Labor Rights in Mideast and Mid-West Are Key to Counter-terrorism

by Jackie Smith

As popular groups around the Middle East challenge authoritarian rulers long supported by the West, U.S. officials are resisting our own democratic movements to defend basic rights and freedoms. The simultaneity of these struggles is no coincidence. Along with militant fundamentalism, they are responses to the current moment of crisis, which grows from the basic limits of U.S. power.

The United States and its allies have supported dictators in the Middle East in order to ensure stable and secure supplies of cheap oil. Low-cost energy fueled the industrial growth that allowed many in the rich countries of the world to enjoy rising standards of living. But we’re now seeing the limits to this economic expansion in the form of peak oil, water scarcity, rising food prices, and chronic unemployment.


Despite the fact that U.S. military spending is more than all other countries combined, this country can no longer depend upon its overwhelming military strength to demand its way in the world. The economic model long championed by Washington has been discredited at a great cost to many of the world’s most vulnerable people and countries. In Cairo, Tunis, Tripoli, Madison, and Indianapolis, it is now these groups—those who don’t control the key levers of financial and military power—who are standing up to say “Enough”.


These nonviolent struggles are a threat to both the power centers against which they are directed and to the militant fundamentalist movements that have thrived by mobilizing sentiments against the brutal regimes of the Middle East and their Western allies.

The fight against terrorism requires an end to dictatorships and the advance of democratic rule overseas and in the United States. It also requires fundamental economic transformation to address people’s long-term needs for food, health care, shelter, and economic opportunity. It is increasingly obvious that the policies of global free trade and consumption-based economic growth will not solve the problems of high youth unemployment in Egypt or of unrelenting cuts to U.S. workers’ security and benefits.

But if the needs of people are not addressed, militants’ appeal will grow. Desperation leads people to choose violence, and the current global economic and political order is designed to produce such desperation at the bottom in order to maintain the privileges of those at the top. Thus, workers everywhere have seen their wages stagnate or decline at a time when the U.S. and world economy saw unprecedented growth.

As long as enough of the wealth “trickled down” to at least some of the middle and working classes, the system could be maintained. But rising economic insecurity, will bring a growing frequency and intensity of the kinds of protests witnessed across Europe last fall and in the Middle East and U.S. Midwest this winter.

Leaders in Washington will be tempted to use military and economic power to try to impose stability on an increasingly volatile world. But this will only further strain domestic strife, as debt and military costs claim more and more of the scarce resources that could support local and state needs.

Workers’ right to organize is a foundation of a democratic society. It enables and encourages people to address their differences in a peaceful manner. It fosters social cohesion and solidarity, and encourages respect for human rights. Unions are a key to democratization in the Middle East, and they are no less vital to the preservation of democracy at home. What is more, if unions fail in either struggle, militants everywhere will find larger and larger pools of eager (and desperate) recruits.