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Uniting to protect workers' rights

The emergence of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) — a new institutional mechanism made up of some 166 million members from over 150 countries — in Vienna following the dissolution of two of the world's largest conglomerations of workers' bodies, marks a historic realignment of forces in the most vital segment of the modern industrial economy. The now-disbanded International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and the World Confederation of Labour (WCL), which represented social democratic and Christian democratic political outlooks respectively, have attributed this manifestation of solidarity to their determination to contain what they view as unbridled globalisation. Their common objective is to protect the workers' basic right to association and hard-won entitlements to fair wages that are being eroded. While the principal trade unions of the United States, France, Britain, and Germany, among others, have rallied behind the ITUC, which in its charter has called for reform of the Bretton Woods institutions and the World Trade Organisation, the communist-inspired World Federation of Trade Unions has kept out of the new body, arguing that its programme amounted to a compromise with the predominant model of the market economy.

The formation of the ITUC underpins a recognition by its two predecessor organisations that the traditional social democratic commitment to state-provided entitlements of labour and the Christian democratic policies geared to the free market require them to forge a common front in the present situation of massive job losses. The labour federations have in recent times been faced with the emergence of the far-right in their traditional strongholds, exploiting the uncertainties created by the churning in the labour market, as well as structural changes in the developed countries in the aftermath of the loss of competitiveness in manufacturing, especially in labour-intensive sectors. The interdependence of social democratic and Christian democratic unions could also be seen as a corollary to the growing proximity between mainstream centre-left and centre-right political parties, of the kind already institutionalised in Germany and taking shape in neighbouring Austria. It is a relevant question whether the factors behind the current reconfiguration of forces should prompt trade unions wedded to social democratic values to re-examine their basic premise of the political economy of modern-day capitalism — that the welfare state is the answer to the inequalities of industrial societies.

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