In case anyone hasn't seen it yet, there is an excellent piece in MR Zine by Benjamin Weinthal about this:
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/weinthal210207.html
This is also the main theme of this week's issue of Jungle World, which Weinthal occasionally writes for. The article by Felix Klopotek is particularly good:
http://jungle-world.com/seiten/2007/08/9392.php
One of the things that kind of surprised is Weinthal's piece was this:
"Robert Fitch, who was interviewed by Michael Yates in Monthly Review, minimized the first VW corruption scandal as a kind of anomaly within the European labor movement [...] Fitch moreover maintained that there is "no comparison between European and American corruption. No one has ever charged a European union with being a criminal enterprise." "
It is disappointing that Fitch, who is normally such a critical fellow, can really put on the blinders on this point.
Of course, German unions are not mafia organizations like the Teamsters in the U.S. That is not the point.
The point of the VW scandal, or the Mannesman scandal, is precisely that they show how deeply integrated the trade union bureaucracy in Germany is with the structures of large capital and the state. For a critic of the institutional structures of trade unions like Fitch, it is a real shame that he would minimize this in order to make a point concerning the more gutter criminality of American unions.
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