ICFTU: "NEW REALISM" GOES GLOBAL
Rich Winkel
/** headlines: 152.0 **/
** Topic: ICFTU: "NEW REALISM" GOES GLOBAL **
** Written 8:40 AM Nov 13, 1997 by labornet in cdp:headlines **
/* Written 4:13 PM Nov 8, 1997 by lan...@YORKU.CA in list.labor */
/* ---------- "BILL JORDAN'S ICFTU: NEW REALISM GO" ---------- */
Date: Fri, 7 Nov 1997 12:41:28 +0800 (HKT)
From: AMRC <am...@HK.Super.NET>
BILL JORDAN'S ICFTU: BRITISH UNIONS' "NEW REALISM" GOES GLOBAL
Gerard Greenfield
Remember Bill Jordan? No? While most people in Britain have probably
forgotten him, the 3000 striking electrical workers he sold out in the
late 1980s when he was president of the Amalgamated Engineering and
Electrical Union remember him very well. And we have got to know him here
in Asia all too well. After selling out his members in the UK, he went on
to be appointed General Secretary of the International Confederation of
Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) in January 1995, where he now employs his subtle
blend of compromise and more compromise in a confederation that claims a
membership of over 126 million workers worldwide.
The compromises and concessions which underpin Bill Jordan's global union
strategy has its origins in the "new realism" which swept the British
trade union movement after the defeat of the miners' strikes in 1984-85.
As a precursor to Britain's New Labourism, 'new realism' mean that union
members had to be realistic about pit closures and factory closures,
realistic about the casualisation of work and the loss of job security,
realistic about the end of collective But the socialist movement which
grew out of the miners' strikes taught us that being realistic about all
of these things would only concede more ground to the New Right and
exacerbate the losses inflicted on the labour movement. We also understood
that with unionists like Bill Jordan in charge these losses were more or
less self-inflicted.
After each concession that further diminishes the capacity of workers to
exercise their collective power, after each compromise that limits the
power of trade unions in the bargaining process, there is a 'realistic
reassessment' of the new situation by union leaders. They start off by
saying, "The best we can do under the circumstances....", and before
they've finished workers have heard a list of new concessions and
compromises. A lot of this is justified in terms of raising productivity
and becoming or staying competitive. So rather than fighting to maintain a
critical space for workers' collection bargaining power, and rather than
demanding what is _necessary_ (as opposed to limiting ourselves to what
the New Right leads us to think is _possible_), union leaders are
returning from the bargaining table to tell their members that there's no
alternative but to accept what's being done to them. When Bill Jordan did
this to his own union the result was that the electrical workers - like so
many other unionised workers in Britain - had to go back to the bargaining
table individually, not collectively.
This is what business unionism boils down to. In the pursuit of a
partnership with management, and the personal power and privilege that
this brings to union leaders, the space for collective action by workers
is disappearing and the whole notion of 'struggle' is thrown out as
irrelevant and old fashioned. And the benefits? A few members keep their
jobs - sometimes the majority - but the class interests of workers and
their communities are abandoned. The greatest benefit of all is enjoyed by
the union leaders themselves, who no longer have to feel isolated and
marginalised from the decision-making structures of governments and
corporations. This is precisely what underlies Bill Jordan's bid to be
included in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) as the representative of
global labour. In fact the ICFTU's internet updates on proposals to
include a social clause in the WTO already refer to Jordan as the "global
union boss"!
In asserting its claim to be the legitimate representative of global
labour in the post-Cold War world, the ICFTU has managed an easy
convergence of business unionism and authoritarian state unionism. Under
the helmsmanship of Bill Jordan and pressure from the conservative
Japanese trade union confederation, Rengo, the ICFTU is moving quickly
towards recognition of the official All China Federation of Trade Unions
(ACFTU). Of course no mention is made of the ACFTU's support for the
state's massacre of workers and students in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The
ACFTU played an active role in this repression by denouncing the Beijing
Workers Autonomous Federation and calling on its members to report the
names of labour organisers involved in the movement. Since 1989, the ACFTU
has continued to play this repressive role by intervening to end workers'
strikes and supporting the arrest and conviction of independent labour
organisers as 'subversives'.
At the international conference of the ICFTU's Asia and Pacific Regional
Organisation (APRO) held in Hong Kong earlier this year, the ICFTU
leadership made it clear that they have _not_ forgotten the ACFTU's role
in the Tiananmen Square massacre. That's exactly why they referred to the
massacre as an "incident", and suggested that it was time to move on.
Jordan even pointed out that he has been meeting with the ACFTU and
holding "fruitful discussions". He then reassured the Hong Kong
Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU) that all is well, despite the very
real possibility of repression by the ACFTU after reunification. As the
conference dragged on it was increasingly clear that the "global labour
boss" was distancing himself from the HKCTU. This comes as no surprise
since the HKCTU is one of the few ICFTU affiliates in Asia which is
independent of both business and the government. (In the September 26,
1997 ICFTU-APRO Labour Flash the ICFTU report on its visit to China,
ICFTU-APRO praises the work of ACFTU in protesting workers' rights,
concluding: "The delegation was particularly impressed with protections
for workers and trade union rights in the Special Economic Zones.")
It was during this same conference in Hong Kong that Bill Jordan revealed
both his 'new realist' agenda and his ignorance. He started off by telling
the audience of local union representatives that, "Hong Kong's tradition
of democracy and a strong labour movement has made it one of the most
dynamic economies in the world". Local unionists were a bit stunned,
because Jordan had hit on the two things Hong Kong has never had. At the
time he was speaking Hong Kong was still under British colonial rule and
was about to see another non-elected government take power. Moreover, only
4% of workers are organised and there are only two collective bargaining
agreements in the whole of Hong Kong. After 150 years of colonial rule the
labour movement is still struggling for the right to organise and
collective bargaining, as well as protection against dismissal and the
right to union pluralism. And despite the rhetoric about Hong Kong's
economic success, the average working class _wage_ is less than ten per
cent of the average monthly _rent_ in the middle class residential
districts.
While the fate of the HKCTU remains unclear, there is no doubt that the
partnership emerging between the ICFTU and the ACFTU will consolidate the
fusion of business unionism and authoritarian state unionism within the
region. But is Bill Jordan's compliance with the demands of conservative
national centres like Japan's Rengo and Singapore's state-run National
Trade Union Council (whose president is usually a government minister)
simply due to his complete ignorance of what's going on? His speech on
Hong Kong's democratic traditions and "strong labour movement" suggests
that this might be the case. But if we look at the nature of business
unionism in Asia, the alignment with the management structures of
transnational corporations, the obsession with managing workers to ensure
competitiveness and productivity, and the compromises and concessions
imposed on workers to bring their unions into line with the interests of
management, then we can see that what Jordan did to electrical workers in
Britain is merely a microcosm of all this. There's no doubt about it: new
realism has gone global.
Some may question the impact of all this on the local scene, arguing that,
"Our national union centre may be a member of the ICFTU, but it's a real
union so none of this global union politics really affects us." Well it
does. First of all we should remember that the 'new realism' is all about
the concessions we're told we must make to stay competitive. But if
workers' collective rights are being rolled back all over the world, then
these concessions in the name of competitiveness will lead to a race to
the bottom for all of us. The second point is that the international
departments of even the most progressive and democratic trade unions are
often dominated by the ICFTU's own politics of compromise.
Most important of all is the fact that most of us draw our inspiration
from workers' struggles overseas as much as struggles at home. So if the
ICFTU's business unionism is affecting these struggles, then it's our
business too. Take the general strike in South Korea, for example. The
massive, nation-wide strike by workers in South Korea demonstrated that we
can and should wage a collective struggle against the attempts by
governments to reverse the gains of workers' movements in the name of
competitiveness. It also represented social movement unionism in action,
with the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) building alliances
and partnerships with a number of human rights, women's, students' and
community-based organisations and movements. However, although the ICFTU
declared its support for the general strike, the ICFTU leadership focused
solely on the illegality of the new laws and the violation of
International Labour Conventions. During Jordan's visit to Seoul, the
ICFTU was careful to stress that the strike was a struggle over workers'
legal rights, and not a struggle for political and social change. Of
course Jordan's line did not have much impact on the KCTU leadership
because the militancy of the workers' movement and its ties to other
social movements ensured that they were not about to reduce their demands
to a narrowly defined set of rights.
It's worth remembering that Jordan did not issue any criticism of the new
anti-worker labour laws until it was clear that the state-controlled
Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU) would also oppose the new laws.
We should also recall that at the time of an even greater struggle by the
independent union movement in South Korea and its bloody repression in the
1980s, the ICFTU only recognised and worked with the trade union
federation controlled by the state and big business - the FKTU.
It is ironic that at the time of the general strike in South Korea Bill
Jordan presented it as having an organic link to the work of the ICFTU.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The ICFTU promotes the kind of
new realism and business unionism that tells workers to accept the
sacrifices being demanded of them, to compromise and settle things
quickly. Their message to their 126 million members is no different from
Jordan's message to the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union
members: don't strike, just go home and we'll sort things out for you. In
contrast, the workers in South Korea took to the streets and refused to
compromise. Rather than reflecting any organic link with the ICFTU, the
South Korean workers' struggle represented a rejection of business
unionism and new realism. By mobilising communities and forming alliances
with other social movements, they demonstrated the importance of social
movement unionism as a strategy for reinvigorating working class struggle.
This also reinforced the notion that only if unions are _in struggle_ will
they succeed in representing the interests of their members and the
working class at large, and only by being _in struggle_ will they
challenge the attack on collective bargaining rights, the casualisation of
work and the destruction of job and income security. But with the
predominance of new realists and business unionists like Jordan in the
leadership of the ICFTU, genuine workers' unions must not only be _in
struggle_ against corporations and governments, but also against the ICFTU
itself.
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