Unions Protect Democracy. How Do We Protect Unions?
Demonstrators take part in a protest to mark Labor Day in Manila on May 1, 2022. (Maria Tan / Getty Images)
20 global labor leaders weigh in on the myriad ways the right is threatening organizing efforts.
Aformer guerrilla fighter is elected president in Colombia, and Filipinos choose Bongbong Marcos, the son of a dictator, to lead their country. Meanwhile, other nations around the world are teetering between democracy and authoritarianism.
Why is democracy so precarious and what is the role of unions in this fight? I talked with 20 global labor leaders who came to the AFL-CIO convention in June about their winning strategies, what’s working, and how they resist repression.
DEMOCRACY HAS FAILED TO PROTECT WORKING PEOPLE.
Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation sees authoritarianism accelerating. “In every democracy there’s a feeling among working people [that] they’ve been left behind. So the overall state of the world is that the labor market is broken. And if you have a broken labor market, there’s no rule of law.”
Daniela Kolbe is the vice president of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and a leader in the German Trade Union Confederation. She remembers growing up in Leipzig when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989: “When the wall came down, we got democracy and job loss—not democracy and jobs. Leipzig had a population of 600,000 people and lost 100,000 manufacturing jobs. People are still angry, especially older men. There are angry and wounded people around the world.”
“As long as the economy is not in the interest of the vast majority of people, you continue to have problems in society and pressure on democracy,” explained John Ejoha Odah, executive secretary of the Organization of Trade Unions of West Africa. “People start wondering why they fought to have one-party rule give way for multiparty democracy. As Amilcar Cabral said, the people are not fighting for the ideas in anybody’s head but how this translates into food on the table. The crisis of democracy in our sub-region of West Africa, and I dare say, in the whole of the African continent, is the crisis of employment for the vast majority of the population.”
Josua Mata, general secretary at the United and Progressive Workers Center in the Philippines (SENTRO), ruefully explained how so many workers voted for Bongbong Marcos: “There’s a lot of frustration out there. Many people feel they did not benefit from the so-called ‘dividends of democracy’ that were promised after we kicked out the Marcos dictatorship 36 years ago. There are surveys done on self-rating of poverty: people are asked, do you feel you are poor or not? At the time that Cory Aquino succeeded Marcos, self-rated poverty was around 40 percent. And last December, it was around 43 percent. So there’s not much change. It seems clear to me that the left has failed to deepen democracy, even among workers. That is a wake-up call for everyone.”
David Welsh, country director for Thailand and Burma at the Solidarity Center, explains that “workers who have been messed [with] again and again are confusing their belief that democracy doesn’t work with the fact that capitalism doesn’t work.”
UNIONS ARE A PILLAR OF DEMOCRATIC CIVIL SOCIETY.
The successful election of leftist presidential candidate Gustavo Petro was days away when I talked to Fabio Arias Giraldo, a national officer with Colombia’s Central Union of Workers (CUT). He had a long-term perspective on the role of the labor movement and their decades-long struggle against authoritarianism: “CUT led popular opinion on issues—labor, social, political or economic. And the first thing the government would do is attack and stigmatize the labor movement. That means accusing us of being corrupt, linking us with assassinations.”
In 2019 and 2021, CUT called for national actions and formed the National Strike Committee, which included 30 civil society organizations. “There was a lot of pent-up demand to express rejection of policies coming out of the government,” Arias Giraldo said “We were able to coalesce these disparate organizations because we have the credibility of taking positions in favor of working-class people—and we were also one of the greatest victims of the violence coming from the right. People see that. We may be weak in numbers, but [we are] strong as a historic reference for nonviolent political struggle.” Giraldo credits the National Strike Committee with defining the debate for the election.
In Nigeria, unions aligned with youth protesting police and with other civil society organizations on the need for accountable government, while resisting ethnic and religious divisions. “Politicians divide the citizens as a tool,” Ayuba Philibus Wabba, president of the Nigerian Labour Congress explained. “I try to educate our people to the fact that all of us are citizens and we should not be divided along ethnic lines.” In Honduras, Iris Yolanda Minguia Figeuroa is the secretary of women’s affairs at the Federation of Trade Unions of Agricultural Workers. “We have a close relationship with a group called the Center for Women’s Rights, one of many women’s organizations in the country, with strong, empowered women,” she said. The labor movement in the Philippines has built a broad social movement coalition. “The women’s network, the youth movement, the biggest urban poor groups, they banded together with trade unions and formed a Union of Social Movements,” according to Mata of SENTRO.
“Because of the capacity of the unions, we had been the pillars of the democratic movement, especially for mass mobilizations and rallies,” Ming Lam told me. A leader in the Hong Kong labor movement, Lam is now the managing director of the Hong Kong Labor Rights Monitor, and is exiled in England. “The labor movement in Hong Kong worked hand-in-hand with the rest of civil society in what we called Social Movement Unionism: women’s rights organizations coming to support teachers, for example. It transcends a strike between the workers and their respective employers, becoming a fight between classes; inequality within society.”
THE RIGHT WING IS TARGETING UNIONS.
They are also using new tactics to undermine them.