What is the Labor Movement?
In the most common acceptance of the term, especially in the United States, the labor movement refers to the trade union movement. It is actually far more than that. Historically, it also comprises the political parties created by workers to defend their interests, such as labor parties, socialist and social-democratic parties, as well as many institutions created for a specific purpose. These include workers’ co-operatives (both as producers and as consumers), workers’ banks, workers’ education associations, schools and colleges, health and welfare institutions, cultural institutions (theaters, libraries, chorals, brass bands, book clubs), leisure activities (sports and hiking clubs), women’s organizations, youth organizations, solidarity and defense organizations (including armed militias), radio and TV stations, newspapers and reviews, publishing houses, bookshops. All of these, taken together, constitute the historical labor movement.

The full range of such institutions and organizations rarely existed all at the same time in any one country. The important point is that all these institutions taken together were not only meant to support workers in all aspects of their lives, but were also meant to constitute an alternative society and a counter-culture. The labor movement is a multi-faceted social movement with a cause and a vision of society.

The trade union movement is the most important component of the labor movement in its wider sense. It is the first, and often the last, line of resistance workers have to defend themselves and without it none of the other institutions of the labor movement could survive. It is also the most representative part of the labor movement: it exists in every country in the world except in the most extreme dictatorships.

From its origins, the labor movement has been inspired and organized by many different ideologies: Marxism in various (sometimes contradictory) interpretations, revolutionary and conservative syndicalism, Christian social doctrines, radical liberation movements, and others. Each derives its values and objectives from its own traditions, but they share a common ground, which by now constitutes the culture of the mainstream. The basic elements of this culture are reflected in its values and goals.

Values
The labor movement is the oldest social movement seeking to transform society in the name of universal values, with the objective of creating a society that meets the needs and aspirations of all human beings. The fundamental value, from which all others are derived, is a sense of dignity of the human being: that is a value stronger than even survival since people are prepared to die for it. A related value is that of equality: all human beings are of equal worth, and therefore should have equal rights.

From that derives the value of justice: it is unacceptable that, because of the way power is distributed in society, some should enjoy wealth and privilege while others, the greater number, should be consigned to poverty, starvation and early death. Finally, all human beings aspire to freedom: freedom from exploitation and oppression. These are the values that have driven every movement of resistance to exploitation and oppression throughout history and they are driving the modern labor movement.

What differentiates the modern labor movement from the many earlier liberation movements is that it is international in nature. The transnationality of the labor movement is rooted in the perception that workers constitute a class with a common cause. Because it has no vested interest in exploitation but, on the contrary, has a vital interest in its abolition for all people, the labor movement is not only a self-help movement of workers, but also the liberation movement of humanity.

The values of the labor movement explain its concept of democracy as a process and as a method, not just as an ultimate goal. This concept is based on the understanding that ends and means are closely linked: for example, undemocratic means cannot lead to democratic outcomes. Therefore democracy is a living process and a continuous work in progress.

Goals
The goals of the labor movement naturally derive from its values. They are several, at several levels:

• the defense of the immediate interests of its members on the job: decent wages, security of employment, working conditions that are not threatening to the mental and physical health of the worker, basic social protection.
• socially progressive legislation in the interests of all workers and, indeed, of the vast majority of the population.
• a political society where the rights of workers and of all citizens are guaranteed. The earliest battles of the labor movement were conducted to achieve universal suffrage, a political objective, as well as universal and free education, freedom of association, a free press. To achieve this, the labor movement has, in most countries, sought to exercise political power through its own parties.
• the labor movement has always had international perspectives and objectives, since its achievements are under threat everywhere as long as injustice and oppression exist anywhere. The recognition that workers depend on each other to make sure that justice and freedom prevail everywhere is expressed by the concept of solidarity.

The enduring strength of the solidarity principle is demonstrated by the resilience of the international labor movement, which has survived the wars and totalitarian dictatorships of the twentieth century, keeping in mind that these dictatorships specifically targeted the labor movement for destruction. Every dictatorship, to establish itself, first has to break the unions; Churches and business have survived and flourished in dictatorships where labor activists went to jail, concentration camps and death.

History
Broadly speaking, there are four periods in the history of the international labor movement: first, from its origins to World War I; second, the inter-war years; third, the period from the end of World War II to the collapse of Stalinism as a political system; and finally, the present period of globalizing capitalism.
The first period is that of the ascendancy of the labor movement, of the First and Second Internationals. That is where the foundations of the movement were laid.

The Origins
The history of the modern labor movement begins in Europe over several decades between the end of the 18th century and the middle of the 19th (depending on the country), with the industrial revolution, the emergence of capitalist mass production and the formation of an impoverished, but increasingly powerful, no longer artisanal, working class.

The brutal injustice of the emergent society inspired social reformers in the first two decades of the 19th century to propose a more rational and fairer social order.

By the end of the 1830s, small groups of trade unionists, socialists and democrats in Britain and in France, including political exiles from Germany, Poland, Hungary, Italy and other countries, were planning for an “international association for the emancipation of the working class”.

In 1843, Flora Tristan Moscoso (1803-1844), who had been a social activist in France and in Peru, published “L’Union ouvrière” (The Workers’ Union), in which she proposed the creation of an international general workers’ union. “The Workers’ Union, she wrote, should establish … in all capitals of Europe, committees of correspondence.” In her pamphlet, she anticipated Marx and Engels by stressing that the workers had to emancipate themselves by their own action, and no one was going to do it for them, and that they had to unite internationally because society itself had become international.

The Communist Manifesto
Between 1845 and 1847, some workers and political exiles living in London organized a “Group for Communist Education”. The Germans among them knew of Karl Marx (1818-1883), who had been the editor of a radical democratic newspaper in Cologne and had emigrated to Paris in 1843 to escape harassment by the Prussian authorities. Marx had been a student of Hegelian philosophy in Germany; in Paris, he went on to study the writings of the French and English socialist thinkers and of English classical economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Since 1844, Marx, who had become a socialist, had been working closely with his friend Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), also a student of economic and social issues, a journalist and an expert on military science. The “Group for Communist Education” approached Marx and Engels for help in establishing a Communist Federation. A meeting held in London in November 1847 did not establish an organization but adopted a declaration and a program, written by Marx on the basis of a first draft by Engels, which became known as “The Communist Manifesto”.

The Manifesto, a short, tightly argued and highly compressed document, contains a philosophy of history, a critical analysis of socialist doctrines and a call to revolutionary action. Its core is the analysis of history as a process of struggle between classes driven by technological changes, the ultimate result of which – the establishment of a socialist society—could be brought about only by the workers themselves, organized as a political party.

In sharp contrast to the authoritarian schools of thought dominating the socialist movement of the time, the Manifesto proclaimed that the first objective of the revolution was to “win the battle of democracy”. The socialist society could not be brought about by top-down decrees, nor by elitist conspiracies, but by the working class as a whole, democratically organized for and through this struggle.

The workers’ struggle, according to the Manifesto, though national in form, was international in essence: the bourgeoisie had created a world market; it was destroying nationally-based production and creating new “cosmopolitan” industries using “raw materials drawn from the remotest zones… whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe”. This had created “universal inter-dependence of nations” and, consequently united action of workers in “the leading civilized countries at least”, was one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the working class. The Manifesto ends with the basic message: “Workers of all countries, unite!” which has since appeared on the masthead of hundreds of radical publications and remains the basic message of the contemporary labor movement.

First published in February 1848, the Manifesto eventually emerged as the basic statement of the increasingly influential Marxist version of socialism and became, explicitly or implicitly, the theoretical basis of the modern mainstream labor movement.

The First International
The First International was established at a meeting in London in 1864. as the “International Working Men’s Association”, with headquarters in London and with branches in all European countries. Later that year, its General Committee approved a program – the “Inaugural Address” – and Rules prepared by Karl Marx. The preamble to the Rules starts with the words: “Considering that the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves …”. The Inaugural Address, like the Manifesto, ends with the call: “Workers of all countries, unite!”.

This first International was open to local and national workers’ societies, known as “sections”, and included all possible forms of workers’ organizations: political parties and propaganda groups, unions, co-operatives, mutual aid societies, etc.

The first congress of the International, the first international labor congress ever held, met in Geneva in 1866. As from 1868, the International grew rapidly, as unions developed in many countries. In the United States, the National Labor Union, then the central trade union body, at its convention in 1870, declared its adherence to “the principles of the Working Men’s Association” and its intention to “join the Association in a short time”.

Marx became the political leader of the International, but was challenged by the anarchists, followers of Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), who were strong in Southern Europe.

Whereas Marxists held that the labor movement had to conquer the State through political action, the anarchists believed that any State could only be authoritarian by nature and therefore had to destroyed and replaced by federated system of community-based bodies. The syndicalist variant of this school of thought held that trade unions could simply replace the State: since their members were running production and services anyway, political superstructures were redundant and parasitical. The conflict between Marxists and anarchists led to several splits and eventually contributed to the demise of the International in 1876.

Another factor in its decline was the repression of the Paris Commune. Following the military defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, an insurrectionary government took control of Paris in March 1871, after the withdrawal of the Prussian troops. This government, composed of radical democrats, socialists and anarchists of various tendencies, proclaimed a democratic republic and introduced some progressive social legislation (such as establishment of a minimum wage, the prohibition of night work in bakeries, reform of public education, etc.) The Commune governed in Paris for eleven weeks. In May, troops under the command of the conservative national government occupied Paris in a week of bloody street fighting. Some 25,000 Paris citizens were killed in the fighting and in the subsequent massacres. Thousands others were deported to forced labor in New Caledonia, were imprisoned or went into exile.

Contrary to what was often asserted at the time, the Commune was not the work of the International, although some of its members took an important part in it. The International, however, supported it. Marx wrote an analysis and a report on the events published by the International under the title The Civil War in France, in which he declared that the Commune had demonstrated the ability of workers to exercise power democratically and to reorganize society and the State, and was thus the prototype of the coming socialist revolutions.

As an international labor organization, the First International had obvious weaknesses: despite some links with the US labor movement, it remained basically a European organization and, in Europe, it was an organization of an activist minority. Its sections represented a thin layer of politically conscious workers in essentially conservative societies. Income from dues was never enough to carry out basic tasks, such as publishing a bulletin or conducting research.

Its achievements were all the more remarkable. It gave the first practical expression to labor internationalism and established the first regular contacts between labor organizations of different countries, which survived its demise and became the basis of its successor organizations. It was the first to formulate general demands (such as the eight-hour day), which became common demands of unions internationally and it provided the labor movement with a theoretical and political framework for international action.

The Second International
Several attempts were made to revive an international labor organization in the following decade and after. In this period, socialist mass parties arose in Central and Western Europe, with close links to the trade union movement, itself much stronger and more representative. Strong anarcho-syndicalist unions also emerged in Southern Europe. The founding of the Second (or Labor) International in Paris in 1889 (the centennial year of the French Revolution) reflected these developments.

One of the most significant decisions of the Paris congress was to declare the First of May an international day of struggle for the eight-hour day. Most delegates did not realize the import of the resolution and It was only in the course of the preparations for the first May Day that its wider significance emerged, not least because of the reactions it called forth among the ruling establishment.

When May Day 1890 came around, it turned out to be a more forceful and impressive demonstration than its organizers had dared to hope, and the Labor International was revealed, to its enemies and to its followers, as a new political and social reality. The congress of the International in August 1891, noted that the May Day demonstrations had given a tremendous impulse to the labor movement worldwide. May Day became the official day of struggle, of remembrance and of celebration of the international labor movement, which it has remained to this day.

Like the First International, the Second included both political parties and trade unions, as well as other workers’ organizations. Soon, however, the need for a clearer division of labor made itself felt. Its main components, parties, unions, co-operatives and mutual benefit societies, gradually established their autonomy. After 1900, the Second International evolved into an organization of socialist parties. The International Co-operative Alliance was founded in 1895 and the International Mutual Benefit Federation was established in 1906.

The Trade Unions Organize Internationally
Some of the unions attending the founding congress of the International decided to establish international organizations of workers in the same trade or industry. These became known as the International Trade Secretariats (ITS), the first permanently organized form of international trade union solidarity. Twenty-eight ITS had been formed by 1911, with a total membership of about 6.3 million. Their main activities were organizing solidarity during strikes and exchanges of information on conditions in the trade and labor legislation. Although politically independent, all of them had close political links with the socialist parties.

The national trade union centers in different countries, some of which were not involved in the Second International (in particular the syndicalist CGT in France and the British trade unions), also felt the need for an independent international organization. As a result, a formal organization was set up in 1903, which became the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) in 1913. In that year, the IFTU had members in twenty countries (all of them European except the USA) with a total membership of approximately 7.7 million.

The ITS (renamed Global Union Federations, or GUFs, in 2002) not only were the first international trade union organizations but turned out to be the most resilient and adaptable and also the most effective in the long term, certainly as trade union organizations but also, in some instances, in political terms.
At their origins, most were rooted in craft unionism and their culture often reflected that of the pre-industrial artisan guilds from which craft unionism had emerged. With the development of industrial mass production, they became organizations principally based on industrial unionism and several mergers took place in the process. At this time, ten Global Union Federations, with a total membership of approximately 120 million, cover nearly all spheres of work in paid employment (although very little in the informal economy).

In the period between the two world wars, the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), under the leadership of its then general secretary Edo Fimmen (1881-1942), was politically and organizationally the most important ITS, also the only truly global one through its seamen’s constituency. Fimmen realized, since the early 1920s, that the internationalization of capital required a reorganization of the international labor movement and proposed that a new, and more powerful, international trade union organization should be created based on both national centers (the constituency of the IFTU) and the ITS. This idea has re-surfaced and has been discussed several times since, but was never widely supported. Today the ITS (GUFs) are still independent entities, though associated through a co-operation agreement with the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), the successor organization of the IFTU.

War and Political Collapse
The first phase of the movement came to an abrupt end with the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. Neither the Second International, nor the IFTU, survived the war.

In the preceding decade, the socialist labor movement had developed into a mass-movement with strong positions against militarism and war [1] Nevertheless, when war broke out the tidal wave of nationalism and patriotic fervor swept all before it. The parliamentary deputations of the socialist parties, in their great majority, supported the governments in most European countries and voted for the war credits [2].

After one year of war, the labor movement was split three ways: the parties and unions that supported the Allies (Britain, France, Belgium, Russia), those that supported the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria) and those of the neutral countries (Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Italy until 1916). Minorities of revolutionary socialists and syndicalists opposed the war in all European countries (as the Socialist Party and the IWW [4] did in the United States in 1917). This opposition gained strength as the war progressed and as revulsion against what was increasingly perceived as a senseless mass slaughter spread throughout Europe.

Revolution and Reconstruction
In 1917, revolution broke out in Russia: in April, the Tsar was overthrown and replaced by a center-left Constituent Assembly; that government was overthrown in November and replaced by a coalition government of revolutionary socialists, where the radical wing of Russian Social-Democracy, the Bolsheviks, were the dominant political force. In January 1918, they dissolved the Constituent Assembly and established a government based on Councils (Soviets); in March, they took Russia out of the war and in June a decree was issued nationalizing the land and the main industries. A two-year civil war broke out with several “white” armies seeking to overthrow the new Soviet government, which in turn created a Red Army and a system or repression of political opposition through terror.

The impact of the Bolshevik revolution on the labor movement was two fold: on the one hand, it greatly strengthened the agitation for peace and for political, social and economic reforms. At the same time, Bolshevism caused a deep rift in the socialist movement. Most socialist parties and unions rejected the Bolshevik system of a political dictatorship supported by terror and stressed that political democracy was an inseparable part of socialism.

In March 1919, the Bolsheviks convened an international conference in Moscow to establish the Communist or Third International. The conference, which was called in haste as a pre-emptive strike against the reconstitution of the Second International, was hardly representative: most of the delegates came from small minorities and the only large party represented, the German one, opposed the constitution of a new International. The conference, however, adopted a manifesto calling on workers to rise and to establish Soviet republics on the Russian model, called for an uncompromising struggle against all other socialist parties and movements that were not prepared to accept their leadership, adopted provisional statutes and elected a provisional executive committee.

In June 1921, immediately after the third congress of the Communist International, an international congress of trade unionists in Moscow established a new trade union International: the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU), a coalition of communist and syndicalist unions, with a close connection to the Communist International [3].

Meanwhile, the IFTU had been reconstituted at a congress in Amsterdam in July 1919, representing 23 million members in twenty-two countries. The Socialist International was reconstituted in 1923 as the Labor and Socialist International, after overcoming with some difficulty the splits caused by the war and the political upheavals of the previous decade.

Also in 1919, the Allied Powers met a long-standing demand of the social-democratic labor movement by setting up the International Labor Organization (ILO), as a part of the Versailles Peace Treaty. The ILO, a tripartite institution with representation from government, employers and workers (in general but not always represented by unions), survived the Second World War and is now part of the United Nations system. It prepares social legislation in the form of conventions, which are then ratified by the member States and form the basis of national legislation. In the context of the time when it was established, it was meant to be a reformist alternative to the revolutionary threat from Russia.

The period from the 1920s to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, was dominated by the bitter and increasingly irreconcilable split between the social-democratic and the Communist movements. The suppression of the non-Bolshevik Left in Russia, followed by the suppression of organized tendencies within the Bolshevik party, the invasion and occupation of social-democratic Georgia in 1921, the Stalinization of the Communist Parties after 1926 and finally the extermination of any form of opposition in the 1930s made a reconciliation impossible. Anti-fascist and popular front “unity” policies promoted by the Communist parties proved to be tactical maneuvers to be turned off or on according the requirements of the foreign policy of the USSR. Stalin’s intervention in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) demonstrated that the only unity the Communist parties would accept was where they were in total control.

Again Descent Into War
These political struggles took place in the midst of a historical catastrophe of huge proportions. Fascism had wiped out the labor movement in most of Europe: first in Italy and Portugal, then in Germany and Austria, then in Spain then, as the German armies occupied nearly all of the continent, everywhere except in Britain and a few remaining neutral or unoccupied countries. The Jewish Labor Bund, strongest in Poland, was destroyed together with the population that supported it. Stalinism had, for its part, exterminated hundreds of thousands of socialists, anarchists and Communists in Russia itself, later in the occupied countries of Eastern and Central Europe.

No one has so far established a reliable statistic of the losses of the labor movement in the three decades following the Russian Revolution, but we can safely say that about two political generations of activists and leaders disappeared in that period, more than that in Portugal and Spain where fascism lasted 50 and 40 years, more than that in Eastern Europe with 40 years of Stalinism, or on the territory of the former USSR, with 70 years of Stalinism.

On August 23, 1939 the USSR and Nazi Germany had signed a treaty of non-aggression and divided Eastern Europe into spheres of influence; on September 1, Germany started the Second World War by invading Poland, and on September 17 the USSR also invaded Poland and annexed its eastern region. As Britain and France declared war on Germany, the Communist Parties denounced the “imperialist war”. On June 22, 1941 Germany attacked the USSR and within weeks the German army was deep in Russian territory. From one day to the next, the Communist Parties changed their line and declared that the war was no longer an “imperialist struggle” but a war for democracy and freedom. The USSR had become part of the Allied coalition.

The RILU, which was no longer useful to the foreign policy of the USSR in the context of the “popular front” policy from 1935 to 1939, became inactive and was formally dissolved in 1939. In May 1943, the Communist International itself was dissolved to reassure the Allied powers that the USSR no longer harbored revolutionary ambitions.

A False Dawn of Unity
The social-democratic labor movement emerged from the war superficially victorious, actually greatly weakened by its losses, and far more dependent on the State than it had been before the war. This was partly due to its war-time alliance with the Allied powers, partly to its objective weakness in economies devastated by the war, partly because most of the leading post-war governments in the principal industrial countries were either social-democratic or at any rate socially-oriented and prepared to support the legislative agenda of the labor movement.

The Socialist International was reconstituted in 1951 at a congress held in Frankfurt but increasingly evolved into an open forum with weak links to the trade union movement. Attempts to broaden its constituency beyond Europe in the 1980s led mostly to a loss of political substance. By the end of the 20th century, it had ceased to exercise a significant influence in international labor politics.

The Communist labor movement also emerged strongly at first, as a dominant force in France and Italy, but also strong elsewhere in Europe, building on its prestige in the resistance movement (which it had joined only after 1941) and by the prestige of the USSR as the principal land-based power in Europe that had defeated Nazi Germany.

At the end of the war, there was a widespread assumption that the war-time alliance could be reflected in trade union terms, and that a united international trade union organization, including the Soviet trade unions and the Western social-democratic unions, was possible. After several exploratory international meetings, such an organization, the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), was established at a conference in Paris in October 1945 and in December the IFTU was formally dissolved by its General Council.

Soon, however, differences developed between the social-democratic and Communist unions. In Eastern Europe under Soviet occupation, the surviving social-democratic, independent Left and dissident Communist cadres quickly disappeared in the jails and labor camps of the KGB [4]. Trade unions were forcibly dissolved and replaced by State organizations for labor administration on the Soviet model. In Western Europe, the European Recovery Program (the Marshall Plan) was welcomed by the social-democratic unions and opposed by the Communist unions. The ITS rejected the attempt, supported by the Communist unions, to become an integral part of the WFTU structure and broke off relations. Political conflicts led to splits in the trade union movement in France, Germany and Italy, in most cases with the support of the AFofL, which, unlike the CIO, had refused to join the WFTU. By 1949, these accumulated conflicts became unbridgeable and the non-Communist unions left the WFTU. At the end of that year, they had established a new organization, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU).

The WFTU continued as a Soviet-controlled rump based on the State labor organizations of the Soviet bloc and a few Communist-led unions in Europe, Asia and Latin America. When the Soviet bloc collapsed in the 1990s, the WFTU collapsed with it: a small secretariat remains in Prague, with very few member organizations of any importance. In Africa, all of its affiliates, and some national centers that had maintained a neutral stance, joined the ICFTU. The Italian CGIL had already left the WFTU in 1978 and the French CGT left in 1995.

The Cold War, which began in 1949, also cast its shadow over the trade union movement but was actually less decisive a factor in the split than is sometimes assumed. In fact, the WFTU was an artificial construct based on the exigencies of the wartime alliance between the Allied Powers and the USSR. None of the issues that had caused the earlier split, in 1921, between the IFTU and the RILU, had been resolved. These had nothing to do with the Cold War. They had very much to do with questions like whether “bourgeois democracy” was preferable to no democracy at all, whether unions should be accountable to their members or to a State, and whether this State represented some form of socialism or a new class exercising total control over society, including the working class, by means of terror (as the socialist theoretician Karl Kautsky (1854-1938) held already in 1929).

The beginning of the Cold War meant that the political clamp of the war time antifascist alliance, that briefly held together organizations with fundamentally opposed views, political cultures and practices, had come off, and a split which had existed for the past thirty years was no longer papered over.
The ICFTU was far less grounded in the socialist tradition than the IFTU had been. Anti-Communism was a far stronger driving force, even limiting its human and workers’ rights agenda (for example, the Chinese Federation of Labor in Taiwan was accepted as a member even though Taiwan was a one-party State at the time and the unions just as much under control of the single party and the State as in any of the Soviet bloc countries). The main achievement of the ICFTU was to become a truly world wide organization, whereas all previous international labor organizations had been essentially European, not in intent but in practice.

The Christian Unions
At the end of the 19th century the Catholic Church became concerned about the spread of socialist and anarchist ideas among workers and decided to create its own trade union movement. Its initial ideological basis was the encyclical De Rerum Novarum by pope Leo XIII in 1891. After 1891, Christian trade unions, made up largely of Catholic workers, were formed in a number of European countries. The International Federation of Christian Trade Unions (IFCTU) was established in 1920. Politically, most of its members supported Catholic parties but in their trade union practice they acted in general in concert with the IFTU affiliates. Like other trade unions, the Christian trade unions were suppressed under fascism and Nazism and some of their activists joined those of the Left in the anti-fascist resistance movement, first in Italy, Germany and Austria, then in occupied Europe.

In 1945, the IFCTU reorganized and declined invitations to join the WFTU, as well as later the ICFTU (in 1949). It expanded outside Europe, with affiliations in Canada (Québec), in the former French colonies in Africa where the French Christian unions had established branches, in Latin America and in Asia. It decided to broaden its membership to include unions based on other religious affiliations (like the Buddhists of South Vietnam) and, in 1968, changed its name to World Confederation of Labor (WCL). At the same time, it developed an anti-capitalist program, incorporating elements of liberation theology, and seeking to position itself somewhere to the left of the ICFTU.

Whilst trying to broaden its appeal, it was actually in the process of losing important affiliates to the ICFTU, in Germany, Italy, France, the Netherlands and in Spain. In Europe, the main WCL affiliates (Belgium, Luxemburg, Netherlands) had joined the GUFs in the 1970s and 1980s. Although the WCL had maintained its international trade federations, these could not compete with the GUFs at any level of activity.

In 2002, the WCL claimed 25 million members; by most serious estimates, a more realistic figure is around 3 million. actual dues-paying members. In only one country, Belgium, it has a member organization that represents a majority of organized workers (by a small margin). Its weak membership base is compensated by the financial support from Catholic and Christian-Democratic funding agencies, mostly in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. In summary, Lewis Lorwin’s verdict on the IFCTU of 1929 still applies to the WCL of 2003: “It could neither inaugurate important action in the trade union world nor exercise independent influence on international labor and social policy.” [5]

International Unions and Transnational Capital
The rise of the Transnational Corporations (TNCs) since the 1980s to a dominant position in the world economy has set new priorities for ITS activities, insofar as the ITS are the natural type of structure for the co-ordination of national trade union activities within the same TNC, and also for mobilizing international support for any union facing difficulties within the same TNC.

One dramatic example of the latter was the campaign conducted by the IUF (food workers’ international) in 1979-81 and 1984-85 against the Coca-Cola Company to protect a union in a Coke bottling plant in Guatemala owned by a franchise holder. In the context of a brutal military dictatorship, the manager of the plant had tried to destroy the union by having its leaders assassinated by death squads. The IUF held Coca-Cola responsible and organized an international campaign, involving boycotts, strikes and other protest actions in seventeen countries all over the world. This first campaign forced Coca-Cola to buy out the franchise. The new directors appointed by Coca-Cola recognized the union and signed a collective agreement. At the end of 1983, these directors attempted to close the plant and disappeared after declaring bankruptcy. The workers then occupied the plant. Again Coca-Cola initially refused to take responsibility and the IUF organized a second international campaign, more forceful than the first, but it took over a year before a final settlement could be reached, the occupation ended and the plant re-opened. Coca-Cola had sold the plant to a Guatemalan businessman who again recognized the union and signed a new collective agreement. Today, the union is still there and the agreement is still in effect.

International campaigns can also be conducted at the level of a global industry. For example, the ITF has conducted a campaign for nearly fifty-five years to regulate wages and working conditions for seafarers working on ships flying the flag of a country other than the country of ownership (“flags of convenience” – FOC). FOC countries typically have lax or substandard regulations, and once a ship is registered under an FOC, many ship owners then recruit the cheapest labor they can find, pay minimal wages and cut costs by lowering living and working conditions for the crew. The aims of the ITF campaign have been the elimination of the FOC system and the establishment of a regulatory framework for the shipping industry, and to seek ITF acceptable standards on all ships irrespective of flag, using all the political, industrial and legal means at the ITFs disposal. The ITF has inspectors in most ports in the world, who will detain a ship when these standards are not met. One of the most successful aspects of the ITF inspectors’ work is gaining back pay for seafarers. From 1996 to 2001, USD163.3 million has been recovered by the ITF for crew who had not been paid – an average of USD28m per year. Many FOC ships are now covered by ITF agreements, giving direct protection to over 140,000 seafarers.

Because of the growing internationalization of companies where ultimately international management is responsible for decisions such as outsourcing and relocation of production, local workplace representatives are increasingly faced with collective bargaining responsibilities directly with international management. They need to exchange experiences and information with unionists in other countries, often over great geographical distances, and seek or respond to practical forms of international solidarity.

To meet this need the ITS in metal (IMF), chemicals (then ICF, now ICEM) and food (IUF) had sought, already in the middle 1960s, to establish permanent co-ordinating structures (sometimes called world councils) in the leading TNCs of their industrial sector. This co-ordination, and contacts with some companies prepared to enter into a formal relationship with ITS, led to the negotiation of International Framework Agreements (IFAs).

These agreements deal with general questions of principle: workers’ rights and international labor standards, although some also cover other issues, such as equality, vocational training, safety and health, etc.. Typically, they commit the company to respecting freedom of association and of collective bargaining in terms of the ILO conventions. They are not a substitute to collective bargaining at local or national level, but are designed to ensure fundamental workers’ rights in all the company’s workplaces. In that respect, they are also an organizing tool, especially in those parts of a company’s operation where unions are weak or non-existent.

The first such agreement was signed in 1988 by the IUF with the French food company Danone. There are thirty-one IFAs at this time and their number is constantly growing. Not all, however, are equally monitored and enforced and therefore some have little impact at workplace level. Also, given that there are more than 60,000 TNCs, their number is still too small to make a significant difference in global social relations.

Their significance lies in the fact that they represent the first form of collective bargaining at international level, and may set a pattern for future international industrial relations. In that, they are also fundamentally different from “codes of conduct”. These are unilaterally proclaimed, or voluntarily adhered to, by companies and can therefore also be unilaterally revoked or amended. They are monitored according to procedures also unilaterally decided by the TNC (usually by commercial monitoring companies or by compliant NGOs). IFAs, like all collective agreements, involve recognized mutual obligations between social counterparts. On paper and, in the best case, in reality, they include negotiated and agreed procedures for monitoring, verification and the handling of grievances and disputes. The monitoring is generally done by local unions.

The World Outside Europe
Since the labor movement originated in the workers’ revolt against exploitation in the early capitalist economies, it naturally first developed in Europe, where the capitalist economy was most advanced. The First and Second Internationals, and the IFTU, were basically European organizations, at any rate dominated by their European membership. In a relatively small, densely populated area of the world it was easy to establish international organizations; maintaining regular contact with organizations that could be reached from Europe only after several weeks or months of travel was a different matter. Therefore the early labor internationals were world wide in intent, but remained European in practice. It is only in the second half of the twentieth century that spectacular advances in communication and transport technology created the conditions for organizations functioning at a truly global level.

Nevertheless, socialist and anarchist, or revolutionary syndicalist, ideas spread rapidly over the world, often through seamen in the merchant marine and through immigrants. Unions, as well as workers’ parties and other labor movement institutions, were getting organized in Latin America and in Asia in the second half of the 19th century, in Africa a few decades later.

In the United States, unions developed locally as early as the late 18th century, more or less at the same time as in Europe. The first national organizations appeared in the mid-19th century; and the first lasting federation of national unions, the American Federation of Labor (AFofL), a forerunner of the present AFL-CIO, was established in 1886. Massive immigration from Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century changed American trade unionism, radicalizing the unions, creating socialist organizations and eventually opening the way to the organization of the mass production industries in the 1930s under the leadership of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The CIO merged with the AFofL in 1955.
Socialist movements were influential in the US labor movement in the first decades of the 20th century. Eugene Victor Debs, who had founded the first industrial union, the American Railway Union, in 1893, gained 6 percent of the popular vote as Socialist Party candidate in the presidential elections of 1912.

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a revolutionary syndicalist trade union federation, was founded in 1905. At its peak (1917) it had close to 200,000 members in the US and, at different times in its history, branches in Australia, Britain, Canada, Chile, Germany, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway and South Africa. Despite the decline of socialist organizations into insignificance in electoral terms and in membership, socialists have remained influential in parts of the US trade union movement.

In Latin America, where immigration from Spain, Portugal and Italy was dominant, anarcho-syndicalist unionism prevailed initially. Social struggles in both North and South America were often violent, with military repression a common response to strikes by employers and conservative governments. With the exception of Mexico, where the trade union movement remained powerful as an institution of the State inherited from the revolution of 1910, and Chile and Uruguay, where powerful labor movements emerged in a democratic political context, unions and the Left were violently suppressed in most Latin American countries in the 1930s and in the period following World War II. In Argentina, however, the dictatorship of General Juan Perón (1946-55) combined an authoritarian ideology with pro-labor policies, and facilitated the emergence of powerful trade unions linked to the regime while suppressing the older socialist, communist and syndicalist unions. Peronist unionism survived the second Perón presidency (1973-74), far more conservative than the first, and the military dictatorship of 1976 to 1983, one of the bloodiest in Latin American history. It is still the dominant force in the Argentine labor movement. In Brazil, after a long period of State control (1937-1954) and a repressive military dictatorship (1964-1985), the trade union movement, in part linked to a socialist mass party, emerged as a strong social and political force in the 1990s, with a former union organizer gaining the presidency.

In the British empire, trade unionism spread on the British model, with unions in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, especially in the skilled trades, often retaining their affiliation to the British parent organization. General unions also arose in Australia and Canada. The first union of black workers in South Africa, the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU), led by Clemens Kadalie, was a general union. Founded in 1919, it had close to 50,000 members at its peak, but declined in the late 1920s and was defunct by 1930.

Asia
In Asia, European immigration played no role in the rise of the labor movement, although contacts between the Asian intelligentsia and European and American radicals influenced, to varying degrees, the direction in which the early Asian labor movements developed. Thus the organizers of the early Japanese unions, such as Fusataro Takano, had first organized Japanese workers in San Francisco in 1890 with the help of the AFofL. Sun Yat Sen, the leader of the Chinese democratic revolution of 1911, and other progressive Chinese intellectuals, maintained friendly relations with the Second International; at the same time, Chinese anarchist groups were meeting in Paris and Tokyo. In what was then the Dutch East Indies, Henk Sneevliet, a Dutch railway unionist and a revolutionary Marxist, organized the first socialist party in 1914 with other Dutch socialists and with Indonesians such as Semaun, a leader of the Railway and Streetcar Workers’ Union and later a founder of the Communist Party. In the Philippines, progressive intellectuals discovered socialism and anarcho-syndicalism in Spain in the late 19th century, and before World War I, Indian nationalist leaders participated in the socialist movements of several European countries and of the United States.

Although these links were tenuous and involved a relatively small number of individuals, they were hugely influential and demonstrated the universality of the ideologies of the labor movement. Whilst material conditions for a closely-knit and functioning international organization did not yet exist, a virtual labour International at global level was already taking shape.

Japan is a nearly unique case in so far as it was the principal Asian country (the other exception is Thailand) not to be colonized or even partially occupied by Western powers. Therefore its labor movement did not develop as part of an anti-colonial or national liberation movement, but rather as part of a democracy movement against an authoritarian regime.

Liberal intellectuals were campaigning for human rights and universal suffrage in the 1880s and the first socialist groups appeared in the 1890s. The first unions were organized in 1898: metal workers, the railway engine drivers, printers, cooks. Sen Katayama, who had founded the metal workers’ union, was also a founder of the Socialist Party in 1901, the only Asian party which adhered to the Second International. The Japanese socialists courageously opposed the war with Russia, and the handshake, on the platform of the Amsterdam congress of the International in 1904, between Katayama and Plekhanov, leader of the Russian Social-Democratic Party, became a symbol of socialist internationalism. A radical current in Japanese socialism, moving to anarchism, had become influential under the leadership of Shusui Kotoku. In 1910, the government launched a massive repression. Twenty-four radical socialists and anarchists were arrested and charged with high treason; twelve were condemned to death and executed, including Kotoku. The “long winter” (until the 1920s) of Japanese socialism had begun. After leading a successful streetcar strike in 1912 in Tokyo, Katayama was briefly jailed, then left Japan in 1914 for the United States never to return. In 1921 he left for Soviet Russia where he was welcomed as the “grand old man” of the Communist International.

The trade union movement survived, despite repression and politically-based splits, for nearly two decades. The main labor federation, the social-democratic Sodomei, was a member of the IFTU in the inter-war years. However, after the Japanese army advanced into China in July 1937, officially sponsored nationalism became politically dominant and the organizational strength, as well as the political integrity, of labor organizations steadily eroded. In 1940, all independent labor organizations were dissolved and trade unions were replaced by a government-controlled labor front. At the end of the war in 1945, under the American occupation, left-wing parties and trade unions re-emerged with unprecedented strength: in 1949, the proportion of organized workers had risen to 55.8% (the highest organizing ratio before the war was 7.9% in 1931). Today, there are three national federations: the largest, Rengo, with 6.8 million members, is dominated by company-based unions and is an ICFTU affiliate; Zenroren (840,000 members) is under communist leadership and Zenrokyo (270,000 members) is an organization of independent Left unions. Union membership, however, has declined to approximately 20%, mainly through the failure of the company-based union system to organize the growing labor force in sub-contracted and casual jobs. The two socialist parties which emerged strongly after the war virtually disappeared in the 1990s through merger with other parties, after losing most of their trade union support.
In China, the trade union movement initially developed, mainly in South China and in Shanghai, as part of the May 4, 1919 nationalist movement against Japanese and Western encroachments on Chinese sovereignty. After the founding the Communist Party in 1921, communist influence rapidly increased, but in 1927 the communist-led labor movement was brutally suppressed by the Kuomintang, which became the authoritarian single party of nationalist China (and later Taiwan). After the conquest of State power by the Communist Party in 1949, independent unionism was replaced by State controlled labor organizations. Today the main independent union federation on Chinese territory is the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU), founded in 1990 (160,000 members).

In India, organized trade unionism was a late development, although strikes were frequent at the end of the 19th century, particularly in the textile industry and the railways, even in the absence of unions. The junction of the nationalist movement with organized labor also came late, although in 1908 the arrest of Tilak, a prominent nationalist leader, caused a six-day general strike of Bombay mill workers, the first political mass strike in Indian history. In 1918 the Madras Labour Union was formed, and in 1920 the Textile Labour Association of Ahmedabad was founded by a woman leader, Anasuya Sarabhai, working with Gandhi, who had led a successful textile workers’ strike in 1917. The All India Trade Union Congress, the first all-India organization of labor, was founded in 1920, followed one year later by the formation of the All India Railwaymen’s Federation. Following independence in 1947, the trade union movement started fragmenting along political lines. At this time, the largest national federation, the BMS, is linked to a far-right Hindu party, the BJP; the INTUC is linked to the Congress Party; there are two communist federations, the AITUC and the CITU; the HMS originated in the socialist movement and two branches of the UTUC are led by revolutionary socialists. There are also several independent organizations, such as the Trade Union Solidarity Committee in Bombay. All of these organizations taken together represent no more than a small minority of Indian wage earners, mostly in formal employment, which in turn represents approximately 3% of the Indian working class (with 97% in the informal economy). For a long period of Congress rule, Indian trade unionism enjoyed a relatively protected situation with autarkic economic policies and favorable labor legislation. In the context of globalization, the opening up of India to transnational capital represents a serious challenge to a weak, divided and bureaucratized union movement.

Organizing in the informal economy is now a basic task and a survival issue for the Indian labor movement. A pioneering union in this field is the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) based in Ahmedabad. Founded in 1972, SEWA now has 700,000 members in seven Indian federal states.

In Thailand, the first union to be organized was the Tramway Workers’ Association in 1897 but trade unionism developed on a wider scale only after WWII. The first national federation was the General Labour Union of Siam (1947) with 64 member unions, some of which existed before the war. At this time, two labor federations and independent unions exist, but union density remains low (5%). The strongest unions are in the public sector; in March 2004, the electrical workers’ union conducted a successful campaign against the privatization of electricity.

In Malaya, the first unions were organized by Chinese anarchists in the early 1920s. Following the Japanese occupation in WWII and the return of the British administration, the communist unions were suppressed and replaced by moderate unions. In Singapore, the People’s Action Party, originally a socialist party, established what is practically a one-party State, at the same time taking control of the trade unions, whilst in Malaysia a relatively strong independent trade union movement has survived.
In Indonesia, a powerful trade union movement arose after independence (1945), dominated by the Communist Party. Rising tensions with the army led to a wholesale slaughter of communists and alleged communists in 1965, with several hundred thousands of casualties and the imposition of an authoritarian regime in 1967. Under the “New Order” of the military, a single trade union organization was established under tight State control. It was not until the 1990s that independent trade union organizations started to appear, despite continuing repression. In 1998, the “New Order” collapsed and restrictions on union organizing were lifted. A large number of independent and militant unions appeared, but the movement remains fragmented, hemmed in by massive unemployment and underemployment and, after more than thirty years of repression, with limited organizational and political skills.

In the Philippines, the early trade union movement developed in opposition to the Spanish colonial administration. Unions actively participated in the anti-colonial revolution of 1896 and, like the Spanish labor movement at the time, were strongly influenced by anarcho-syndicalism (the oldest Philippine unions, like the printers and the tobacco workers, still have Spanish names). After the Japanese occupation, a strong and radical trade union movement arose under communist leadership: the Congress of Labor Organizations (CLO), inspired by the American CIO. In 1957, the CLO was formally disbanded under the new Anti-Subversion Law and was succeeded by a multitude of organizations. Today, despite a resurgence of militant trade unionism through the socialist Alliance of Progressive Labor (APL) and the Maoist Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU), the movement remains fragmented and deeply divided along different lines of cleavage, some political and ideological, some based on the leaders’ self-interest.

The labour movement in Vietnam was created by communist groups in the 1920s, in what was then French Indochina (including also Laos and Cambodia), even before the formal establishment of the Communist Party of Indochina (CPI) in 1930. The first union, in the Ba Son shipyards in Saigon was established in 1921, and in 1929 a federation of trade unions was established in Hanoi. Throughout the colonial period unions were illegal. Underground unions were organized by the CPI and, after 1932, by Trotskyist groups. Except for the brief interlude of the Popular Front in France (1936-1938), French repression was brutal and nearly wiped out the CPI on several occasions.

From 1940 to 1945 Indochina was under Japanese occupation with the French administration still in place (recognizing the authority of the Vichy government). The CPI created a Front for national independence (Viet Minh) in 1941, supposedly a broad and inclusive front, actually under CPI control, to fight both the Japanese and the French. With the Japanese capitulation in 1945, the Japanese army disintegrated, the Viet Minh declared Vietnamese independence, and immediately found itself fighting a British expeditionary corps which had landed in the South, soon to be joined by French military, to keep Indochina in the French colonial empire. The first Indochina war (1946 – 1954) had begun. Within a matter of months, the CPI had succeeded in eliminating or marginalizing all non-communist parties or organizations from the Vietminh. The Trotskyist groups were destroyed in the battles with the expeditionary corps and a campaign of assassinations by the CPI which wiped out most of their remaining cadres.

The first Indochina war ended with the Geneva Agreements of 1954 which established two Vietnamese States divided by a border on the 17th Parallel. In 1946 the CPI (renamed Labour Party of Vietnam in 1951) had set up the General Confederation of Labour of Vietnam (GCLV) on the Soviet model. As the Communists took control of the North, the GCLV became the sole authorized organization in the North.

In the South, several trade union organizations emerged, the most important of which was the Confederation of Vietnam Workers (CVT), founded in 1957 as a successor organization to the Indochina section of the French Catholic confederation (CFTC), and an affiliate of the International Confederation of Christian Trade Unions. At its peak, it claimed 500,000 members and was able to conduct several significant and successful strikes even under the authoritarian regime of Ngo Dinh Diem.

After the military reunification of Vietnam at the end of the second Indochina war, the Vietnam General Federation of Trade Unions was formed in June 1975 and became . the sole authorized labour organization throughout the country. With the reintroduction of capitalism in the 1990s, unauthorized and îndependent strikes have become quite frequent. In 2006, the formation of two independent unions was reported. They were quickly suppressed and their leaders sentences to prison terms or to house arrest. One of them, Le Tri Tue, disappeared after fleeing to Cambodia in 2007, and was reportedly assassinated by Vietnam government agents.

In Cambodia, unions started to reorganize in 1979, after the defeat of the Khmer Rouge regime, which had sought to eliminate all industry and all urban classes, including workers. The trade union movement is very fragmented and several national centers exist. The most important national centers are the Cambodian Confederation of Trade Unions, which is close to the government party (the former Communist Party) and the Free Trade Union of Workers of the Kingdom of Cambodia (FTUWKC), which is strong in the garment industry and close to the Sam Rainsy Party, the leading opposition. Between 2004 and 2007, three of its leaders were assassinated: Its president, Chea Vichea, in January 2004, one of its local leaders, Ros Sovannareth, in March 2004, and another local leader, Hy Vuthy, in February 2007. None of these murders have been solved or punished.

In Laos, the Lao Federation of Trade Unions (LFTU) is the only permitted trade union organization and it is under the control of the ruling party, the Lao Revolutionary People’s Party.

Africa
In Africa, the trade union movement was first organized in the branches of economic activity, which, under colonial rule, developed to loot the continent of its natural resources: mining and plantations, railways, harbors and administration. In Africa south of the Sahara, the first African union appears to have been the railway workers’ union of Sierra Leone, which was founded in 1917 and called a strike in Freetown in 1919 (6). However, significant trade union activity in the British and French colonies only developed in the 1930s. The mineworkers in the “copper belt” in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) were in the forefront: in 1935 they went on strike against an increase in the poll tax – characteristically a political demand. Five were killed in the repression. In 1940 they struck again; this time 17 were killed and 65 wounded, and the strikers were forced back after a few days. In 1947, African unions were allowed to exist legally, and the African Mine Workers’ Union was founded in 1949. In 1952, the union fought its first great strike, which lasted three weeks, and obtained substantial wage increases. The Financial Times wrote: “This is the first time that a major African union has managed to bring its members to the point of using industrial force. Clearly a new power has arrived in Africa whose potentialities are tremendous.” In 1954, the union struck again for 58 days and The Economist observed: “The genii of African organization and solidarity will not be forced back into the bottle.” The New York Times pointed out the political significance of the strike: “Most leading Northern Rhodesian African political leaders … are affiliated with the African Mine Workers’ Union. This union has become the spearhead of African political aspirations, which are regarded a equivalent to immediate advancement of Africans to many jobs now limited to Europeans.”

In Nigeria, the Railway Workers’ Union was the first to be organized and registered in 1939. During the war unions grew rapidly, and in 1949 the Trade Union Council of Nigeria was formed. After the war, two major strikes gave the trade union movement even greater momentum: the general strike of 1945, which started in Lagos, then spread to the railways, the plantation workers and the commercial workers; then, in 1949, the strike in the Enugu coal mines, which was brutally suppressed by the police, with several miners being killed.

In the Gold Coast (now Ghana), a Trade Union Congress was founded in 1943. At the end of 1949 and in early 1950 the trade unions called a general strike in support of the Conventions People’s Party, which was conducting a campaign of non-co-operation against British rule. During the same period, national union federations were also organized in British East Africa, also in close co-operation with nationalist parties and liberation movements.

In the French colonies, the trade union movement started in every country as branches of French trade unions, sporadically in the late 1930s, but massively after 1944 when, as a by-product of the Liberation in France, freedom to organize trade unions was granted to the “natives” of colonial territories. Here, as elsewhere, the trade unions were soon linked to nationalist movements. In 1955-56, the African unions severed the links to the French trade unions and constituted themselves as independent, African-based organizations.

On November 3, 1952, the unions in French West Africa called a general strike for the enactment of the Labor Code, which had first been presented to the French National Assembly in 1947. The main provision of the Labor Code was the 40-hour week with a 20% increase in the hourly wage rates. The strike was totally effective throughout French West Africa. There had never been before in the history of African trade unionism a strike that had been as effective over such a large territory. On November 22, as a direct consequence of the strike, the Assembly passed the bill which became law on December 16.

However, because of obstruction by the employers backed by the local colonial administrations, the main battle, over implementation, remained to be fought. A series of general strikes took place in each of the colonies from June to November 1953. In Guinea, the general strike lasted for two months, from September 21 to November 25, and was supported by the African peasants who fed the strikers. During these strikes, eight leading trade unionists were imprisoned, several strikers were wounded by the police in Senegal and in Guinea, and one striker was killed in Guinea. However, on November 27, the French government sent instructions to the local administrations in the colonies to ensure that the principle of a 20% wage increase and of the 40-hour week be applied everywhere.

South Africa is a special case insofar as the development of trade unionism was dominated by the race issue. Non-European workers joined unions in great numbers during and immediately after WWII (200,000 approximately between 1940 and 1945). Under the Nationalist government (1948-1994) separation on the basis of race (apartheid) became entrenched in legislation covering all aspects of social life. Unions organizing workers of all races became illegal and such mixed unions as existed were destroyed by the government. Union organization of African workers nevertheless continued, albeit under severe restrictions, in rare cases (garment, food and commercial workers) with the support of existing European unions.

As from the 1970s, labor service organizations set up by anti-apartheid activists provided a focal point for the organization of independent Black and non-racial unions. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, these unions formed federations: the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU) in 1979, and the Council of Unions of S.A. (CUSA) in 1980. In the 1980s, workers massively joined unions. The government introduced legal reforms: the Labour Relations Amendment Act of 1981 deleted all reference to race. In 1985, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) was formed, incorporating FOSATU, independent unions and the National Union of Mineworkers, which had left CUSA to join the new federation.

Today, COSATU is the dominant federation, with 1.8 million members, with a basically socialist orientation. CUSA, which originated in the Black consciousness movement, merged with a small Pan-Africanist center, AZACTU, to form the National Council of Trade Unions (NACTU), with 400,000 members. A third center, the Federation of Unions of South Africa (FEDUSA), formed in 1997, with 500,000 members, is a regrouping of mainly White, principally skilled trades, white collar and public service unions. It declares itself to be politically independent. All three federations are affiliated to the ICFTU. By 1996, trade union density had reached 57.5 percent, making the South African labor movement one of the strongest in the world. Its main problems, which mainly affect COSATU, are, on the one hand, the outflow of skilled leadership to the political arena and, after the 1994 election, to government positions; on the other, an increasingly conservative macro-economic orientation of the ANC government to which it is allied, which has limited the ability of the unions to meet the expectations of their members. Politically, the socialist and social-democratic political space has been occupied by the South African Communist Party, in alliance with COSATU and the ANC. Other Left groups (Trotskyist, Pan-Africanist) have remained marginal, except in the Western Cape.

Having looked at the world, what can be said of the global labor movement? In the first place, that organized labor is a reality in nearly all parts of the world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, even in the absence of effective international organizations. The universality of the labor movement, in terms of the interests it represents and of its ideologies, precedes its organizational expression. In any event, at the latest by the end of WWII the elements of a global international movement are in place; it will then take several decades before such a movement arises in a recognizable form.

Rise and Fall of the Third World
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Cold War became the new global political reality. Each of the two superpowers were deploying tremendous financial and political resources to control the labor movement in support of their bloc. The labor movement became polarised and the position of all those who were seeking to maintain an independent trade union movement based on an independent class interest became very difficult.

This affected particularly the emergent trade union movement in the former colonies in Africa and Asia, and in the Latin American countries.

At the end of the war, most European powers had given up their colonial empires, sometimes with destructive military rear-guard actions (France in Indochina and Algeria, the Netherlands in Indonesia, later Portugal in its African colonies). As we have seen, in some of the former colonial countries, the labor movement had a long history, in others its origins were more recent and linked to the anti-colonial struggle. In Latin America, the labor movement is nearly as old as the European one, but dependency on the industrial economies of the North, archaic and oppressive social structures and authoritarian regimes had placed the unions in a situation not very different from those in the newly independent ex-colonial countries.

The labor movement in this “Third World” (as opposed of the First World of the advanced industrial countries and the Second World of the Soviet bloc) was initially strong, benefiting from its alliance with the liberation movements that formed the first post-colonial governments. Several factors eroded this position of strength: the contending big power blocs in the Cold War were trying to buy allies, thereby introducing wide spread corruption; initially democratic regimes developed into authoritarian one-party States, confronting the labor movement with the choice of submission or repression. As from the 1980s, the Structural Adjustment Programs imposed by the international financial institutions undermined the public sector and therefore the principal membership base of the trade union movement.

Regionalism
Third World unions had formed regional organizations, such as the Organization of African Trade Union Unity (OATUU) and the International Confederation of Arab Trade Unions (ICATU). Because their member unions had for the most part become State controlled, by force if not by choice, these regional organizations served mainly the political purposes of the governments that financed and controlled them, and therefore have little relevance in terms of international trade union action.
The European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), formed in 1973, is largely dependent on the European Union (EU) for its budget (about 70%) and generally supports EU policies. It is composed of the European affiliates of the ICFTU and the WCL, and organizations without other international affiliations (the French CGT and the Portuguese CGTP-Intersindical). The most useful part of its work is done by its research and education branches (the European Trade Union Institute and the European Trade Union College).
The immediate consequence of the establishment of the ETUC was the loss to the ICFTU of its European Regional Organization (ERO). The AFL-CIO had left the ICFTU in 1969 (it returned in 1982), over disagreements concerning increasing contacts of European affiliates with Communist unions in Eastern and Western Europe, and the leading European unions became increasingly committed to establishing an all-inclusive regional body independent of the ICFTU. The ICFTU-ERO was wound up in 1969, in preparation to the establishment of the ETUC as a totally independent body from both ICFTU and WCL.
The ideological basis of this new regional organization was a strong sense of European identity, which some perceived as a European nationalism, hardly better than the nationalisms it sought to replace, and in fact generated by the European Commission (7). This new inward-looking and separatist orientation of many European unions created not only strains in the relations of the ETUC and the ICFTU, but between the ETUC and the GUFs.

The structure of the ETUC includes the European Trade Union Federations (ETUFs), which are industrial branch organizations corresponding largely to the GUFs in their jurisdictional scope. Their relationship to the GUFs ranged from situations where the ETUF was constituted as a totally separate entity from the international organization (as in metal) to those where it was fully integrated as a regional organization (as in services). In the IUF (food and agriculture) and in the ITF (transport) two competing organizations existed side by side and only unified after several years of protracted conflict, with the unified organization finally being recognized both as an ETUF in the ETUC framework and as a regional organization of the GUF.

European separatism also affected trade union positions when the European Works Councils (EWC) were formed following an EU directive in 1994. Under the directive, transnational corporations operating in more than two EU countries and employing a given minimum of workers are obliged to establish works councils where the workers of each of their enterprises are represented.

The directive has been hailed by unions as obliging corporations to meet with representative bodies of their employees at least once a year, but it also sets limits which run counter to workers’ interests: it only covers EU countries (thus leaving out all non-EU countries in Europe as well as the rest of the world); it defines the purpose of the EWCs as “information and consultation” (not negotiation) and it only mentions “workers’ representatives” (not unions, thereby opening the door to non-union representatives and, in the worst case, council members hand-picked by management). The directive, however, also provides for changes in the pattern as long as the “social partners” agree to such changes, which means that the scope, the functions and the composition of the EWCs can be subject to negotiation. In that context, it is the ETUFs that had the closest connections with their GUFs that were most active and successful in pushing the limits, whereas the “separatist” ETUF’s tended to acquiesce in the framework imposed by the directive and settled for councils of limited value.

More recently, the other regional organizations of the ICFTU (ICFTU-AFRO for Africa, ICFTU-APRO for Asia and the Pacific, and ORIT for the Western Hemisphere) also started asserting their independence, notably on the issue of independently accessing funding agencies rather than having to go through the international secretariat in Brussels. Thus the ICFTU, after having lost Europe, entered the 21st century with greatly weakened control over its other regions.

The main issue in the regional debate is accountability: an international organization must recognize that different regional realities can best be dealt with at regional level and therefore require a high degree of regional autonomy, but it fails in its purpose if its regions are not accountable to each other within the international organization and do not submit to what one might call peer review in an international context.

As from the 1980s, the onset of globalization would undermine much of the economic and political base of regional exceptionalism and separatism, but at the same time created massive new problems for the international labor movement.

Globalization
The end of the Cold War coincided, broadly speaking, with the end of the post-war economic boom. Mass unemployment started appearing in the industrialized countries in the early 1980s after the first “oil shock” of 1974; the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the USSR was dissolved in 1991, with its successor States, and the former Soviet bloc countries, opening up to transnational capital. In little over ten years, the world economy underwent a fundamental change, moving from an aggregate of national economies linked together by a network of trade, investment and credit, to an integrated, borderless global economy.

Revolutionary changes in telecommunications and transport, driven by transnational capital, which is also the chief beneficiary of these changes, has immensely increased its power by increasing its mobility while the autonomy, the power and the resources of the national State have been steadily shrinking.

Transnational capital has emancipated itself from the national State and can seek ever-increasing profits where it pleases. It is reordering the world economy in its own interests, with the support of the government of the leading world power and of the leading European governments, through the International Financial Institutions, the World Trade Organization and the EU institutions. To attract foreign direct investment, States in the former Second and Third Worlds underbid each other, in a downward spiral of steadily deteriorating wages and conditions, social welfare cuts, mounting unemployment and restrictions on human and democratic rights.

The immediate consequences have been growing social inequalities, social disruption, the undermining of social protection, the spread of poverty world wide, and new and growing threats to the environment, potentially life threatening for humanity.

In the global labor market, workers of all countries are compelled to compete against each other, with huge wage spreads ranging from one to one hundred. The traditional core workforce with permanent and regulated employment is shrinking in all industrialized countries as outsourcing and subcontracting are spreading at both national and global level. Relocation of industrial production and services cascades down from high wage countries to lower and lowest wage countries, much of it ending up in China, where free trade unions are banned and workers earn an average of $20 per month.

The labor movement, internationally, was badly prepared for the unfolding new situation. Decades of complacency had diluted and trivialised its ideological and political heritage. Its priorities had been distorted by the Cold War. Still powerful trade union organizations were led, in most cases, by leaderships geared to administering gains of earlier struggles rather than to organizing and engaging in new struggles, generally unquestioning in their acceptance of the ideology of social partnership and bereft of political imagination. The rank-and-file was educated to bureaucratic routine and to passivity.

Neither the ICFTU, nor the ETUC, and not many of the GUFs, had a perspective or a strategy to meet the new challenges. The main problem of all international labor organizations remains that they are in fact loose associations of national unions, which think and react in national terms, at a time when capital is international, and thinks and acts globally. As long as this situation obtains, unions will be unable to develop a common global strategy, only at best a lowest common denominator.

In 2003, the international labor movement faces critical challenges, some of which are old, unresolved issues that have become acute in the new global context. Others are new challenges, equally pressing.

Challenges
(1) The Changing Working Class
Three issues are closely linked in the context of the new global economy: the changing composition of the working class, the growth of the informal economy and the gender issue.

The gender issue in trade unions has been complex and contradictory. Trade unions, since their inception, have championed women’s rights and many women have been charismatic leaders throughout the history of the labor movement. At the same time, the trade union movement has been dominated since its origins by the culture of the industrial worker, where men generally predominated. Despite significant and continuing progress on equality issues, much of the trade union movement still remains male-dominated and its self-image remains predominantly that of the male industrial worker.
Today this culture is not only an obstacle to the progress of the trade union movement but a threat to its survival. The growth of economic sectors with weak or non-existent union traditions, such as the service industries, partial or total deregulation of the labor market and privatization of the public sector, have created a new working class, largely composed of women, often in unregulated and unprotected jobs, without previous union experience.

A growing proportion of this new working class is in informal employment, without secure contracts, benefits or social protection. It includes self-employed workers in informal enterprises as well as paid workers in informal jobs. Informal work is spreading in industrialized countries where it is seen as a historical regression, but it has always been prevalent in countries of the South where workers in the informal economy have been a growing majority, in some cases an overwhelming majority. It is impossible today to conceive of organizing a majority of workers on a global scale without serious organizing in the informal economy. A great majority of workers in the informal economy are women and in this context unions need to form partnerships with women’s movements.

Women in informal employment have formed their own unions: as we have seen, one of the best known is the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India, but there is a growing number. The traditional trade union movement has found it difficult to relate to these unions of a new type, yet unions must make organizing in the informal economy a priority and need to create the alliances that are essential for that purpose.

(2) Human Rights
The role of repression is often ignored or understated. Repression can take extreme forms, such as in Colombia, where over 1,500 trade unionists have been assassinated in the last ten years, or in China, where only State-controlled unions are allowed, or in countries like Saudi Arabia, where any form of trade unionism is prohibited.

But repression can also take subtler forms. restrictive legislation can in practice undermine workers’ rights that are recognized in theory. In the United States, 32m. workers are excluded by law from the right to form trade unions. Employers routinely violate the law in aggressive anti-union campaigns and legal redress is slow and uncertain. In Britain, legislation adopted by conservative governments drastically curtailed the right to strike and in most countries, including advanced industrial democracies, certain forms of strikes are prohibited. This is almost always the case of international solidarity strikes, which is precisely the form of international action unions must be able to exercise to effectively defend their members in a globalized economy.

The international labor movement has been campaigning for the recognition of workers’ rights as human rights, stressing at the same time that workers’ rights are in fact union rights, since free and independent trade unions are the only means workers have to collectively express and protect themselves. With declining support from their traditional political allies, unions need to form alliances with human rights organizations and others to raise public awareness of an issue that concerns society as a whole.

(3) New Social Movements
A major social and political development of the last ten years has been the emergence of new social movements: single issue movements and protest movements against globalizing capitalism dominated by transnational corporations. They are capable of forming powerful coalitions: the World Social Forum is one of their platforms. Collectively, they are often described as the Global Justice Movement.
This movement is filling a void left by the labor movement as it retreated from its broader social concerns and responsibilities and it now represents a new challenge to the international labor movement: is it going to join the coalition of those calling for an “alternative globalization”, basically on an anti-capitalist platform, or is it going to remain suspended in what is essentially a lobbying activity with the international financial institutions, the EU and other inter-governmental institutions?

(4) Politics
In many countries the relationship between the trade union movement and its historical allies, the social-democratic and labor parties, has become difficult. Yet, the trade union movement needs a political dimension. In the present situation, restoring the political dimension to the trade union movement cannot mean re-establishing allegiances and much less dependencies with respect to existing political parties, nor taking control of a political party.

For reasons which cannot be elaborated here, but which have to do with the declining autonomy of the nation-State with respect to transnational capital, the traditional labor parties are backing away from the trade union movement. The relationships of the past, be they transmission belts (both ways), electoral machine politics or corporatist agreements at the top become more difficult to maintain and produce diminishing returns everywhere. This does not mean that the trade union movement does not need a political dimension: on the contrary, all trade union activity is political by nature. What it means, is that the politics of the trade union movement have to be reinvented, taking as a point of departure the interests of its members at the point of production.

One might say that democratic socialism has to be reinvented, from and by the trade union movement, as an alternative to the “new world order” of transnational capital, rather than as an ambulance service to its victims.

(5) The Big Issue
The labor movement entered history as the carrier of an alternative social order to capitalism. Today, most of its leadership has given up a perspective of fundamental social change; yet, the movement remains, stubbornly and irreducibly the largest movement of resistance in the world, made up of thousands of daily struggles, big and small, by workers who struggle because they have no alternative, no other place to go. Today, millions of people rally to the vision that “another world is possible”: the most powerful anti-capitalist movement the world has seen since historical socialism left the scene. When organized labor joins once again in this vision of global justice, another, and a better, world will become possible.

End Notes
(1) Sweden and Norway were a single State under the Swedish crown until 1905, when Norway declared independence. The successful action of the Swedish labor movement that year, which threatened a general strike if the conservative Swedish government attempted to prevent the separation of Norway by military means, helped accredit the idea that it was possible to prevent war by the threat of peaceful mass action.
(2) The Socialist Party of Serbia was the only one in Europe to oppose its government and to vote against the war credits in parliament.
(3) In 1922, the syndicalists broke away to form a separate international organization with headquarters in Berlin. Its strongest national organization was the Spanish CNT, and its suppression for four decades after the fascist victory in the civil war in 1939 ended revolutionary syndicalism as a significant force in the international labor movement.
(4) KGB: Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security): the main political police of the USSR.
(5) Lewis Lorwin, “The International Labor Movement”, Harper & Brothers, 1953, p. 162
(6) André Giacometti, The Working Class Movement in Tropical Africa, in “The New International” (New York), Summer 1956, Winter 1957 and Spring 1957.
(7) See for example: editorial in the IUF News Bulletin, Nr. 10. 1972 (which refers to the “ECFTU”, since the name of the new organization had not yet been finalized):

“There are consequences to the fact that the ECFTU has grown, not as a result of struggles which required practical solidarity, but as a lobby in response to the growth of (European) Community institutions, and in close symbiotic relationship with these institutions….

“In their attempts to achieve political unity in Europe, the conservative technocrats of the European High Commission appear to be intent on fostering a European mystique which is essentially nationalist in nature. This mystique has struck some responsive chords in trade union circles, and the reasons for this response must be sought in the persistence of national thinking in trade unions, of which (European) patriotism is only one variant….

“It may be argued that European nationalism represents progress over French, German, Belgian or British nationalism, but at today’s world scale the difference is actually slight and the issue is debatable. In any event, it is quite unrelated to the basic interests and purposes of the trade union movement.
“The international labor movement is founded on the recognition of the fact that there is only one labor interest, and that it is common to the workers of all nations. This reality has been ignored at various times by those who out of shortsightedness or cowardice gave precedence to national interests and who fancied themselves to be realists for doing so. The result has invariably been defeats for the labor movement – for all of the labor movement. Some organizations are monuments to such defeats, standing like tombstones over the buried hopes of the international working class.

“After a century and more of labor history, internationalism remains a fragile growth. Its roots in North America are tenuous; it is often denied by the Third World nationalisms of the underdeveloped countries; today, it is questioned in Europe, the cradle of all labor Internationals.

“We know that many leaders of the ECFTU are aware of these dangers. They know, as we do, that the interest of the labor movement is international and not regional; that the multinational corporations are international, and not regional; that the decisive battles of the labor movement are not fought in the halls of the Community institutions but on the shop floor, and that they require world-wide solidarity to be successful.

“A ‘Workers’ Europe’ is not only a possibility but a necessity. Let it grow as a vital part of a dynamic international movement, up from the problems and workplaces, not down from the offices and the institutions, in close solidarity with all workers in the world who have similar problems.”

Further Reading
Harold Laski, “Communist Manifesto, Socialist Landmark”, 160p., George Allen and Unwin, London, 1948 (includes original text and prefaces) (also published as a Mentor Book in the New American Library, Random House, New York, 1967).
Hal Draper, “The Two Souls of Socialism”, 34p., Bookmarks, London, Chicago and Melbourne, 1996.
Lewis L. Lorwin, “The International Labor Movement—History, Policies, Outlook”, 366p., Harper and Brothers, New York, 1953.
Marcel van der Linden (ed.), “The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions”, 624p., Peter Lang, Bern, 2000.
(a history of the international labor movement, focusing on the period after 1945, by five authors)
Adolf Sturmthal, “The Tragedy of European Labour 1918–1939”, 288p., Victor Gollancz, London, 1944
(another edition was published by Columbia University Press in 1943, which contains a last chapter missing from the Gollancz edition).
Walter Kendall, “The Labour Movement in Europe”, 456p., Allen Lane, London, 1975.
Edo Fimmen, “Labour’s Alternative: The United States of Europe or Europe Limited”, 128p., The Labour Publishing Company, London, 1924 (also on the web site of the Global Labour Institute, http://www.global-labour.org).
Bob Reinalda (ed.), “The International Transport workers’ Federation 1914-1945 – The Edo Fimmen Era”, 301 p., IISG, Amsterdam, 1997 (fifteen authors).
Patricia Cayo Sexton, “The War on Labor and the Left”, 325p., Westview Press, Boulder, San Francisco, Oxford, 1991.
Dan Gallin, Inside the New World Order – Drawing the Battle Lines, in “New Politics”, Vol. V, No. 1, Summer 1994 (also on the web site of the Global Labour Institute: http://www.global-labour.org).
Kim Moody, “Workers in a Lean World – Unions in the International Economy”, 342 p., Verso, London and New York, 1997.
Jeffrey Harrod and Robert O’Brien (eds.), “Global Unions? Theory and Strategies of Organized Labour in the Global Political Economy”, 282 p., Routledge, London and New York, 2002 (fourteen authors).

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A shorter version of this paper was published in “Transnational Civil Society – An Introduction”, edited by Srilatha Batliwala and L. David Brown, Kumarian Press, Bloomfield CT USA, 2006, 270 p. (ISBN-13: 978-1-56549-210-3).

An Indonesian version (Gerakan Buruh) was published in February 2006 by the Indonesian Project Office of the IUF and several editions have been published since.

A Thai version was published in December 2009 by the Thai Labour Campaign, in a volume together with Hal Draper’s Two Souls of Socialism. The chapter on Vietnam, included below, was not part of the original version but was written for the Thai edition.