Socialists who have lived in different countries: what differences did you notice in their labour movement?
Socialists who have lived in different countries: what differences did you notice in their labour movement?
Every place has its different environment, whether it be the level of organisation, reputation of socialism, dominant values of society, history and experiences, conflicts and crises. Because of these dynamics, I'd expect to see stark differences in what the movement looks like around the world. An obvious example familiar to most here is seeing the widespread and militant union mobilisations in France's retirement age protests.
Which countries do you have experience in, and how are their labour movements different?
The title is intentionally vague by saying 'labour movement', so you're welcome to talk about workplace attitudes, unions, socialist organisations, legislation and more.
I can provide some context from Greece.
First of all, the unemployment rate is high. The official figure is currently at 12.5% but has been steadily decreasing from its peak of 27.7% in 2013. The real numbers are probably higher since people that haven't been employed within the last few years are not accounted.
As a result, labour rights are non-existent, overtime is rarely paid, wages have been stagnant since 2008, it is really common to work in unsafe conditions, and worker abuse occurs so often noone bats an eye.
While we do have unions more often than not they are powerless. For example, last year we had a major train accident (57 people died), the goverment blamed the train workers, their response was pretty much "our strikes for the safety issues that lead to the accident were deemed illegal, while our attempts to raise the issues were dismissed by the ministry of transportation".
We have had major nationwide protests with more than a million of people taking to the streets, but noone feels like that ever lead to anywhere.
IMO one of the greatest problems is the lack of information. Mainstream media are corrupt, and independent media are sabotaged or persecuted by the government. People do not know their rights, we have been trying to survive for so long that we cannot imagine a better future, and that allows employers to freely profit from laborers.
One interesting development is that lately more collectives are popping here and there, from coffee shops to softwafe development houses, more and more people are fed up and try to take matters on their own hands (even if in absolute numbers they are still very few).
I'm a union organizer in tech. I'm Italian, but I live in Germany and I do interact a lot with American organizers.
In Germany, most organizing is effectively cleansed of political identity and needs to be conducted in a very sanitized environment to be appealing to workers. It's also very very focused on the legal aspects.
Americans are way more technical about the whole of it: more methodologies, more processes, more tools, it's a game of numbers.
Italians..., well, let's say the unions there deserve the hate. Not because they are particularly corrupted or conservative (which they are), but because they have no fucking clue what they are doing. They are much slower than their foreign counterparts, they have no resources, they have very little coordination and no interest in getting better. Like many things in Italy, they are slowly sinking in the quicksand. The organizers on the ground they are often under prepared and they have no concept of methodology: they know their legal stuff, but they believe that building momentum in the workplace is just a matter of identifying the right arguments and deliver the right speech at the worker assemblies. Basically they rely on luck, workers motivation and 50 years old processes. They also have no operational coordination on a regional or national level. People from the same union working on the same category don't know or talk to each other unless they work in the same physical office.
I’m an American software engineer who has badly wanted my field to unionize. Do you think it will ever happen? I’m not hopeful because there are too many people who are just in the field for the lucrative salaries and have no real interest or passion. They’ll put up with anything if it means a six figure+ salary:
Scrummicromanagement, open office spaces, incredibly unrealistic deadlines that were set without engineer input, vacation time hardly ever getting approved, etc.
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What do you think was the source of the general disdain in the UK?
My parent's generation in the UK experienced things like the three day week ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week ), major disruptions to normal life due to strikes. In the end, the Conservatives in some ways 'won' and so this has gone down in the cultural memory as unions having 'too much power'. Add to this that, largely due to unrelated geopolitical and macroeconomic reasons, the 70s (when unions had more power) were hard times, and in the 80s (when Thatcher and Reagan were doing their thing) things felt like they were getting better for lots of people (even though with hindsight inequality was starting to grow and the seeds of many of today's problems were being planted).
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What are they accusing the construction union of? I saw an article about the union going to administration but it didn't really say why.
The allegations are that outlaw bikie gang members were acting as delegates and were involved in government-funded projects. It comes off the back of the Victorian branch's leader John Setka being expelled from the ALP due to some ugly allegations of domestic abuse.