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Demystifying global economics: making the local/global connection.
Winter, 2001, by Mary Zerkel

Five years ago those educators who saw the necessity of helping people make the 
connections between local economic issues and the global economy were fighting 
an uphill battle. Most people had either never heard of the World Trade 
Organization or the International Monetary Fund/World Bank, or they did not see 
how something so distant could have relevance to their lives as they dealt with 
cuts in welfare, or lack of affordable housing. However, after high profile 
demonstrations in Seattle, Quebec City and Washington DC, people are more 
curious about what "globalization" means and how the increasing trend toward 
corporate control of the economy affects their lives. Most people are still 
concerned with survival issues, but they are starting to suspect that there 
might be a connection to what the protests are all about. The growing movement 
for global economic justice has provided educators with a framework through 
which people of all ages can learn about how local economic issues are connected 
to the global econ omy.
The Praxis/Economic Justice Project of the Chicago Office of the American 
Friends Service Committee has been working since 1994 to develop leaders from 
within labor, community and student groups while focusing on local and global 
economic justice issues. Our work utilizes the principles of popular education 
and is focused on helping groups link their local economic issues to the larger 
picture of globalization through analysis and action. We strive to develop 
long-term relationships with groups, and one of our most successful 
collaborations was a three and a half year experience with a public sector union 
local. During our years with the union local we helped the members to connect 
their personal knowledge of economics and the local fight against privatization 
to a larger analysis of globalization, which will be described in some detail 
below.
WHO WE ARE
Our facilitation team consists of myself, program co-director Darlene Gramigna 
and University of Illinois at Chicago economist Dave Ranney. The three of us 
have worked together for the last four years, doing workshops with community 
groups, church groups, youth, and unions. We have all come to this work through 
a long-term engagement with social justice movements. Darlene worked for many 
years on Central American solidarity and the with sanctuary movement, Dave has 
worked with the labor movement since the sixties, and I am an artist who came to 
this work through community art education and producing documentaries on the 
labor movement. The three of us bring different strengths to the work and we 
function best as a team. Darlene and I bring knowledge of popular education 
gained through our respective experiences in Nicaragua and Brazil; Dave brings 
analytical skills honed by his work as an economist as well as the invaluable 
experience of his labor background.
Because our long-term goal is to build leadership to help strengthen the 
movement for economic justice, we prefer to work with groups over several years, 
instead of doing single workshops or presentations (although, we still do 
strategic one-time workshops for some groups, especially when we are organizing 
around a campaign). Working with a group over the long haul allows us all to 
work toward a deeper growth of critical consciousness, to see and assess 
development, and to find our place within the larger movement. Working long-term 
also gives facilitators the luxury of extreme flexibility when building an 
agenda. While working long-term, if an exciting argument or discussion pops up, 
a facilitator can relax and let it play out instead of trying to stick to every 
bit of the agenda, knowing that there will be plenty of sessions in the future.
We choose to work with groups, such as community organizations and unions, and 
not individuals. Working with groups that are already organized around a 
neighborhood, a workplace or an issue allows leadership to develop from within 
and creates more opportunity to put analysis into action. Our focus on economic 
justice work leads us to work with groups that have been marginalized under the 
current economic system: women, youth, people of color, and workers.
AN EXPERIENCE IN LINKING LOCAL ISSUES TO GLOBAL ECONOMICS
In the Fall of 1997 we were invited to design and facilitate a series of 
workshops for a public sector union local whose members included public school 
janitors, teachers' aides, park district workers, and county hospital workers. 
The primarily African-American and Latino participants were mostly stewards, 
although a few staff participated as well. Although all stewards were invited 
and encouraged to attend, we had a fluctuating group of around thirty each 
session, with a core group of fifteen that were always there. The first year we 
created a series of workshops that provided an overview of global economic 
trends. We started by talking about personal history and then NAFTA, because 
most union members are familiar with this trade agreement. However, we expanded 
our discussion to cover a broader spectrum of global economic concepts and 
issues, including other trade agreements, international debt, international 
financial institutions, and neoliberalism. (1) It quickly became clear that the 
most significant glo bal trend for the members in this particular union local 
was privatization. Over the next couple of years we concentrated on a careful 
analysis of local privatization while linking it to the broader global economic 
picture. We also helped to develop materials and strategies for an 
anti-privatization campaign.
A series of methodological principles will help illustrate our experience 
concretely. Most of these are rooted in the political principles we've learned 
from our reading of Freire, Gramsci and the example of the Highlander Center in 
Tennessee. These are methodologies that we use within every workshop series, and 
they work very well as a framework for making the local/global connection. (2)
* Develop an assessment tool. We always try to start with some kind of an 
exercise that will help us determine the level of knowledge and analysis in the 
group. In our work with the union local, we used an exercise developed by the 
Resource Center of the Americas. (3) We asked the group to split into smaller 
groups of three or four and spend 15 minutes "drawing yourself in the global 
economy." We them that they were allowed to define "yourself" either 
individually, as a union, or any other way they appropriate. Sometimes people 
complain that they do not have information to complete this task, but we just 
ask them to come up with something and to be assured that there are no wrong 
answers. The whole point is to find out what they know and what they do not 
know. The drawings the union stewards made that day revealed that they had 
experienced the growing gap between the rich and poor: many of the drawings 
showed the middle class being squeezed or phrases such as "the rich get richer 
and the poor get poorer." Though this demonstrated an intuitive knowledge that 
the growing gap in the United States was connected to global economics somehow, 
there were no specific analyses of those links and no specific references to 
global institutions or agreements. It wa s then our goal to deepen this 
analysis, which is a process we measured by asking them to make other drawings 
throughout the process.
* Start from personal experience. One of the principal tenets of popular 
education is to start from the participants' personal experience. We find this 
to be particularly important when dealing with economics, because people are 
generally intimidated by the whole subject. However, everyone has plenty of life 
experience with economics, and when they realize that this knowledge has value 
they generally feel less threatened. To connect with the participants' personal 
knowledge, we almost always start with a classic popular education tool that we 
have adapted for our purposes. The tool is called "The Tree of Life," and it 
uses the metaphor of a tree to look at family history. We have adapted it to 
draw out the participants' economic family histories. It is also a wonderful 
exercise to begin to build trust and relationships within the group. We start by 
drawing a large picture of a tree on the blackboard or on butcher-block paper 
and labeling the leaves "yourself," the trunk "your parents," and the roots 
"your grandparents." Then, we pass out a smaller drawing of the tree that has 
questions written on it. The questions ask what the participants' parents and 
grandparents did for a living, whether or nor the mother's labor in the home was 
valued, how the family's experience shaped their attitudes toward work and 
education, and other things related to the family economic history. We ask each 
person to take fifteen minutes to fill out the questionnaire and then to spend 
thirty minutes or so sharing their storie s in small groups. Then we ask each 
small group to report to the large group on similarities and differences that 
they discovered, and we write these up on the large tree in the front of the 
room. People generally enjoy beginning to think about these questions and the 
exercise gives the facilitator an opportunity to connect the personal stories to 
larger economic trends or historical events. For example in the workshop with 
the union local (as with almost any group) we learned that many families had 
been forced to migrate or emigrate due to economic conditions. Some families 
came to Chicago from the South during the Great Black Migration, while others 
came from Mexico during the Mexican Bracero program. Almost every person had a 
story of migration or immigration in their family, which led to a very diverse 
group feeling somewhat connected to each other and also to global economics. (4)
This exercise also works well with youth and can be used as a homework 
assignment, giving the young people a chance to go home and discuss the 
questions with a family member or guardian. Quite often, young people in Chicago 
will report that a family member lost a factory job because the factory moved to 
Mexico, providing an opportunity to talk about global trade agreements.
* Develop a group analysis. Group analysis is particularly important in popular 
economics education because the facilitator has technical information about 
economics that the rest of the group will not have learned through lived 
experience. Group analysis helps to avoid an authoritarian relationship between 
the facilitator with "expert" information and the participants by providing an 
opportunity for participants to attain a new understanding based upon the 
facilitator's information combined with their own knowledge and experiences.
At the Praxis/Economic Justice Project we have worked for several years with a 
process that we have developed based on some of Antonio Gramsci's ideas, as well 
as work done in Latin America and Canada. (5) The process is called coyuntural 
analysis and it is a way for groups to analyze the current historical moment. 
Over the years, we have used a couple of exercises with the union local to 
develop group analysis. We repeated these exercises because of the somewhat 
fluctuating participation and also because the situation being analyzed changes 
all the time. One exercise called "The Matrix" is a way of beginning to organize 
information about the current historical moment. By looking at the political, 
economic, ideological, race and gender-based trends and events that have 
occurred recently, you'll have a solid base of information that will inform your 
analysis for the rest of the workshop series. This exercise has worked well for 
us with youth as well as adults. It is also a great way to begin to understand 
the way that the economy is intertwined with other forces in our society, and 
the links between local and global. We start by breaking up into five smaller 
groups. Each group is given a category: political, ideological, economics, race 
or gender. (6) The groups are then asked to brainstorm about current trends and 
events in their category locally, nationally, and internationally. We have each 
group write their answers on colored paper (each category gets a different 
color), then tape them to the wall with each category starting with the local, 
then putting national underneath, and lastly international. This way, the papers 
on the wall create a grid, or matrix. The large group can look at the grid 
vertically and see all of the local, national, and international trends and 
events in one category, or can read the grid horizontally and see all the local 
trends and events in each of the categories and so on. Often groups initially 
have difficulty filling out the international trends and events, but a 
facilitator within the group asking questions can often solve this problem, and 
as one continues to work and repeat the exercise this stops being a problem. 
Some people are intimidated by the concept of ideology, but often the discussion 
of this category can be the most revealing and rich. In our work with the union, 
the ideology group pointed out that there were local, national and global 
ideological trends tow ard always viewing the private sector as better than the 
public sector. Over the years, the ideological dimension of privatization has 
become an important part of our analysis, culminating in an anti-privatization 
strategy that included a public awareness campaign about the myths concerning 
privatization.
* Look at historical trends. We emphasize that we are living within a particular 
historical moment that is a convergence of political, economic and social 
trends. Identifying that moment, as well as knowing our history, helps us form 
our analysis and determine our course of action. One of our favorite tools to 
achieve this objective is a group time line. (7) With a general group, we 
sometimes put a big blank piece of paper on the wall with a few key dates for 
reference, and ask people to fill in the paper with dates that are important to 
the economy. Lots of times people will know an event, but not the exact dates. 
That is fine. People can also post personal events, such as "1975: Got my first 
union job." In this way people start to see that they are part of history too. 
With a group that is working on something more specific, we'll develop a special 
time line.
With the union local we developed a "Key Privatization Events" time line. We put 
it up on the wall and talked through some of the main points, including 
Pinochet's widespread privatization of Chile in 1974, and the election of Ronald 
Reagan in 1980. At this point we asked everyone to come up with some dates of 
their own. The group came up with events such as the 1989 election of Mayor 
Richard Daley (ushering in a new era of privatization in Chicago) and 1996 job 
cuts at the Board of Education. This whole process helps people to see that 
their personal and local events are connected to national and international 
events, all of them becoming part of the flow of history. We also ask the group 
to read the time line carefully and to see if they notice trends.
We often ask the group to develop a concurrent time line of Popular Movements so 
that we can look at how movements grow and change in relation to other events. 
Feeling that they are part of a movement and that popular struggle has had 
victories can be an important part of maintaining the group's feeling of 
empowerment.
In this case, the union stewards added dates that reflected their involvement in 
the Black Panthers, and the labor and civil rights movements.
* Focus on global connections to a local issue. Whenever possible, we try to 
connect concepts in the global economy to local issues with which most people 
have experience and by which they are motivated. For instance, whenever 
approaching the issue of international debt, we start with exercises and 
discussions about credit card debt. People immediately relate to this topic, and 
their experience of being buried under credit card debt provides an apt analogy 
to the situation of many developing countries. In our workshops with the union 
local we developed an exercise to compare and contrast privatization in other 
countries to the situation in the United States. In this exercise we break the 
group into five smaller groups. Each group gets a case study of a different 
country: South Africa, Puerto Rico, Nigeria and Chile. Each case study gives a 
little background and history on the country and its privatization, and talks 
about the rationale being used to privatize. Each also details what resistance 
to privatizatio n there has been. The groups must answer the following 
questions: Who are the actors in this situation? Who will benefit and who will 
suffer? Who works together? What strategies have the workers in this country 
developed? What can we learn from this situation? Through the discussions that 
followed, the group became very interested in the work that the South African 
Municipal Worker's Union had done on public education about privatization. This 
later became part of our anti-privatization campaign. There were also very 
helpful discussions about the allies that workers in other countries had in 
their fight against privatization, and whether or not those strategies would 
work in Chicago. On a related note, our work with this union local and work done 
by Chicago Jobs with Justice made privatization a big issue within the 
progressive Chicago labor community. This has provided an opportunity to get 
labor interested in other aspects of the global economy. For instance, last 
winter we held a screening of "It's Our Wat er Damn It!," a video which derails 
the resistance to the privatization of water in Bolivia. This privatization is 
the result of World Bank policies and we were trying to drum up support for a 
national World Bank Bond Boycott. At the screening, organizers from Bolivia 
spoke along with a local union member speaking about the local privatization 
situation. This worked well in interesting the local labor community on issues 
of international debt.
Focus on alternatives and strategies. One thing we have consistently found is 
that learning about global economics can be pretty depressing. We try hard not 
to leave the groups that we work with feeling defeated and overwhelmed at the 
end of a workshop. One way to work against this feeling is to focus on 
alternatives to our current economic system as well as strategies for attaining 
them. This may sometimes involve giving people information about ongoing 
anti-globalization campaigns such as the World Bank Bond Boycott or the campaign 
against Fast-Track for the Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement. Sometimes 
our efforts include helping people organize local demonstrations or rake part in 
larger nationwide demonstrations. We have worked with local groups to send buses 
to demonstrations in Washington DC and Quebec City. Often we spend time 
connecting the group to alternative policy projects such as the Alternatives for 
the Americas, a collaborative document developed by the Hemispheric Social 
Alliance. Each of these strategies has the added benefit of helping people feel 
connected to a larger movement. We helped the union local to form an 
anti-privatization committee that met regularly to plan strategies for a camp 
aign. The campaign was the result of the anti-privatization committee's hard 
work, and of brainstorming strategies and research projects that were part of 
our workshops. The strategies included lots of noisy demonstrations at City 
Hall, as well as public education that included meetings with community and 
church groups, as well as a comic book that we produced called "The Mythbusters 
Fight Privatization!."
* Develop a qualitative evaluation toot When we have had the luxury of working 
with a group for more than one or two workshops, we use evaluation to go deeper 
than finding our what participants did and didn't like. Although we still ask 
quantitative questions, we are always trying to come up with qualitative 
evaluation tools as well. Early on in our work with the union we realized that 
there was a low level of literacy, so trying to measure understanding with 
writing would not work. We eventually decided that repeating the drawing 
exercise detailed above would be a good way to measure the development of 
analysis, since that is what we used to get an initial reading. As you will 
recall, the initial drawings the group made in answering "Draw Yourself in the 
Global Economy" reflected a sense that there was a growing gap between the rich 
and poor, but nor much else. Midway through the process we asked the group to do 
a drawing that reflected the relationships between local forces involved in 
privatization. This drawing showed a much more specific local analysis of how 
privatization was connected to the growing gap, revealing a step toward a deeper 
analysis. For instance, one drawing showed the connection between the Mayor of 
Chicago, big business, and certai n aldermen. These forces were shown driving a 
big train that puffed dollar signs our of its chimney. The train was running 
over community and union members who were being left out of the decision making 
process, and felt their economic status threatened. At the conclusion of our 
second year with the union local, we asked them to repeat our initial "Draw 
Yourself in the Global Economy" exercise. The drawings revealed a deeper 
analysis, one that included both a local analysis as well as its connections to 
global actors and institutions. One of the drawings showed a pyramid that 
included the words: Philippines, Ghana, United States, Mexico--We Are All the 
Same. Surrounding the pyramid were the phrases: low wages, cuts in welfare, 
privatization, no health care, all representing economic policies that are 
experienced in these countries either because of the IMF/World Bank or the 
United Stares' domestic policy.
ONE MORE STEP TOWARD BUILDING THE MOVEMENT
Our work with the union local taught us much about the way people learn and the 
way learning can promote change. When we attempted to train the stewards in the 
principles of popular education, we learned how hard it is for people who have 
been organizing for years to think of themselves as educators. And we also 
learned some tough lessons about the limitations of working within the 
constraints of organized labor. While the union local invited us in and 
wholeheartedly supported the educational sessions, it became clear at a certain 
point that our work with the stewards would always be limited by internal union 
politics. About a year ago, this particular local was absorbed by a larger local 
as part of a large reorganization. This was a frustrating moment for all of us, 
as our education sessions were put on hold indefinitely, the anti-privatization 
campaign was stalled and an important democratic institution, the Steward's 
Council, was nullified by this new arrangement.
Around the same time as these events, an outside evaluator interviewed some of 
the stewards who had attended our workshops. The stewards felt that they had 
definitely expanded their knowledge of both local and global economics and that 
the formation of the antiprivatization committee had been an important result of 
this work They felt personally empowered and more able to articulate global 
economic concepts. But to our surprise, the stewards also Felt that the 
development of the Steward's Council could be attributed to our work as well. 
While we were happy and supportive when they took this step, we did not really 
think that it ]had anything to do with us. But the stewards interviewed felt 
that the education sessions had worked as a catalyst For positive change within 
the group. 'These sessions brought isolated workers together to analyze and 
strategize and in the process created a strong and bonded group that felt 
empowered to work for change.
We have a good relationship with the new union local, have worked on several 
coalitions and demonstrations together, and we hope to do some work together in 
the future.
Meanwhile, although we will all be struggling to protect public services from 
privatization for years to come, several of the stewards have emerged as leaders 
and have expanded their activism to other issues as well. One steward started an 
underground newsletter called "Privatize This!," and organized demonstrations 
against the death penalty. Another steward traveled to Tucson with us to help 
facilitate a workshop on privatization. Stewards have attended local coalition 
meetings and have been a visible force at the very large May Day March in 
Chicago each year. Several of the stewards attended a recent training of 
trainers held by a coalition against the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and 
many of them have participated in local demonstrations against the FTAA, the 
World Trade Organization, and the IMF/World Bank. Each time we see each other at 
the sit-in at the congressman's office or the march down Michigan Avenue, we 
have the knowledge that our experience together was just one step on the road 
that we are all building, learning from each other along the way.
NOTES:
(1.) Though the term "globalization" is often used to describe the current 
global economic situation, we prefer the term neoliberalism. Neoliberal economic 
policy has been implemented around the world using these strategies: I. Cheapen 
the cost of production by driving down living and environmental standards and 
the quality of social services; 2. Accomplish this through total capital 
mobility, making the national base of corporations and the products and services 
they produce of decreasing significance ; 3. Undermine the ability of national 
governments to regulate big business; 4. Create powerful global institutions 
accountable only to big business
(2.) Most of the exercises that follow can be found in two manuals that the 
Praxis/Economic Justice Project has produced. Economics Education: Building a 
Movement for Global Economic Justice ($15, shipping included) and Coynmural 
Analysis: Critical Thinking for Meaningful Action ($10, shipping included) can 
be ordered by contacting praxisafsc@igc.org or by calling 312-427-2533.
(3.) This exercise is part of a great simulation game called The New Global 
Economy Game: A View from the Bottom Up. It is available from the Resource 
Center of the Americas website or by calling 612-276-0788.
(4.) This exercise can sometimes be difficult for people, if their history has 
been painful, but we always ask for confidentiality in the room and tell people 
to only share what they are comfortable with sharing.
(5.) See Antonio Gramsci , Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and 
translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoff rey Nowell Smith (New York International 
Publishers, 1971), and Deborah Barndt, Naming the Moment (Toronto: The Jesuit 
Centre for Social Faith and Justice, 1989).
(6.) It is usually a good idea to clarify definitions together before beginning 
this exercise. Here are the definitions we use: Event--a single historical 
incident or fact. Trend--a series of events that can be seen as a pattern. 
Political--the power relations between peoples and groups. Ideology--the realm 
of ideas; all the mechanisms and processes that influence the consciousness of 
people, their ideas and values, tastes and feelings. Economic--that which 
relates to the production, distribution and consumption of commodities and 
wealth. Gender-socially imposed dichotomy of masculine and feminine roles; in 
this category we will also consider sexual identity. Race--a sociopolitical 
construct that connects persons by common descent and origin, in this category 
we will also consider culture and ethnicity.
(7.) Project South has developed several interesting time lines and ways of 
using them. See their book, Popular Education for Movement Building, available 
by calling 404-622-0602. Our Economics Education manual (see above) also 
contains time lines on international debt, free trade and privatization.
Mary Zerkel is the co-director of the Praxis/Economic Justice Project of the 
Chicago Office of the American Friends Service Committee. She is the author of 
"Coyuntural Analysis: Critical Thinking for Meaningful Action" and the editor of 
"Economics Education: Building a Movement for Global Economic Justice."
COPYRIGHT 2001 Center for Critical Education, Inc. in association with The Gale 
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