Out of the deadlock!

The Seafarers Union ITF – Forerunner of Global Unions

Input to the trade unionist discussion meeting at the alternative summit, Rostock june 6 2007

“Against locational competition and wage dumping: Trade Unions on the Global Stage!” Two panels organisied by the initiators of the international labour call in cooperation with ver.di, DGB-Jugend, BaSo, labournet

by Werner Sauerborn, ver.di / international unionists call

There are different ways and different levels of showing trade union solidarity and of exercising trans-border solidarity. The concept of “social movement unionism” is one of them and a very effective one. Different methods and strategies can complement one another.

However trade unions are very specific NGOs. When we are at our best, we hold a very effective means of pressure in the centre of economy: If we succeed in establishing a monopoly of labour force within an economic sector (an economic sector is defined by the competition of capital in the commodity markets) we can improve wages, working time, working conditions, and trade unions will regain respect in the political area.

Obviously this has not worked for the last 20 to 30 years. We have lost influence and the situation of workers downgraded dramatically – not only in Germany but more or less all over the world.

This didn`t happen because our leaders were bad eggs or corrupt; nor was it because we were morally or ideologically blinded – at least no more than we had been before. This happened because capitalism changed its framework and we didn`t understand it and draw the necessary conclusions.

National trade unions are no longer able to establish a monopoly of labour force in an economic sector which is no longer national, but global. This is – in one sentence – the tragedy of trade unions and the explanation of our defensive situation and of our everyday defeats. We are at impasse with capital.

The long-term answer to this situation is to reconstruct trade unions along the increasingly globalising economic sectors.

I will give you the example of a branch that became global much earlier than most others, maritime shipping.

When an older seafarer watches what happens to the trade unions nowadays, it must seem to him like a déjà vu. Sailing has always been an international business. During the 70s of the last century, the shipping industry itself developed into a global business. Wage dumping between ship-owner-companies worldwide began.

The ship owners gave up their national identity. They fled into low wage sectors, into the so called flags of convenience (foc’s), what we call offshoring today. Thus they made national boundaries less relevant for workers and made them global workers – a symbolic forerunner for the increasingly global labour market.

ÖTV, the German union responsible for seafarers at that time and predecessor of ver.di – tried to stop this development by allowing the creation of a low-wage sector, the so-called second register of shipping. This was a defeat. Thousands of seafarers lost their income und security. Moreover, this concession could not prevent further defeats. Neither moral nor politico-economic arguments came across as a counter-balance to new grown economic power of the capitalist opponent.

ÖTV than draw very pragmatic consequences: silently and without great theoretical debates it delegated the responsibility for collective bargaining in so far to the ITF – International Transport Workers Federation, maritime section.

What did this mean?

• whereas there are some differences, the ITF was like dozens of others up to then primarily an umbrella organisation of national trade unions organising seafarers.
  
  However, by raising the national collective bargaining to the global ITF-level, the ITF has changed, step by step, from an umbrella organisation to a real union, to a real power of counter-balance with representations in all relevant harbours world-wide with union officials, so-called ITF inspectors.

• As a consequence, the ship owners were forced to establish employer’s associations as a counterpart at the global level to deal with ITF. Before, the national federations of ship owners had more or less lost their function as employer’s federations.

• As a result of the regained power of the seafarers, the ITF succeeded in establishing a collective agreement for seafarers with a salary, meanwhile more than about $1400 a month (more than $1800 for an electrician and nearly $1200 for a greaser) and lots of other points concerning working times and conditions.
  And this is the specific strategy of the ITF: inspectors visit a vessel when it anchors in a harbour. They demand that the captain ratify the ITF’s collective agreement. The captain rings up the ship owner. Either they accept, which means higher wages for the seafarers and often even back-pay for previous times - or they do not.
  In this case the vessel will be tied down, the departure will be delayed, the dockers will boycott unloading (the united fighting of seafarers and dockers is another story of union success).

• This way, the seafarers and the ITF got through this first global collective agreement – ship by ship, company by company – up till now for nearly half of the 20 000 ships worldwide.

• Contrary to the unions in general, there is no union crisis in this sector. ITF gains members (directly or via national unions), and can therefore recruit, rather than reduce personal.
  

Regrettably, the trade union mainstream doesn’t take this story as an example. Usually this development in the shipping industry is declared an anomaly. But it is a successful, because adequate, answer to a changing, globalizing, economic framework.

This is the way out of the deadlock, and will lead unions to the global stage and make them a serious counterpart to global capital.