For the first time, instead of deepening the divisions between
Russian unions, the AFL-CIO is helping overcome them. The March strike was
greeted with solidarity statements by both John Sweeney, president of the
AFL-CIO, and Bill Jordan, head of the International Confederation of Free
Trade Unions.
"The reality is that the world has changed," says Barbara Shailor,
director of the AFL-CIO' Department of International Affairs. "The cold
war has ended, and we're faced now with aggressive neoliberal politics and
globalization. We're making alliances with confederations trying to deal
effectively with these problems for their own workers. It's absolutely
essential that we work with all organizations that are addressing these
basic issues. We're working with everybody."
This wasn't always the case.
In fact, from the beginning of the cold war, the AFL-CIO pursued a
policy of total hostility toward Soviet trade unions, accusing them of
being dominated by the Communist Party. The Department of International
Affairs fought the influence of radical, socialist and communist unions
around the globe, activities funded at first through the U.S. government
intelligence budget, and later by the U.S. Agency for International
Development (USAID), and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
The State Department and the DIA cooperated to prevent visits by
trade unionists from the Soviet Union or other socialist countries.
AFL-CIO Presidents George Meany and Lane Kirkland attacked U.S. union
leaders, like Machinists President William Winpisinger, who favored
friendly relations.
In 1989, however, Kirkland saw in the coal miners' strikes the
seeds of a movement he believed might play the same political role in the
Soviet Union that Solidarnosc did in Poland. He immediately funneled money
and resources to the fledgling independent union. Coal strike leaders were
invited to the U.S., and given financial support.
In April, 1992 the Free Trade Union Institute established an office
in Moscow, and organized the Russian American Foundation for Trade Union
Research and Education. RAFTURE sought to encourage the formation of a new
labor center to replace the FNPR, and trained organizers for raids. It was
a creature of U.S. foreign policy, guiding resources to those unions which
supported Yeltsin and economic reforms.
FTUI paid the salaries of administrative staff in certain
independent unions, and started a newspaper, Delo, with $250,000 from the
National Endowment for Democracy. Delo campaigned for Yeltsin and for
business/labor/government partnership, urging workers not to demonstrate
against non-payment of wages.
FTUI funded a database of union activists and "different
anti-democratic union groups," paid for television programs and a labor
education program, and set up a public relations operation and an advisory
council of trade union leaders. While the AFL-CIO has yet to set up its
first radio station in the U.S., it had $660,000 to run four of them in
Russia in 1994.
Individual U.S. unions also ran U.S. government-funded programs.
The American Federation of Teachers received grants to design "democratic
curricula," washing Marxism from the hair of Russian schoolchildren. The
AFT also blocked the FNPR-affiliated teachers union from joining Education
International, the worldwide educators' federation.
Today, most FTUI programs no longer exist. Ironically, Senator
Jesse Helms slashed the foreign aid budget funding Kirkland's
intelligence-related activity. But it was the election of John Sweeney as
AFL-CIO president in 1995 which brought significant changes in the
direction of the federation's international activity. Secretary-Treasurer
Richard Trumka describes the new program as "international involvement
focused towards building solidarity abroad, helping workers achieve their
goals here at home."
Irene Stevenson took charge of the FTUI office in Moscow, and today
maintains a much more impartial attitude between rival Russian unions than
her predecessors. The office provides assistance to an international
campaign against non-payment, which includes the FNPR and the independent
unions. At the end of November, the International Confederation of Free
Trade Unions (set up in the 1950s to fight Communists in world labor) and
the International Labor Organization sponsored a Moscow conference on
non-payment, bringing all the Russian unions together.
Stevenson focuses on legal actions. "The problem," she says, "is
not the law as such. It is the lack of penalties for those who ignore it.
An entire host of American firms ... disregard both laws on wage payments
and dismissals. Unfortunately, most of them win the gamble."
In January, however, the legal road was further blocked when the
Russian Constitutional Court overturned the law giving workers first claim
on a company's assets, treating wages as a human right. The court upheld
the government's position that paying taxes comes first. As a result,
actions like those of unions in Samara, which had collected nearly $20
million in unpaid wages through 2000 civil suits, will no longer be
possible.
"I personally would term the 'new' policy an attempt to give the
FNPR the benefit of the doubt," Stevenson says. The FNPR is no longer
excluded from FTUI's education and training programs. And this fall in
Pittsburgh, Shmakov and FNPR International Department head Evgeni Sidorov,
along with independent union leader Alexander Sergeyev, were the first
guests ever from the Russian labor movement at an AFL-CIO convention.
In 1994, the World Bank promised a $500 million dollar loan to
Russia to finance the privatization and restructuring of the coal industry.
Yeltsin is rumored to have used these loan funds to finance massive
spending on his 1996 reelection. "He spent 30-40 trillion rubles, an
enormous expense which helped escalate the non-payment of wages crisis just
after the election," Timofeyev says.
As part of the World Bank package, FTUI sparked the creation of
Partners In Economic Reform (PIER). This program brought together the U.S.
coal industry, the United Mine Workers of America, the U.S. government Mine
Safety Administration, the Russian coal ministry, and the independent
Russian miners' union. Kirkland and then-UMWA President Rich Trumka sat on
its board, along with retired Peabody Coal President Robert Quenon.
PIER's major purpose, funded by USAID, was to organize an
infrastructure to soften the blows of the massive unemployment expected in
the closure of half Russia's coal pits. While PIER became dormant in the
wake of foreign aid cuts, mine restructuring will still take place, costing
the jobs of hundreds of thousands of miners, a bitter payment for their
past loyalty to Yeltsin.
PIER is not just an abandoned project, however. It is typical of
the selective vision which deals only with the effects of reform, while in
effect supporting the reforms themselves.
Linda Cook, of Brown University's Watson Institute for
International Studies, states that "the United States has a strong
interest in supporting Russian unions because they can contribute not only
to democratic stabilization but also to the success of economic reform," in
a revealing report entitled "Labor and Liberalization" written for the
Twentieth Century Fund. "Building more effective bargaining institutions
for the labor force...may make the distress caused by those reforms more
palatable."
For Russian miners, however, the reforms themselves are the
problem, and even more, their purpose - reestablishing a capitalism
barbaric in its treatment of workers, beholden to foreign loans and
investment. It's not just a Russian problem. The project of dismantling
socialism has an enormous impact on workers in every part of the globe.
"Just as the Holy Alliance in Europe after the Napoleonic Wars
tried to root out the results of the French Revolution," cautions Russian
socialist Boris Kagarlitsky, "so today the International Monetary Fund,
Maastricht Europe and the American 'new world order' represent the
reactionary answer of the old elites to the downfall of the revolutionary
experiment."
No one - not the AFL-CIO, the independents nor the FNPR - wants to
ask the obvious question: are Russian workers better or worse off now than
they were ten years ago? U.S. and Russian unions, although coming from
opposite ideological traditions, find themselves in quite a similar
political predicament.
How can a union support the policies which produce payment in bed
sheets, and then protest the bed sheets themselves? Only by refusing to
connect present conditions with their origin.
The AFL-CIO's approach to this problem speaks clearly about the
limitations of its vision for a radically different society, whether in
Russia or here at home. "If economic restructuring brings an increase in
living standards to the majority of citizens, and if markets are mechanisms
which distribute wealth, then we support them," Shailor says. "But
economic restructuring should not take place on the backs of workers, and
clearly in many cases it does."
The AFL-CIO will no longer deny aid to unions which don't want to
pay the price of reform, regardless of their history or politics, a vast
improvement over previous policy. "We will stand with any union," Shailor
says, "which opposes [restructuring], and we're giving solidarity and
support where there is resistance."
But AFL-CIO international activity is still funded by USAID and the
NED, although at less than the $40 million/year of the early 1990s. The
non-payment situation is growing extreme enough that future U.S. policy may
even favor softening the reforms' impact, so long as the goal remains
unchanged. To the extent that Russian unions accept that goal, and limit
their fight to the impact, USAID support for current AFL-CIO activity in
Russia may not be in immediate danger.
Support would surely be withdrawn, however, if the AFL-CIO
continued a policy of solidarity with a Russian labor movement pushed in a
more radical direction by economic crisis and rising militancy at the
bottom. Russian unions advocating even traditionally nationalist policies
of import substitution and limits on foreign investment would undoubtedly
be viewed as enemies. If U.S. aid policy and that of the AFL-CIO become
contradictory, "then we'll figure out a way to do the work, with our
without government funding," Shailor promises.
A day of decision is approaching, not only for unions in Russia,
but for the AFL-CIO in relation to U.S. foreign policy. Speaking last
February at the Davos forum of international bankers in Switzerland,
Sweeney warned that "the neoliberal version of the American model now held
out for export offers no answer to the fundamental economic challenges of
our day." Yet this is exactly the economic model the U.S. has exported to
Russia, and not just there.
Already unionists like ICEM's Vic Thorpe are calling for a more
fundamental reassessment. "We need urgently to revisit the ideas behind the
Bretton Woods institutions and seriously to question whether they are still
appropriate," he told the November conference on non-payment. "Their
policies have destroyed attempts to base growth on more secure and
socially-just systems of import substitution and self-sustaining
development in favor of dependence on multinational banks and corporations
and a limited social elite. It is time to acknowledge that the
institutions have not worked ... that they were a bad idea, founded on an
inappropriate model of growth."
These are important voices, pointing out that the road of
independence from U.S. foreign policy, both corporate and government, has
its necessary and logical conclusion in opposition to free market reforms
and the uninhibited growth of capitalism.
But even they leaves a deeper question unasked. If Russian workers
decide to look for an alternative, or for that matter, if workers in any
other country do so, what can they hope for today from the AFL-CIO's new
commitment to international solidarity?
- 30 -
sidebar - BATTLING THE TIDE OF PRIVATIZATION
By David Bacon
MOSCOW (2/16/98) -- The beneficiaries of the new order aren't just
Russian nouveau-capitalists.
In 1995, Proctor and Gamble discovered a way to use non-payment to
buy one of Russia's largest chemical companies for pennies - NBKh - the old
Soviet Union's leading manufacturer of detergents and cleansers. The
enterprise employed thousands of people in a big complex in Tula.
In the early 1990s the company installed the most modern Japanese
production equipment. That made it a target of the government's program to
privatize industry. Privatization is the central element of the economic
reforms intended to dismantle socialism. The sale of state enterprises,
required by the International Monetary Fund as a condition for vast loans
from the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development, has
been the source of widespread accusations of government corruption.
The NBKh sale, according to an investigative report in the Moscow
News, was pushed by Anatoly Chubais, formerly key advisor to Russian
President Boris Yeltsin. In November, public outcry forced Yeltsin to
remove Chubais as finance minister. Chubais got caught engineering the
sale of another state company to a billionaire Russian banker, in return
for $90,000 disguised as a fee for writing a "history" of privatization.
Lauren Filipp, Proctor and Gamble general manager in Russia,
belonged to the government's council for promoting investment. Other U.S.
advisors helped to draft Russia's privatization laws.
Shortly before Proctor and Gamble made its bid to buy NBKh, the
factory started to hold back its workers' wages. Working without
paychecks, NBKh workers logically wondered if their company was on the
rocks. When the privatization program distributed ownership shares to the
employees, they were only too happy to sell them to Proctor and Gamble for
40,000-150,000 rubles apiece (at that time, $1 was worth 5400 rubles). The
U.S. company was able to pick up the entire enterprise for $14.6 million,
just after new construction alone had cost the Russian government $142
million.
Then the corporation announced it was eliminating the jobs of 700
employees and closing major production units. It began cutting production
of chemicals used by other cleanser manufacturers, leading to suspended
production there also. Meanwhile, imports of Proctor and Gamble detergents
like Tide and Ariel rose. The corporation is now reportedly maneuvering to
purchase Termos Public Joint Stock Company, Russia's second-largest
cleanser producer.
The most vocal critic of Proctor and Gamble has been the union for
NBKh workers, and its chairman Alexander Alexeyev. "If we unite and act as
a single force," he told the Moscow News' Lyudmila Butuzova, "we'll be able
to assert our rights and interests." Alexeyev attacked Proctor and Gamble
for the shady maneuvering involved in NBKh's privatization and the
non-payment of wages. His union is fighting the downsizing.
The privatization of NBKh exposes more than just the corruption of
the sale of state enterprises. Privatization is being paid for by workers,
who lose jobs, wages and benefits to pay the cost of increased profits.
Those profits, furthermore, are taken out of the country, while imports
flood in. The market produces not more competition, but larger monopolies,
and Russia loses control over its own economy.
But privatization is producing one positive change. The union at
NBKh, formerly wedded to management like most other traditional unions, has
become its fiercest independent critic. Privatization, non-payment of
wages and economic reforms are cutting the umbilical cord between Russian
enterprise manangers and the bulk of the country's unions.
- 30 -
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david bacon - labornet email david bacon
internet: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 1631 channing way
phone: 510.549.0291 berkeley, ca 94703
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