The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [103]
The road that took Collingsworth to court that month began in Malaysia nearly two decades before. After graduating from Duke Law School in 1982 and paying off his law school debts, Collingsworth set off on a back-packing trip across Asia. Arriving in Kuala Lumpur, he ran upon a protest of workers fighting for their right to unionize at their company, U.S.-based Harris Semiconductor, which had been exempted from collective bargaining by the Malaysian government. Impulsively, he offered to help them when he returned to the United States, even though it had little to do with his own dreams of becoming a lawyer who, like Kovalik, would defend the rights of American workers to unionize.
Although he now looks like the very picture of a buttoned-up lawyer, Collingsworth grew up in unions himself, following his father and uncle into a copper plant near his hometown of Cleveland. His job was to operate a crane dumping copper ore into a molten furnace, and he admits the union made it a cushy one. “My total collective work time was probably like an hour and a half a night,” he says. “Looking back it’s almost outrageous.” He used his free time to get a college degree, attending Cleveland State by day and studying books in the crane cab by night with the goal of helping people like his father and his uncle who were getting increasingly squeezed.
By the early 1980s, it was clear that manufacturing was in trouble. The same shareholder value movement pushed by Jack Welch and Robert Goizueta was leading to massive downsizing of employee rolls and reliance on temporary workers or relocation of plants overseas in search of cheap labor. (Collingsworth’s own plant eventually was moved to South Korea.) The protest he saw in Malaysia was the flipside of the equation—whereby developing countries were easing up on human rights and environmental standards in order to attract companies from the United States and Europe.
The question Collingsworth faced then—and the one that he and Kovalik would face two decades later—was how to impose morality on multinational corporations driven by economic factors that were inherently amoral. As long as competitors were doing everything they could to increase their own profits, taking moral questions into account in their business plans was a sure way of going out of business. At the same time, developing countries were in effect competing against one another to attract foreign investment to lift themselves out of poverty, giving them even less incentive on their side to push for more stringent labor requirements.
As it happened, when Collingsworth returned from his Asia trip he found a representative from his home state of Ohio, Don Pease, who was working on legislation to deal with this very issue. Pease’s idea was to give those incentives in the form of preferential trading status to countries “taking steps to afford internationally recognized workers’ rights” such as collective bargaining and a minimum wage. After it was passed, Collingsworth partnered with one of Pease’s staffers, William Gould, to form the International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF) in an attempt to enforce the new law by filing petitions on behalf of workers around the world. Their very first petition dealt with the computer workers in Malaysia. Unfortunately for them, however, the law’s language that a country could retain benefits as long as it was “taking steps” to change provided enormous wiggle room to companies and to the panel appointed by the Reagan administration to interpret the