Opening Up to Communist Unions
Recent confessions of past sins and claims of independence by leaders of the giant labor unions in the Soviet Union are surprising, even in light of more dramatic political and social upheavals throughout that country.
Drastic changes are also going on in labor unions throughout Eastern Europe.
Unfortunately, these exciting developments have not resolved disputes among unions in Western countries over their relations with unions in the former Soviet Bloc.
Many unions in Western Europe and the United States want to continue increasing contacts with their old Cold War enemies to encourage more change and more democratization.
But other unions in the West, led primarily by top officials of the AFL-CIO, remain profoundly skeptical of the depth of democratization of most labor organizations in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. These skeptics, dedicated anti-communists, want far more evidence of fundamental change than they have seen so far.
However, the AFL-CIO has made one major but largely unnoticed policy shift: It has finally dropped a decades-long insistence that leaders of unions in the Soviet Union and other communist countries be denied visas to enter the United States as labor representatives because they are only government puppets. The U.S. State Department has gone along with the AFL-CIO’s position, and it, too, has dropped the restriction and issued visas to union leaders from the old Soviet Bloc.
But Tom Kahn, head of the Federation’s International Affairs Department, says the AFL-CIO itself will still not meet with the foreign communist labor leaders until they become “truly representative of workers and not of their governments.”
Union leaders and those once unswerving communist dictatorships used to boast that they never led strikes to help workers because they lived in “workers’ paradises.” They seemed proud that they were not unions in the “decadent” Western sense but instead were only “transmission belts” used to spread the Communist Party line.
After Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, however, and with his encouragement, unions in the Soviet Union said they had abandoned their old subservient role.
Vladimir Scherbakov, the new head of the Soviet labor federation, confesses that “our union leaders were appointed by management. Our unions lost all contact with the workers of our country.” Strikes are no longer automatically repressed by government troops, and hundreds have been called in the past two years.
Not all of the old Soviet labor federation leaders are gone, and some new ones are their handpicked successors. Often they seem to back conservative military forces and others opposing continued basic reforms in that country.
But about 300 new unions have sprung up, and several of the old ones are no longer affiliated with the reformed nationwide labor federation.
In Bulgaria, most of the old captive unions insist that they have been replaced by democratic ones. Strikes are legal, and workers do not need government approval to form unions. Hungary and Romania have made the same reforms.
Poland’s Solidarity union founder, Lech Walesa, now heads the Polish government itself, but Solidarity is divided over his leadership. Also, the old communist-run labor federation there still has substantial economic power, but happily none of the factions are trying to revive totalitarianism.
There are a few signs of change in Albania, although unions are still arms of the Communist Party. And unions in Yugoslavia, although not government captives, are as divided as the political parties of that disintegrating country itself. Unions in remarkably open Czechoslovakia have the right to strike and to elect leaders of what had been the government-run labor federation.
Although many of the issues that divide world unions are being resolved, the debate over how to deal with the new order of things still rages.
Many AFL-CIO leaders continue to argue that the best way to encourage democratic independent unions is to meet only with labor officials who can prove that they speak for workers and are independent of government. Even meeting with government-connected union officials gives them undeserved legitimacy and may help them keep or restore repressive regimes, the argument goes.
They cite Poland as an example, saying that the AFL-CIO’s help was crucial to Solidarity’s stunning victory, a victory that would have been less likely if the Americans had not ignored the old communist-dominated unions.
The AFL-CIO officials are following the same policy in other countries: “no contacts” with unions that haven’t proved their independence. This is especially true in the Soviet Union. The AFL-CIO is also using some of the same weapons in Latvia, Lithuania and elsewhere that worked so well in Poland: It is sending in fax machines, computers and other equipment to help them build more democratic unions.
But many unions in Western Europe and several in this country argue that these types of initiatives need to be extended even to unions that don’t pass the AFL-CIO’s litmus test of purity.
That argument was summarized recently by George Kourpias, president of the International Assn. of Machinists, who said the other day: “Our meetings with representatives from Eastern Bloc unions are more important today than ever before.
“The unions there are seeking guidance and assistance on how to function in their emerging market economies. If we agree that the democratization of these unions is good for ‘the new world order,’ then it behooves all segments of society to meet and share our experiences, problems and proposed solutions.”
Complex political struggles are still going on in unions around the world, and it is a mistake for the AFL-CIO to refuse to talk with officials of unions that may not have all of the political freedom they deserve.
