More than 90 million customers visit Wal-Mart stores each week. Its 900,000-plus employees are prohibited from forming unions. Whoever tries, soon joins the ranks of the unemployed. This immensely successful company openly denies one of the human rights recognised by the United Nations (UN) - freedom of association.

The founder of Wal-Mart, Sam Walton, received the 1992 Medal of Freedom, one of the highest honours conferred by the United States government.

One of every four American adults and nine out of ten children eat at McDonalds. The employees of the fast food giant are as disposable as the plastic food they serve: They are crushed by the same machine. Their workers don't have the right to unionise either.

In Malaysia, workers are still able to form unions but Intel, Motorola, Texas Instruments, and Hewlett Packard have managed to get around this annoyance. The Malaysian government has declared the electronics sector 'union-free'.

The 190 women workers who were burned to death in Thailand in 1993 had no chance of forming a union either. The shed where they made Sesame Street, Bart Simpson, and Muppets' dolls was barred shut from the outside.

During last year's US presidential campaign, both Bush and Gore agreed on the need to continue imposing the American model of labour relations on the world.

'Our way of work', as both candidates called it, is setting the pace of globalisation as it charges ahead into the most remote corners of the world.

New wonder

The abolition of distance by technology has introduced a new wonder for the world - a Nike worker in Indonesia would have to work 100,000 years to make what a Nike executive makes in one.

It is a continuation of the colonial era, but on a far grander scale. The poor of the world continue to play their traditional role -they provide cheap labour to make cheap products, only now they produce dolls, sports shoes, computers, and high-tech gadgets in addition to the commodities they produced before, like rubber, rice, coffee, and sugar.

Since 1919, 183 international conventions have been signed regulating labour relations around the world. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), of these 183 accords, France ratified 115, Norway 106, Germany 76, and the US ... 14.

The country that leads the process of globalisation obeys only its own orders. In this way it can guarantee sufficient impunity to its corporations in their hunt for cheap labour and areas which their filthy industries can pollute to their heart's content.

Paradoxically, this country which recognises no law but that of outlaw labour, now says that there is no choice but to include 'social clauses' and 'environmental protection clauses' in free trade accords. What would become of reality without the advertising that camouflages it?

These clauses are but a tiny fee that vice pays virtue under the heading of public relations, but even this passing mention of workers' rights raises the hackles on the most fervent advocates of starvation wages, the elastic schedule, and unlimited firing.

Squeezing lemons

Since Ernesto Zedillo left the presidency of Mexico, he has joined the board of directors of the Union Pacific Corporation and Proctor and Gamble, which does business in 140 countries.

He also heads a UN commission and publishes his opinions in the Forbes magazine: There, in his technocratese, he vents his rage against 'the imposition of homogenous labour standards in new trade accords'. Which means: 'Let us once and for all get rid of any international legislation that still protects the workers'. The retired president is paid to preach slavery.

The CEO of General Electric puts it more succinctly: ''You've got to squeeze lemons if you're going to be competitive". The facts are the facts.

Faced with accusations and protests, businesses wash their hands: 'I wasn't there' is their alibi. In post-modern industry, work is no longer concentrated in one plant or company. Three-quarters of the parts of every Toyota automobile are made by contractors.

Only one of every five Volkswagen workers in Brazil is a Volkswagen employee. Of the 81 workers of the Brazilian state oil company, Petrobras, who died in work accidents over the last three years, 66 were working for contractors who failed to maintain safety standards.

Using 300 contractors, China produces half of the world's Barbie dolls. In China there are unions, but they obey a state that in the name of socialism keeps labour reigned in tight: ''We fight worker agitation and social instability to ensure a climate that is favourable to investors,'' Bo Xilai, secretary-general of the Communist Party of a major Chinese port, recently explained.

Economic power is more monopolised than ever, yet countries and people compete as best they can to see who can offer more for less and work twice as hard for half the pay. Two centuries' gains of workers rights are being jettisoned from the ship of commerce.

The maquiladora plants of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean grow at a far faster pace than industry as a whole. Eight out of ten new employees in Argentina work underground, without any legal protection.

Internal obstacles

Indeed, in Latin America as a whole, nine out of ten workers are employed in the 'informal sector' - a euphemism meaning that they depend entirely on the grace of God.

The way things are going, will job stability and other workers' rights soon be a subject for archaeologists - memories of an extinct species?

In this upside down world, freedom oppresses. The freedom of money requires that workers live in the prison of fear. The market god threatens and punishes, as workers everywhere know all too well.

The fear of unemployment, which employers exploit to cut labour costs and boost productivity, is today the source of universal anguish. Who is free from the panic of being thrown on the heap of people searching for work?

Who does not fear being turned into an 'internal obstacle', to use the words of the president of Coca-Cola, who a year ago explained the firing of thousands of workers as 'we eliminated the internal obstacles'?

One last question: In response to the globalisation of money, which has divided the world into the conquerors and the conquered, would it be possible to internationalise the fight for dignity of labour? A tiny challenge.

EDUARDO GALEANO, an Uruguayan journalist, is author of Memories of Fire and The Open Veins of Latin America . The above article was first written for the Inter-Press Service.