Repression of Trade Unions

by Durutti Fri Jun 13, 2003 13:30

SP are part of Sell Out leadership in fire fighter strike.

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http://www.indymedia.ie/cgi-bin/newswire.cgi?id=52314&start=0

by pat c Wed Jun 11, 2003 15:53

Trade unions

Déjà vu?

Jun 5th 2003 | PARIS
From The Economist print edition

AP

Strikes and demonstrations are returning to the streets and the headlines. Do they signal a revival of organised labour?

ON JUNE 3rd, France was virtually closed by yet another nationwide strike. The government's plan to reform the country's pension system is being opposed by massed ranks of workers on the streets. Their colourful banners and shouted slogans have dominated the local media for over a month, rising to a crescendo this week in advance of the parliamentary debate on the plan, scheduled to begin on June 10th. The last time organised labour took on the government over this issue (in 1995) the government backed down. This time it appears to have more resolve. The prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, has said that he does not intend to yield on the issue: it is, he has said, “about the survival of the republic”.

It is not just in France, though, that trade unions have been flexing their muscles of late. Demonstrations of organised labour on the move have been widespread.

Reform in Germany and France
Jun 5th 2003
The future of trade unions
Jun 5th 2003

Paris

France, Germany

European Trade Union Congress, American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organisations, International Labour Organisation, Trade Union Advisory Committee

• In Germany, the unions have been battling against their government's efforts to raise pensioners' contributions to their health-care schemes. Thousands marched in a series of rallies on May 24th to protest. This week, workers in eastern Germany were on the march again, this time to protest at the length of their working week.

• Even normally placid Austria was gripped by widespread strikes on June 3rd, following equally crippling stoppages on May 6th. This week's were said to be the largest industrial protest in the country since the second world war. Co-ordinated by the national federation of Austrian unions, they drew more than a million people on to the streets to protest (as in France) against planned pension reforms. Wolfgang Schüssel, Austria's chancellor, attacked the unions for launching a “disproportionate” strike and said that parliament would not be swayed.

• On May 21st, India suffered a general strike as workers protested against plans to privatise state-owned assets and reform labour laws. A huge march brought Calcutta to a standstill.

• In Britain, firemen have been on partial strike for months, demanding a huge pay increase while bitterly resisting changes to their working conditions. Tony Blair's Labour government has watched with some alarm as a series of elections has put militant leaders into the top jobs at some of the biggest unions. In April, Kevin Curran, a former welder, succeeded the more moderate John Edmonds as leader of the GMB, Britain's fourth-largest union, and in May, Tony Woodley, a left-winger, defeated a candidate favoured by the Labour Party for the leadership of the powerful T&G union.

• In America, powerful unions have been holding back efforts to restructure ailing industries. In April, American Airlines narrowly avoided bankruptcy after it reached last-minute deals with unions representing pilots, flight attendants and ground staff. However, the USWA, the traditionally obstructive steelworkers' union, changed its attitude last September when it agreed to more flexible, less generous employment contracts and put its weight behind consolidation of the industry. On May 19th, it duly signalled its approval of a takeover by US Steel of rival National Steel, securing pension rights for its members in the process.

Strikingly deceptive
Europe at least appears to have entered a new period of labour militancy. But appearances can be deceptive. In Prague last week, members of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) met for their four-yearly assembly to discuss their agenda for the future. (The ETUC brings together 78 national trade-union confederations with roughly 60m members.) The occasion was much more muted than recent events might have suggested. Cross-border wage-bargaining initiatives and minimum working standards featured more prominently than did industrial protest.

For the reality is that the past few years have been tough for the labour movement. In Britain, Germany and the Netherlands, the unions lost one-third of their members before they began offering carrots such as discount holidays and cheap insurance in order to regain them. In America, membership levels are considerably lower than in Europe: the proportion of workers who are union members is around 14%, compared with 21% in Japan and an average of 43% in Europe (see chart). The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), America's labour confederation, has struggled in recent years to replace its ageing membership.

But events in France show that small or declining membership is not necessarily the same thing as declining influence. Private-sector union membership in France is even smaller than the 13% figure for the country overall. But this belies the extent of union power, which is cemented not by mass membership but rather by the unions' formal role in the welfare system—via the mutuelles, organisations for delivering health and unemployment insurance.

Moreover, militancy itself is not easy to interpret—militant unions are not necessarily strong ones. A measure of protest, such as days lost to strikes, can be misleading. Rising industrial action may signal the failure of an existing social consensus—and corresponding union weakness—rather than a resurgence of union strength. By contrast, America's remarkably low strike activity (in 2001, the days lost to strikes were at a record low) is undoubtedly a sign of its unions' weakness across a widening band of the industrial spectrum.

Rent by economics
“With a few exceptions, trade unionism has been on the back foot,” says John Monks, a former head of Britain's Trades Union Congress (TUC) who last week was elected head of the ETUC. Some go further. Jeremy Waddington, an academic at UMIST in Manchester, England, argues that unionism is in crisis following the decline of a (largely European) model for its activity and organisation that emerged after 1945 and remained relatively stable until the late 1970s.

AFP


Fists on the table, not on the street

Several factors destabilised the model. In particular, the Thatcher government in Britain succeeded in reining in the power of unions that had previously held the country to ransom. New labour laws introduced strike ballots by secret vote rather than by a show of hands and made it much easier for companies to sack striking workers. In America, Ronald Reagan took on the country's 13,000 stroppy air-traffic controllers in 1981, sacking all those who refused to return to work and later decertifying their union.

Persistently high unemployment in Europe in the early 1990s was also important, as jobless workers gave up memberships they could no longer afford. The changing nature of work—with many more part-timers and the end of lifelong employment as a norm—also played an important role in challenging the traditional rationale for unions. Mr Monks points to the success of America's economy in the late 1990s as another big influence on declining union membership. With employers bending over backwards to find good workers, who needed union support? The unions, it would seem, were damned in good times and damned in bad.

As the American economy boomed, so other countries sought to emulate its success. There was a wave of deregulation and privatisation, and the cult of shareholder value—a trend in which unions were kept very much in the background. The rise of market-led economics combined with low inflation to limit their room for manoeuvre. Mr Monks also cites the anti-union influence of business schools, calling them “bible colleges for the American way”.

The changing nature of the economy in big industrial nations has also played a more subtle role in undermining unions. Waves of cost-cutting and efficiency exercises have made private-sector companies leaner. Manufacturing jobs have been lost to developing countries with lower labour costs, leading to the end of the era of big factories in the West. “When there were 5,000 workers on one site, it was relatively cheap per member for a union to service them,” says Stephen Pursey, an analyst with the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Geneva. Plants with only 500 workers are much more expensive to serve. Some companies—such as Merloni, an Italian white-goods manufacturer—kept their plants small for this very reason.

The public sector has attempted, less successfully, to become leaner, and unions have responded in order to protect their members there. The recent wave of strikes across Europe has been largely related to pension reform and the protection of social benefits for public-sector workers. Less obvious, but no less potent, have been the struggles behind the scenes as governments have tried to improve public-sector performance. Union negotiators have fought a largely losing battle to preserve these workers' entrenched rights, while often recognising in private that something has to give.

Political persuasions
Their relations with government have also inevitably had a big effect on the unions. In America, trade unions have always been seen as affiliated to the Democratic Party, a useful alignment during the Clinton presidency, but one which has been disastrous since. John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, publicly backed Al Gore against George Bush in the 2000 election. Not surprisingly, Mr Bush feels little compulsion to return his calls today.

Nevertheless, the unions retain considerable power in Congress, and a few have been courted by the Bush administration. But these have been in politically sensitive sectors—such as steel and oil—where there are jobs (and votes) to protect.

In some parts of the world, unions continue to play an important political role. In Brazil, for example, Lula da Silva, a former metalworker and shop steward, became president in January. His rise to power was the culmination of an indigenous union movement that for decades had campaigned for economic reforms.

In other countries, notably Italy, the unions have defied predictions that they would be marginalised. In 1991, CGIL, the biggest of three big union groups, adroitly abandoned its traditional goal of class struggle, adopting instead bargaining demands that were thought to be reasonable within the constraints of a capitalist economy, and seeking “co-determination” rather than confrontation. That set the tone for a decade or so of constructive engagement with the nation's politicians, a time when CGIL became a model of open communication with its members.

Flexible friends
The debate about what services a union should provide to its members in the 21st century is an ongoing one. Some have experimented and offered financial services, such as cheap mortgages and credit cards. Others believe the future lies in providing legal services, with union dues becoming more like insurance premiums for protection against problems at work.

Many unions have become far more pragmatic than they have dared to admit in public. In Germany, for example, big companies face daunting labour regulations that make it difficult to compete against more flexible foreign competitors. It is against the law to operate 24-hour shifts, or for Saturday to be treated as a normal working day. In public, IG Metall, Germany's biggest industrial union, is usually recalcitrant on these issues, refusing to discuss ways round the problem with company managers. Companies have, however, found their own solutions by negotiating directly with their works councils, essentially committees of worker representatives. Although they are union members, the representatives operate at the local level and can do things that it would be impossible for a national union to do without losing face.

Siemens, a giant engineering group, has negotiated more than 100 different deals on working hours in its German factories, deals that technically have broken the law but have been responsible for keeping thousands of jobs inside the country. A few years ago, the group's big medical-equipment division was in danger of having to abandon its historic centre in Erlangen, a loss that would have devastated the local economy. But a deal on flexible working time was agreed with the works council, and Erlangen now boasts modern high-tech Siemens factories that make medical scanners and good profits.

There are other examples of union pragmatism that defy the general conception of their inflexibility. John Evans, the general secretary of the Trade Union Advisory Committee (TUAC), a consultative body to the OECD, points to a group of countries where three-way deals between unions, government and employers have had a big impact, not just on economic performance but also on union participation. These countries include the Netherlands and the Nordic region, where a willingness by unions to take part in public dialogue about restructuring social safety nets has led to a resurgence of interest in union membership.

Also in this group of countries is Ireland. In the late 1980s, Ireland introduced a wide-ranging social pact, which included acceptance by the unions of wage restraint. Lucio Baccaro and Marco Simoni, the authors of a recent study commissioned by the ILO, found that Ireland's rolling three-year social agreements “altered the process of wage formation” and had an important side-effect in allowing big foreign companies to create highly competitive (but non-unionised) operations in the country.

Mr Pursey of the ILO suggests that social partnership can be an effective tool of economic management, particularly for smaller countries operating in the euro area. Facing budgetary constraints and unable to devalue their currencies, such countries can use co-ordinated national-level wage bargaining to keep claims in a narrow band and minimise differences between the public and private sectors.

Global brothers
Mr Monks says that there are plenty of other opportunities for organised labour to exploit. For example, it is slowly becoming aware that it has a largely untapped source of influence. Of the $17 trillion in worldwide pension and mutual funds, around $12 trillion either has direct union participation or employee involvement at the trustee level, says Mr Evans. Through the activism of funds such as TIAA-CREF, an American teacher's fund, unions have begun to realise that they can have a bigger voice in the broadening debate about corporate governance. The AFL-CIO, for example, has been very active in this year's shareholder revolt against executive pay.

There is also scope for more imaginative recruitment. The AFL-CIO has had some success in reaching America's growing Latino population. But women and minorities remain generally under-represented everywhere; few unions have made them central to their cause. The gender pay gap, for instance, has barely narrowed in recent years and remains high—20%, on average—across Europe.

Perhaps the biggest opportunity, though, is for the unions to find a new international model to replace the plethora of misogynistic national organisations that continue to run the show today. “Many big companies are global and have a mindset to match,” says Mr Monks. “Unions have to understand this and adapt their approach accordingly.”

There are signs of the beginning of an international approach to union organisation. ETUC has scored some successes in Europe, including framework agreements defining minimum rights for workers and, more notably, the introduction of a directive on European works councils. There has been less progress towards a Europe-wide, collective-bargaining regime, mainly because there are internal tensions between national confederations and industry or sector federations.

Ironically, help is coming from a number of big companies. Mr Evans says that a few of the world's biggest firms are actively trying to polish their haloes by showing they meet or exceed guidelines on working practices—a sort of labour equivalent of environmental standards. Last year, for example, Volkswagen signed a global agreement with the International Metalworkers' Federation that set out the ground rules for how it operates worldwide. These include the recognition of workers' rights to join a union, and a commitment to proper pay and conditions. TUAC has had enquiries from dozens of big companies about such agreements.

In the end, the future of trade unions rests largely in their own hands. A few pioneers, notably in the Netherlands, have shown that a willingness to address their own organisational weaknesses (and an acceptance that some social reforms are inevitable) can translate into a much greater degree of influence. The noisy, colourful demonstrations of recent weeks attract media attention and raise the unions' profile. But they are not symptomatic of what influential unions do today, nor of what they want to do tomorrow.

by pat c Tue Jun 10, 2003 16:59

This weeks Economist (7-13 June)has a special on Trade Unions. Take the following:

"Unions are no longer needed (if they ever were) to advance basic rights through economic blackmail: todays rich countries have better ways of discussing such matters. Depriving unions of the means to engage in blackmail, by curbing their legal immunities, would help to channel their thinking in a more productive direction - before it is too late."

The battle lines have been drawn. Go to ICTU HQ in Parnell Square to pick up your AK-47.