Johannesburg, South Africa – 16 February 2015
The Hypocrisy of ITUC and the fake interest of reformists for the “right to strike”
By Lulamile Sibanda, South African Trade Unionist*
The ITUC’s call for a Global Day of Action about the “right to strike” on February 18thwould have been a funny joke if it wasn’t a grand show of hypocrisy and fake interest for a “right” that the ITUC and its main Organizations have long abandoned.
The International Trade Union Confederation is a strong Organization with “176 million members in 162 countries” as it claims. It has the ILO wrapped around its finger and undemocratically bans all other international and regional trade union Organizations from being represented proportionally in the ILO bodies. A characteristic example is that the current ILO Director General is the previous General Secretary of the ITUC, Mr. Guy Ryder. But yet the Employers and Government Groups find it so easy to open a debate about a Right included in the Freedom of Association Convention (87) established almost a century ago and not contested until now. How can this be possible? Do the employers and the Governments feel the majority of the Workers Group is too weak to block their efforts or do they consider it is even friendly to their wishes? We cannot tell what is worse but in both cases the attack against the right to strike in the level of the ILO either shows the total failure of the ITUC to defend the workers’ rights or the grand betrayal of the working class by the ITUC.
And it could not have been otherwise since the leading Organizations within the ITUC and the ITUC itself have long betrayed the working class and its struggle and have in praxis abandoned the right to strike. In some cases they have even aligned themselves with the Employers and the Governments against the right to strike.
Here are a few examples that are characteristic:
1. How many times have trade unionists of TUC in Britain, AFL-CIO in USA, in LO-Sweden, in LO-Denmark, in Finland, in Australia, in Austria, in Switzerland etc. heard from the leaderships of the Confederations that a General Strike, the highest form of united struggle of the working class, will never be organized by them because it is “too political”? Let us just remember that the last General Strike in Britain was in 1926, in USA in 1936, in Australia in 1976!
2. Another example from Germany as it was DGB of Germany that hosted the last Congress of ITUC. It was also DGB that openly attacked the strike in transport sector in 2014 and has openly supported together with the employers a government’s bill to ban the right to strike to smaller unions. In practice DGB of Germany is against the freedom of association. With this legislation it will be given the monopoly of controlling the workers struggle to suppress it.
3. In Spain the main Confederations, busy receiving millions of funding though the State, have been working together with the Government against the labour and social rights. In 2011, the UGT and CCOO signed a “social pact” with the government and the employers’ association, which included a pension reform that increased the age of retirement by two years, from 65 to 67, while wage-cuts have also been agreed with employers though joint agreements. Off course no strikes can be organized by these Confederations for a policy they are forming together with their “social partners”.
4. In Greece, which has been in the center of the media attention worldwide for the peoples resistance to the policies of the Government, the European Union and the IMF, it was under the pressure of the people’s problems and the pressure of PAME (the All-Workers Militant Front) that more than 35 General Strikes and hundreds of branch and workplace-based strikes over the last 5 years were called and organized. The leadership of the General Confederation (GSEE), an affiliate of the ITUC and the ETUC, when it could not do anything else to prevent the strikes, it did everything possible to undermine the actual participation of the workers.
Now that reformism has prevailed in the leaderships of many previously fighting confederations weakening the trade union movement; Now that the employers and Governments have repeatedly violated the right to strike, imprisoned workers leaders and banned strikes without any complaint from ITUC and its leading Organizations; Now that ITUC has laid the red carpet for the Employers and the Governments to walk over the workers’ rights and become ruthless enough to even demand the complete and legislative elimination of the right to strike; Now ITUC calls for a global day of action!
And why does it call for a global day of action? To continue serving its real purpose as the long arm of the Employers and the Governments inside the workers movement. The ITUC’s exists in order to control and manipulate the inevitable anger and frustration of the workers from the anti-labour policy and to channel them in harmless struggles that might at some point manage to re-adjust the exploitation rate and manicure capitalism but would never challenge the mechanism generating the workers and social problems. This is none other than, the contradiction between social production and individual appropriation of wealth, the profit-making exploitation. In other words slaves need to remain slaves. Maybe they can form a union, organize some protests and become modernized slaves, but they must remain slaves!
In a final blow of betrayal of the working class, the ITUC is proposing that the question, raised by Employers in the ILO, of whether there should be a right to strike and what are its “limitations”, should be referred to and answered by the International Court of Justice! This means that ITUC wants to refer a right gained by bloody workers struggles to an advisory judicial organ which is not and cannot be neutral.
The WFTU on the contrary says that the right to strike can only be defended and reclaimed de facto by the exercise of the right to strike and the workers united and class-oriented struggle.
*Regional Chairperson of NEHAWU South Africa, Member of the WFTU Youth Secretariat
