Eric Lee

I have been helping organize online campaigns in support of workers' rights for several years now. The latest campaign I'm helping with concerns Zimbabwe. It supports a call by the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions demanding that President Robert Mugabe respect workers rights.

Very few of the campaigns that I have been involved in may be considered controversial – at least they are not usually controversial within the labour movement. When you attack a company like Wal-Mart, everyone on the left has only nice things to say about you.

But campaigns like the Zimbabwe one, and ones we have done in support of trade unionists in Eritrea and Belarus, have generated their fair share of critical comment.

More critical comments have come in about Zimbabwe than any other recent campaign – and despite these, it is still one of the largest and most successful online campaigns I've been involved in. There is only a tiny minority of activists who have an issue with this sort of campaign and this, more or less, is what they say:

Robert Mugabe, for better or worse, has made enemies of George Bush and Tony Blair. If they and their stooges in the media (CNN and Fox News) say Mugabe is a dictator, therefore Mugabe must be a pretty good guy. Any anyway, didn't he do some kind of land reform?

The emails I have been getting are all pretty much along these lines. And they reflect a larger failure of thinking, a real problem for our movement. But let's start with Zimbabwe.

The call for an international online campaign of protest came from the organized working class in Zimbabwe. The only national trade union center in that country is the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU). It has all kinds of critical things to say about the Mugabe regime and as I write these words, it has called its members out in a general strike.

If this had happened in any other country, activists would not hesitate to lend their support.

Those unions in Zimbabwe are being backed by trade union movements all across Africa –- in Nigeria, in Ghana, and above all in South Africa. The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) has taken a very strong stand in support of the ZCTU and against the Mugabe regime. They have done so for the same reasons that they are also struggling against the tyranny in Swaziland. And for the same reasons that they played such a heroic role in the struggle against the apartheid regime in their own country.

The South African unions feel so strongly about Zimbabwe that they have broken ranks with their partners in the African National Congress, whose leadership is wavering on Zimbabwe rather than taking a stand.

In other words, among African trade unionists in the front lines of the struggle against poverty, racism, neo-liberalism and neo-colonialism, there is near-unanimity on the question of Zimbabwe.

A few years back I was involved in a similar campaign in support of free and independent trade unions in Belarus. These unions were being crushed by Belarussian President Aleksandr Lukashenko. I learned about the issues there not from Belarussian unionists, and certainly not from Fox News, but from progressive Russian trade unionists who were concerned that a neighboring country was plunging back into the dark days of Stalinist dictatorship.

And even then, I got the occasional angry email from leftists in the West who had a knee-jerk reaction – if the Bush administration didn't seem to like the dictator in Minsk, ipso facto he must be some kind of progressive.

When trade unionists were arrested and jailed in a secret prison in Eritrea a year or two ago, I had a number of angry emails from leftists who were somehow vaguely convinced that the Eritrean regime was progressive and could not possibly be arresting innocent trade unionists.

I think that for many of the people who send on these kinds of messages to me, their own agenda is being set by Bush and Fox News much more than they would like to admit.

Rather than form independent judgments based on reading a wide range of media – and online media offers us lots of news that you don't see on network television – these comrades are simply taking whatever agenda they see coming out of the White House and reversing it. If Bush says black, they say white. They are allowing the corporations and their political representatives to determine their politics – and this is nonsense.

During the Cold War, we knew that Western opposition to Stalinism didn't make the Soviet Union a workers' paradise. One had to form independent judgments based on what was in the interests of the working class – and not be guided solely by opposing whatever the ruling elite seemed to be supporting.

In the post Cold War world, we cannot afford to make that error. When workers appeal for our support, we need to look at the concrete situation in the country they're coming from, and not make our decision based on what we think George Bush or Tony Blair would do.

An injury to one is an injury to all – and that's true even when the one doing the injuring is no friend of George Bush. These are the ABCs of working class internationalism and they must be repeated from time to time, and passed on to the next generation.

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Posted by Eric Lee at 05:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The issue of private equity has suddenly burst onto the trade union scene, almost out of nowhere. In the last few weeks, the GMB and other unions have picketed, demonstrated, issued press releases and campaigned to raise public awareness of the problem. And media attention has not been lacking either. The prospect of giant companies (and major employers) such as Alliance Boots or Sainsburys being taken over by shadowy private firms with reputations as asset strippers has not gone unnoticed in the mainstream media.

The TUC has backed calls for the forthcoming G8 summit “to set up an international task force to examine whether the growth of hedge funds and private equity threatens the stability of international financial markets, and how to introduce a regulatory and taxation regime that secures a level-playing field between private equity and other forms of investment.” In a statement, the TUC also pointed out that “employees are the normally the main losers, but the wider community loses from a lower tax take and short-termism.”

The problem is not only British – though takeovers of well-known companies like AA have made headlines here. It is a global issue, and is increasingly being addressed at the level of the global union federations. One of those, the global union for food, farm and hotel workers (the IUF), has just launched a major new website focussing on private equity. The website is located at http://www.buyoutwatch.info and is already an indispensable resource.

According to the IUF, the website will “strengthen our collective response” to the threat posed by private equity. The site will include news of private equity developments in the food, farm and hotel sectors, reports on union campaigns, organising and bargaining strategies in response to leveraged buyouts, and updates on key developments in the campaign to contain and roll back private equity through political and regulatory tools.

Recent articles on the BuyOutWatch site have drawn attention to private equity attempts to buy such household names as Cadbury Schweppes, Carrefour, and Gate Gourmet – a company which will be familiar to all British trade unionists due to its “sacking by megaphone” of hundreds of unionised staff at London's Heathrow Airport and the struggle which ensued.

Another global union federation, UNI, has also devoted a special section of its website to private equity issues, here:

http://www.union-network.org/uniindep.nsf/privateequity?openpage

Last November, another global union federation (the International Metalworkers Federation) joined with the IUF and UNI to hold a conference which noted that “trade unions were increasingly confronted with aggressive anti-union behaviour in the service of reducing wages and benefits.”

Finally, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), which unites national trade union centres (such as the TUC) representing 168 million workers in 153 countries, raised the issue at the world economic forum in Davos this year. In a press release on the ITUC website, the group wrote that “With some US$600 billion in such acquisitions spent in 2006, double the amount of the previous year, questions about transparency, corporate governance and sustainability are critically important, not least for the working women and men whose employment, rights and working conditions are often threatened by the behaviour of these funds.”

At present the ITUC website doesn't have a dedicated section focussed on private equity, but presumably in the near future, following in the footsteps of UNI and the IUF, it will.

Posted by Eric Lee at 07:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)