Don’t Confuse East Bloc Unions With Western Organizations

Harry Bernstein is off the mark (“AFL-CIO Should Formalize Its East Bloc Contacts,” Nov. 14) in comparing U.S.-Soviet Bloc exchanges in other fields with his proposed labor contacts.

For example, American physicists have common ground--interest in their science--with their East Bloc counterparts, even if the latter were in the past forced into a government mold in their research. Cartographers have a common interest in their techniques, even if Soviet maps have been notorious (and often comical) for their deliberate distortions. Sculptors and painters have a common concern with art, even if East Bloc artists have been pressured into conforming to communist themes.

But who are the Soviet counterparts of American union leaders and what are the common areas of interest? Surely, no one is proposing that exchanges be about steel making, oil drilling, machine shop work, carpentry and so on. The “business” of AFL-CIO leaders is empowerment of workers in a union movement for economic and social democracy through collective bargaining and other kinds of activism.

The “leaders” imposed by the Communist Party and government on their labor fronts are not in that business. And their counterfeit imitations of unions are not unions by any rational definition. Even calling them unions legitimizes them--a trap into which Bernstein falls.

In contrast, Polish Solidarity is truly a union movement. It deserves the enthusiastic and unflagging support it has been receiving from the AFL-CIO. Others striving to build genuine independent unions in the East bloc have also been getting aid. And as totalitarianism crumbles, some individuals from other organizational entities may defect to authentic union groups and will need fraternal good will and assistance. But heads of the counterfeit unions have no particularly distinctive affinity for genuine unionism.

MAX MONT

LOS ANGELES

The writer is executive director of the Jewish Labor Committee.