<HTML>The voice of LM sayeth: <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">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. </BLOCKQUOTE> 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 -- </HTML>