{"id":542,"date":"2011-12-17T17:25:49","date_gmt":"2011-12-17T16:25:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/?p=542"},"modified":"2011-12-17T17:25:49","modified_gmt":"2011-12-17T16:25:49","slug":"trade-unions-and-social-democracy-the-rift-widens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/trade-unions-and-social-democracy-the-rift-widens\/","title":{"rendered":"Trade unions and social democracy: The rift widens"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article appears in the current issue of\u00a0Solidarity.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

In an interview this week for an Australian newspaper, the leader of the world\u2019s trade union movement made an interesting observation.
\n\u201cHave progressive parties lost the narrative that connects them with working people in many countries?\u201d asked Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).
\nOne would have expected a diplomatic answer \u2014 something along the lines of, well, it varies from country to country, clearly some labour and social democratic parties remain closer to their roots, and so on.
\nBut that is not what she said. Burrow, who chose not to pursue a political career in Australia and instead moved to Brussels to take over the ITUC, was blunt:
\n\u201cThe answer is yes, absolutely,\u201d she said. Labour and social democratic parties have lost their connection with the working class.
\nSo next you\u2019d expect her to say that it was really important for those parties to rebuild those connections, that unions and the parties they founded needed to re-connect, and so on.
\nBut once again, her answer was surprising.
\n\u201cMy job is not to worry about the parties,\u201d she said, \u201cbut to build the issues on which we can base a conversation with workers.\u201d
\n\u201cWe\u201d in this case means the trade union movement.
\nShe did have one final comment for the politicians, though.
\n\u201cIf any smart politician who shares even an ounce of our values can’t get elected on the basis of that conversation, that is, frankly, pretty despairing stuff.\u201d
\nI found her comments very interesting coming in the wake of November 30th public sector strike here in the UK \u2014 a strike which went ahead without the support of the Labour Party or its leader, Ed Miliband, who was elected with the support of unions.
\nTrade unionists in a number of countries are finding that the political parties acting in their names are doing very little on their behalf. In some cases, this is causing unions to turn inward. When Sharan Burrow says \u201cmy job is not to worry about the parties\u201d it\u2019s a clear expression of that feeling.
\nAnd the feeling is global. In the USA, many trade unionists have expressed a deep frustration with the Obama administration. Unions had a long shopping list for the first Democrat to win a national election since 1996 \u2014 and the top of their list was passage of labour law reform. They didn\u2019t get it. Banks got bailed out, but unions got very little.
\nMarxists like to point out that the Democratic Party in the USA is a bourgeois party, so that\u2019s pretty much what we can expect.
\nBut this is a naive explanation. Unions in the USA play roughly the same role with regard to the Democrats as British unions do with regard to the Labour Party here. Sometimes, Democratic politicians even sound more left-wing than their British labour counterparts.
\nThere are even worse cases like these \u2014 such as the Greek social democrats managing an austerity drive that triggered massive street protests. One imagines that Greek trade unionists have little time for \u201cprogressive\u201d politicians these days.
\nThere are, of course, notable exceptions. In Canada, the union-backed New Democratic Party which did extremely well in the most recent federal elections, threw its parliamentary support behind postal workers and others in recent national disputes.
\nOne doesn\u2019t have to be a supporter of the Fourth International to get that there is a growing rift between the working class and the social democratic and labour parties that speak in its name.
\nTo hear a moderate, mainstream trade union leader like Sharan Burrow make comments like that shows just how far things have gone.
\nAt the end of the interview, Burrow says \u201cwe believe in non-violent protest, absolutely.\u201d But then she adds, \u201cif there’s no capacity to resolve the problem, then we are on the streets.\u201d
\nThe question is not how mainstream left parties can re-connect to their base. Burrow is right about that. It\u2019s a bigger problem.
\nAnd yet her comments leave many unanswered questions.
\nCan unions go it alone? Do they not need to be engaged in politics?
\nCan parliaments and local governments be left in the hands of those who have no sympathy for and no connection to the working class?
\nIs being \u201con the streets\u201d a strategy?
\nThe willingness of trade union leaders like Burrow to speak the plain truth opens the possibility of having a serious conversation about these issues in the labour movement. And that\u2019s a conversation in which Marxists have something to say.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article appears in the current issue of\u00a0Solidarity. In an interview this week for an Australian newspaper, the leader of the world\u2019s trade union movement made an interesting observation. \u201cHave progressive parties lost the narrative…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-solidarity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=542"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/542\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":543,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/542\/revisions\/543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}