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Issue No. 129 | 22 March 2002 |
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Not So Happy Campers
Interview: Pulling the Pin International: At the Crossroads Unions: A Case Of Lost Identity History: Rocking the Foundations Industrial: Rocky Road Economics: Cracking a Coldie Poetry: The Right Was Wrong Satire: Heffernan�s Evidence Conclusive: Proves He's An Idiot Review: Upstairs, Downstairs
The Soapbox The Locker Room Postcard Cole-Watch Week in Review
 Letter to Howard #1Letter to Howard #2Letter to Howard #3Jump Before You're Pushed
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International At the CrossroadsBy Andrew Casey
The German SDP, the British Labour Party, the ANC in South Africa, the NDP in Canada and the Democrats in the USA are all on the nose when it comes to their long-standing and, some would say, natural union allies. Does any of this sound familiar? Meanwhile in South Korea - where the union members regularly go on hunger strikes in a desperate bid to be legally recognised - we see trade unions wanting to actively jump into bed with a political machine. The moderate FKTU has announced they will run hundreds of independent union candidates in the forthcoming Korean elections, while the militant KCTU has just set up its own Democratic Labor Party to run in the elections. Here is a quick and dirty ( and sometimes sloppy) over-view, for Workers Online readers, of some the brawling going on between unions and their political allies. I'll leave it up to some of my more intellectual readers to draw together some of these threads and expound a new treatises on the future relationships between trade unions and labour/social democratic parties. But one word of warning to the theorists among us - at least in some of these case studies there is a huge dose of posturing by union leaders who like to see their names in the media, or who like to use the media headlines as part of their negotiating tactics. Now does any of this sound familiar to Australians? ********** It's just six months till the German general elections and the SDP has just been told that it can't rely on its natural allies to get out the vote - the trade union movement. Recent statements by prominent German trade unionists suggest a growing disillusionment with the market-friendly, "third-way" policies pursued by the SDP's Gerhard Schr�der' in government. The president of the German nation trade union center, the DGB, Dieter Schulte , says the policies pursued by the SPD-led coalition government with the environmentalist Greens, had not fully met the unions' standards in terms of their effects on labor and social justice. Meanwhile the big German manufacturing union, IG Metall, which represents 3.6 million workers, and is currently running a series of rolling strikes in support of a 6.5% wage claim, is angry with Schr�der for undermining their wages' push. The German government, with one eye on the elections, has very publically appealed to the unions to back down on their pay claims because of rising unemployment and rising inflation figures. Jurgen Peters, vice-president of IGMetall has accused the SDP leader, Gerhard Schr�der, of moving away from his base towards a right of centre neoliberalism. Workers may well decide that there's no point in voting, Jurgen Peters told the German media **************** In the UK Tony Blair finds himself under attack from the normally sedate TUC leader, John Monks, who called the British PM ' bloody stupid' for aligning himself with the right-wing Italian PM in calls for new EU workplace flexibility laws. Monks went on to warn Blair that unions are no longer prepared to act as the government's "long-suffering stooges", and he went on to warn the government that ' an explosive cocktail of issues' could lead to a 'haemorrhaging of trade union support, especially at the polling booths.' Most of this 'explosive cocktail' is based on the Blair government's headlong rush to seemingly bring under private sector control whole slabs of the civil service - including schools and hospitals. Earlier PM Blair had attacked left-wing union leaders opposed to his privatization plans calling them ' wreckers' in a Labour Party conference speech. The leader of the Transport and General Workers' Union, Bill Morris, another union moderate has backed the TUC saying that Blair's Labour government is " working very hard to lose the core support of the ordinary working people they enjoyed during the past two elections." The Opposition Conservatives have been enjoying all this brawling and very cheekily offered to open talks with the TUC about the problems with privatisation. Monks surprised both the Tories and the Labour Party by saying he was very willing to sit down and talk with the political children and grand-children of the union-bashing Margaret Thatcher. But while a range of 'moderate' union leaders are prepared to attack the Blair Labour government a group of so-called 'new generation' union leaders are talking of walking out of the Labour Party and co-operating with the Greens, the Lib-Dems and even forming their own party. Billy Hayes, recently elected general secretary of the Communication Workers Union and one of the so-called 'new-generation' union leaders who is not a member of the Labour Party is particularly angry with Blair over plans to privatise and introduce competition to the Royal Mail. After being elected to lead the CWU he vowed that: "not one penny will go to any organisation unless it guarantees to support our call for a publicly-owned, publicly-funded Post Office." ********** In New York the union-aligned NY State Democrats have collapsed in shock to find that one of their strongest allies - the powerful get-out-the vote machine of Local 1119 of the SEIU - has just crossed the party line to back, for the first time in its history, the Republican Governor George Pataki. Dennis Rivera, the dynamic leader of New York state's largest health care union, Local 1199/SEIU, has switched sides after Gov Pataki delivered on a deal that provided $1.8 billion in raises for health care workers to his largely immigrant, low-waged, Spanish-speaking membership. The shock is huge because the NY Democrats are much closer to our idea of a labour party than almost any other section of the Democrats in that huge nation. *********** COSATU the South African national trade union centre has spent almost all of the last twelve months angrily blueing with the ANC government of Thabo Mbeki over its privatisation plans. COSATU had threatened to bring the country to a halt with a general strike over privatisation if the ANC didn't stop and listen to its long list of complaints. In response government operatives leaked documents to the South African press maligning the character of COSATU leaders and suggesting union leaders were traitors to the post-apartheid rainbow nation. The COSATU leadership reacted angrily with pointed statements telling Thabo Mbeki and his ministers that they would not become his uncritical lap dogs, or lead unions that served only as a transmission belt for those in power. Throughout most of last year the unions focused most of their vocal campaigning against the ANC on the government's plan to privatise the country's electricity utility, Eskom. Eslom's privatisation is part of a broader governments agenda of privatising the country's four big state-owned firms - defence group Denel, power utility Eskom, transport group Transnet and phone firm Telkom. While there has been a lot of anger targeting Mbeki most of the union bitterness has focused on the South African Communist Party minister Jeff Radebe who is responsible for the sale of these public assets. Only in recent days have the two sides come to an agreement which will see them step back from the brink because the ANC had begun to engage seriously with Cosatu's demands. ******** In Canada the social democratic NDP, which is a little over 40 years old, spent most of the last six months wracked by internal fighting over which way it should head - and what role there should be in the party for labour unions. Many of the party's union allies are angry with the NDP for moving towards the centre and away from a working-class base in an attempt to garner new supporters and new votes. Though the NDP has never formed a national government it has been very influential in some Canadian provinces where it helped to establish free education and free health systems. At its national conference at the end of last year a group of unions and rank-and-filers, organising under the banner of the New Politics Initiative, attempted to shift the party back to the left - or threatened to split off to form their own party. This left-caucus had as its most prominent member the charismatic Canadian union leader, Buzz Hargrove, head of the Canadian Autoworkers. While not all the Canadian unions agree with him Hargrove has regularly threatened to break away, and has irregularly campaigned to support the end of union contributions to the NDP. Note: There is a so-called Naomi Klein wing of the NDP based around the very popular Canadian progressive newspaper columnist. It is interesting to note that most of the Naomi Kleiners shout community politics as the key to revival of their party - and few of this group want anything to do with Canadian trade unions. Ah, It all does sound very familiar for us here in Australia. Now I'll leave you to analyse what it all means for the many and varied inquiries set up by the ALP to discuss its own revival - and how trade unions will fit into this revival. But just before I go let me remind you that last weekend in Korea the KCTU celebrated the second anniversary of the formation of its very own political party - the Democratic Labor Party . That convention made preparations for an assault on political power at the coming local and national elections. The KCTU is eager to get its party into power so that they can create laws which will legitimate unions such as the civil servants union which is currently an 'illegal' union because local laws ban public servants from associating as industrial organizations. The other, larger, Korean trade union centre, the FKTU, has decided not to join in the formation of the DLP, just yet, instead they will back 400 FKTU 'independent' candidates running in the coming elections.
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