Eric Lee

A friend of mine who's been working for 25 years on a shop floor in an Israeli factory summed up the historic signficance of Amir Peretz's rise to power in the Labor Party. It doesn't really matter all that much what happens in the general elections, he told me. By raising the issues of poverty and social injustice, by compelling all politicians -- including Sharon -- to address those issues, Amir Peretz has aleady won. A generation ago, Israel was known as a country where social class barely existed. The first person I knew who visited the country back in 1971 came back elated. "There is no bourgeoisie in Israel," he told me. It was a slight exaggeration -- but only a slight one. The much poorer Israel of the 1970s did indeed have social classes -- and the social injustice of that time gave rise to a movement of young Sephardic Jews known as the "Black Panthers". But compared to the Israel of today, the Jewish state of 30 years ago was a workers' paradise. Israel has gone from being one of the world's more just and fair societies to one of the least. The rich are getting richer, and the poor poorer, on a scale unmatched in other countries.

There are reasons for this which Israel shares with other countries -- such as globalization and the worldwide race to the bottom as countries try to compete with one another, driving down wages and reducing the size of government. But there are also uniquely Israeli reasons and these have to do with the fact that despite appearing to be one of the most politically alive countries in the world, Israel in fact has had no politics in the sense that we understand politics in the advanced industrial world.

In its simplest, crudest sense, politics is an expression of the struggle between social classes. There was a time when Americans would have laughed off that idea as a silly Marxist slogan. Today under Bush, it is clear to many people just how right Marx was on this point at least. In most countries, there are parties of the left and the right, parties expressing the economic interests of this or that social class.

In Britain, where I live, you can still mostly predict how someone will vote in an election based on how much money they earn, or what type of house they live in, or whether or not they are members of a trade union. In other European countries, the distinction is even sharper.

But Israel has never had, at least not in the last generation, this kind of class politics. Israelis would vote for political parties based on their views regarding the conflict with the Palestinians. Those who believed that compromise with the Palestinians was possible considered themselves to be "doves". Those who were more skeptical became "hawks". Doves and hawks -- not left and right.

And the lines dividing them had little to do with social class. For example, a number of the wealthiest businessmen in the country found themselves supporting progress on the peace process -- and were thereby aligned with socialists and communists. Meanwhile, many of Israel's poor became, for a wide range of reasons, supporters of the extreme right.

Class politics, if it ever existed in Israel, virtually came to an end following the 1967 war, once the national debate began to focus solely on the question of how, and if, to resolve the dispute with the country's Arab neighbors.

And one result of this has been that every time Palestinian terrorists go out on one of their murderous sprees, thousands of poor Israelis cast their votes for politicians like Netanyahu who represent the interests of the very rich.

This is the crazy reality of Israeli politics. The security situation motivates tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Israeli voters to vote against their own economic interests and to back leaders and parties like Netanyahu and the Likud which, once in power, drive down their standards of living and widen the social gap.

There are some parallels with American politics. In his brilliant book, "What's the Matter with Kansas?," Thomas Frank describes how right-wing Republicans have been able to do much the same with some working class and poor Americans. In the US, issues like abortion and gay marriage are used by right-wing politicians to coax people to vote against their own interests. Sometimes this works. But in Israel, this has been the dominant theme of politics for nearly four decades.

And now we come to the rise of Amir Peretz.

Amir Peretz represents that rare bird in Israeli politics -- a man who actually believes in, and practices, class politics. Amir belongs to that generation of Moroccan immigrants who threw their support behind Menachem Begin and brought the Likud to power in 1977. Most of those immigrants and their children, who suffered from poverty and inequality under the various Labor Party governments, had been backing parties which once in power began to tear down the welfare state, weaken the unions and increase poverty.

But not Amir. He joined the Labor Party, and was elected mayor of Sderot, a dusty development town just over the border from Gaza. Development towns are the kinds of places where politicians like David Levy, who spent most of his life in the Likud, grew up. They are the kinds of places where politicians like Shimon Peres would get heckled on a good day, and physically attacked on a bad one. People in those towns are notorious for gathering in small crowds and shouting "Death to Arabs" following a terrorist attack.

But not Amir. He helped found "Peace Now" and he blamed excessive government spending on West Bank and Gaza settlements for the poverty in Sderot and elsewhere. When he saw crime and violence on the rise in his town and throughout Israeli society, he blamed the occupation for corroding the moral fiber of the country.

You couldn't be more off-message than that. And he continued doing things that no once else even dreamed of doing.

A decade ago, when he and Haim Ramon decided to challenge the Labor Party's 70-year-long dominance of the Histadrut trade union federation, no expected them to win. But they did win, and within a year or two, that federation had lost hundreds of thousands of its members as Ramon broke the link between health care and union membership. Once he'd done that, Ramon moved on and left Peretz in control of the broken, hollow shell that was once one of the world's great trade union movements.

What happened next was pretty amazing. Amir Peretz treated the Histadrut like it was a trade union. For decades the Histadrut had been much more than a union -- it owned a big slice of the Israeli economy, it provided health care, it published books and newspapers, it had its own soccer teams, it ran a youth movement, and so on. It had a trade union "department", which looking back seems a bit odd. How many unions in the world needed a specific department to do the union stuff?

Amir thought that the role of the Histadrut should be to protect the weak, to resist attempts to roll back wages and pensions, and so on. Anywhere else in the world and that is the normal bread-and-butter work of trade unionists. But not in Israel, where the unions were busy doing everything but trade union work.

Amir turned that all around, began to show up at strikes with a megaphone and a message. At first journalists were confused. I recall one long profile of him in an Israeli paper entitled "The last social democrat".

Well, maybe not the very last. After all, his little political party grew in strength from election to election, and when he merged it back into the Labor Party last year, he returned to the fold from a position of strength.

And still, they underestimated him. He was Israel's last social democrat. He spoke about social class while everyone else was focussed on all the million issues that divide Israeli politicans -- the gap between religious and secular Jews, and the conflict with the Palestinians. He was out of tune, out of touch, and of course in the Knesset elections, with his own little party, he hadn't done very well, had he?

The polls early in 2005 reflected this. When Amir was one of the initial 8 or 9 candidates for the leadership of the Labor Party, some polls placed him last. None expected that he could win.

He was talking about issues like the rise of poverty, the criminally low minimum wage, the lack of a proper pension, the special suffering of Israel's Arab minority and new immigrants -- issues that are not traditional vote-getters. And the audiences that might have shown an interest in those issues were, like Amir himself, Moroccans in development towns, the kind of people that used to follow David Levy in the Likud.

In the Labor Party, with its kibbutzniks and dovish intellectuals and its liberal businessmen, Amir could not be considered a serious candidate.

But then something strange happened.

All the candidates for leadership of the Labor Party began recruiting supporters to sign up for the party in time to vote in a scheduled primary last spring. Every candidate worked hard to bring in as many new members as they could, and the ranks of the party swelled. But no one worked as hard as Amir Peretz, a man who knows working people across the country, who has access to neighborhood and factories and workshops that no other Labor politician even knows exists.

Thousands of new members were recruited by Amir and his supporters, and polls began to show something odd. By June, Peretz was running only a few points behind Shimon Peres -- and far ahead of all the usual gang of retired generals. Peretz's opponents began to scream about fraud, borrowing a page from the traditional Likud textbook, accusing the trade unions of being heavy-handed and corrupt and so on. The party leadership panicked, and decided to postpone those primary elections while they sorted out whether or not Amir had bullied or coerced people into joining the party.

That postponement of the primary elections, the long delay while party officials checked for any signs of corruption in the recruitment of new members, led journalists to once again write off Peretz. He was a storm in a teacup, and his time had passed. By mid-October 2005, Ha'aretz had already written him off, and talked about "despair" in the Peretz camp. They did, however, note one unusual fact: Amir Peretz himself was not despairing. Amir still seem convinced that somehow, despite polls which showed a huge lead for Shimon Peres, that he would win.

That is why when Amir Peretz defeated Shimon Peres in the November Labor Party primary the only person in the country who was not suprised was Amir himself. Because he understood something which most pundits had completely missed -- for the time time in a generation, Israelis were participating in something other countries have long known about: politics.

Israel was discovering what class politics was all about. On the day of the primary, in the high-unemployment towns where the Likud traditionally did so well, such as Afula and Be'er Sheva, Peretz was racking up victories. Peres did well in the posh suburbs of Tel-Aviv, such as Kfar Saba. Poor and working class members of the Labor Party were backing the union leader.

And when he won, the whole town of Sderot -- both Labor party supporters and Likudniks -- cheered his victory. It was their victory.

Elections are now scheduled for the spring of 2006. Between now and then, many things will change. Parties will dissolve and merge, arise and disappear. Any article written today will be out of date by tomorrow morning. And yet certain things now seem likely, and at the risk of seeming a fool on the day after the election, here are four of more probable developments:

1. The Likud is finished. The party founded by Menachem Begin to unite poor Sephardic workers with rich businessmen on an anti-Arab platform has lost its electoral base. As those Moroccans from Sderot and Beit Shean and Afula who used to vote for David Levy now move over to Peretz, Begin's party will shrink to include only the far-right fanatics who reject any peace process and who support Thatcherite economics. The Likud is now a fringe party.

2. Sharon's new party is a bubble. These parties always are. They always do extremely well in the first days and weeks that they exist as the media gives them attention. But they have no base of activists, no organization, and come election day, they produce -- always -- disappointing results. Sharon knows this, of course. He broke from the Likud not because he thought he could do really well by forming a new center party, but because he had no choice. Since his decision to withdraw from Gaza, he was no longer been a Likudnik anyway, and left the party before they threw him out.

3. Like the Likud, I believe that Meretz too is finished. What distinguished it from Labor when it was founded a decade ago are all the things that Amir Peretz represents -- which is why polls show it losing much of is support to Peretz already. You could argue that Peretz is the ultimate Mapamnik, representing that tradition within Meretz of dovishness and socialist, class politics. As I understand it, Meretz leaders are currently divided about what to do. But in the end, it won't matter what they decide. Voters will decide if Israel needs a party to the left of Labor -- something which right now seems unlikely.

4. Peretz and Labor will continue to rise, just as Peretz has been rising for the last six years. Sharon and his government stink of corruption. The Likud is a rump. The smaller parties such as Shas and Shinui are in terminal decline. Peretz is the only national leader who is not under threat of indictment or at the end of his career. Within days of his victory in the Labor primary, polls showed Peretz taking the party up from 21 Knesset seats (out of 120) to 28 -- a gain of 33%. Imagine what will happen once he starts campaigning. Labor will certainly grow in strength. But can it win?

In an ideal world, all the poor and working class people of Israel, all those who want to see an end to the conflict with the Palestinians, would rally around Amir Peretz and the Labor Party. Labour would get 80 or 90 seats in the Knesset. But that isn't going to happen.

Israelis will continue to vote in their thousands against their own class interests, and many will vote according to their ethnicity, or as their rabbi tells them to.

Still, the numbers are promising. If only one in ten of those who now say they will back Sharon's new party were to change their minds and vote for Labor, Peretz will be the next prime minister. Of course he will need to put together a coalition with other parties, and one of those parties might well be Sharon's. In which case, a likely scenario is a government lead by Peretz, with Sharon as high-ranking minister.

Or something entirely different might happen. But let's not forget the most important thing. A day or two after Peretz won the Labor primary, Sharon announced his plan for a "war on poverty". And when he resigned from his leadership of Likud, his aspiring successors lined up one by one to announce their own social agendas, their own commitments to closing the social gap and ending poverty in the country.

Suddenly, everyone in Israel is a "social democrat".

And in that sense, regardless of what happens next, as my friend on the factory floor has said -- Amir Peretz has already won.

Posted by Eric Lee at 06:27 PM | Permalink

I've just had a quick look at some of the best websites that focus on union rights -- the Campaign for Labor Rights based in Washington, ICTUR in London, and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions in Brussels. All three sites have a lot in common. They give trade unionists and the general public information about trade union rights and they all inspire us to become more active. They are all incredibly useful websites and they meet the needs of our movement for an online presence -- if this were 1995.

Back in 1995, the web consisted of text-based sites, sometimes with photos. The few million people who were then online were happy to spend hours reading texts. Remember that the Internet was designed by and for scientists and engineers, and the World Wide Web was created by a British nuclear physicist. These were the kinds of people who read books on quantum mechanics for pleasure.

I believe that text is still important. But a few things have changed since 1995. Broadband has become hugely popular in the industrialized countries. In places like Korea, the vast majority of people have high-speed connections to the net. This allows people to watch Internet video without any real time lag.

Also, the software one needs to see and hear more than just text has gotten a lot better in the last decade. The current versions of programs like Real Player, QuickTime and Windows Media Player bear little resemblance to what was available in the mid-1990s. All these programs are free of charge.

It used to be that you couldn't put Internet video up on your website because these files were huge, and web hosting companies were charing by the megabyte. Websites we set up as recently as a couple of years ago would have limits of 10 megabytes - barely enough to put up a 3-minute video in the Real Player format. But web hosting costs have plummeted, and a standard web hosting package in Britain today offers 6,000 megabytes -- that's 600 times what was available before. You can put a lot of Internet video into 6,000 megabtyes.

And finally, hundreds of millions of people have come online who were not online a decade ago,. For many of them, our websites are not appearing in their native languages. It may be far easier for them to understand a video in English or French than to read a text in those languages. And many of them are low-literacy users, people who are not at ease reading long texts in any language.

For all those reasons, the big websites now all offer sound and moving images. They do so because (as we have known for more than a hundred years), sound and moving images are very effective ways to communicate.

We in the labour movement have long known about the power of moving images -- maybe going back to the great early years of Soviet cinema (think "Battleship Potemkin") and right up to the powerful films of Ken Loach today. In the real world, we all watch television, go to the cinema, buy and rent DVDs and videos. But when it comes to our websites, we in the labour movement continue working as if nothing has changed in the last ten years.

I'd like to imagine a different way of doing things. Imagine if every time we wanted to focus attention on a trade union rights issue we could do so using video. For example, LabourStart was recently asked by Russian oil workers to put pressure on a company which was union-busting in Siberia. The company had forced a trade union leader and his family out of their apartment. Wouldn't video footage, with sound, have been worth a thousand words -- or more?

The Campaign for Labor Rights is trying to build support for garment workers in Nicaragua -- and shows one digital photo, but no more than that. Their website tells us about a police presence surrounding a factory -- but wouldn't it be better to show this?

I think one of the reasons why unions don't do this is that making Internet video is seen as being costly and difficult. It is neither.

In Britain, where electronic gear is notoriously expensive, you can now get high-quality digital camcorders for less than �200. These cameras are very user-friendly, and the transfer of video from a digital camcorder to a PC for editing is usually a process of connecting a cable. (Computers these days come with high-speed FireWire ports that allow the connection of digital camcorders.)

The digital video editing software now available -- in Britain, for less than �50 -- is designed to be used by families making home movies of their kids. In other words, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to make a video and to put it online.

Some unions have made use -- and sometimes extensive use -- of Internet video. The South Korean unions for a long time have documented their often-militant struggles with employers and the police, producing extraordinary footage. (Workers have been specifically trained to use digital video cameras, and they turn out in force at demonstrations.) The Canadian Auto Workers and the Machinists union in the USA both have regular video news shows on their websites. Working TV, based in Vancouver, has a decade of experience creating digital video for the trade union movement.

Until very recently, there was probably no easy to way to know all this. If you were Canadian, you might have known about Working TV, which is shown on some local cable television stations as well as online. Members of the Machinists union may have known that their union had an "IAM News" show on the website. But if you didn't belong to those particular unions, you might never have known what was possible.

All that changed in November 2005 with the launch of LabourStart TV. LabourStart TV, located at http://www.labourstart.tv, is basically a video version of the original LabourStart website. It's not a television channel. It's a portal site with links to a large number of videos produced by and for unions.

During the week of its launch, over 500,000 Australian workers poured out into the streets in the biggest demonstrations the country has ever seen. But for the first few hours, there was no video coverage on any Australian union site. However, LabourStart TV was able to locate sixteen short videos and put them all up in a single place, allowing Australians -- and the world -- to see a labour movement getting up on its feet.

Back in 1995, we might have known about that mass protest by reading some text on a website. Maybe there would have been a photo too. But times have changed. Broadband Internet, the availability of cheap digital camcorders and digital video editing software, and low-cost webspace has changed everything.

I'd like the international trade union movement to fast foward a decade, and to use the cheap and user-friendly technology of Internet video -- right now.

Posted by Eric Lee at 11:10 AM | Permalink

The launch of LabourStart TV (at http://www.labourstart.tv) may mark the beginning of new era in union communications. I say that knowing that it sounds like hyperbole, and grossly exaggerates what we are doing. But let me explain. We have had the ability for more than a decade now to put videos on the net. The first clunky efforts (who remembers VDOLive?) were replaced by better tools like Real Player. Today's videos -- viewable with software such as Windows Media Player and Quick Time -- can actually be quite good. Several of the major media players around the world are investing a lot in the delivery of films and television through the net. The publicly-owned BBC, for example, has announced plans to make nearly all of its programs viewable online.

And popular movements have also embraced the new technology. IndyMedia shows videos. So does OneWorld.

Unions, as usual, have lagged behind. And yet there have been examples for several years now of unions producing quality online video on a regular basis.

The outstanding example is probably the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) with its regular video news. The machinists' union (IAM) has also been producing videos on a regular basis and making them available through their website. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) uses a digital camcorder to give members a chance to tell their stories, using web-based video as a recruiting tool. And in Vancouver, Working TV has been making its regular television program since the 1990s available through the net.

If you are a member of the CAW, IAM or RWDSU, you may have known this. But even then, you may not have known what other unions are doing. And if you're not a member of any of those unions, you probably did not know that unions can use, and have been using, this technology for some time now.

I'm reminded a bit of what the trade union movement was like a decade ago. If your union had a website back in the mid-1990s, you might have been able to find out what was happening -- in your union. If you wanted to know what was happening in the broader labour movement, there weren't a lot of ways to find out. To learn about union struggles overseas, you'd have to trawl through many different websites. Today, with news services like LabourStart offering up hundreds of union news stories from around the world every single day, everything has changed. Union members can keep up with union news, and can feel themselves part of a much broader international movement.

This has clearly changed the consciousness of many trade union members who now regularly participate in online campaigns in support of fellow workers in other countries. Websites that offer up international labour news have contributed a lot to that change of consciousness.

LabourStart.tv aims to do the same thing, only with sound and moving images. Here is how it works: The 350 volunteer LabourStart correspondents around the world can now add links to video files in addition to links to text-based news stories. Those video links are collected and displayed on LabourStart TV. Visitors to LabourStart TV can click on any of the links and watch and listen to labour news presented in a different way.

Right now, we're showing a video of the Iraqi labour solidarity tour, produced for U.S. Labor Against the War. We're showing a short tribute produced by the IAM to honor Rosa Parks. We have three short animated films produced by British trade unions -- all of them, by the way, quite amusing. We have links to several speeches given at the recent founding convention of the Change to Win federation.

We know that all of this is a bit new for many union members, so we've made it easy to view the films. There are links to the software you might need next to each film, depending on its file type. But for most people with modern computers, you just click on the link and the video starts playing.

Like LabourStart, LabourStart TV does not create its own news content. We link to existing videos produced by unions.

As I write these words, we are showing links to 39 union videos produced in the last few months. By the time you read this, there will be many more. Already, you can spend several hours watching these videos.

Moving images with sound can do things that text cannot. We all know this. All of us watch television, play videos and DVDs, and go to the cinema.

We all know the value of film as a tool for propaganda -- think back to early Soviet film pioneers like Eisenstein. When his classic, "Battleship Potemkin," was first shown in German cinemas, the audience rioted. Movies can move us profoundly -- and they can move us to act.

I look forward to showing links to union videos in dozens of languages from around the world, showing workers in struggle and moving all of us to greater activity.

To do this requires that there be at least one place on the web that puts all of this together, that shows us what unions are doing and what can be done. The creation of such a place does offer the promise of a new era in labour communications. That is why I am so excited about LabourStart TV.

Posted by Eric Lee at 08:52 AM | Permalink

I haven't done a careful academic study of this, but it seems to me that few unions in Britain offer more opportunities for members to express themselves online than Napo -- the union for family court and probation staff. Napo is a small union and was a late-comer to setting up a website. But its members have embraced the technology and are constantly inventing new ways of using the web for discussion.

Napo was one of the first British unions to feature a weblog and its General Secretary, Judy McKnight, has faithfully kept hers up to date for several years now. It's a good thing in and of itself for a trade union general secretary to use the web to communicate with members. Blogs offer members the chance to talk back, and members often do. At the annual Napo conference, it has now become a tradition to offer a special conference blog written by officers. Members can comment there as well. A year ago, Napo relaunched its discussion forum -- and as of last count, some 1,300 messages have been posted by members. Often, several "conversations" take place at the same time in these forums. And as if that were not enough, at the union's AGM in mid-October 2005, all 37 branches got weblogs of their own, each allowing members to comment on stories posted.

The experience has not been pain-free -- and the union is learning all the time.

The original discussion forums required a password to ensure that only members could use them. The problem was, no one could remember the password. Very few participated and the forums were dormant and uninteresting. When Napo decided to get rid of the password, and highlighted this fact on its front page, the forums came alive.

A more serious difficulty has been coping with comment spam. This is a bit like the email spam we all have to deal with, except that instead of appearing in your inbox, this spam appears as comments on your weblog. Fortunately, the latest version of the blogging software Napo uses takes care of this -- but until now, it has been a real headache.

Another issue to deal with is people who deliberately use trade union forums to attack unions. Even little Napo has its enemies and they were quick to use the forums to attempt to disrupt the union's work. In extreme cases, passwords are being reintroduced as necessary to exclude these people and make forums useful again.

A final problem is the Wild West character of the web itself. Last year, in the middle of its annual conference, the Napo website (and many others at the same time) were brought down by a vicious hacker attack. It took days to recover. Such attacks might happen again, but the union is better prepared now.

Posted by Eric Lee at 07:09 AM | Permalink