Deborah Eade and Alan Leather (eds). 2004. Trade Union and NGO Relations in Development and Social Justice, Development in Practice Vol. 14, 1-2, pp. 5-285
Unions and NGOs, separately or jointly, have claimed that they in some sense represent a global civil society in the making. But in exactly what sense is this?
Here we have an original and substantial collection on a relationship, more crucial than most involved may realise, to the development of a meaningful civil society globally. This is because unions and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are two considerable but evidently very different sets of socio-political institutions which can be seen as bearers, respectively, of the old internationalism and the new. And which, separately or jointly, have claimed - or have had claimed for them - that they represent a global civil society (GCS) in the making. What the collection actually represents, I think, is an exceptionally rich resource book but one that does not possess the language for, or even the intention of, of looking at these phenomena from the outside, nor the specific forest in which they stand.[1]
Content and coverage
As with all such extensive collections the problem is of how one does them any possible kind of justice, or, rather, on deciding and making explicit with what kind of injustice one is going to handle them. Appendix 1 below provides readers of this piece with at least the structure and contents of the collection. But, given its size and scope, I am just going to have to concentrate on the major introductory pieces and abandon the rest to the gnawing criticism of other reviewers. This cavalier attitude can only be justified on my side by stressing that anyone interested in the construction of some kind of global civil society really ought to read this collection.
To start with we have the tone-setting editorial item of Deborah Eades and the path-breaking mode of Alan Leather.
The tone consists, in the Eades overview, of two major elements: firstly the explicit engagement of both editors and many contributors with both unions and NGOs; secondly an assertion of the significant differences between these two forces, yet the necessity, given the growing ethos of the global market and consequently growing social divisions and poverty, of their collaboration. The differences are described in terms familiar to those who have ploughed this field: 1) the membership mandate but bureaucratic procedures of the unions as against the speed and flexibility of the NGOs (which may lead to them following their own noses regardless of others); 2) the ideological positions, or criticisms of each other: the unions castigating the NGOs for a concentration on poverty-reduction measures that may ignore or undermine worker power and organisation; the NGOs criticising union recruitment, organisation and strategies as inadequate to the needs of the poor in a globalised economy.
The Alan Leather piece embodies and expresses these elements in an autobiographical piece - a mode I give high priority. This is because of an increasing need or demand, amongst ever-wider publics, to see a connection, in would-be - even has-been? -leaders and leaderships, between the Professional, the Political and the Personal. From being a British printer and union activist, Alan moved into the new social movements of the 1960s (peace, anti-apartheid) to the state-sponsored Voluntary Service Overseas, then work with Oxfam and the British cooperative movement, and then the trade unions. These bodies were then originally busy with their own developmental or justice concerns, making occasional alliances, carrying out joint actions, with others from what we now call civil society. During this time he worked in Botswana and India. Eventually he pioneered the Trade Union International Research and Education Group (TUIREG), which worked on unions and development cooperation. TUIREG balanced cautiously between the union-created Ruskin College (I studied there 1961-3), the national and international trade unions, and other British NGOs involved in development education and solidarity. In 1987 Alan became a union education officer with what is now called a Global Union Federation (GUF), the Public Services International (PSI), of which he is now the Deputy General Secretary. The PSI has, particularly since the mid-90s, developed an increasing variety of relations with development and justice NGOs.
Alan makes significant mention of the UK War on Want publication, subtitled An Account of Trade Union Imperialism (Thompson and Larson 1978). This, he records, caused major problems between this NGO and the inter/national union movement.[2] It was a wild and woolly collaboration, striking just one note on the piano, which actually has several more. It nonetheless threw - to switch metaphors - the kind of laser light on a West European union development paternalism that had previously been concentrated on the US ones.[3] I note, however, that Alan makes no mention at all of International Labour Reports (my archive runs 1984-89), which not only had a longer-lasting but a broader impact within the UK, and which was inspired by notions less of trade union imperialism or development cooperation than of solidarity. It even started a difficult dialogue with at least one international trade union leader of social-democratic plumage, one which has continued, under other circumstances, till the present day.[4]
ILR, co-founded by Alans co-contributor to this collection, Dave Spooner, was a rubber-band and paper-clip operation (for the computer bit see below), run by a changing team, partly by each taking turns in switching between minimal pay and unemployment insurance. Born with the first wave of New Social Movements (NSMs) and independent socialism from the 1970s, it was, for five years or more, the coordinating principle of the new labour internationalism in Europe - exercising some influence in the USA, Europe and elsewhere. ILR clearly saw itself less as providing a service, or acting as a pressure group, within the existing inter/national union movement, more as pioneering meaningful solidarity relations with and between workers at company and shopfloor level. This was particularly so for the outstanding social movement unions of this moment - in South Africa, Poland, the Philippines and South Korea (Waterman 2001:Ch 5). ILRs pathbreaking effort at moving beyond both the discourses of union development cooperation and union imperialism eventually foundered on the customary rocks: no rocks (despite confidential backhanders from sympathetic funding agencies), high staff turnover, eventual burnout. There were also policy differences between those prominently involved. And, to my mind, a limiting territorial imperative, with sympathetic academics[5] made clear their role was to be one of support to rather than cooperation and dialogue with. Two of its important additional legacies, however, were its understanding, explicit or implicit, that the new labour internationalism was going to be communications-dependent. I am referring here less to the magazine itself, since there had been forerunners, than to its enthusiastic commitment to what I seem to recall was not yet even called the Internet. International labour communication by computer in the UK and internationally was largely pioneered by ILR.
Alliances and tensions (threats and promises?)
Dave Spooner provides us with an outstanding geography of the collections terrain, well structured, of wide coverage, relevantly illustrated. A whole course could be run on this foundation. The basis for cooperation between the unions and the NGOs lies, he starts, not so much with their differing histories and constituencies but their common concern for working people in general and their desire to advance and improve the human condition(19). They are crucial components of a global civil society in formation. They have had specific and longstanding interests and collaboration in the areas of international development and human rights, and, increasingly, in new rights agendas that address the needs of both the unionisable and marginalised, buffeted by neo-liberal globalisation. Obstacles to collaboration include the breadth and generality of the union agenda itself, the differences between levels of union organisation, those between unions North and South, East and West, the problem of a necessary European union address to both the European and global levels; and then the sexy ones - gender, culture/democracy/class. The list continues. Dave (with whom I have repeatedly tossed this argument over the decades) gives much stress to the C/D/C complex - the historical origins, internal governance and the class composition of the two types of body.
I quote here at length, and pointedly, from page 27:
Point A
While examples of autocratically run and bureaucratic trade unions, some well-known, exist in many countries, it remains true, nevertheless, that the trade union movement as a whole is by far and away the most democratic institution in every society and certainly the only major democratic international movement worldwide.
Point B All trade unions have a clearly-defined leadership elected at regular intervalsThis leadership may lose the next electionUnion accounts are usually audited and available to the scrutiny of the membership and the general public [] In a democratic (i.e. typical) trade union, members are the citizens.
Point C
By contrast, there are few NGOs with a membership that has a sense of citizenship and ownership of the organisation. In many cases, NGOs are perceived by unions to have a self-appointed and co-opted leadership, with no accountability to a constituency other than public opinion and funding agencies.
Point D
The middle- or upper-class origins of NGO activists of staff members, especially in the UK context, are vividly obvious to working-class union representatives. Their apparent shared confidence and social and cultural affinity with the enemy (corporate or governmental), and their frequently displayed academic training, can easily create distrust and animosity among unions. NGOs may be perceived as being populated by posh people, perhaps with private incomes, and with no experience of the realities faced by working-class communities, whether in inner-city London or on the streets of Manila. (27)
I have to here offer a series of energetic caveats. Point A. Unions are here presented, naively, and without argument or example, as not only historical models of democracy (which they certainly once were) but as the contemporary vanguard of such internationally. This despite a century of intensive and continuing political and theoretical debate about the crisis of union and now all other forms of representative democracy.
Point B. Citizenship, also within unions, is a many-splendoured - and many- poison-prickled - thing. The ICFTU knows it has 150 million members, but how many of them know that they have it (Or who leads it? Or what it does? Or doesnt? No one has ever asked them).
Point C. The problem of NGO accountability has been a matter of increasing public debate within and around the NGO community. And inter/national unions may be dependent, for 70 percent of their development cooperation expenses on the self-same funding agencies as the NGOs. Pots and kettles!
Point D. The image of the NGOs is marked by such polemical overkill as to raise the question of whether it really lies in the retina of the worker. Which workers? Where? When? To what extent? Are we thinking of information workers, now, on broad definition, a majority of at least the Western waged working classes? Or does this image rest in the imagination of the writer? As for the question of who is sleeping with the corporate or governmental enemy (not enemy), well, this is, of course, the century-old critique of unions made less by the upper- and middle-classes than by their own unruly members[6] - as well, of course, of NGOs by their own unruly elements. And as for posh peoplewith private incomes! Por favor, compaero! In so far as Dave himself has been long working for a range of labour-oriented NGOs, nationally and internationally, this caricature can hardly be intended to portray himself and his (commonly or universally university-educated) colleagues, either Back in the ILR, or around him today in the international worker and adult education movement. It belongs, in fact, to a treasured epoch of socialist caricature, with top-hatted capitalists on money bags crushing burly but smouldering proletarians in cloth caps and hob-nailed boots. And I fear it serves a purpose - hopefully unconscious - that of preserving fences where Dave Spooner apparently intends to build bridges. Can this be why he attributes these images to others rather than expressing them in the first person himself? Moving beyond attitudes, impressions and mutual counter-accusations, Spooner reports the increasingly central debate - under neo-liberal globalisation - around unions, NGOs and the informal economy. This took dramatic place at the International Labour Conference 2002. The chief protagonists here were the ICFTU and friends, on the one hand, and the feminist Women in Informal Employment Globalising and Organising (WIEGO, a highly-professional and effective Harvard-based NGO) on the other.[7] At issue here was the challenge to the trade unions, from the NGOs and from the ILO itself, over who does, should or could speak for this growing economic sector and its growing percentage of the worlds workers.
On the one hand, the trade unions are part of the original tripartite social partnership, together with capital and state, that created the ILO in 1919 (Capital and State 75 percent, Unions 25 percent). On the other hand, balloons were being floated for a quatripartite ILO, with the NGOs being brought in to somehow represent the un-unionised/un-unionisable, often women, workers in what some outside, and inside, the unions see as a promising sector of a globalised, networked, flexible capitalist economy that will, by some social-reformist Houdini manipulation of a neo-liberal economy, save, enrich, empower and - above all - pacify the increasing percentage of the poor living below some fat-cat technocrats poverty line. Little surprise that the union response to this was one of extreme scepticism, often of downright hostility. The problem was not in any way reduced, in my opinion, by trade-union territoriality (the dog in the manger) and the movements lack of any equivalent, or alternative, to a 19th century socialist, socially-addressed and mobilising vocabulary, updated in recognition of the globalisation juggernaut.[8]
In a balanced and detailed account of this complex matter Dave Spooner suggests that there are and can be negotiated solutions between the parties concerned. There are, indeed, there can be, and there will be more. Unfortunately these will, within the dispensation of this collection, likely preserve an archaic institutional balance of power within the ILO - the highest international instance for managing international labour-capital discontent. This dispensation is also one that preserves an increasingly ineffective discourse of social partnership between capital, state and unions - one in which the unions have always consciously or unconsciously accepted an inferior and dependent status. Most gravely of all, any defensive or territorial attitude of the unions prevents consideration of the extent to which the new pro-labour NGO networks might not provide the very model for an effective global labour solidarity movement in times of globalisation. Maybe not, but the matter is surely worthy of investigation (Waterman 2004).
The unions - and the NGOs for that matter - are also trapped within a discourse that should have been long dead, buried and forgotten. This is development, either in practice or theory, since what it has increasingly meant - out in the world beyond discourse, academies and grant-dependent NGOs - is the increase in every possible indicator of human misery and alienation, both within and between nation states and blocs. And this, now, at a moment of the crudest and most violent capitalist aggression/regression of living memory (I do not forget war, the sex and body-parts trade and natural disasters). We are, after all, talking about the cancer stage of capitalism, in which the proletarianisation and commoditisation of everything provokes and even facilitates (through alternative web networks for one dramatic example) a common labour and social movement reassertion, this time on a global scale - with the global including, of course, Cyberia. The Martians around the Corner A book on one of the repeated indigenous invasions of the Andean capital, and parliament, of Ecuador is called The Martian at the Corner. The title suggests that the Martians are already both there and visible, and the book is about how the local bourgeois-mestizo Quito press responded to this rather earthly space/place war. In the present collection, unfortunately, the Martians are here alright, the citadel is in a condition of considerable apprehension. But the Martians are not yet visible. And they do not even have a metaphorical name of their own.
This is curious, since the general motivation/orientation of these invisible space-beings is partially hinted at in the subtitle of the collection under consideration. This movement called itself, around WSF2, 2002, the global justice and solidarity movement (GJ&SM). This particular, if much-disputed, title will do quite well for the movements present moment of self-realisation and for my present purposes. To leap metaphorically through both space and time, I think that what we have in this collection is Hamlet, though less without his Fathers Ghost than the Prince himself - as well as Gertrude, Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Sundry Others, whether wearing swords or bearing skulls. The prince (a New Prince for Gramscians?) is not, repeat not, an NGO. It is not an NGO.
An NGO is, after all, a perfectly literal non-entity, in so far as it is negatively defined and therefore logically dependent on that which it is not (i.e government). It is, moreover, as Dave Spooner suggests, a descendent, of 19th century church and charity good works - though also, of course, of democratic clubs (sometimes full, simultaneously, of both top hats and cloth caps), community organisations, producer and consumer cooperatives, schools, anti-slavery campaigns, feisty vote-seeking women, anti-alcohol, anti-imperial and peace movements. So unions and NGOs really need to be placed within the history and significant stages of capitalist development (this noun is acceptable to me when accompanied by that adjective), as well as that of resistance to and struggles beyond capitalism. I refer to our present stage as a globalised, networked finance and services capitalism, though I am quite happy to work with related understandings. As for Marxs real movement that transforms the present nature of things (Arthur 1970:56-7), this is now, pace Karl, the GJ&SM.
Trade unions and NGOs are the names of trees in 1) the burning forest of capitalist hegemony, and of 2) the admitedly uneven, inchoate, but recognisably burgeoning, counter-hegemonic movements (armed with fire-fighting equipment). Within such a perspective, unions and NGOs can be found, with research, to have as much in common with as differences from unions. The question is what in common, what in difference, and how might each, apart or together, contribute to this new wave of struggle for human emancipation.
There is, in Britain, a cloth-capped word, gobsmacked.[9] A top-hatted word for this might be somewhat surprised. There appears, in this 2004 collection to be no mention of the major or minor expressions of what might, in the 1990s, have been called the anti-globalisation movement (I would need an index or a digital version of the collection to confirm this). The popular, if decade-late, launch-date and place for this is Chiapas 1994, and this thing, whatever it is, moves transversally, in network fashion, to Amsterdam, Seattle, Washington, Cochabamba, and a myriad other places of which, as Neville Chamberlain might have remarked, we know very little (he didnt have web access to Indy Media Centre). Given its long legs we had better call this apparition a Triffid rather than a Martian. It has frequent but movable feasts in the World Social Forum process (2001-Whenever). It is based in that South which knows what development isnt. And it is an event in which the national and international union movement, and labour-oriented NGOs have been increasingly involved (Waterman and Timms 2004). Yes, I think the word has to be gobsmacked. And, to revert to Shakespeare, I am afraid that in the absence of all this, what we might have here is, possibly, a Wicked Uncle, an Angry if Indecisive Nephew but no play. The plot has not been lost; it has not yet found.
Conclusion Read this collection. What we have here is a significant stimulus to a serious dialogue about the new drama.[10] I do not feel it necessary to apologise for the passionate (polemical?) note I strike. And this for at least the following reasons.
Firstly, we are confronted with two very considerable world-scale socio-political-cultural actors. The GJ&SM could well do with the full commitment of the institutionalised unions mobilising, potentially, 150 million members (China and Whereveristan so far not included). And there is no single hope of turning round the continuing decline in union power internationally without a profound, open, dialogue and dialectic between the old unions and the odd NGOs.
Secondly, we still have to consider, and then continually renegotiate, under public scrutiny, and with full worker control, the terms of engagement. At present, for example, it seems to me quite feasible that the two sets of leaders might settle for a new social (i.e. capitalist) partnership. This would be of Untransformed Unions (with shiny new logos and non-interactive websites), Reasonable Capital (bearing Greek gifts for limited workforces and periods of time), Friendly Statesmen (at WSF 3, Porto Alegre 2003, they were represented by or as President Lula) and Interstate Organisations (with ever-newer compacts, contracts, standards and other shiny but disposable and infinitely replaceable trinkets). This might well even deliver on a Global Neo-Keynesianism that restores some new capitalist balance, much as did the Inter/national Keynesianism of the Post-World War Two years. I am myself inclined to consider this a necessary but also quite insufficient stage - and therefore hardly a recommendable project.
Here we must call again for all power to the imagination. Look at it like this. You have been seriously infected by one weeks TV news. Can you trust your health to a system, in which there is no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest(Marx and Engels 1980/1848). Can you trust it to cure a complex and self-transforming virus, consisting of global warming, human hunger, HIV-AIDS, imperial wars and sub-imperial genocides, the epidemic of obesity, fear and loathing in the bursting cities, dumbed-down media, gun violence in the schools, farmers committing suicide (also in Blairs Booming Britain), the citizen-as-consumer, mad scientists and greasy CEOs producing Frankenstein foods (whilst consulting stakeholders or, at least steak-eaters), representative democratic politicians fiddling while Iraq burns? And do the trade unions, confronted by this, want to be seen globally - as Prasad and Snell remind us in their late contribution to the book - bearing the shield of vested interest or wielding the sword of social justice?[11]
Appendix 1
Editorial overview Deborah Eade
Guest editorial Trade union and NGO relations in development and social justice Alan Leather
Section 1: Alliances and tensions between trade unions and NGOs
Trade unions and NGOs: the need for cooperation Dave Spooner
Building bridges across a double divide: alliances between US and Latin American labour and NGOs Mark Anner and Peter Evans
Challenging relations: a labour-NGO coalition to oppose the Canada-US and North American Free Trade Agreements (NAFTA), 1985-1993 Sophia Huyer
Time to scale up cooperation? Trade unions, NGOs, and the international anti-sweatshop movement Tim Connor
International NGOs and unions in the South: worlds apart or allies in the struggle? Deborah Eade
Organising citizenship at Local 890s Citizenship Project: unleashing innovation through an affiliate organisation Paul Johnston
The trade union solution or the NGO problem? The fight for global labour rights Joseph Roman
Section 2: Experiences of union-based NGOs
The Global Workplace - challenging the race to the bottom Jackie Simpkins
Working at the intersection-a story from Australia Ken Davis
Representing labour in India Pravin Sinha
Section 3: Workers in the informal and maquila economy
Organising home-based workers in the global economy: An action-research approach Ruth Pearson
Never the twain shall meet? Womens organisations and trade unions in the maquila industry in Central America Marina Prieto and Carolina Quinteros
Beyond the barriers: new forms of labour internationalism Angela Hale
Spreading manufacturing growth gains through local jobs: lessons from the Guatemalan highlands Omar Ortez
Implementing ILO Child Labour Convention 182: lessons from Honduras Leslie Groves
Section 4: Workplace codes of conduct
Who should code your conduct? Trade union and NGO differences in the fight for workers rights Rainer Braun and Judy Gearhart
Sweating it out: NGO campaigns and trade union empowerment Ronnie D. Lipschutz
Trade unions, NGOs, and corporate codes of conduct Lance Compa
Workplace codes as tools for workers Neil Kearney and Judy Gearhart
Section 5: Case studies
United we stand: labour unions and human rights NGOs in the democratisation process in Nigeria E. Remi Aiyede
Combining worker and user interests in the health sector: trade unions and NGOs Jane Lethbridge
More than a token gesture: NGOs and trade unions campaigning for a common cause Jonathan Ellis
Trade unions and womens NGOs: diverse civil society organisations in Iran Elaheh Rostami Povey
The Sword of Justice: South Pacific trade unions and NGOs during a decade of lost development Satendra Prasad and Darryn Snell
Relations between NGOs and trade unions: the case of Ukraine Dodina Yevgeniya
References
Gallin. 2001. Propositions on Trade Unions and Informal Employment in Times of Globalisation, in Peter Waterman and Jane Wills (eds), Place, Space and the New Internationalisms. Oxford: Blackwell.
Arthur, Chris (ed). 1970/1845-6. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: The German Ideology. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Flanders, Alan. 1970. Management and Unions. London: Faber.
Hirsch, Fred. 1974. Analysis of Our AFL-CIO Role in Latin America: Or Under the Covers with the CIA. San Jose CA, 57 pp.
Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. 1980/1848. Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Marx/Engels Selected Works in One Volume. London: Lawrence and Wishart, p. 38.
Scipes, Kim. 2004. CAL STATE AFL-CIO-- "Immediate" End to U.S. Occupation of Iraq. Email received July 15. Waterman, Peter. 2001. Globalisation, Social Movements and the New Internationalisms. London: Continuum. Waterman, Peter. 2004. Research Project Outline: The Internationalisms of Labours Others: Shall the Last be the First?.
Waterman, Peter and Jill Timms. 2004. Trade Union Internationalism and the Challenge of Globalisation: The Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning?, in Mary Kaldor, Helmut Anheier and Marlies Glasius (eds), K: Sage? (eds). Global Civil Society 2004/5. London: Sage.
Wedin, Ake. 1991. La Solidaridad Sindical Internacional y Sus Victimas: Tres Estudios de Case Latinoamericanos (International Trade Union Solidarity and its Victims: Three Latin American Case Studies). Stockholm: Institute of Latin American Studies.
Notes
[1] I feel I ought to mention that I was invited to contribute to the volume by Deborah Eade, Editor of the journal. I have known personally, though to differing degrees, Alan Leather, its Guest Editor, and Dave Spooner, who makes the first major contribution. I concentrate upon their contributions and see this as a re-opening of an old debate, discussion or dialogue with them. I cant remember if I gave Deborah, who shares their union-cum-NGO background, a reason for not myself contributing to the collection and have even now mixed feelings about my failure to do so. The ambiguity may have to do with the fact that although my own career and commitments have overlapped with those of these major contributors, I have a radically different angle on the matter to theirs (Waterman 2001). This is not so much the difference between Development in Practice (them) and Development in Theory (me); there are plenty of academic contributors here. The difference is that, despite 27 years in an institute of development studies, I never believed in development even when I first joined it! Lets see what this development-scepticism might mean. If my style along the way is partly autobiographical, licence is given Alan Leathers contribution.
[2] Also, I seem to recall, with funding, since such activities were considered incompatible with its tax-advantageous charity status in the UK.
[3] I collaborated enthusiastically with this effort, but with no success in taming the wild and woolly argumentation, layout or grammar - a matter of much frustration when it concerned my own research on Nigeria. Where Thompson and Larsen pioneered, others followed, with Wedin (1991) pouring criticism down on the AFL-CIO, the Christian World Confederation of Labour - and the ICFTU.
[4] This was with Dan Gallin, then General Secretary of the food and allied union international, of whom more in Footnote 7. In case it should be thought I praise ILR too much, I would like to record that when I suggested, at its collapse, that I be given access to the files to write up the experience, and even seek accomodation in the Netherlands for such, this was turned down by the editorial board on the grounds that such an account was being planned, and that a local archive was going to be sought for the files. There was and is no such book, or even a memoir, as far as I know. And I know neither where the archive might be, nor whether it might now be accessible to the interested researcher.
[5] Well, OK, this activist academic, running his own shoestring Newsletter of International Labour Studies, c. 1980-90. Whilst I have no intention of comparing my material base with theirs, this activity carried its own risks. I can state that I took every possible advantage of my job - formal, informal and very informal - to further this commitment. This, amongst other hypothetical crimes or misdemeanours, led to my expulsion from the Labour Studies programme and near-expulsion from the institute. My skin was saved for me by more-democratic and tolerant colleagues elsewhere at the institute, one Marxist, some social-democratic, most liberal. The point of this all is to try to break down any possible binary opposition between risk-taking activists and cautious academics. Like the Colonels Lady and Mrs OGrady, we can - and should be - sisters under the skin. More on binaries below.
[6] One national case in point. And hardly a marginal one for what is better called trade-union foreign policy. It has taken 40 years, in the AFL-CIO, for left activists to move from pamphlet exposures of its relations with US MNCs and US imperial interventions, invasions and torturings, to a resolution by its largest state affiliate, in California, significantly entitled, Build Unity and Trust among Workers Worldwide (Scipes 2004). This despite the energetic, not to say, devious and violent opposition to such protests by both the right and the left within what has to surely be called the Wests most autocratic and bureaucratic trade union. Key in this campaign has been Fred Hirsch (1974). Whether he would consider this new and yet-to-be-won campaign a victory for liberal representative democracy or a campaigning radical democracy would be interesting to know. I make this last point because the AFL-CIO has had, during its century and more of history, less Presidents than the Catholic Church has had Popes and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had General Secretaries: Popes (since around the creation of the AFL), Leo XIII (1878-1903), St. Pius X (1903-14), Benedict XV (1914-22), Pius XI (1922-39), Pius XII (1939-58), Blessed John XXIII (1958-63), Paul VI (1963-78), John Paul I (1978), John Paul II (1978-). Nine. But then produced with no particular democratic charade but announced by puffs of smoke from a conclave of cardinals. General/First Secretaries? MmmStalin, Malenkov, Khruschev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, Gorbachov. Seven. If we throw in Lenin, who led the Party but never had such a title, Eight. But over the period 1917-91, and produced by democratic centralism. Presidents (of the un- or merged body) Gompers (twice), McBride, Green, Meany, Kirkland, Donahue, Sweeney (I may have missed one or two). Seven since 1886, or eight if we count Gompers twice. This is the outcome of processes in a democratic (i.e. typical) trade union, of which its members are citizens. These things have to be said and, regretably, still from the margins of the labour, the socialist and even the global justice movement movement. This because European union leaders, independent socialists and international labour-support NGOs - who know well enough the crimes and misdemeanours of the US trade union movement - have their own dubious or disreputable reasons for not sinking - or even warning - the Titanic. For a radical-democratic critique of and alternative to the AFL-CIO oligarchy, follow up the veteran US labour radical, Harry Kelber, who says of it:
The Executive Council functions as a self-perpetuating oligarchy that guarantees automatic re-election of its members, no matter how poorly they perform. It maintains a glass ceiling and a freeze on new union leadership. Council members dont have to be accountable to the rank-and file, since they are assured of re-election. Having been elected three times in a row by the voice vote of convention delegates, they expect to be re-elected for another four years at the 2003 convention, since they control the election machinery to block any opposing candidates. This outrageous situation is unlikely to change for the better, because the AFL-CIO hierarchy has shown no indication that they are willing to reform their undemocratic structure and practices. http://www.rankandfileaflcio.org/ (14.08.04).
[7] Weird and full of wonder is the brave new world of TU-NGO collaboration. An eminent, though less-cloth-capped, ex-international union leader has been a prominent consultant with the top-hatted Harvard feminists of WIEGO (Gallin 2001).
[8] So who on earth floated this balloon? The secret lies with our union and NGO cardinals who, after some admitedly desultory enquiry by myself, are not going to tell a sinner such as I. My guess is Juan Somavia himself, since he obviously has both the innovatory bug and the political background. The latter includes, prominently, the 1995 Social Summit which he led. Maybe, however, this is not a floating balloon but a haunting spectre?
[9] Word, quite arbitrarily in my lexicographic imagination, makes of this two words, without so much as a hyphen.
[10] By significant coincidence, an overlapping collection on global labour rights was produced, in English, on an international NGO website in Latin America around the same time. See Choike - 'In Depth' . Being digital rather than printed, this one has the built-in possibility of being added to, which is what happened to a first draft of this paper! However, two compilations do not a dialogue make. But the electronic one has the possibility of developing into such. And then, hypothetically, in Spanish as well as English. Should this happen it might be the first time that an open international dialogue on fundamental labour questions, involving those from the world of trade unions and of social movements (and of social movement unions?) did take place.
[11] Prasad and Snell have borrowed this metaphor from Richard Hyman (2000), who himself borrows it from Alan Flanders (1970). This has its own particular significance for our argument, given that neither of these was or is an ultra-radical anarcho-communist. Flanders was some kind of social-democrat and Hyman an independent socialist but only the quitest of firebrands.
Published on 14 November 2004 by RISQ Peter Waterman | www.risq.org 6437 reads
Re: Book Review | Trade Unions, NGOs and Global Social Justice: Another Tale to Tell
by Anonymous 08 August 2008
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Re: Book Review | Trade Unions, NGOs and Global Social Justice: Another Tale to Tell
Re: Book Review | Trade Unions, NGOs and Global Social Justice: Another Tale to Tell
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Re: Book Review | Trade Unions, NGOs and Global Social Justice: Another Tale to Tell
