European union leaders on the fight for democracy

 European union leaders on the fight for democracy

KAREN NUSSBAUM 21st July 2022

As core democratic institutions, trade unions have had to learn hard lessons on defeating authoritarianism.

(trade unions,democracy,authoritarianism,civil society,populist,populism,far right)

Fascism never again—one of tens of thousands of demonstrators in Rome a week after the far-right attack on the headquarters of the trade union confederation CGIL last October (Fabiana, CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0)

‘The right wing isn’t new,’ Luca Visentini, general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) said in 2016 at a trans-Atlantic discussion on the rise of the right. ‘From the 1920s through the 1980s, we’ve had Nazism, fascism and dictatorships. Then the far right idled. It became more moderate and careful, and adopted more democratic values.’

With the threat to democracy growing, according to Freedom House, how do union leaders see their role in fighting authoritarianism today? At the AFL-CIO convention in Philadelphia last month, Visentini and five other European union leaders talked to me about their perspectives and strategies.

Luca Visentini, Italy: general secretary, ETUC

People are starting to realise that this [far-right] recipe doesn’t work, but the situation is contradictory … The fight is intense.

The traditional right-wing parties and conservative forces implemented the neoliberal economic model at the global level. The consequences were financial speculation and the financial crisis. Working people and the poor paid the price. The solution—austerity—implemented by traditional conservatives created the conditions for the new far right to arise.

This new far right is more populist. They mislead working people by saying: ‘The traditional conservatives implemented these bad policies. The left and progressives were not able to react and the trade unions were not able to defend you. So we will take care of you.’

Many, including working people, have seen the far-right-populist movements as a possible alternative. When these forces got into government—[Donald] Trump in the United States, regimes and governments in Europe and other parts of the world—they didn’t take care of working people. They implemented the same neoliberal policies. And they started reducing democratic rights: attacks on human rights, migrants, LGBT rights, exploitation in the labour market, racial discrimination. They also attacked the trade unions, considering them one of the last paragons of democratic values in society and the labour market.

During the period of the financial crisis and austerity, we were so concentrated on saving jobs that we didn’t dedicate enough time talking to workers, being in touch with them, explaining that these proposals coming from the right were not the solution for working people and building an alternative narrative. In the last few years, we started investing in these efforts and it is showing results.

In Italy, the situation is complex because we have two types of far-right movements. There are those that are just violent in the streets, operating outside of institutions. They have attacked trade unions, including a recent episode of fascists attacking the national headquarters of the CGIL [union confederation]. The trade unions have mobilised along with other democratic forces and this has contributed to reducing this kind of far-right violence on the ground.

The other problem is the more institutional far right. The parties that are in parliament and in some cases run the government have implemented an aggressive, far-right policy in the last few years.

People are starting to realise that this recipe doesn’t work but the situation is contradictory. In recent local elections, for instance, we had the strange phenomenon that the Lega, the most well-known populist right-wing party, shrank a lot but, on the other hand, an institutional neo-fascist party [Fratelli d’Italia] is on the rise. The fight is intense.

I’m confident that in the end we will prevail. But there is not a single second where we can give up.

Daniela Kolbe, Germany: vice-president, Friedrich Ebert Siftung and vice-president of the DGB union federation in Saxony

The workers are not really in favour of getting out of coal but they accept that there will be a way out, that there will be money for a transition and they will not be alone.

I was ten years old and living in Leipzig when the wall came down. I experienced the fear people had—it was as if they were pushed into a pool of water and they didn’t know the new rules [of the game]. The whole eastern part of Germany faced tremendous job loss, tremendous change. It was a structural break, not a transition.

We have to make change by design and not by a disaster. If we do nothing, we will have more great structural breaks. Artificial intelligence, for example—if we just let it happen, this new technology will break down whole industries. You need strong workers’ councils; that is what we do in Germany. You have to ask whether or not it is okay to introduce new technology like artificial intelligence.

It’s the same with climate change. There were years of discussions with workers. Shall we stick to coal? What is the alternative? It became clear that it was mad to stick with coal. So then we had to discuss how to get out of it. The workers are not really in favour of getting out of coal but they accept that there will be a way out, that there will be money for a transition and they will not be alone.

It’s a long-term thing. It’s not just one discussion and then the workers say: ‘Yeah, democracy is great!’ No, this will be a long process. But what we see is if we debate these crucial things in society—like the economy, social justice, wages, migration and so on—then the right wing is weaker, because they have nothing to say about social justice, they have no opinion about wages and unions. We can focus on the things that unite workers.

Samantha Smith, Norway: director, International Trade Union Confederation (and partners) Just Transition Centre

We recognised it was a do-or-die moment. We put money into the elections. We spent a ton of time campaigning.

The [Norwegian] social-democratic party had ruled for decades since World War II but it was part of the overall decline of social-democratic parties across Europe. An additional contributing factor was domestic terrorism—youth members of the Labour Party were attacked [on the island of Utøya in 2011] by a domestic terrorist acting on a ‘replacement theory’ about Muslims in Norway.

This provided an opening for the conservatives which headed up a coalition government. To get a majority conservative government, they had to include the far-right party—this was the first time the far right was in government.

Our conservative party became good at putting on the clothes of social democracy, talking about the welfare state. But at the same time they cut taxes on rich people. Inequality in Norway shot up under their rule. They did their best to weaken labour laws, making it easier to hire people on temporary contracts, for example. And they stepped away from a very strong tripartite tradition, even to the point where employers were unhappy about it.

We recognised it was a do-or-die moment. We put money into the elections. We spent a ton of time campaigning. We had countless meetings at the local level with union members and Labour Party members to talk about issues in the platform. We pushed the Labour Party to move away from the neoliberal direction and to have a pro-worker agenda. And it worked.

[On just transition,] on the populist right they promise to get rid of all this ‘climate stuff’ that’s coming to get your jobs. For example, in Germany the right-wing [Alternative für Deutschland] founded fake unions that came in and told coal workers: ‘Look, the social democrats are selling you out—they’re going to shut down coal. We’re going to make sure we burn coal forever.’ You get that in every country. You also occasionally get green yet authoritarian governments that say: ‘We’re gonna meet all of our climate targets—screw your jobs and screw your rights.’

There is great research on the co-determination model in Germany, with workers on supervisory boards and labour-management councils in all the workplaces. The more you have of that, the more likely workers are to reject the right.

When we talk about just transition I rarely talk about climate change. I rarely go into the science. Instead we talk about bread-and-butter issues, because that unites everybody. The lesson becomes ‘democracy works’: you can negotiate, you can use these structures we have. We have a voice and can be part of these decisions instead of decisions being made about us.

Cristina Faciaben Lacorte, Spain: secretary for international cooperation and migration, Confederation of Workers’ Commissions (CCOO)

Vox is also trying to recreate the French ‘yellow vest’ movement in Spain with extreme-right demonstrations.

Vox [a far-right party founded in 2013] is an authentic threat. The polls say they may do better in the next elections in Spain. One of the main reasons working people vote for Vox is that they are angry, disappointed with politics. Vox is pretending that it is an anti-establishment party and they are offering very easy solutions to big problems. They say the problem with the labour market, with unemployment, is migration—that migrants are robbing the Spanish people. These workers feel they have no future and see this as a possible solution.

For Vox, the unions are a main focus of hate, because we represent the collective achievement of rights, solidarity, unity and the left. They created their own union called Solidarity. They have few delegates but are making headway in some sectors, such as Catholic schools.

We must be aware of a problem our French colleagues have suffered. In France, the Rassemblement National, the Le Pen party people, they go to the workplace and meet with workers. They say: ‘We are the friend of working people, watch out for foreigners.’ Vox is also trying to recreate the French ‘yellow vest’ movement in Spain with extreme-right demonstrations.

We make a mistake by making very complex arguments. Our statements are too complicated and argumentative. We need to make sure that people know this is an anti-fascist union—we were born out of the fight against Francoism. We never write this because we assumed everyone knows it. But we need to now, especially for younger delegates.

Piotr Ostrowski, Poland: vice-president of the Poland Alliance of Trade Unions (OPZZ)

 In the past, working with other civil-society organisations was not so obvious.

Authoritarianism is steadily rising in Poland. The current government, of course, was not promising authoritarianism. But we see in many areas of our life—our political, social, economic situation—how much the government is getting more controlling in society.

For example, the public media are not public: they are the governmental media. You can watch, you can listen, only to the one voice, the one message, which is always in favour of the government.

It is also obvious that unions are treated unequally by the government. Social dialogue exists as an institution in Poland: we have meetings with employers and with representatives of the government. But it’s a rather illusionary social dialogue, because we don’t have any involvement in the socio-economic policy in Poland—our opinions are not taken into account by the government. On the other side, they have very close relations to the union Solidarnosc, which [led the opposition to the dictatorship in Poland but now] is very much in line with the government.

The government sees itself as a hegemonic institution. This is not democracy. Democracy doesn’t mean that every four years you put ballots into a box during elections. Democracy is every day and it works every day and it must act every day. We as unions are the democracy. We have democratic elections, we have democratic discussions. We listen to the people. We, the leaders, speak the language of the members. This is democracy in everyday life.

In the past, working with other civil-society organisations was not so obvious. I am happy that we are changing internally, that we see we need to co-operate with NGOs. I see members in my confederation change their point of view. Maybe before they were [saying]: ‘Well, we are unions, so we need to focus on union principles and nothing else, full stop.’ Now they are starting to think that civic society is also very important. We are part of civic society and we are part of the democratic debate.

[As to the dangers of alienating some members by speaking out on those issues,] often they are afraid that there is a zero-sum game: it’s working conditions and salaries and nothing more. We need to say we do not forget about fighting for your rights at the workplace and for better salaries. But as an element of the democratic society, we cannot be blind to other issues—rights for minorities, migrants, women and LGBT groups. And members of these other groups can be your members as well. They can be members of unions and we will be stronger if we bring more in.  

We need to include people, not to exclude people. We need to not erect barriers but to open doors. And we know especially for young people this is an important issue, and if we want to have young people in our unions we need to speak their language.

A representative of independent trade unions in the Russian Federation

What can you do when governments are simply not afraid?

We are now in an absolutely different situation after starting the ‘special military operation’ in Europe. Several of our people were physically attacked, jailed. Attempts to create independent unions were absolutely destroyed. The legal opportunity to strike existed in Russian legislation—now you can organise a strike only if the boss allows it. Picket lines, even a picket line with one human being, are completely forbidden. It wasn’t that way in the past. We expect more problems will come.

How do we organise, how do we give voice to people, how do we protect people from violation? These are the questions we are facing. We’re trying to continue our activity. We’re still part of the national social dialogue. We can still speak with authorities and government agencies about labour rights. But since the time the military operation started, we are trying to survive. We really need international labour solidarity.

It’s even worse in Belarus. At least 20 people are in jail for attempting to create independent trade unions. Our aim right now is to get them out of prison. If we lose this international campaign supporting the Belarusian unions it will go from Belarus to Russia, to Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, to each of the countries of the former Soviet Union.

What can you do when governments are simply not afraid? The [International Labour Organization] discussed the Belarusian issue and the conditions they made were very strict. But just after the ILO resolution was adopted, the general prosecutor of Belarus applied to the Supreme Court to cancel the registration of the Belarusian Congress of Trade Unions and all of its affiliates. The leaders of these unions are already in jail. That means the Belarusian government is saying to the international labour movement: ‘We don’t care. We don’t care about international labor solidarity. These people will sit in prison and the unions will be destroyed.’

We need to find our own way to organise and protect people. I’m a strong believer in the democratic mechanism inside of trade unions. I believe that elected leaders should be active and honest, at the international level, the enterprise level and the local level. We’re trying to bring our people up to do this. If we succeed, we will survive.

Commmon themes

These leaders come from different circumstances but echo common themes. The threat of the far right is pervasive and fuelled by the damage done by neoliberalism.

Trade unions are essential democratic institutions. But they need to go deeper with members and wider with civil-society allies. They need to treat elections as urgent contests. We need international solidarity to protect those under the greatest attack—and to learn from each other at this historic tipping-point.

Karen Nussbaum

Karen Nussbaum is the founding director of Working America, community affiliate of the AFL-CIO union confederation, and is on its board. She co-founded and led 9to5, the National Association of Working Women, and District 925 of the Service Employees International Union.