Talks Between Communist, U.S. Unions Could Be Useful
It was a rare sight. There they were, two prominent American union leaders chatting informally with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev for 90 minutes last month in an unprecedented private meeting in Communist Party offices in Moscow.
The two union officers were denounced by radical right-wingers such as columnist Arnold Beichman, who said they “betrayed the meaning of democratic trade unionism” by their session with Gorbachev because it helped his attempts to “win influence in what until now has been the hostile world of free trade unionism.”
But the visit by Jack Sheinkman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers, and William Winpisinger, outgoing head of the Machinists Union, was hardly a shocker.
After all, Gorbachev has met often with Western world leaders--including that leading anti-communist, former President Ronald Reagan--to discuss the astonishing worldwide implications of perestroika , among many other issues.
The militantly anti-communist AFL-CIO, though, still follows its historic policy of refusing to exchange official visits with leaders of labor organizations in the Soviet Union or other communist countries.
The U.S. government has adopted the AFL-CIO policy, refusing to issue visas for labor leaders in communist countries to visit America.
Other American union officials have visited communist countries, but the Sheinkman-Winpisinger visit was the first by presidents of major, AFL-CIO-affiliated unions in this country.
However, AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland’s recent appointment of two special committees on China and the Soviet Union may well have an even greater impact on the federation’s “no-contact-with-communist-unions” policy.
The committees are studying the dramatic changes in China and the Soviet Union to see how they might affect the AFL-CIO policy. That policy is based on the facts that the communist union leaders are not freely elected worker representatives and that the unions are creatures of their governments.
Labor organizations in almost all communist countries except Yugoslavia and now Poland are officially called “transmission belts,” working primarily to implement and enforce government decisions.
Perestroika, though, seems to be changing both the function and design of the communist unions and that, in turn, promoted the review of the longstanding AFL-CIO policy.
Sheinkman and Winpisinger are in the vanguard of a possible policy reversal, but their visit to the Soviet Union was not connected to the new federation committees.
Morton Bahr, head of the Communications Workers of America and chairman of the China committee, says this is the first time the federation has initiated such a full-scale review of the issue.
Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, heads the committee studying perestroika and Soviet labor unions. Shanker has been a strong advocate of the present policy, so a revision of his position would be surprising and a great influence on other AFL-CIO leaders.
Gorbachev was blunt when he talked with Sheinkman and Winpisinger about the changes he says he wants in Soviet labor unions.
The Soviet leader talked about union-management relations in his country, complaining that Soviet labor unions “are waltzing too closely to management” and saying they must act more independently.
Stepan Shalayev, a top Soviet labor leader, told the Americans that for the first time there will be contested elections of union leaders and that unions will have a limited right to strike.
On May 3, two weeks after the Americans’ visit, Shalayev publicly disclosed the plan for radically changing the role of Soviet labor unions.
Sheinkman said Gorbachev talked of the problem of allowing unprecedented freedoms to workers and unions “in a balanced way” that will not cause “chaos.”
Presumably that referred to the turmoil in Poland, where a government-created union is in open competition with the militantly independent union, Solidarity.
In this country, union leaders are debating whether an exchange of visits with official unions in communist countries would add a measure of respectability to those unions and thereby undermine efforts of dissidents to establish independent unions such as Solidarity.
Or, in contrast, would such exchanges of visits encourage perestroika to the benefit of workers in all countries?
The answer would seem to vary from country to country. In Poland, it would have been a mistake for American unions to recognize and deal with the puppet union. Instead, they gave strong assistance to the now officially recognized Solidarity, whose leader, Lech Walesa, is scheduled to address the AFL-CIO convention next fall.
But it could be very useful for American unions to start dialogues with established unions in the Soviet Union, where perestroika may soon make them far more independent of the government than they are now.
And there is substantial social unrest in China, but few signs of independent unions that would be undermined if America’s unions deal with the government-sponsored ones.
American unions should not continue to live in isolation from most of the communist world, waiting for that day when there might be Solidarity-like unions in all communist-bloc nations.
We should be thankful that U.S. presidents, doctors, scientists, farmers, businessmen and union leaders such as Sheinkman and Winpisinger aren’t waiting to start talking with their opposite numbers until the communist countries more closely mirror our own.
