 6 and8000 political assassinations per year, and over 2.9 million people are internallydisplaced out of a population of 45 million. A low-level civil war has been foughtout between Marxist guerrilla and state and para-state forces for several decades,and that conflict has intensified in recent years. In common with other US allies,Colombia has received extensive military support and training in ‘counterinsur-gency’ from its ‘partner’ in the North. This has led to the conscious blurring of theline between combatants and civilians with trade union and social movementssystematically targeted by both state and para-state forces in what is known as a ‘dirtywar’.

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In the post Cold War era the ‘communist’ threat was refashioned into the‘narcotics’ threat, and Colombia’s now infamous role as cocaine producer hasprovided the justification for increased US intervention via Plan Colombia, a multi-billion dollar (largely military) aid package aimed at eliminating drugs and the‘narco-guerrillas’ and ‘narco-terrorists’ that allegedly live off this. The language haschanged, but the targets and tactics of counterinsurgency continue (Stokes, 2001,2004). For Colombian trade union and social leaders and activists it is this dirtywar and the fear that it produces shapes their lives. Many trade union leaders andactivists now carry weapons for self-defence while trade union headquarters havebeen bullet-proofed. Many of the most prominent leaders are forced into a semiclandestine life as they carry out their internationally recognized right to organizeand form trade unions.

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Social relations

. The reason for the severity of the conflict in Colombia, outlinedabove, lies in the fact that underpinning the military conflict is a deeply rootedsocial conflict being fought over the distribution of the benefits of Colombia’s richnatural, agricultural, and human resources. The country has vast deposits of coal,emeralds, oil, ferronickel, gold, and water; a fertile agricultural terrain which makesColombia a leading producer of coffee, flowers, and bananas, and a large pool ofskilled and unskilled labour available at a fraction of the cost of workers in theindustrialized north (Fernandez, 2003). Geopolitically and geostrategically it islocated at the crossroads by land and by sea to a range of crucial transnationalcommunication links (Petras, 2001). Topographically it is also a highly mountain-ous country, making state territorial control a difficult task. This, coupled with itsfertility, helps to explain why it has become one of the world’s major producers ofillegal narcotics, particularly cocaine and opium.

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This conflict has been intensified since the beginning of the imposition of a neolib-eral economic model in the early 1990s. The shift in economic model has ledcampesinos, indigenous communities, black communities, social organisations andtrade unionists to engage in popular struggles to hold on to their land, theirresources, their rights and to the wealth and independence of their nation as thegovernment attempted to push through privatisation policies, develop mega-projects, create tax free ‘export zones’, reform labour laws, and cutback on stateand social benefits. Trade union membership has dropped as a consequence of thedirty war, but also as a result of state sector employment being reduced and/or

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workers fired and then re-hired under new terms and conditions much inferior tobefore

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new labour reforms have been pushed through, despite mass opposition,while overtime payments have been eliminated, increasing the length of the work-ing week, and making it easier for employers to fire workers.

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Opening up the agri-cultural sector to external competition has meant that large sectors of agriculturehave all but collapsed, with over a million hectares of arable land abandoned(Ahumada, 2001, p. 36). Likewise, industrial production saw a year-on-year fallduring the 1990s, affecting particularly (though not exclusively) small and mediumproducers (Ahumada, 2001, p. 40). According to official government statistics,unemployment has risen from 10.5% in 1990 to its highest levels this century; in2001 unemployment reached 20.4%. The informal labour sector increased from52.7% in 1996 to 60.3% in 2000, with an estimated 80% of these workers fallingoutside the social security system and not earning enough to survive (ENS, 2003).Not surprisingly, this skewed development model has according to the WorldBank’s own figures left 64% of the population living below the poverty line (WorldBank, 2002).

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Ironically, arguments that neo-liberal economic reforms would-kick start theColombian economy have proved illusory, and growth, on average, stagnatedduring the period. While in the 1980s GNP grew on average 4%, in the 1990s itgrew only 2.6%, the lowest in a century. In 1998 there was zero growth, and in1999 it was –5%. Meanwhile, despite claims that austerity measures would reducethe public debt, this has multiplied over the last decade (Ahumada, 1998, 2001;Castillo, 2000; Nueva Gaceta, 2001).

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While, as the above highlights, many have been excluded from the benefits ofneoliberalism, there have also been winners. This is reflected in the transfer ofwealth during the decade. In 1990 the ratio of income between the poorest andrichest 10% was 1:40, at the end of the decade that rested at 1:80 (Palacio, 2001,p. 89). The strengthening of the local elite during the 1990s has been matched bya marked upsurge in foreign direct investment as multinational corporations fromthe US, Japan and Europe benefited from new laws allowing increased foreigninvolvement in natural resource extraction, the privatisation of public services andstate companies and the liberalization of the financial sector, and thus now controllarge sectors of the Colombian economy. This polarization of extreme wealth andpoverty has produced what Santos (1998) calls ‘societal fascism’. In this case, whilethe rich live in luxury, gated communities, the poor reside in ghettoes excludedfrom basic human rights and are subject to highly repressive policing.

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Political relations.

The political configuration of forces pushing forward the neolib-eral project in Colombia can be understood by drawing on Gill’s (2002, p. 118)idea of the ‘supremacist historical bloc’. Gill’s notion draws upon a confrontationalrather then consensus model of governance and is based on an alliance between asmall elite backed by transnational capital and US military power. This ‘suprema-cist bloc’ develops a range of coercive measures to defend the highly unequal devel-opment model from those ever increasing populations that are left out. As theeconomic and social crisis worsened in the late 1990s, and the civil war intensified

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with the introduction of Plan Colombia, traditional authority was fragmented. Thetwo traditional parties, the liberals and the conservative, who shared power sincethe 1850s, saw their support bases weaken (Pizarro Leongómez, 2002) as old clien-telist politics failed to deliver to the masses left out of the neoliberal economicmodel. At the same time sections of the elite, particularly those based in agricul-tural production and smaller industries, lost out to foreign imports. Emerging outof this crisis was a neo-fascist project headed by the controversial ex-governor ofAntioquia, Alvaro Uribe Velez, who, on a central pledge to end the internal civilwar militarily, eventually became President in 2002. During his time as governorof Antioquia he was central in setting up armed civilian organisations(‘CONVIVIR’), which eventually became paramilitary organisations. His electionsignified a political victory for the paramilitary organisations in Colombia and anescalation of the armed conflict (Hylton, 2003).

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From oppositional social forces there has also been a similar crisis of legitimacy.This can be partly explained through the more global effects that the collapse ofthe Soviet Bloc has had on the left internationally. However, other factors, such asthe effectiveness of the ‘dirty war’ and the fear that it creates for any alternativesolutions, the tactic of kidnapping (the ELN) and allegations of involvement indrug production (the FARC) have also all had a negative effect on the image andlegitimacy of the guerrilla. A new political attempt to unite those forces left out ofthe benefits of neoliberalism began in the late 1990s with the foundation of theSocial and Political Front. This Front sought to create a broad social democraticpolitical alliance of ‘social’ movements, trade unions, and ‘political’ organisations.In the 2002 elections this was incorporated into a broader electoral front—the‘Polo Democratico’ (Democratic Pole) which has, since then, made substantialelectoral gains.

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There remain, however, significant tensions within the alliance.

Taken together, these different aspects combined into what Gramsci (1986)termed an ‘organic crisis’ of the state, whereby in the economic, the political and themilitary there exists a situation of generalized crisis. It is within this complicatedconfiguration of social, political and military relations that the conflict betweenSINTRAEMCALI and the state takes place.

The emergence of trade union renewal

The impulse to begin a process of transformation within SINTRAEMCALI resultedfrom the recognition that the way the union had operated up to 1991 was no longereither appropriate or sufficient for the successful defence of public services in the cityunder conditions of neoliberal globalisation (interview with Alexander Lopez, the ex-President of SINTRAEMCALI, 2002). In the early 1990s the trade union was facedwith the threat of privatisation, emanating from changes in the 1991 constitution.This change removed the obligation of the Colombian state from being the ‘soleprovider’ of public services, to that of being ‘regulator’ (interview with NelsonSanchez, SINTRAEMCALI financial adviser, 2002), paving the way for legislation

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to facilitate privatisation in public utilities, which was enacted in Law 142 (1994) and143 (1994), the latter specifically for electricity.

According to Alexander Lopez (who would lead the transformation of the union),prior to the new legislation, SINTRAEMCALI ‘was just a calm, normal union work-ing on normal grievances’ (En Camino, 2003). However, the new environment forcedthe organisation to rethink its strategic direction. Yet there was nothing automatic ordeterministic about the new more ‘movement’ direction that the union would take.In many countries neoliberal globalisation ushered in ‘business unionism’ (Moody,1997) which attempted to accommodate capital’s drive to cut costs and improveproductivity at the expense of its members’ terms and conditions. This may well havebeen the course for SINTRAEMCALI had it not been for a radical break in leader-ship that occurred in the second half of the 1990s.

The new leadership emerged from a rank and file committee that was born in thesewerage section of the company. The initial challenge to the union leadership wasrelated to the ‘deplorable working conditions’ in the sewerage section: lack of disin-fectants, protective clothing, and hygiene facilities. As they began to organize andmobilize these conditions improved and, as a result, a group of around 250 workersbegan to develop a political direction within the union itself. It met twice a week inthe plant to discuss the situation of the company and the country. The group becameknown as the ‘comité de base’ (rank and file committee). From the early improve-ments in working conditions the group began to push for political representation inthe Executive Committee of the union. Alexander Lopez was chosen as the candidate,and eventually entered SINTRAEMCALI’s Executive Committee in 1994. Insidethe union’s leadership there was deep suspicion concerning the intentions of thisgroup, and Alexander Lopez was immediately marginalized. However, after sustainedpressure from the ‘comité de base’ he was eventually given the position of treasurer.

The position of treasurer allowed him to investigate the finances of the union andduring this period he discovered irregularities in the handling of money by some ofthe union leadership. He denounced the irregularities at the Workers Assemblies

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and became a ‘stone in the shoe’ (interview with Alexander Lopez, 2002) for theunion leadership, whilst simultaneously gaining credibility amongst the workers, andstrengthening his position within the union.

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From modest beginnings the ‘comitéde base’ would begin to develop in other directions and lay the foundations for thelater transformation of the union.

In the first half of the 1990s the process of privatisation in Colombia was set inmotion. During this period a consensus was being developed amongst trade unionistson what was at stake, focused particularly on questions of national sovereignty andcitizenship rights:

We were clear that behind a privatisation, behind the sale of a public service, in the caseof water, or electricity we were handing over national territory and if we look at thescenario of telecommunications and electricity we were handing over the aerial space, theelectromagnetic spectre and all our resources in these areas, and when we refer to watercompanies we are handing over a source of natural resources represented in the rich virginforests that we have in our country. (Interview with Alexander Lopez, 2002)

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In Cali, the union developed a range of activities against the planned privatisation ofEMCALI by the then mayor of Cali, Mauricio Guzmán. This included a six-dayoccupation of the work-plants in 1996. However, this failed to achieve its objectivesand resulted in over 600 workers being suspended from work for 60 days and theunion itself being fined. This defeat was a bitter blow, and paved the way for thecontinuing plans for privatisation of the company (interview with Alexander Lopez,2002). That defeat led Alexander Lopez to deepen the internal educational processestaking place in the union:

We started travelling from work plant to work plant, and brought some comrades fromother unions at the national level to share their experiences with the EMCALI workers.Each one would come and stay for a couple of weeks, even up to a month, and in that waywe began regular work in each of the plants, in each of the work places to chat and discussthe real situation of the company. We also developed at that time a very important tradeunion education course with the teacher Eduardo Umana Mendoza

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and with membersof USO (Petrol Workers Union), ETB (Bogotá Telecommunication Workers Union),SINTRAMUNICIPIO Jumbo (Municipal Workers Union of Jumbo), and comrades fromother unions who came and gave talks and seminars to the workers. (Interview with Alex-ander Lopez, 2002)

It was during these non-formal educational events that the union began to develop acadre of committed workers, which today are known as the ‘base fuerte’ (strong base)and the ‘base consciente’ (conscious base) of workers in the union who continue tosustain its activities. With support inside the union for a radical shift in direction,Alexander Lopez assumed increasing power. In 1996 he was joined by two other closeallies from the sewerage plant, Luis Hernandez Monroy and Robinson Masso, in theExecutive Committee of SINTRAEMCALI. From that stage onwards the unionbegan to take on the form of a social movement. As Johnston (2000, p. 3) notes:

When labor surfaces as a social movement … it typically produces and in turn depends forits development on a very specific type of labor organisation: labor as a social movementorganisation. Social movement organisations broadcast agendas for social change andmobilize, support and deploy networks of membership and collective action in support ofthose agendas.

Once support had been won for a radical challenge to privatisation then the questionbecame one of strategy. How could the union take on a highly repressive state and itstransnational allies in the complex conditions of Colombia?

Challenging privatisation: material critique, mobilization strategies and human rights

In terms of the strategic development of the union, and the process of learning andeducation within that, we can isolate three major trajectories, which provided aresponse to the military, social and political environment that I outlined above. Thefirst trajectory was the ongoing development of a material critique of Colombian statearguments over the causes of, and solutions to, the financial crisis in EMCALI. Thiscan be seen as the development of an alternative critique of both past practice and the

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development of an alternative plan for the future provision of public services in statehands. This challenged the discursive strategies of the state to portray public servicesas naturally inefficient. It also critiqued the TINA philosophy and highlighted that,unlike privatisation (which would benefit national elites and transnational corpora-tions) EMCALI could be managed efficiently and in the interests of the community.The second trajectory recognized the conflictual nature of any alternative develop-ment plans and the necessity to construct alternative ‘power’ mechanisms to defendand expand the ‘propositions’ being developed. It recognized that the social forcesintent on privatising EMCALI would not be persuaded by words alone, and thusmass mobilization and direct action had to be deployed. Thirdly, there was a humanrights trajectory which emerged as a defensive response to state and para-state repres-sion, but as it developed also became the tool for gaining new political spaces andserved as the vehicle for the ‘transnationalisation’ of SINTRAEMCALI’s activity.

Plan PARE: alternative economic strategy

From the early process of trade union renewal in the 1990s, there had alreadyemerged a collective understanding of the notion of public services being a questionof national sovereignty. What was lacking was a negative critique of the neoliberalarguments on the inefficiency of public services along with a positive critique of howpublic services within EMCALI could become more efficient. The pursuit of theanswers to these questions would lead to the development of the Plan PARE for therecuperation of the company, a pedagogical process of Action Research, which canbe divided into three fairly clear periods.

Stage one: uncovering corruption

The first period dating from around 1995 to1999 was focused on investigation ofcorruption inside the company and its relationship to local and national political andeconomic elites. This emerged directly as a result of the trade union’s need to refutethe local and national government’s assertions that EMCALI, as a state owned publicservice provider, was economically unviable. ‘Anti-corruption teams’ were set up inall the different workplants to monitor management activities, gather documents andanalyse the evidence drawing on SINTRAEMCALI’s financial and legal advisers toassist. During this process it was discovered that in the latter half of the decadeEMCALI’s debt had increased from 36 thousand million pesos to 500 thousandmillion Colombian pesos, and that much of this money had been wasted on severallarge ‘joint venture’ infrastructural projects between EMCALI, local private corpora-tions and foreign multinationals (SINTRAEMCALI, 2000; Revista Valle, 2000).

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Uncovering corruption in EMCALI served as a powerful counter tool to critiqueWorld Bank/IMF and Colombian elite arguments that ‘national industries’ werenecessarily inefficient. The union uncovered evidence and presented legal chargesshowing that up to 1 billion Colombian pesos was siphoned off in corrupt practicesduring the 1990s (Desde Abajo, 2003). The union argued that it was corrupt officials

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linked to foreign multinational private interests, not worker inefficiency, that haddriven the company towards bankruptcy, and that more transparency and workersparticipation could remedy the situation. The union highlighted that total salarycosts, including pensions, represented only 28% of total company income, while thedebt accrued through corrupt practices amounted to 70% of income. It was, theyargued, those in charge of the company during this period of bad administration andresponsible for the crisis that were pushing through plans to privatise the companyand hide their corrupt practices once and for all (Desde Abajo, 2003).

What this research and investigation highlighted was that the problems of EMCALI didnot stem for the salaries of the workers, nor that the business was unviable, but that thefinances of EMCALI had been put at risk by local political clientelism linked to multina-tional corporations … this began to widen out the critique away from merely corruptiontowards a broader understanding of the situation. And this led us to begin an analysis ofthe aggressive factors facing the company. (Interview with Nelson Sanchez, 2002)

These ‘aggressive factors’ were the debt, the PTAR (water treatment plant),Termoemcali (a power plant), the lack of provision for pension payments, and thelack of operational savings, and all of this led to the setting up of the second stage ofthe Action Research Project.

Stage two: alternative development strategy

The second stage, from early 1999 to May 2001, saw the shift from a negative critiqueof the company’s present and past management strategies towards the positive devel-opment of an alternative management plan based on making EMCALI a viableeconomic unit rooted in the interests of the community. In early 1999 an advisoryteam made up of lawyers, financial analysts, business administrators, and experts inpublic service utility providers was set up. This group worked alongside professionalsinside the company who were supportive of the union’s position: around 50 peoplerepresented most of the different workplants and offices. The advisers ensured thatthe trade union would integrate within its ‘social discourse’ a component of efficientbusiness management (interview with Nelson Sanchez, 2002).

The organisation was led by the union and worked with the ‘anti-corruptioncommission’ that already existed under the leadership of Robinson Masso and LuisHernandez. It was a multi-disciplinary organisation, an external team that coordi-nated with each one of the management teams from the different sections, and withthem began to develop positions for the recuperation of the company.

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In August 1999 SINTRAEMCALI called a weekend meeting for all those workers,technicians and professionals that wanted to join the union in its plan for the salvationof EMCALI. Around 120 people attended. This meeting can be seen as the beginningof the shift from a negative to a positive critique of the company, and represents animportant milestone in the union’s development.

We began with a presentation by the advisory team on the changing reality of the situationin the country for public services in a globalised world. This was crucial because the work-

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ers had to understand ‘gain consciousnesses’ about the impact of neoliberal policies inLatin America and in Europe. This was firmly located in the changed constitution of 1991which despite having some democratic gains, altered the hegemony of public services ascontrolled solely by the state—as a social function of the state, and represented a breakfrom Keynesian state intervention. (Interview with Nelson Sanchez, 2002)

The new constitution by shifting the state role from ‘provider’ to ‘regulator’, allowedfor the entry of private capital into areas which had previously been the social respon-sibility of the state: to guarantee basic health, drinking water, sewerage treatment,management of the environment, the electromagnetic space. The union began toquestion the ability of ‘private interests’ to deliver ‘social goods’ and presented thehandover of national natural resources to foreign corporations as a threat to nationalsovereignty (interview with Nelson Sanchez, 2002).

All of that discussion provided the catalyst for the plans that were later drawn up.It was a meeting of sharing knowledge, of marketing, engineering, economics,finance, and designing the ideal company; the company that the participants aspiredto. The weekend meeting developed an analysis of the future of the company in clas-sic business terms, of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The companywas conceptualised as a ‘business platform’ with a social function. For Sanchez, thisshift from merely denouncing corruption to proposing alternatives ‘allowed us tomake a qualitative leap forward in the populist vision of the trade union leadership’(interview with Nelson Sanchez, 2002).

For the leadership of the union the implications were clear; the future struggle forthe defence of EMCALI as a state owned company was ‘not a trade union theme …but eminently social and political’ (interview with Nelson Sanchez, 2002) and thusrequired a broad based trade union/community alliance. For this to be achieved theunion needed to reframe the problem of EMCALI away from a conflict betweenSINTRAEMCALI and the state towards a conflict between Cali citizens and thestate. The problem prior to that was that the union was accused of merely defendingits own members’ interests. However, with a shift in discourse and focus, the unioncould not be so easily attacked by the government and media as it turned its focus onthe social and political issues facing the city produced by the economic model beingimposed from without.

Emerging out of the development plan was a clearer understanding of the financialviability of the company and the underlying reasons why the company was attractingthe attention of a range of multinational corporations engaged in water, electricity andtelecommunications delivery. The reason for this lay both in the unique geostrategicposition of the company, located as the company closest to the Pacific Costal port thatprovides for the exportation of 80% of all Colombian production, and 90% of allimports, and also in the resource and institutional capacity of the company whichprovided water, electricity, and telecommunications to 2 million users, and had thecapacity to expand that greatly (SINTRAEMCALI, 2003a).

Control of EMCALI for the multinational corporations would allow them to linkthis rich technological platform with others running across Latin America. The taskof the Plan PARE team was to develop a business plan for the company that allowed

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it to run both efficiently and socially. Emerging out of this was a plan that would cutwastage in the company via new work practices, reduce upper level management bygiving workers increasing control over production, and renegotiate the external debtwith creditors.

One of the crucial strategies that the plan addressed was overcoming misunder-standings between EMCALI workers and local communities. There was a problemwithin EMCALI that could not just be explained by corrupt management practices.There existed a certain level of complicity between workers and managers in the weakperformance of the company, and a lack of ‘service ethic’ in the performance of dutiescarried out by the workforce. This poor ‘service ethic’ served to legitimate govern-ment and media accusations that the workers gained from good salary and benefitsprovided by the company at the expense of the community. There was a need tochange the attitude of workers as well as the attitude of the local community towardsthem. This required a sustained process of education on both sides, and a meetingpoint whereby workers and local communities could come together (interview withAlexander Lopez, 2002). The question that was then posed to SINTRAEMCALIwas how to break down these barriers, and demonstrate to the poorest sections of thecommunity that the trade union was not fighting for itself but for all those sections ofthe Cali community suffering from the effects of neoliberalism.

This process of building up relations with the local community had begun in themid 1990s, and was aimed at raising the ‘political consciousness’ of the local margin-alized communities:

This is the objective of our organisation, to educate the people, to generate education‘obrero-popular’ (worker-popular). That means that both the workers and the communityneed to learn their rights, their constitution, to develop their sense of belonging, of classconsciousness, and to move closer to what it means to defend ‘the public’, to become partof the process of struggling for sovereignty. (Interview with Lucho Hernandez, 2002)

This community work ranged from public meetings, to workshops, to the setting upof the SINTRAEMCALI Institute,

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to joining in local community demonstrationsand protests:

We have done this work in a whole range of neighbourhoods over the last five years. Wehave been working in the neighbourhoods with the ‘popular sector’, with some of the mostmarginalized sectors. Many of these are citizens without work, with their spirit broken. Wetry to raise their spirits and their consciousness so that they can go on living, not from aperspective of a process of begging, as the politicians do in this country, but through aprocess of organisation and struggle. In this I think we have played an important role inthis educational process. Many of these social sectors have responded positively to thesocial struggles of the trade union organisation and joined in the support of SINTRAEM-CALI because they recognize that we are an organisation of struggle … an organisationabove all that struggles for social rights and which has become a true defender of the rightsof the Cali community and the Colombian people. (Interview with Lucho Hernandez,2002)

A further initiative aimed at forging stronger links with the local community was thesetting up of ‘Minga Comunitarios’,

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whereby EMCALI workers would give up one

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weekend per month and carry out repairs and damage to infrastructure in the poorestareas of the city. These developed as a form of ‘popular fiesta’ with educational andcultural events, music, food and dancing and extended to the participation of othertrade unions leading to the provision of free health care consultancy, hairdressing andlegal advice. While the actual economic importance of the ‘minga comunitario’s’ wassubstantial, they also had a symbolic value, which was equally important. Here youhad the community and workers engaged in voluntary work together in the poorestareas in the city. For EMCALI workers it served to promote a spirit of solidarity withlocal communities and pride in their company; for the communities it allowed for abetter understanding of the objectives and activities of the union and how these relateto their own struggles. It also allowed for the union activists to bring the problems ofEMCALI to the communities, counter the arguments of the mainstream media, andaddress any worries and questions. This process also served to shift the culture andattitude of many of the EMCALI workers:

There has been a closening of links with the community which has changed the mentalityof the workers, so that they don’t see consumers of EMCALI as clients, but see them asowners whom we are defending, as the owners of this company … we have tried to changethe culture of the workers and this has resulted in the community seeing us in a differentlight, it has been important in changing the attitude towards the provision of services, tobe attentive to the needs of the community, it has meant a big change on the part of theworkers, but also a change in the relationship on the part of the community. (Interviewwith Alexander Lopez, 2002)

The Plan PARE was presented in 1999 but not accepted either by the management,the local council, or the Superintendent of Public Services. From that point on theunion began to confront the Superintendent of Public Services, link up with otherunions, and provide a critique of the neoliberal economic model that was beingapplied. Two crucial factors intervened to change the political situation in favour ofthe union’s proposals (interview with Nelson Sanchez, 2002, p. 7). The first was therevelation of corruption at the highest levels of government relating to private sectorinvolvement in public service provision.

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Coupled with increased revelations ofcorruption within EMCALI, local elections for the Mayor were won by an indepen-dent candidate Jon Maro Rodriguez

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who stood on a platform of anti-corruption andwas actively supported by the union. Jon Maro Rodriguez began his term of office onthe 1 January 2001 and the new mayor committed himself to implementing the PlanPARE, which was initiated in May 2001. This represented another strategic leap forthe union, as they now had an ally in local government, which ‘officially’ controlledthe company.

Stage three: implementing Plan PARE

In May 2001 Juan Manuel Pulido was appointed as General Manager of EMCALIand began to implement the Plan PARE. This situation finally provided the unionwith the chance to put into practice its plan, and EMCALI workers began to co-manage the company. Not everyone at local or state level was happy and two

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narratives emerged concerning the company’s future. The first, emanating fromthe Superintendent of Public Services and widely broadcast in the media, arguedthat EMCALI was financially inviable and needed external capitalization. Thesecond, emerging from the local mayor and the manager (Juan Manuel Pulido)argued that EMCALI was a good business and potentially highly profitable. Thisgenerated a ‘break/fissure of power within national government’ (interview withNelson Sanchez, 2002).

During the seven months of implementing the Plan PARE there was a notable shiftin the financial fortunes of the company:

In the seven months we achieved a reversal of the deficitary tendency of the company, andalthough the prediction for that period was that we would end with a deficit of threehundred million pesos in fact we ended in credit … the structure of the budget changedradically because in the recuperation plan for EMCALI we gave priority to cuttingexpenses and generating new sources of income, and attacking corrupt practices. Thus forthe first time in seven years the company had a viable budget, that being a balance betweenoutgoings and expenses. (Interview with Nelson Sanchez, 2002)

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While the reversal of economic fortune was celebrated by all those involved in thePlan PARE, there was deep anxiety amongst the government of the example thatEMCALI might be setting. Rumours began to surface relating to the government’sintentions to overturn the Plan PARE, which they duly attempted to do on 24December 2001. This triggered the 36-day occupation (interview with NelsonSanchez, 2002).

Mobilization strategy

In opposition to those that understand the process of development as being somehowa technical phenomenon, I want to highlight the fundamentally conflictual nature ofthat process and what that meant for the development of a strategy for the defence ofEMCALI as a state owned public service. As a result of the union’s decision to chal-lenge the attempts of the Colombian government to privatise EMCALI the union wasforced to develop a range of defensive methods of mobilization to oppose governmentplans. The balance between the necessity of exerting pressure on the Colombiangovernment, and the need to build a broad base of support in the city of Cali and itsenvirons meant the careful selection and utilization of mobilization strategies.

The logic of numbers, the logic of material damage, and the logic of bearing witness(Della Porta & Diani, 1999, p. 178) are seen as three broad rationales behind formsof protest. SINTRAEMCALI’s tactics are often a combination of all these, with massbased, colourful demonstrations, blockades and mass meetings that would oftenblock traffic and bring the city to a standstill. The trademark of the union from 1994became the ‘occupation’ of high profile buildings, a highly symbolic tool whichfocused attention on an issue, raised the question of ‘control’ but did not inflict mate-rial damage on the company. Nor did it cause unnecessary inconvenience to thegeneral public. In SINTRAEMCALI’s presentation at the World Social Forum,Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2003 (SINTRAEMCALI, 2003b), they highlighted a list of

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their ‘most important actions’, and one can clearly see the preference for this partic-ular type of action:

Peaceful Occupations: Spanish Embassy, August 1994; National Council, Bogotá,November 1994; Murillo Toro Park, Ibagué, 1995; Departmental Government, Valle,1995; EMCALI workplants for 6 six days, 1996; EMCALI workplants, 1997; MunicipalAdministration, 1997; CAM Tower, EMCALI Central Administration 16 days, Septem-ber, 1998; Municipal Administration, 1998, 1999; 2000; CAM Tower, EMCALI CentralAdministration 36 days, December, 2001.

The occupation became the learnt tool of action, one that surfaced every time therewas a serious conflict. Within the union, a core of several hundred activists had beeninvolved in the majority of the occupations since 1994. They had, over the years,developed a clear understanding of what to do, how to do it, and felt comfortable inthe environment. They had become ‘occupation experts’ (Interview with G,

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2002),knowing exactly how to control and defend the space taken: perimeters patrolled,doors and windows electrified, some areas alarmed, cleaning rotas, psychologicalcounselling, recreational activities, and also ensuring that public utilities wouldcontinue without interruption.

There appears to be several reasons why the occupation became the preferred toolof action: firstly, strikes began to be seen as counter-productive as they would affectnot only the government, but also the citizens in the city who were their potentialallies and would damage union/community alliances and provide an easy tool forstate/mass media propaganda. Secondly, the space of the occupation is clearlydefined, unlike in a demonstration where the immediate environment is less control-lable and easily subject to ‘agent provocateurs’, police and para-state attacks. Thirdly,and related to this, the occupation is a phenomena able to raise the profile of theconflict and make the ‘opportunity cost ratio’ for state terror more costly (Sluka,2000). There are also other issues related to visibility, as many conflicts go unre-ported. However, occupations of strategic and important buildings in the city, partic-ularly when the form that the occupation takes is very symbolic, tends to prevent thedisappearance of a conflict. Furthermore, the psychological power of the occupationof the EMCALI buildings lay in the fact that control over production was challengedand taken over by the workers, while services were maintained, the right to govern wasremoved from the state, though the right to public services for the public was not.This proved strategically important for building credibility amongst the local popula-tion. Ultimately, the fact that occupations had achieved short-term objectives in thepast was probably the single biggest reason for why it was so often utilized (interviewswith: Lucho Hernandez, 2002; Alexander Lopez, 2002; Nelson Sanchez, 2002).

While SINTRAEMCALI would manage the internal workings of the occupation,it was heavily reliant on community support for the successful resolution of anyconflicts. The main vehicles for the mobilization of communities in Cali has been theMunicipal Strike Command which was created in the early 1990s to coordinate civicstrikes (as opposed to national strikes which would be only for public employees) inopposition to neo-liberal reforms. This ‘space of action’ includes elected members ofJACs (Local Action Committees), local councillors’, representatives of rural constit-

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uents on the outskirts of the city, other trade unionists, students, activists and repre-sentatives of community TV channels. Through these members, links are providedwith broader non-organized sectors of the Cali community. It also includes othertrade union movements in the area, with representatives of individual unions andelected members of the regional headquarters of the CUT Valle de Cauca Section.

This ‘space of action’ can also be seen as a pedagogical space where workers andlocal communities work out their differences and plan common actions. It is a forumfor political, trade union and community activists to meet together in a non-hierar-chical environment, where issues are debated and decisions taken by consensus.While there are no formal positions within the Strike Command, working groups areset up to deal with particular activities between meetings. Otoniel Ramirez, presidentof the CUT Valle and a leading participant in the Strike Command refers to it as aspace of ‘unity of action’, ‘when we agree on something, a common problem, we planaction.’ The Municipal Strike Command played a pivotal role in the majorSINTRAEMCALI occupations of 1998 and 2001.

Human rights strategy

The union’s development of a human rights strategy can be seen as a defensive act toprotect the lives and physical integrity of members and supporters. This strategyeventually became a means of ‘offensive’ action, which allowed the union to utilizehuman rights mechanisms to weaken the Colombian government politically. In acountry such as Colombia, SINTRAEMCALI’s determination to mobilize to defendthe company and its uncovering and revelations of high level corruption inevitablyplaced it in direct confrontation with sections of the elite and state and ‘para-state’forces. SINTRAEMCALI has had 15 members of the union assassinated in the last6 years; several have been wounded or kidnapped, and countless members havereceived death threats and were forced to leave the region. Furthermore there havebeen three assassination attempts against the life of the ex-President of the Union,and the entire board of directors have received death threats. Several workers havebeen arrested and imprisoned under charges of subversion and terrorism. There hasalso been a persistent campaign aimed at undermining the union’s legitimacy throughallegations that it is linked to the armed insurgency active in the country (AmnestyInternational Report, 2000).

The increase in human rights violations led the union ever closer to a range ofnational human rights organisations. The arrival of Berenice Celeyta, President of theColombian NGO NOMADESC, in 2000 led to new directions in the union’s meth-ods for the protection of its members and activists. NOMADESC

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was central insetting up a Human Rights Department based at the union’s headquarters, whichmonitors human rights abuses across the city and beyond. It carries out education andtraining work, providing local activists with practical knowledge of human rightsmechanisms at their disposal. This department has, subsequently, become a type ofcommunity or drop-in centre for organisations and individuals facing problems in thefield of human rights, broadly defined: economic, social, cultural, political and civil.

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It has also injected a fresh range of practices and discourses into the activities of theunion itself (interview with Berenice Celeyta, 2002) and diffused this information toother popular organisations in the region, with several hundred activists graduating as‘human rights defenders’ across the region.

27

The actions of the human rights depart-ment and human rights defenders take place on a range of scales from local mediationof conflicts to national and transnational advocacy, lobbying and legal work whichhave provided new spaces within which the trade union could strengthen its ability tooppose privatisation.

Local, national and transnational human rights advocacy

At the local level the human rights department has been instrumental in training localactivists in human rights norms and mechanisms for self-defence. They provideparticipants with methods of intervention into conflicts, setting up local emergencyhuman rights networks among social movements, and providing a background intothe legal frameworks that exist at regional and global levels. In June 2001 this processwas expanded with the setting up of the ‘National and International Human RightsCampaign Against Corruption, Privatisation and the Criminalisation of SocialProtest’, which unites over 20 social organisations and carries out legal, political,cultural, educational, and lobbying work. In all of the direct actions that the unionengaged in, human rights activists and representatives of Human Rights NGO’s werepresent and were able to contact the appropriate authorities and pressure the localpolice and military to ensure their response was measured. Much of the power ofthese human rights activists derives from their ability to link up to transnationalhuman rights networks, able to pressure the Colombian government to followaccepted international norms of behaviour.

At this international level the human rights department has facilitated the involve-ment of major human rights organisations in SINTRAEMCALI’s situation. Repre-sentatives of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have intervened onmany occasions. These powerful organisations engage in lobbying, the translation/production and distribution of urgent actions, the compilation of reports on thehuman rights situation in the region and high level visits to representatives of thearmed forces, the government and supranational organisations such as the UNCHR.These organisations have particular skills and abilities to influence governments byapplying selective pressure and lobbying. The involvement of Amnesty and HumanRights Watch is understood discursively by the union’s leaders as providing ‘a cordonof protection’ within which they carry out their activities.

While it is virtually impossible to quantify the effect of international advocacy asopposed to activity at local and national levels, it does appear to make a qualitativedifference and for many of the Colombian activists this has been a crucial shift (inter-view with Carlos Gonzalez,

28

2002). This may be accounted for partly due to Colom-bia’s growing notoriety amongst trade unionists as an international pariah state. Thepressure has meant that the Colombian government is particularly sensitive towardsits ‘human rights’ image outside of its own country. This sensitivity was utilized by

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campaign activists. According to Berenice Celeyta, the international focus is the‘Achilles heel’ of the Colombian government (interview with Berenice Celeyta,2002).

Access to supra-legal networks

Closely related to this network is the role of the supranational labour and humanrights bodies such as the UNCHR, the ILO and the Inter American Commission ofHuman Rights who have the ability to sanction national governments for failure toenforce and protect human rights. These organisations are the supranational equiva-lent of state labour and justice departments with the power to sanction states ratherthan individuals. In the particular case of SINTRAEMCALI, the union with theassistance of national human rights organisations took their case of systematic perse-cution from state and para-state forces to the Inter-American human rights courtwho, on 21 June 2000, found the Colombian government responsible for not provid-ing adequate security for the trade union to carry out its internationally legitimateduties. The court ordered the Colombian government to provide protection for theentire leadership of the union including bodyguards, weapons, bullet-proof vehiclesand communications equipment.

29

This protection, while not eliminating the danger,at least allowed some ‘space’ for activity, and was a severe political defeat for thegovernment that vigorously opposed the application.

International solidarity networks

The human rights department has also been a fundamental catalyst in building tran-snational links with trade union, solidarity and activist organisations in the West. Inthe United Kingdom strong international links began during the President of theunion’s brief period of exile in London in October–December 2000. Since that pointthere have been delegations, exchanges, and several invitations for SINTRAEM-CALI representatives to talk at British trade union conferences. SINTRAEMCALIalso forged strong links with the Colombia Solidarity Campaign, UK, whichcampaigns on human rights and political issues in Colombia, and several of itsmembers have worked as volunteers in the human rights department of the union.

30

Since 2000 there has been an almost continual process of communication and dele-gations, which have forged strong bonds between Colombian and British activists.This strategy has extended more recently to Spain, Canada, the USA, and Australiaand includes links with sympathetic politicians, human rights groups, NGO’s andsocial movements in each of these countries. The rapidly expanding Colombian exilecommunity in these countries has strengthened the transnational links and manyColombian exiles are founding members and activists in solidarity organisations, as isthe case in the UK.

More traditional international trade union activity has been developed alongsidethe Colombian CUT

31

(Central Workers Union) and other national trade unionorganisations. With the backing of the British TUC, it has also put forward motions

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for the last three years at the annual ILO conference in Geneva to call for a ‘specialcommission of inquiry’ into the human rights emergency for Colombian workers. Themotion was defeated each time by intense lobbying by the Colombian government.Likewise the union has, on a range of occasions, and often via the British TUC and/or UNISON, managed to obtain the intervention of the ICFTU and the PSI.

All of these links with trade unions, solidarity groups, and activist organisations ina range of countries have facilitated the union’s awareness of, and ability to enter into,a wide range of transnational human rights and solidarity networks such as the anti-globalisation movement.32 These have been particularly effective in relation tospecific disputes and actions where human rights violations had taken place or werelikely to take place. Sending out ‘Urgent Actions’ on these networks resulted inprotest letters and pickets of Colombian embassies, which served to pressure theColombian state (interview with Berenice Celeyta, 2002).

Conclusion

Returning to the question posed in the beginning of how a small trade union with only3000 members could spark off such a broad range of local, national and transnationalsupport and mount a challenge to the transnational alliance intent on privatisingpublic services, we can now begin to see how the CAM Tower occupation can beunderstood as an ‘educational outcome’ of a much longer process of strategic learningthat had emerged within SINTRAEMCALI as a pedagogical response to the complexconditions under which processes of neoliberal globalisation manifested themselvesin Colombia and expanded outwards both horizontally and transnationally.

The Plan PARE Action Research programme produced a sophisticated materialcritique of past management practices, current privatisation plans and posited analternative development plan. Discursively, the union was able to broadcast this aswell as point a well-documented finger at the processes of high-level corruption thathad led to the financial crisis. This in turn framed the trade union/community allianceas the ‘defender’ of both the interest of the poor and working classes and the naturalresources of the region. Furthermore, the group of organic intellectuals that had beendeveloped during this process were able to broadcast this message utilizing thenetwork of community organisations and local community TV channels to counterthe negative framing of events portrayed in the local and national media.

Inside the occupation the union was able to draw on a core of committed members,well skilled in both defending the territory under their control and keeping basicservices running. This highly motivated group were steadfast in their belief in thedefence of public services and prepared to risk their lives and make enormouspersonal sacrifices. The community alliance that had been forged, coordinatedthrough the ‘Strike Command’, controlled the surrounds of the CAM Tower, andmobilized local communities to apply pressure through marches, road blockades, andpublic meetings.

From the immediate moments in the morning of the 25 December when the work-ers entered the occupation, human rights defenders, many of whom had graduated or

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taught on the human rights diplomas set up by the union, were present to negotiatewith the armed police to prevent any violent entry. Likewise, through a series ofcommuniqués and urgent actions they were able to activate the transnationalnetworks of solidarity and support that had been built up over several years. In differ-ent parts of the world, but particularly in the UK, documents were translated, meet-ings were arranged with the different organisations that had had contact withSINTRAEMCALI, and information was transmitted through a range of globalhuman rights, labour and anti-globalisation networks. Messages of protest beganflowing in from across the network, and high level intervention ranging from lettersto protests outside the Colombian embassy in London were initiated.

While there was nothing inevitable about the end result, this combination of mili-tant actions, clear arguments, mass mobilizations, skilled human rights interventions,and transnational solidarity, eventually proved too much for the Colombian govern-ment and on the 29 January 2002 a negotiated settlement was reached and the work-ers left the building victoriously, with their core demands met.

Understanding SINTRAEMCALI’s struggle against privatisation as a process of‘strategic learning’ sheds light into the concrete processes that contributed to thetransformation of the union and highlights the important role of research, educationand learning in the production and promotion of alternative globalisations able tocounteract the military, political and economic power of hegemonic neoliberal global-isation.

From the darkness of contemporary Colombia, the experience of SINTRAEM-CALI represents an emerging alternative, a ray of hope in the struggles of ordinarypeople against what Naomi Klein has called the ‘privatisation of all aspects of life’. Italso offers new tools and ideas for other social movements to learn from in their strug-gles for a more just and equitable world.

Notes

1. This research has been funded by the ESRC, award number R4220003431.2. For a brief article on the struggle against water privatisation see Levy (2001), which is available

at www.newint.org/issue338/water.htm. For a similar process in Arequipe, Peru see Martorell(2001), www.marxist.com/Latinam/peru_arequipa.html. For my own eyewitness accountsfrom Cali, see www.colombiasolidarity.org.uk/Solidarity%205/eyewitnessreports.html, andNovelli (2002).

3. For example, the coalition that emerged around the Brazilian Workers Party, the FrenteAmplio in Uruguay, the Social and Political Front in Colombia, and the MAS (Movement toSocialism) in Bolivia.

4. While this literature often focuses on the breakdown of Keynesian pacts and the decline of thewelfare state in Western countries, others have gone further to show how a form of Keynesianpact existed in a range of parts of the world, albeit with different degrees of social benefits forworkers. See Tickel and Peck (1995) and Munck (2002), who draws on their work.

5. The Church appears to have played a similar role to the Labour movement during the CivilRights movement in the US, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, and a range ofstruggles against military regimes in Latin America. In El Salvador, much of the repression wasdirected against the Catholic Church (McClintock, 1985).

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6. An exception to this is an excellent piece by Herod and Salt (2000), which explores ‘formal’and ‘non-formal’ educational strategies of several trade union organisations against criteriarelated to neoliberal globalisation.

7. ATTAC is an ‘international movement for democratic control of financial markets and theirinstitutions’, with a presence in 33 countries. For further information see www.attac.org/indexen/index.html.

8. The word ‘popular’ in Spanish has the connotation of including the poor and the workingclasses. A ‘barrio popular’ (popular neighbourhood) signifies a poor or working class neigh-bourhood. Trade unions, community groups, indigenous organisations would all be under-stood as examples of ‘popular’ movements, and collectively would be known as ‘the popularmovement’. See Kane (2001, pp. 8–9) for a discussion of this. Subaltern would be a suitablyinclusive synonym, but in this piece I will use the Spanish ‘popular’.

9. This is covered in far greater detail in Novelli (2004).10. For detailed documentation linking paramilitary death squads to the Colombian state see

Human Rights Watch (1996, 2000, 2001).11. For detailed studies of this see McClintock (1985).12. The most recent example was the liquidation in June 2003 of Telecom; the Colombian state

owned Telecommunications Company, where over 5000 workers lost their jobs. See NationalCoordination of the Colombian Platform for Human Rights, Democracy and Development(2003, p. 78)

13. See the Colombian government’s COINVERTIR (2004), which states: ‘Colombia has one ofthe most flexible labour regimes of Latin America. The following aspects show it: The diurnallabour journey has extended from 6 am to 10 pm. With this, an employer can hire two workturns without paying extra hours or nocturnal overcharges. The apprentices contracting modal-ity of the National Vocational Training Service (SENA), allows an employer to hire work forcethrough a services instalment contract and without labour linking with the company. With this,the employer doesn’t have to pay social benefits. Compensations by dismissal without justcauses have been reduced.’

14. The most important occurred in the Municipal elections of 2003 when Lucho Garzon, ex-Pres-ident of the CUT, was elected Mayor of Bogotá, the Colombian capital.

15. Workers assemblies were held normally on a monthly basis and attendance was compulsory. Afine on one day’s salary was automatically deducted for non-attendance.

16. The role of both union leaders and workers in corrupt practices would necessitate a transfor-mation of the culture and attitude of the workers towards the company in the new environment.A sense of civic pride and responsibility had to be brought into the attitude of the workers. Thiswill be addressed later in the paper.

17. An eminent Colombian lawyer and activist who was assassinated by paramilitaries on 18 April1998.

18. One was the PTAR water treatment plant, and the other was a power generator TERMO-EMCALI.

19. Sanchez notes that it was crucial for the advisory team to remain independent. They neededthe ability to be able to criticize not only the management, but also the union and its way ofoperating. It could not become a mere adjunct to the union.

20. A formal technical school based at the union’s headquarters aimed at teenagers unable to affordsecondary education.

21. The word Minga comes for one of the indigenous languages and has can be understood as aform of voluntary communal labour, whereby people come together to carry out a specific task.

22. In tandem with Sithe Energies, a US Multinational, a web of false contracts, bribes and corrup-tion was discovered centering on a proposed Thermo-Electric Power Plant—Thermo Rio,which began in 1997. Detailed revelations led to the imprisonment of the Superintendent forPublic Services Enrique Ramirez Yañez, and a range of high-level resignations. More embar-rassing still for the government was the fact that the disgraced minister was a close personal

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friend of the then President of Colombia Andres Pastrana (see Bosshard, 2002; Bocagrande,2002; Molinski, 2002; PSI, 2002).

23. Jon Maro Rodriguez was a well-known and popular local journalistic and radio presenter in thecity.

24. The annual report of the Local Government of Cali backs up these figures (Mayor of Cali,2002).

25. Some interviewees, particularly rank and file activists who are not in the media spotlight,preferred to remain anonymous and were thus given letters of identification for the transcripts.

26. The name stems from the root NOMAD (expressing the reality that many Colombians havebeen displaced from their homes—3 million according to the United Nations) and DESC(derechos economicos, sociales y culturales) economic, social and cultural rights.

27. In June 2003, with assistance form the British-based NGO War on Want, it secured a£220,000 grant from the UK’s Department for International Development for a two-yearproject to train trade union and social movement activists in human rights defence and protec-tion and to carry out research and investigation on the human rights situation in the region.

28. Leading member of SINTRAUNICOL (University Workers Union) and one of SINTRAEM-CALI’s official spokespersons during the CAM Tower occupation.

29. The Inter-American Human Rights Court verdict can be found at www.cidh.oas.org/medidas/2000.sp.htm.21.

30. This research was carried out whilst working as a volunteer for one year in the SINTRAEM-CALI Human Rights Department.

31. The CUT is the biggest of the national union federations, comprising of around 67.3% of allunionised workers (Escuela Nacional Sindical, 2003).

32. In 2003, Luis Hernandez (current President of SINTRAEMCALI) participated in the WorldSocial Forum in Porto Alegre. In November 2002, Berenice Celeyta, head of SINTRAEM-CALI’s Human Rights Department was invited by War on Want, a British-based NGO, to talkabout SINTRAEMCALI at the European Social Forum in Florence.

Note on contributor

Mario Novelli is a Phd Candidate in the Graduate School of Education, Universityof Bristol (UK), and a part time lecturer in the Department of Politics. He holdsa degree in Politics and International Relations, and an MEd in InternationalPolicy and Management in Education, and has taught in the UK, Egypt, Pales-tine and Colombia. He researches and writes on globalisation, education and theSouth; social and labour movement education; new social movement unionism;and popular resistance to neo-liberalism. He is also a founding member of theUK based Colombia Solidarity Campaign that works on advocacy issues relatingto the human rights situation in Colombia.

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