Eric Lee

Back in the 1930s, CIO organizers in the American South would go to factory gates and hand out leaflets with pictures of President Roosevelt, decorated with the national flag. And the leaflets would proclaim in a very large type: "You have the right to join a union."

At the time, the right to join a union, particularly in the South, existed on paper only. The newly-enacted National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) did guarantee the right to form and join unions, but in parts of the country where racial segregation was still practiced, and where the Ku Klux Klan waged a campaign of terror, the NLRA was little more than a scrap of paper.

Nevertheless, it was a very important organizing tool for the rapidly growing CIO unions. It told workers that they had a legal right to join a union. The law, which for so long had been used to suppress unions, seemed to finally be on their side.

The world today is a little bit like the 1930s in this sense: There is a law which guarantees workers the right to join and form trade unions -- everywhere in the world. That law consists primarily of the eight "core conventions" of the International Labour Organization.

For trade union organizers, the most important of those "core conventions" are number 87 (Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organize, 1948) and number 98 (Right to Organize and Collective Bargaining, 1949). At the heart of these conventions is the assertion that workers everywhere in the world have "the right to establish and ... to join organisations of their own choosing".

In many countries, those conventions are little more than a scrap of paper, just like the NLRA was in many U.S. states seventy years ago. And this is the case even for countries which have ratified those conventions and which are bound to enforce them. For example, Colombia ratified both conventions 87 and 98 nearly thirty years ago, and yet remains today the most dangerous country on the planet for trade unionists.

Just as trade union organizers would use the law (even if unenforced) as a tool for recruiting members in the American South, so today unions around the world often mention the ILO core conventions.

They come up again and again; most recently, I heard them raised in a discussion about Iraq. The Iraqi unions are eager for the country's new Labour Code to incorporate those conventions. Someone suggested that the website of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions should even link to the texts.

So I went on the web to look for them. Imagine my surprise when I searched on Google for "ILO core conventions" and the first result (from the ILO website) produced a broken link. When I tried to view what is perhaps the best known of the core conventions, Number 87 (Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organize), I received an error message. Even if the link had worked, it was not the kind of web address that one easily remembers, beginning with http://ilolex.ilo.ch:1567/ -- and so on. (The full address would take up a line or two of this article.)

Once I found the text of convention 87, I thought it would be interesting to see how many web pages linked to it -- this being an indication of its popularity. According to Google, only 80 pages (nearly all of them pages on the ILO website), link to the web page with the text of convention 87. By comparison, well over 1,500 sites link to LabourStart's front page.

It struck me that one would have to look rather hard to find the core conventions, and even harder if the languages you wanted them in weren't English, French or Spanish. Though there are translations of the core conventions into a number of languages, these are scattered around the various ILO websites, including regional sites, in a somewhat haphazard manner. In some cases, such as Arabic, they exist only in PDF format, not as web pages, meaning that they will not turn up in many searches.

I think it's essential that these core conventions be accessible to trade unionists everywhere. That means they should be easy to find, and available in as many languages as possible.

Towards that end, there's now a new section of LabourStart located at http://www.labourstart.org/rights which will list in the simplest and clearest way possible all eight core conventions in every available language. As more languages become available, the list will expand. If you go online today and search Google for "ILO core conventions", you'll see a little ad in the upper right corner of the page reading "ILO core conventions: You have a legal right to join or form a trade union." Click on that link and you're taken to LabourStart's new page with links to every ILO core convention.

This is a step forward, but only a very small step. We should be working to ensure that the core conventions are available in dozens of languages, including translations into many new ones. They should be in HTML format, and made easily searchable. There should be a facility to request that the texts of core conventions be emailed, particularly to people in developing countries without web access, or for whom access is expensive, or whose access to the web is censored by their governments. And of course there should be print versions of all the conventions, with explanatory text, available free of charge in many languages.

Back in the 1930s, millions of unorganized workers in the US learned about their new rights to join trade unions not from the government, but from union organizers. So it will be in the 21st century, as unions organizing globally take advantage of existing international agreements and laws. We must be sending out a loud and clear message to unorganized workers in places like Colombia, China and Iraq, saying "You have the right to join a union!"

Posted by Eric Lee at 07:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Approximately 70 trade unionists from Britain and Iraq attended an all-day conference organized by the Trades Union Congress (TUC), held in its headquarters in London.

The event was preceded the evening before by a memorial meeting organized jointly by the TUC and the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) in memory of the IFTU International Secretary, Hadi Saleh, who was tortured and murdered in his home in early January by Ba'athist terrorists. Speakers at the memorial meeting included Brendan Barber, general secretary of the TUC, Hadi's widow, Abdullah Muhsin, foreign representative of the IFTU, and David Bacon from US Labor Against the War.

The morning session featured speakers from the International Labour Office (ILO), the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), Labour Friends of Iraq (LFIQ) and the IFTU.

Walid Hamdan, from the Middle East region of the ILO, opened by asserting the ILO's commitment to the creation of independent and democratic trade unions in Iraq. Amaya Fernandez, who is coordinating the ICFTU's work on Iraq, reported on a series of meetings between international and Iraqi trade unionists, and emphasized the importance of trade union unity in Iraq -- and the ending of the occupation. Harry Barnes MP, one of the founders of Labour Friends of Iraq, spoke about the importance of British support for efforts to create a new Iraq. Ghasib A. Hassan from the IFTU spoke about the challenges facing the Iraqi trade unions following decades of Saddamist rule.

This plenary session was followed by a series of workshops in which Iraqi trade unionists were able to speak directly to their British colleagues.

The workshop I attended was opened by Hangaw Abdulla Khan from the Kurdish unions, who spoke in Kurdish, which was then translated into Arabic, and from that to English. His union represents some 100,000 workers in Kurdistan, which achieved autonomy in 1991 following the Gulf War. When asked what British unions could do, the Kurdish unions had prepared a list of 12 requests, including items for their trade union offices and training both within Iraq and abroad. They urged British unionists to visit Kurdistan.

Ali Sharif Ali from the teachers union then spoke. The union claims some 400,000 members; 75,000 of them in the Baghdad region alone. He spoke about the Ba'ath era when the union existed as an arm of the regime, promoting its values. He offered some examples of practical solidarity, including courses on modern technology organized together with the American Federation of Teachers. He said that for every opening on that course, which would be held in Kurdistan, there were over 100 applicants. When discussing the union's needs, he emphasized the need for training.

The Iraqis were asked about obstacles to organizing and emphasized the lack of a labour code, protection of union rights in the constitution, and other issues. Attacks by the "resistance" were also mentioned. Workers are prevented from attending union meetings and even going to work because of these attacks. Extremely high unemployment is also a key issue.

They reported that the proposed labour code would be presented to the interim national assembly. The unions expressed some reservations about the proposed code.

The Iraqi unions attending the conference included the IFTU, the Kurdistan Workers Syndicate, the Iraqi Teachers Union, the Iraqi Journalists' Union, the Federation of Workers Councils and Unions of Iraq, and -- suprisingly -- the General Federation of Iraqi Trade Unions (GFITU), the national trade union centre controlled by the former Saddamist dictatorship. Colleagues who attended the workshop in which a GFITU representative spoke said that the answers he gave to questions about the organization's Ba'athist past went unanswered.

In addition to representatives of the ILO and ICFTU, there were also delegates from two global union federations (the International Transport Workers Federation and the ICEM), and the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center.

At least 16 British unions sent delegates, including the CWU, PCS, Unison, GMB, Connect, NASUWT, NATFHE, T&GWU, FBU, Amicus, Prospect, NUJ, TSSA, NUT, RMT, and Community. In a least two cases, these unions were represented by their general secretaries (NATFHE and RMT).

***

This article was reprinted (without permission) on the website of the Communist Party USA's 'theoretical journal', Political Affairs, here:

http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/view/669/

Posted by Eric Lee at 05:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Long before there was LabourStart, long before unions were using the Internet, I was a computer programmer. I worked in a worker-owned and democratically-run wire and cable factory, and my job was to maintain the computerized information systems. I learned to program in a language called RPG which was used on IBM computers.

The skills I learned then have proven to be of great use to me now, as an Internet activist working with unions around the world. I think the time has come for unions to begin to understand that programmers can play a vital role in our organizing and communications strategies.

These days I no longer program in RPG and haven't seen an IBM mini-computer for years. Most of my programming these days is done in a language called Perl, which is one of the two or three most popular languages for writing Web-based applications.

Many trade union webmasters have learned HTML, which is the language that web pages are written in, and many have learned how to use tools like DreamWeaver or FrontPage to write the HTML for them, but very few have learned a proper programming language.

Why should they?

Because these languages -- and the most popular would probably be Perl, PHP and Python -- allow you to do things that ordinary web page design doesn't allow.

By using such languages, you can tremendously expand the effectiveness of your website.

Let me explain by example.

I was working on a website of an international organization that has affiliates in many countries. It wants to list on its website all the affiliates, by country, in alphabetical order, with their website addresses and email addresses. The last two have to be links, so that you can just click on the name of the affiliate and visit their website, or click on their email address to automatically send a message to them. And the list changes every few weeks.

Using Perl, I was able to write a very simple script to read through a text file with all the information, sorting it and formatting it as web page. No one on the organization's staff needs to know any HTML at all -- my Perl script handles all that. All they need to do is to keep their text list up to date.

That's a very small and simple example, but I think you get the idea.

If you look at LabourStart, you'll see an increasing number of interactive components to the website. There are the labour newswires, which generate syndicated content automatically, every few minutes, in different formats (JavaScript and RSS). All that is done using Perl scripts.

There's a directory of all the websites using those newswires, and a sub-directory of those which use only the new health and safety newswire. That too was written entirely in Perl.

Of course the entire back-end of the website, the giant news links database with its thousands of records in 19 languages, submitted by over 300 volunteer corresponents, is entirely coded in Perl.

So is the whole campaigning system -- the generation of HTML web pages with online forms, the sending of protest messages, the counter tracking the success of a campaign -- all of these are interactive scripts, written in Perl.

Okay, so I've got you convinced. Unions can make great use of languages like Perl, PHP or Python to get their websites to do a lot more than simply display some web pages. But there is a downside.

A few years ago, I suggested to a union that they make some changes to their site, which was using Perl scripts. They asked their web design company, and were told that it would cost $1,500 a day to get a Perl programmer to work on the project. I was later told that this was the going market rate in Britain.

But Perl isn't rocket science; if you have a programming background, or if you just take the time and effort, you can teach yourself. I taught myself, mostly using Elizabeth Castro's terrific little book, "Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web". (A dog-eared copy is always within reach of my computer.) And you learn by example; you download Perl scripts that are readily available and you modify them to suit your union's needs. One good source is here.

Perl, PHP and Python should be taught at union education centers to those webmasters who've already learned HTML and want to know more. Those of us who program in these languages should make some of our better scripts available to other unions. For example, LabourStart uses a lovely little script to count visitors to our various home pages, to show them visiting in real time, and even to show which websites they came from. A script like that could be a great alternative to the counters we often see on the bottom of union websites.

Now that unions have been using the web for a decade or more, it is time to upgrade the skills of union webmasters, to become less reliant on outside contractors (especially at the rate of $1,500 a day), and to learn to use the very best tools ourselves.

Posted by Eric Lee at 09:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

Having now completed reading the third in Sean Matgamna's series on Iraq, I want to return to a point he makes several times in the first of the series, the one published in early December in Solidarity.

In attempting to distinguish the views of the AWL from those of Labour Friends of Iraq (LFIQ), Sean makes use on several occasions of the word "Menshevik”.

He accuses Alan Johnson of "adopting the 'stages' approch of Menshevism and Stalinism" regarding Iraq. He adds:

"Think of those poor, benighted political 'idiots', the Bolsheviks, who in 1917 would not listen to the Mensheviks and SRs, or their own Bolshevik right wing, arguing that they needed to rally politically to the Provisional Government in order to prevent the victory of reaction."

Earlier in the article, he summarizes Menshevik strategy as "the working class should avoid doing anything that would frighten the bourgeoisie".

Though the logic of all this might not be clear to everyone, the obvious message is that to be a Bolshevik is a good thing and to be a Menshevik is a bad thing.

This is such a fundamental tenet of Trotskyism that I would imagine it is rarely, if ever questioned.

And yet I wonder if the time hasn't come to take a closer look at the Menshevik bogey-man, to see if he is really all that terrible.

But first, a word about the Bolsheviks. Sean would be the first to admit that the Bolsheviks made their fair share of mistakes. Those mistakes do seem to be rather big ones, looking backwards after some eight decades. Within a few years of coming to power, the Bolsheviks had managed to establish the most brutal regime the world had ever known – a regime responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people.

Of course Trotskyists love to blame all that on Stalin. When Lenin was alive, when Trotsky headed the Red Army, none of that happened.

Not exactly true, comrades. It was Lenin who established the Cheka (later known as the GPU, NKVD and KGB) within weeks of the Bolshevik revolution, months before the outbreak of the civil war. He was the one who ordered the closing of Menshevik and other socialist newspapers even before the end of 1917. It was under Lenin and Trotsky that all the other socialist parties were outlawed (including those who supported the Bolsheviks in the Civil War, such as the Mensheviks under Martov). Under their rule, democracy within the Bolshevik party came to an end with the banning of factions. Under Lenin and Trotsky, the Gulag was launched. And it was under their rule that the only corner of the Russian empire under democratic socialist rule, the little Menshevik republic of Georgia, was invaded and conquered in 1921.

Of course under Stalin all this became far worse, thousands of times worse. And what was the reaction of the Bolshevik old guard? They overwhelmingly capitulated to Stalin. All the "giants" who stood side-by-side with Lenin and Trotsky, such as Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin, every one of them eventually surrendered to Stalin – and every one of them was eventually shot. Trotsky did not share their fate because of his exile. He was allowed out of Russia, and it was in his exile in Turkey, France, Norway and Mexico that he began to develop the critique of Stalinism that made him famous.

Interestingly enough, Trotsky's own views on Menshevism underwent a change once he escaped from the suffocating atmosphere of the Leninist party in Russia. Though he initially supported the infamous Menshevik Party trial in the early 1930s – seen by many as a dress rehearsal for the later Stalinist show trials – he later repudiated his own view, admitting that the Mensheviks accused of sabotage were probably innocent victims of the emerging Stalinist terror. Even he began to understand that not every bad thing said about the Mensheviks was necessarily true.

Furthermore, as his views in the 1930s grew closer and closer to those of the Mensheviks, there were even some contacts – which unfortunately did not bear any fruit.

The great Menshevik historian Boris Nicolaevsky befriended Trotsky's son, Leon Sedov. Some Mensheviks drifted into the Trotskyist camp. Others were increasingly blunt about the similarities in their emerging analysis of the Stalinist regime.

Sometimes the parallels are striking. For example, most Trotskyists know about the split in the Fourth International in 1940 and the development by Max Shachtman of the theory of bureaucratic collectivism to explain the rise of new exploiting ruling class in the USSR.

But few will be familiar with a parallel development in the Menshevik camp at precisely the same moment. Rudolf Hilferding, described by some as "the most outstanding Marxist theorist alive" in 1940, wrote an essay called "State Capitalism or Totalitarian State Economy" in 1940, arguing that Stalinist Russia was neither capitalist nor socialist, but was a new form of society. This view – nearly identical to Shachtman's – appeared in the Menshevik publication Sotsialisticheskii vestnik.

Had Trotsky and the Mensheviks in exile been somewhat more open to one another, the history of the non-Stalinist left might have been radically different.

Sean scoffs at those who warned the Bolsheviks against a premature seizure of power in October 1917 – those who warned that it might result in the triumph of reaction. But I wonder if they weren't right to issue such warnings.

After all, within two decades, Russia was once again an empire, ruled by a dictator, with a secret police infinitely more powerful than the one created by Ivan the Terrible. The breathing space that socialists had in the last years of Romanov rule seemed like paradise compared to the nightmare of Stalinist Russia. Maybe the premature seizure of power by a Marxist party in one of the world's most backward and impoverished states wasn't such a great idea after all.

Indeed, the whole historical experience of the last century should show us that when Marxists seize power in backward countries, such as China, Albania, Angola, Vietnam, Cuba, etc., the result is exactly what Marx predicted: the creation of new class society.

Sean scoffs at the "theory of stages" but it was Marx and Engels who first proposed the idea that socialism would result from the contradictions of advanced capitalism – and not from the blueprints of utopians. The Bolsheviks ignored all this, tried to leap over not one but several historical stages, and the result was the greatest tragedy of modern times.

As for the Mensheviks, they have gotten a rather bad rap, haven't they? For those readers of this newspaper who are not familiar with Menshevik history, maybe a few words are in order.

The Mensheviks originated in the Iskra group of Marxists led by Lenin and Martov. That group succeeded in taking over the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party at its 1903 congress, but split over several organizational questions. Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks remained, formally, members of the same party, sharing the same program and often cooperating, more or less until the 1917 revolution. Several attempts at party unity were made, usually with the backing of the International, but to little avail. Trotsky was far closer to the Mensheviks, sharing their concerns about a possible concentration of power in the Leninist faction.

In 1917 the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks drew even closer with the outbreak of revolution. Lenin's arrival in Petrograd put an end to all that as he saw the chance for the Bolsheviks to seize and hold state power.

In October 1917, the Mensheviks divided over the question of their attitude toward the Bolshevik revolution, but eventually the faction headed by Martov prevailed. Martov supported the Bolsheviks in the civil war, and his party played a role in the unions and the soviets until the early 1920s when they were finally crushed. His faction's support for the revolution became known as the "Martov Line".

For many decades thereafter, the Menshevik party in exile played the role that Trotskyists later grew so fond of: being left-wing critics of the Stalinist regime. Reading over the writings of the outstanding Menshevik thinkers such as Dan, Martov, Nicolaevsky, Abramovich, Dallin and others, one would be hard-pressed to find what the big difference was between the Trotskyist critique and the Menshevik one. Dallin himself wrote as early as 1929, "Trotsky's analysis is very close to our own."

Maybe the Bolsheviks really were wrong to seize power, to outlaw all other socialist parties, to crush the independent unions and found the Cheka and Gulag – all under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky. Maybe the Mensheviks were right in calling for a coalition government of all the socialist parties, including the Social Revolutionaries, for independent trade unions, and for true soviet democracy.

Maybe if Trotsky had lived a little longer, he would indeed have completed the reconciliation with his former Menshevik comrades, realizing that maybe they were not so wrong after all.

And what does all this have to do with Iraq?

If the Menshevik view is that audacious attempts to leap over several stages of history are counter-productive and will have tragic results, that view has some relevance in Iraq.

Surely Sean does not believe that Iraq is ripe for a soviet revolution? I have no doubt that what he and all genuine socialists want for Iraq is the same: the most democratic regime possible, allowing breathing space for socialists and trade unionists after decades of Saddamist rule.

A "Menshevik" view of Iraq would focus on expanding that breathing space, helping Iraqi workers to build those institutions – unions, political parties – which are essential to their survival. Is this a Stalinist "theory of stages"? Of course not – this is the ABC of Marxism.

Let me conclude on a personal note. I grew up as an activist on the socialist left in the United States. There, back in the 1960s and 1970s, the word "socialist" was absolutely taboo. It was used only by the right, as a way to scare off liberals. The outstanding American socialist thinker, Michael Harrington, often made the case that it was in the interests of everyone, and liberals in particular, that the word "socialist" be restored to its proper use. It should not be used a smear word by the right, but instead worn as a badge of honor by the left.

I feel the same way about the word "Menshevik". Enough of using the word Menshevik to scare off one's political opponents. Even Trotsky came to realize that the Mensheviks were not a bunch of imperialist stooges, sabotaging Soviet industry, as the Stalinist prosecutors claimed in 1930. That he never fully came to realize how close his own views were to those of the Mensheviks is one more tragedy of that time.

To be called a Menshevik is not a smear, comrades. I wear that badge with honor.

Posted by Eric Lee at 05:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Unions tend to be fairly conservative, particularly when it comes to technology. They are not known as "early adopters". And that means that sometimes, while they wait for certain technologies to come down in price, or become easier to use, new technologies appear. One example of this is the use of sound in union websites. Very few union websites make any use of the fact that the vast majority of their members have computers with sound cards and speakers.

It is so rare that British unions make use of sound, that when one General Secretary chose to record and broadcast an audio Christmas greeting through the union's website, it triggered one member to publicly post their thanks.

Meanwhile, the use of sound on the web moves on. It has been a decade since Progressive Networks, a company founded (oddly enough) to promote social change, launched "streaming audio" on the net with its product, now known as RealPlayer. It's been more than five years since Live365.com made internet radio broadcasts a possibility for unions (and everyone else). It's been more than a year since Radio LabourStart was launched -- the world's first global labour radio station, broadcasting 24/7 on the web.

So why mention the very latest developments? Because no one is waiting for unions to catch up while technology races ahead. Today it is possible to create audio broadcasts aimed at the millions of people who own an Apple iPod music player (or similar devices). This new possibility is called "podcasting" and it's a very simple way to broadcast audio files in the popular MP3 format through the syndication format known as RSS (which stands for really simple syndication). Podcasting may sound hard to do, but it's not, and to prove the point (once again) Radio LabourStart launched its first podcast in January 2004 with an appeal from a Sri Lankan trade unionist following the earthquake and tsunami disaster.

If this were hard to do, or costly, I'd understand the reluctance of unions to move forward -- but it's neither. You can see a podcast in action, and read more about it by following the links at http://radio.labourstart.org

Posted by Eric Lee at 05:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)