European Unions

[LeoCasey at aol.com]

The voice of LM sayeth:
> 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.
> 

What is it about LM and half-truths?

The most complete analysis of post-WW II union strength is Bruce Western's 
_Between Class and Market: Post-War Unionization in the Capitalist 
Democracies._ Western's analysis shows a far more complex picture than the LM 
line about the decline of the organized working class. In high density union 
countries such as Belgium, Denmark, Finland and Sweden, union density remains 
stable or increases. In medium density union countries, the results are more 
mixed: some such as Norway and Italy [note how  Heartfield changes the terms 
of analysis from union density to strikes in discussing Italy], union density 
remains stable; in others, such as the UK and Ireland, union density falls 
precipitously, in the range of 11%/12%. Most medium density union countries 
have a moderate loss of 3%, such as pre-unification Western Germany. Given 
that unions in pre-unification Eastern Germany were never independent working 
class unions, but rather transmission belts for the Stalinist states, talking 
about a 50% loss in union density there is extraordinarily misleading. Low 
density union countries, from the US to France, have pretty significant 
losses, in the range of 5% to 8%.

Western offers a complex but convincing explanation for these differences in 
the text.

Leo Casey
United Federation of Teachers
260 Park Avenue South
New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)

Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never has, and it never will.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who 
want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and 
lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
-- Frederick Douglass --

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <../attachments/20010405/77f5a87a/attachment.htm>