Conference on Globalisation 2003
LO Skolen, Helsingør, August 20-22, 2003
Strategies for the Labour Movement
by Dan Gallin, Global Labour Institute
I have been asked to introduce a discussion on “strategies for the labour movement” in a globalizing world economy.
To make sure I understood my subject, I looked up “strategy” in the dictionary and found that it is defined as an aspect of military science: “the science and art of military command exercised to meet the enemy in combat under advantageous conditions”. A second definition is also given: “the art of devising or employing plans or stratagems towards a goal”.
In other words, the very concept that the labour movement needs a strategy assumes that it has enemies, that, try as it might, it cannot help engaging them in combat and, when that happens, it better happen under advantageous conditions. It also assumes that the labour movement has goals: a strategy can only have meaning when it is connected to an objective.
The Goals of Labour
So we need to look at the objectives of the labour movement first. They are several, at several levels, or three concentric circles, as it were. At the most basic level they are, of course, 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: health insurance, retirement pay and unemployment pay that enable the worker to maintain more or less the same living standards as he or she had when working.
Most of this can be secured by collective bargaining but, since collective agreements in one place can always be threatened by substandard conditions elsewhere, the same standards need to apply to all workers, whether members of unions or not. In other words, they need to be secured by legislation, like basic social protection. Therefore another objective of the labour movement, the second concentric circle, is to secure socially progressive legislation in the interests of all workers and, indeed, of the vast majority of the population.
What we are talking about here is not just social security. We are also taking about politics: a political society where the rights of workers and of all citizens are guaranteed. We are talking about justice and freedom, and about the democratic order, which guarantees to the largest possible extent justice and freedom. Let us not forget that the earliest battles of the labour movement were conducted to achieve universal suffrage, a political objective, then universal and free education, freedom of association, a free press, the rule of law. All of these are working class issues and labour movement issues and to achieve all this, the labour movement has traditionally sought to exercise political power through its own parties.
What I have been describing so far has been the pattern successfully applied in the Nordic countries and in most of Europe for several decades, more or less for fifty years after the middle 1930s, despite the destruction of the Second World War.
There are also international objectives. Historically, the labour movement has always had international perspectives and objectives, by the simple logic that its achievements were under threat everywhere as long as injustice and oppression existed anywhere. The first international trade union federations were created, among other reasons, in order to co-ordinate the fight against the import of strike breakers from one country to another.
This is the third concentric circle: the recognition that there is a common class interest that unites workers all over the world and that the principle of “one for all, all for one” applies not only within one enterprise, or within one industry, or within one country, or within one region, but everywhere, at any time.
We all know that this principle has been honoured more often in breach than in observance, but its enduring strength is demonstrated by the incredible resilience of the international labour movement. This is a worldwide movement, which has survived the terrible wars and dictatorships of the twentieth century, so that our discussion today is not a historical one about a movement of the past but a discussion about which strategy is appropriate for achieving the goals of a movement that is very much alive.
There is a deep-seated sense among the membership of the labour movement in every country in the world that workers have a common cause and that they must depend on each other to make sure that justice and freedom prevail everywhere. Another word for this is solidarity.
Social Relations are Power Relations
Social relations are about interests, and they are therefore power relations. None of the objectives of the labour movement have been achieved anywhere and at any time in history without a struggle. The form of the struggle may, of course, vary, and has in fact varied along the full range of possible situations, from civil war situations to regulated and routine relations between social counterparts within a democratic political framework. The fact remains that, regardless of context and form, whenever we talk of social relations, or industrial relations, we are talking about interests, reflected in power contests. The outcome of such relations, whether they are reflected in collective agreements, in legislation or any other rules that regulate the coexistence of opposing social forces, depend on the existing relationship of power and they evolve as these power relations change.
There have been several major shifts in global power relations between social forces in the last century. The last two are the most important to consider in this discussion because they have directly shaped our thinking and our experience. The first happened in the late 1940s and was a consequence of World War II; the second happened forty years later and this is what we are referring to when we talk about globalization.
The Post-War Social Compromise
At the end of WWII, when the organized labour movement reconstituted itself in formerly Nazi occupied Europe and in Japan, the conditions of its re-emergence looked promising. Organized business was politically in a weak position, It carried the guilt of having supported fascism, first in Italy, Germany and Austria, then in all of occupied Europe, with a few honourable exceptions. The political mood of the time was therefore anticapitalist.
The unions, although greatly weakened by their war-time losses, were allied to the re-emerging Left and were riding the crest of the Allied victory, whereas business, at any rate in Europe and Japan, had lost the war and was compelled to make far reaching social and economic concessions to safeguard its long term interests.
Trade union rights, in their most extensive form, were taken for granted and incorporated in all post-war legislation. Social reconstruction, financed in large part by the US (in Europe through the Marshall plan) took place on the ideological base of social partnership, meaning roughly a trade off between social peace and the recognition of labour rights, as well as the consent of business to participate politically and financially (through taxes) in building an egalitarian welfare State. Once the opposition (the communist unions in France and Italy and marginally, the radical Left) had been disarmed, this was the pattern that would prevail for the next thirty years or so.
The pressures of the Cold War helped to keep this pattern in place in Western Europe; in Eastern Europe, the labour movement in any meaningful sense had been suppressed. The Cold War also stifled political debate and, by lining up society along the vertical line of cleavage separating the two power blocs, concealed the much more important horizontal line of cleavage separating classes within both blocs.
In the three or four decades following WWII, power relationships had been negotiated basically at national level, where the power of capital was limited by national legislation and by dependence on domestic markets.
The Impact of Globalization
The ground started shifting under our feet in the 1980s. 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. 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 and the power of the national State has been steadily shrinking.
In the global labour market, workers of all countries have been compelled to compete against each other, with huge wage spreads ranging from one to one hundred.
Transnational capital has emancipated itself from society 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, the most reactionary government it has had for about eighty years, and of the leading European governments, through the International Financial Institutions, the World Trade Organization and the EU institutions. To stay in the good graces of transnational capital, States 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. For the first time in modern history, governments and their international institutions, leaders of business and opinion, those who run the global economy and global society, do not hold out to humanity a promise of progress, however insincere, of rising living standards, of more freedom, of a better quality of life, but the contrary. They keep telling us it’s going to get worse.
That is a tremendous change. They are no longer afraid or even embarrassed to deprive humanity of hope.
Yet, there is nothing inevitable about any of this. Globalization as a product of technological change may be inevitable, but the political response to it, how society deals with it, only depends of the decisions of mere mortal men and women.
This, then is the challenge before the labour movement and before all those who believe, as we do, that the world economy must serve human needs and purposes, that is, the common welfare of humanity. The challenge is to show the way to a global economy at the service of the common welfare, and to become organized at a global level to prevail in the power struggle which will determine whether the world, in the next twenty years or so, will become a fit place to live in for the vast majority of humanity.
Rebuilding the Movement
The labour movement, internationally, was badly prepared for the unfolding new situation. Decades of complacency had diluted and trivialized 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 blinkered and politically ignorant 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.
That is not the kind of labour movement that was capable of meeting the challenges of globalization and this also applies, for the most part, to its international organizations. The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and most of the global union federations (GUFs) have no perspective or strategy; as for the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), it takes its policies from the EU Commission. The main problem of all international labour organizations, however, is 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. They are unable to develop a common strategy, only a lowest common denominator.
What we have to do now is at the same time very simple and very difficult; in any event, it requires a great deal of work. We have to internationalize the international movement, and the place to start is ourselves, where we are: in our enterprises, in our works councils, in our unions. Some of the things I am about to tell you will therefore be very simple, others not so simple.
Inform Yourselves
Your first need is the need for information: information about the global economy, global society, global politics, and information about international trade union activity. I have read much of the Danish trade union press over the years and I still read some of it. I can tell you that it will not give you the information you need. International trade union activities and issues are very rarely reported and, when they are, the angle is that your union is doing good in poor countries. That has nothing to do with international trade union activity. I will come back to this but the important point for now is that you need other sources of information. Probably all of your unions are affiliated to one of the ten global union federations: you need to know what they are doing, and if your union won’t tell you, you have to get the information directly from their web sites. There are also other web sites that specialize in international labour issues (LabourStart is one of them).
You have to learn English. English is not only the language of international business, it is the principal language of any international activity. In most transnational corporations, English is already the language of the Board; it is also the main working language of the international unions, the language of communication with the labour movement in North America, Asia, most of Africa and much of Europe. Most of what is written in the world that trade unionists have to read is in English.
Rethinking Internationalism
Most current assumptions about labour internationalism rest on false impressions. Internationalism, as I mentioned earlier, derives from the recognition that workers everywhere have common interests and that therefore mutual support, or solidarity, is a moral duty as well as a common survival strategy. The key word here is: “mutual”. Solidarity is a relationship among organizations based on reciprocity. These organizations may not be equal in power and resources, but they are morally equal: power, especially financial power, does not confer legitimacy or moral superiority on any partner in such a relationship.
In that, solidarity is fundamentally different from charity: charity is a top-down relationship between unequal partners, basically authoritarian and patronizing in nature.
For the past decades, the concept of labour internationalism has been strongly contaminated by humanitarian assumptions and values. International trade union activity has too often become confused with trade union development assistance, and trade union development assistance has too often been influenced by the politics of guilt.
I can recall the case of a significant agricultural workers’ union in a developing country, which for years received huge amounts of money in an open-ended project. Church organizations, trade union organizations, NGOs, supported these “poor rural workers – the poorest of the poor” unconditionally, uncritically and without coordination. This organization lost the sense of solidarity as a mutual relationship, did not understand the concept of accountability and has become adept at manipulating donors.
Donor guilt and the awareness and manipulation of this guilt by the recipient organization has no place in trade union relationships. It destroys solidarity and does not build organization but undermines it.
Yet, those are the assumptions underlying most programs of bilateral trade union development assistance, in which the Danish trade unions are a major player. The global pattern of trade union assistance is still dominated by a North-South funding relationship: the channelling of money from Europe (and North America and Japan) to the “Third World” for “capacity-building” education. The funding structures and institutions are all geared towards the North-South “charity” model, and often exclude funding support for global initiatives (for example, you can get money to fly someone from Dhaka or Bogota to Copenhagen, but not from Chicago or Sydney).
The charity/guilt approach also distorts strategic priorities. The focus for labour development assistance should be the points of leverage that matter in terms of power realities. They should not be determined by humanitarian fashion. When solidarity becomes re-defined as charity, and political fashion comes into it, the danger is always that assistance programs are driven by the political needs of the “donors” rather than the real needs of the recipients and the result can be highly damaging.
To their misfortune, certain countries have become fashionable destinations of assistance and their labour movements have become the victims of a “donor surge”: Nicaragua, El Salvador and Palestine are good examples; unfortunately they are not the only ones. What impact developments in Nicaragua, El Salvador or Palestine – to take just these examples – could have on the global economy and on global power relations is not clear and such fashions are obviously determined by other considerations: Western guilt, anti-Americanism, political romanticism, bureaucratic self-aggrandizement, playing to the home audience – anything but a global trade union strategy that makes sense in terms of basic trade union objectives. In addition, much of this assistance was inappropriate in terms of the real needs of the local movements, in the context of a genuinely strategic international approach.
The money that has flowed into Nicaragua, from many sources and without adequate controls, partly because of competition between donors, has been unbelievable. For that money, we could have simply bought the country and solved the land problem once and for all. Now, years later, the labour movement in Nicaragua is much weaker and more divided than it was before the “donor surge”.
Whatever difference Nicaragua might have made in the big scheme of things, Mexico, next door, with hundreds of thousands of unorganised workers in the maquila system, many struggling to organize, makes a target as big as a house. Yet, I have never heard of a European union interested in supporting organization in Mexico.
There has never been an evaluation of the effect of international trade union development assistance in, say, the last forty years – and we are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars – when it comes to advancing a global trade union agenda, strengthening the trade union movement and changing global power relations. I believe the result of such an evaluation would be devastating. There is an urgent need for such an evaluation to make the movement more honest with itself, more transparent, more accountable and more effective in terms of its own objectives.
Practicing Internationalism
Let us go back to the points of leverage. A key element in any international trade union strategy has to be organizing and the transnational corporations (TNCs) are key to organizing.
Let us remember that the TNCs are today the leading world power, not only because they dominate the world economy but because, either through their lobbies or directly, they exercise a dominant influence on the leading governments of the world, on the international financial institutions, on the World Trade Organization and on the EU.
At present, worldwide trade union density is about 13 percent among wage earners (163 million trade union members out of 1,300 million workers within the wage system – if the informal economy is included, the percentage would be very much lower, perhaps around 5 percent). Clearly, one of the main strategic goals of the labour movement must be to increase the number of trade union members, and the place to start is where it strategically makes the greatest difference.
Although the 73 million workers directly employed by TNCs world wide represent only a minority (a much larger minority if subcontracting is included), it is the most internationalised segment of the world working class and the best placed to make a difference in the over-all power relations between labour and business. Trade union organization in the TNCs is crucial to shifting global power relations.
This is the work done by the global union federations (GUFs), with varying degrees of commitment and effectiveness. Surprisingly, Danish unions are not very much involved in this work, with some exceptions (for example maritime transport, which is a special case). In any case, in comparison with the extent of their bi-lateral programs, their involvement is marginal.
Yet, because of the growing internationalisation 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 in remote parts of the world, and seek or respond to practical forms of international solidarity.
One response of the global union federations to these developments has been to negotiate international framework agreements (IFAs). These agreements deal with general questions of principle: workers’ rights and international labour standards. Typically, they commit the company to respecting ILO core labour standards: freedom of association and of collective bargaining, elimination of forced and child labour and freedom from discrimination. They are not in any way 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.
To be effective, all IFAs must also include agreement on systems for monitoring, verification and the handling of complaints and disputes. This can include agreement on the regular dissemination of company information to the unions, the establishment of regular channels of global negotiation between management and unions, social auditing procedures, etc.
Some companies have adopted codes of conduct, which in some cases cover the same ground. The fundamental difference, of course, is that IFAs are basically collective bargaining agreements with mutually agreed rights and responsibilities, as opposed to codes of conduct, which are unilaterally proclaimed by management and can therefore also be unilaterally revoked or amended by management. No union at national level would accept a unilaterally proclaimed code of conduct as a substitute for a collective bargaining agreement, and it is no different at international level.
There are about thirty IFAs at this time and their number is constantly growing. As the number of companies involved continues to expand, the GUFs face a major expansion of their workload and rising expectations from their affiliates. The negotiation and subsequent monitoring and servicing of each IFA require considerable effort and expense, yet the financial and human resources of most GUFs are severely limited.
You would think that out of global strategical considerations the general trade union movement would support the structures that are at the cutting edge of creating a new power balance with transnational corporations through collective bargaining: the GUFs and their company councils, and which really need that support. That is not happening, or not nearly enough. GUFs do have access to project money, but in general that is tied to conditions conforming to the old do-good North/South pattern and is hard to fit into a global strategic agenda. In the end, the GUFs have to rely on a small number of committed and aware affiliates, and it is often the affiliates that are most boastful about the range of their own international projection which are least active and effective when it comes to supporting international action.
A contributing factor to the confusion of priorities may be the emergence of the European Works Councils (EWCs), as a result of the EU directive of 1994. I do not want to speak too much on the EWCs because that is the next item on your agenda, but I do want to signal three issues which are important from the point of view of an international labour strategy: the negotiation issue, the trade union issue and the geographical issue.
The negotiation issue arises because the directive has not established the EWCs as negotiation bodies: their function is “information and consultation”. It is, however, in the interest of unions that negotiations, in some form, should take place. The important point here is that the content of what happens in an EWC depends on a mutual agreement of the social counterparts and not necessarily by what the directive says. Unions should therefore push for what is consistent with their objectives and their interests, rather than voluntarily conforming to rules invented by others that work to their disadvantage.
The trade union issue arises because the EWC directive is a much-diluted version of the original draft of 1980 which would have given trade unions statutory representation rights. In its final and present form, it does not mention trade unions at all, so that unions have had to fight to nail down the right of union officials to be part of the EWC and to ensure that the lay members should be union members themselves. Where this has not succeeded, sometimes because the European Industry Federation, which negotiated the agreement, was more concerned with the quantity of agreements signed rather than their quality, EWCs remain vulnerable to management manipulation or become outright management-dominated fakes.
The main reason why the trade union presence, and specifically international trade union presence, is necessary, is because it represent the long term general interest of workers, whereas works council representatives are not necessarily committed to defending more than the specific interests of the workers of their enterprise as it appears to them at the time of the meeting. When each delegation comes to the meeting determined to defend its short-term interests, if need be at the expense of others, this can easily lead to a free-for-all where management is free to impose its own decisions. Whenever workers’ representatives meet internationally, it is their obligation to reach a position reflecting the long-term general interest of all involved, and, in order to do so, to negotiate the necessary compromises among themselves. Once this is done, they confront management with a united position. Any other scenario is a recipe for defeat.
The geographical issue arises because the directive formally only applies to EU countries, but leaves agreement on the actual coverage of the council to the social counterparts. Most companies seek to limit the EWCs to the EU only (the issue here is not so much Norway and Switzerland but Central and Eastern Europe, where unions are weak, wages low and conditions miserable). The union interest is of course to secure the maximum coverage, ideally of every single operation of the company regardless of its location. Thus some EWCs are confined to the EU, some cover all of geographical Europe and at least three are worldwide in scope. Unsurprisingly, it is the GUFs who have fought hardest for maximum coverage whereas some European unions have bought into the “Europeanist” agenda and obediently restricted themselves to the letter of the directive.
In summary: the so-called “social dialogue” that has developed at EU level cannot be part of a useful international trade union strategy unless the issues described above are addressed and solved in a way consistent with trade union interests.
Before we leave transnational corporations, I want to tell you how union work in transnational corporations can be strengthened by education programs. One example: the Transport and General Workers’ Union in the UK, in partnership with the Workers’ Education Association, has been investing heavily into intensive residential shop-steward courses on globalization and development. These courses focus on the development of IFAs as a practical instrument for the defense of workers’ rights.
Each course concentrates on a particular sector (food and agriculture, textiles and garments, automotive industry etc) and is designed in close consultation with the appropriate GUF. Every course also invites two or three participants from abroad to bring their first-hand experience of workers’ rights and union organisation into the course. Although there is naturally broad discussion on the impact of globalisation on workers, and the need to introduce international governmental action to prevent the worst abuses of workers, the emphasis is firmly on the practical steps that can be taken at the workplace to help build a global approach to collective bargaining, and to expand the number of employers prepared to negotiate IFAs. The union has also developed an extensive web site to accompany the courses, available through www.tgwu.org.uk (once you are on the home page, click on “education in international development”).
Similar education programmes are being introduced by other unions, federations and GUFs themselves. In September 2002, the International Federation of Workers’ Education Associations (IFWEA) organized the first international seminar of unions, GUFs and NGOs to explore how trade union education on globalisation can be developed, with a strong emphasis on workers’ rights and IFAs. There are plans for this to become a regular event.
The IFWEA has also developed a method to strengthen the global organizing capacity of unions, particularly in transnational corporations: this is the International Study Circle project.
An International Study Circle (ISC) involves bringing together groups of participants based in several countries (local study circles) through the Internet. These local circles work simultaneously on the same subject, which can be a transnational corporation. Between meetings, each group has access to materials on the Internet, including the results of discussions and work completed by the other groups in their previous sessions. In this way, a union network can be created in a company linking local unions in different countries through Internet, which remains as a permanent international union structure – a virtual company council – after the ISC has run its course. It does not replace meetings, but it keeps up the exchange of information and contacts between meetings.
Flanking Alliances
As crucial as organizing in the transnational corporations may be, it is not the only area where unions have to organize and it is not, by itself, sufficient to change global power relations. To do that, unions have to relate to society at several levels and in several ways. This requires alliances with other social actors; the international trade union movement needs the strength that comes from such alliances.
Let us not forget that we are also witnessing today an unprecedented movement of popular resistance against the new world order of transnational capital. Last February, over ten million people were demonstrating in the whole world against the war in Iraq. This has never happened before in history. And it did not come out of nowhere. Unfortunately, it did not come out of the trade union movement. But it would be inconceivable without the worldwide demonstrations against the World Trade Organisation, which preceded it. It would be inconceivable without the meetings of the World Social Forum of Porto Alegre, now in its third year. This is the Global Justice Movement, growing with each of its actions as it emerges from the depth of popular revolt with the battle cry: “another world is possible”.
Our organizations need to be part of this Global Justice Movement, as many of our members already are. For that, the trade union movement needs to clarify its political principles in terms of its original values and objectives. There is no time now to do more than to just signal the main issues. I will try to do this briefly as I conclude.
The first is the human rights issue. This looks simple on the surface: of course we are for human rights and of course we will oppose any dictatorship that oppresses its people. Really?
The biggest dictatorship in the world today, and the most dangerous to the labour movement, is China. It attracts a major part of world wide foreign direct investment, including many Danish companies. Its “competitive advantage” is extraordinarily low labour costs. Chinese workers are among the most exploited in the world. How does this come about? Very simple: free trade unions are prohibited in China. Chinese workers cannot organize to defend themselves. What is called “trade unions” in China are State-controlled organizations which are part of the system of repression that keeps the workers down, exactly as in the old Soviet bloc.
You might think that consequently an international labour strategy should be to help bring about free trade unions in China and that the labour movement, where it is free, should do everything to support those incredibly courageous Chinese workers who are trying to organize independent and free trade unions despite the repression: most of them are currently in jail or in labour camps. That is not what is happening.
For example: a leading Danish trade unionists last year, in an editorial in his union journal, described his visit to Shanghai, where he met the local labour council. After mentioning the importance of maintaining “stability” in China (which in Chinese government parlance means unchallenged one-party rule), he says that his Chinese counterparts stressed the importance of securing a maximum amount of foreign direct investment and seemed to think that the question of distributing the benefits of such investment to the workers was not really important. Surprise, surprise. He realized that this means in fact that workers are set up to compete with each other, but he concluded that the “dialogue” with the Shanghai comrades needs to be pursued.
Not one word about the fact that he was talking to representatives of the State, not of the workers, that such representatives have no authority or legitimacy because they are under instructions from the State and not from their purported membership and that therefore nothing he can tell them in Shanghai or in Copenhagen will make any difference.
I am not aware that his union is actively campaigning for the release of the imprisoned Chinese trade unionists, or that it is supporting those who work for free trade unions in China. This may interfere, of course, with “dialogue” and “dialogue” can go on for a long time, probably until the Chinese workers, without help from the Danish unions, succeed in sweeping away the system that oppresses them.
The trade union movement cannot have credibility on human rights issues as long as it maintains double standards and campaigns selectively on an opportunistic basis.
The second big issue is the women’s issue. The relationship between the historically male dominated trade union movement and women workers has always been problematic. It is improving slowly as more women join unions (in many industrialized countries most of new union members are women). I suppose that in Denmark this issue must be on top of the agenda in the context of the merger discussions between the KAD and SiD.
But there is another dimension to this issue that I would like to briefly signal: that is the growth of the informal economy, where employment is unregulated and unprotected, and workers are often self-employed. This may not be a big issue in Denmark as yet, but it is becoming a major issue in other European countries and especially in Third World countries where workers in the informal economy are a growing majority. With the informal economy representing a majority of the labour force in developing countries, and a significant and growing proportion in industrialized countries, 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. Also, women in informal employment have formed their own unions: one of the best known is the Self Employed Women’s Association in India, but there is a growing number.
An international strategy of the labour movement must make organizing in the informal economy a priority and needs to create the alliances that are essential for that purpose.
A final word about politics. As we all know, in many countries the relationship between the trade union movement and its historical allies, the social-democratic and labour 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 labour 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.
This is not an enormously complicated undertaking. The starting point should be to define the legitimate purpose of any form of social organization, whether local or world wide, in other words, to affirm that enterprises, or an economic system, have legitimacy only to the extent that they serve human welfare in the widest sense of the term (the satisfaction of basic needs, and these do not only include food, shelter and clothing but they also include justice, equality, freedom, access to culture, the rule of law). These values and basic principles together constitute a program of radical democracy diametrically opposed to the currently hegemonic neo-liberalism, and this should become the basic program which the labour movement will defend at all levels with all appropriate means.
I thank you for your attention.