European Unions

James Heartfield Jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk
Thu Apr 5 08:00:05 PDT 2001


In message <Pine.GSU.4.21.0104050454300.5935-100000 at garcia.efn.org>, Dennis Robert Redmond <dredmond at efn.org> writes
>On Thu, 5 Apr 2001, James Heartfield wrote:
>
>> by CIA and AFL tutelage post-war. The Cold War anti-Communist laws
>> ensured that they were deeply conservative organisations.
>
>*Bzzzt.* Now my troll alarm is ringing big-time. IG Metall is strong,
>class-conscious, and has fought effectively for a range of workplace
>rights which makes the US look like the decaying, pathetic semi-periphery
>we indeed are. Central Europe's welfare state, though under attack,
>remains hugely popular, mobilizes vast amounts of capital, and effectively
>keeps the Eurobourgies under control.

This is just silly. Union density and activism in Europe has been on a precipitate slide since the 1980s and all the more so since the collapse of communism. A good survey of the state of the left is Perry Anderson and Patrick Camiller's Mapping the West European Left which gives a rather more sober account.

According to Martin Upham's Trade Unions of the World:

French Union Density 1975: 24% 1992: 10%. In 1992 (last figures available to MU) days lost through strike action reached their lowest ever.

Germany DGB (German TU Federation) shrank by 1.5 million between 1992 and 1994. Union density in the East shrank from 90 to 50 per cent with unification.

Italian days lost through strike action reached an all time low in 1991.

The decline of the European labour movement is so well documented that it is quixotic to deny it without some remarkable new findings to back you up. More to the point, it is the decline of the social democratic left that was the precondition for the emergence of the petit bourgeois environmental movement.

Dennis' methodology seems wrong to me. He takes government spending as a measure of progressive social policy. But state spending seems more like an indicator of social decay.

In any event 'France, Germany and Italy are all currently the scene of major asset sales' (Anderson and Camiller, p 18). 'The fortunes of Northern Social Democracy reached their zenith ... in the early seventies' (Anderson and Camiller, p2)

Dennis' desire to believe that the grass is greener (forgive the pun) on the other side of the Atlantic is touching, but not true.

-- James Heartfield



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