Trade Unionism at a Crossroads: Class Struggle or Imperialist Integration? The role of ITUC

An article by George Perros, deputy Secretary General of WFTU

Developments confirm that imperialism knows no “peaceful periods.” The military intervention of the United States in Venezuela and Iran, the threats against Cuba, countries of Latin America, and even against Denmark, a member of NATO and the EU, over Greenland, reveal that imperialist rivalries are intensifying. Peoples pay the price, either through wars or through sanctions, poverty, repression, and bloodshed, while workers are called upon to accept sacrifices in the name of the war economy.

In this context, the key question for the international trade union movement is not whether it will merely issue declarations, but how it will confront these developments in practice and with what strategy. Here, the confrontation with the ITUC is not secondary, it is central.

The ITUC is not simply a “moderate” version of trade unionism. It is an active mechanism for integrating the working class into the imperialist strategy. Behind rhetoric about “democracy,” “human rights,” and “institutional stability,” it systematically legitimizes the choices of the United States, the European Union, and their allies. It recognizes NATO as a factor of “peace and security,” while NATO drenches peoples in blood from the Middle East to Eastern Europe.

The ITUC presents itself as a defender of peace, democracy, and human rights. However, it functions as a trade-union alibi for imperialism. Its hypocrisy is expressed not only in what it says, but primarily in what it deliberately avoids doing. Not a word about the €850 billion that the European Union will spend on the war economy, with direct consequences for workers’ lives. Not a word when the NATO Secretary General stated that workers must accept cuts to their rights so that funds can be allocated to weapons systems.

It condemns “violence in general,” but never the perpetrators. It speaks of “violations of rights,” but avoids naming the United States, NATO, and the EU as the organizers and executors of wars and interventions. It issues appeals for “peace and dialogue,” while the governments it supports arm themselves, impose sanctions, and turn entire countries into battlefields.

The ITUC’s hypocrisy is fully exposed in its stance toward the murderer-state of Israel. While speaking of “humanitarian crises,” it refuses to take a stand against the genocide of the Palestinian people, refuses to call on unions to block the transport of weapons, and refuses to confront the governments that support and arm Israel. The “human rights” and “peace” of the ITUC end precisely where the interests of its imperialist patrons begin.

This stance is a conscious political choice. The ITUC has repeatedly supported imperialist sanctions against peoples, backed governments involved in imperialist wars, and denounced as “extreme” or “irresponsible” unions that confront the war machine. In practice, it functions as a trade-union arm of the imperialist order.

That is why its line is one of compromise and submission. When unions accept imperialist “normality,” they simultaneously accept the war economy, cuts to wages and social spending, and the disciplining of workers in the name of monopolies’ competitiveness. It promotes social dialogue and labor peace. It pushes the idea that workers and employers are “in the same boat.”

This line leads to compromise, fatalism, defeatism, and the “realism” of submission. It is the breeding ground of decay, corruption, and degeneration of European social democracy (ETUC), which supported reactionary measures with blood-stained petrodollars from Qatar and other lobbies.

In Greece, the recent revelations about the president and leadership of the General Confederation of Workers of Greece (GSEE), an ETUC/ITUC member, are enlightening; involvement in programs worth hundreds of millions of euros, funding from the state and the EU for “training,” shell companies, black money, money laundering, and investigations into embezzlement of funds. When this line prevails, the labor movement rots from within and becomes alienated from those it supposedly represents, the workers.

This is a vile and dangerous line of the ITUC, when, for example, it claims that Israel has the right to self-defense; when it tries to convince workers and unions that profit, the barbarity of poverty and war, and workers’ rights and a dignified life can coexist.

Against this strategy, the path of the World Federation of Trade Unions is the only one that corresponds to the interests of workers. The WFTU cannot and must not function as a “bridge” between capital and labor. Its role is to organize confrontation, strengthen class struggle, to expose the character of governments, their agents within the trade union movement, and imperialist organizations.

In a world moving toward generalized military conflicts, there can be no equal distances. The unions rallying within the WFTU must organize workers at the workplace level, openly confront governments that involve their countries in imperialist wars, and block the war machine in practice. The struggle for wages, working hours, and collective agreements is inseparable from the struggle against imperialist interventions, sanctions, and the transformation of ports, railways, and infrastructure into tools of war.

The WFTU can rally broader and more militant forces precisely because it does not cultivate illusions about “humane imperialism.” It can become stronger if it intensifies ideological and political struggle within the trade union movement, supports unions that confront employers and the state in practice, and highlights that wars, poverty, and exploitation share a common root: the capitalist system.

The working class has no reason to align with the interests of any imperialist center, whether represented by the United States and the EU or by China and Russia, in the inter-imperialist struggle for supremacy, nor with forces such as the ITUC, which seek to ideologically disarm it and drag it into shedding its blood under foreign flags for foreign interests.

The WFTU must strengthen the confrontation with and exposure of the ITUC to the working class. It has no business engaging in transactions, opening channels, or adopting joint positions with ITUC officials who serve as the vanguard of yellow unionism.

Today, as the world smells of gunpowder and burns, the choice for unions and workers is clear and without evasions. Either they will align with the line that serves imperialism and the interests of their exploiters, as the ITUC does, or they will walk the path of class struggle, internationalist solidarity, and confrontation and rupture with the system that generates wars and exploitation. For the class-oriented labor movement, there is no other road.