For the first time, instead of deepening the divisions between Russian unions, the AFL-CIO is helping overcome them. The March strike was greeted with solidarity statements by both John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, and Bill Jordan, head of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. "The reality is that the world has changed," says Barbara Shailor, director of the AFL-CIO' Department of International Affairs. "The cold war has ended, and we're faced now with aggressive neoliberal politics and globalization. We're making alliances with confederations trying to deal effectively with these problems for their own workers. It's absolutely essential that we work with all organizations that are addressing these basic issues. We're working with everybody." This wasn't always the case. In fact, from the beginning of the cold war, the AFL-CIO pursued a policy of total hostility toward Soviet trade unions, accusing them of being dominated by the Communist Party. The Department of International Affairs fought the influence of radical, socialist and communist unions around the globe, activities funded at first through the U.S. government intelligence budget, and later by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The State Department and the DIA cooperated to prevent visits by trade unionists from the Soviet Union or other socialist countries. AFL-CIO Presidents George Meany and Lane Kirkland attacked U.S. union leaders, like Machinists President William Winpisinger, who favored friendly relations. In 1989, however, Kirkland saw in the coal miners' strikes the seeds of a movement he believed might play the same political role in the Soviet Union that Solidarnosc did in Poland. He immediately funneled money and resources to the fledgling independent union. Coal strike leaders were invited to the U.S., and given financial support. In April, 1992 the Free Trade Union Institute established an office in Moscow, and organized the Russian American Foundation for Trade Union Research and Education. RAFTURE sought to encourage the formation of a new labor center to replace the FNPR, and trained organizers for raids. It was a creature of U.S. foreign policy, guiding resources to those unions which supported Yeltsin and economic reforms. FTUI paid the salaries of administrative staff in certain independent unions, and started a newspaper, Delo, with $250,000 from the National Endowment for Democracy. Delo campaigned for Yeltsin and for business/labor/government partnership, urging workers not to demonstrate against non-payment of wages. FTUI funded a database of union activists and "different anti-democratic union groups," paid for television programs and a labor education program, and set up a public relations operation and an advisory council of trade union leaders. While the AFL-CIO has yet to set up its first radio station in the U.S., it had $660,000 to run four of them in Russia in 1994. Individual U.S. unions also ran U.S. government-funded programs. The American Federation of Teachers received grants to design "democratic curricula," washing Marxism from the hair of Russian schoolchildren. The AFT also blocked the FNPR-affiliated teachers union from joining Education International, the worldwide educators' federation. Today, most FTUI programs no longer exist. Ironically, Senator Jesse Helms slashed the foreign aid budget funding Kirkland's intelligence-related activity. But it was the election of John Sweeney as AFL-CIO president in 1995 which brought significant changes in the direction of the federation's international activity. Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka describes the new program as "international involvement focused towards building solidarity abroad, helping workers achieve their goals here at home." Irene Stevenson took charge of the FTUI office in Moscow, and today maintains a much more impartial attitude between rival Russian unions than her predecessors. The office provides assistance to an international campaign against non-payment, which includes the FNPR and the independent unions. At the end of November, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (set up in the 1950s to fight Communists in world labor) and the International Labor Organization sponsored a Moscow conference on non-payment, bringing all the Russian unions together. Stevenson focuses on legal actions. "The problem," she says, "is not the law as such. It is the lack of penalties for those who ignore it. An entire host of American firms ... disregard both laws on wage payments and dismissals. Unfortunately, most of them win the gamble." In January, however, the legal road was further blocked when the Russian Constitutional Court overturned the law giving workers first claim on a company's assets, treating wages as a human right. The court upheld the government's position that paying taxes comes first. As a result, actions like those of unions in Samara, which had collected nearly $20 million in unpaid wages through 2000 civil suits, will no longer be possible. "I personally would term the 'new' policy an attempt to give the FNPR the benefit of the doubt," Stevenson says. The FNPR is no longer excluded from FTUI's education and training programs. And this fall in Pittsburgh, Shmakov and FNPR International Department head Evgeni Sidorov, along with independent union leader Alexander Sergeyev, were the first guests ever from the Russian labor movement at an AFL-CIO convention. In 1994, the World Bank promised a $500 million dollar loan to Russia to finance the privatization and restructuring of the coal industry. Yeltsin is rumored to have used these loan funds to finance massive spending on his 1996 reelection. "He spent 30-40 trillion rubles, an enormous expense which helped escalate the non-payment of wages crisis just after the election," Timofeyev says. As part of the World Bank package, FTUI sparked the creation of Partners In Economic Reform (PIER). This program brought together the U.S. coal industry, the United Mine Workers of America, the U.S. government Mine Safety Administration, the Russian coal ministry, and the independent Russian miners' union. Kirkland and then-UMWA President Rich Trumka sat on its board, along with retired Peabody Coal President Robert Quenon. PIER's major purpose, funded by USAID, was to organize an infrastructure to soften the blows of the massive unemployment expected in the closure of half Russia's coal pits. While PIER became dormant in the wake of foreign aid cuts, mine restructuring will still take place, costing the jobs of hundreds of thousands of miners, a bitter payment for their past loyalty to Yeltsin. PIER is not just an abandoned project, however. It is typical of the selective vision which deals only with the effects of reform, while in effect supporting the reforms themselves. Linda Cook, of Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies, states that "the United States has a strong interest in supporting Russian unions because they can contribute not only to democratic stabilization but also to the success of economic reform," in a revealing report entitled "Labor and Liberalization" written for the Twentieth Century Fund. "Building more effective bargaining institutions for the labor force...may make the distress caused by those reforms more palatable." For Russian miners, however, the reforms themselves are the problem, and even more, their purpose - reestablishing a capitalism barbaric in its treatment of workers, beholden to foreign loans and investment. It's not just a Russian problem. The project of dismantling socialism has an enormous impact on workers in every part of the globe. "Just as the Holy Alliance in Europe after the Napoleonic Wars tried to root out the results of the French Revolution," cautions Russian socialist Boris Kagarlitsky, "so today the International Monetary Fund, Maastricht Europe and the American 'new world order' represent the reactionary answer of the old elites to the downfall of the revolutionary experiment." No one - not the AFL-CIO, the independents nor the FNPR - wants to ask the obvious question: are Russian workers better or worse off now than they were ten years ago? U.S. and Russian unions, although coming from opposite ideological traditions, find themselves in quite a similar political predicament. How can a union support the policies which produce payment in bed sheets, and then protest the bed sheets themselves? Only by refusing to connect present conditions with their origin. The AFL-CIO's approach to this problem speaks clearly about the limitations of its vision for a radically different society, whether in Russia or here at home. "If economic restructuring brings an increase in living standards to the majority of citizens, and if markets are mechanisms which distribute wealth, then we support them," Shailor says. "But economic restructuring should not take place on the backs of workers, and clearly in many cases it does." The AFL-CIO will no longer deny aid to unions which don't want to pay the price of reform, regardless of their history or politics, a vast improvement over previous policy. "We will stand with any union," Shailor says, "which opposes [restructuring], and we're giving solidarity and support where there is resistance." But AFL-CIO international activity is still funded by USAID and the NED, although at less than the $40 million/year of the early 1990s. The non-payment situation is growing extreme enough that future U.S. policy may even favor softening the reforms' impact, so long as the goal remains unchanged. To the extent that Russian unions accept that goal, and limit their fight to the impact, USAID support for current AFL-CIO activity in Russia may not be in immediate danger. Support would surely be withdrawn, however, if the AFL-CIO continued a policy of solidarity with a Russian labor movement pushed in a more radical direction by economic crisis and rising militancy at the bottom. Russian unions advocating even traditionally nationalist policies of import substitution and limits on foreign investment would undoubtedly be viewed as enemies. If U.S. aid policy and that of the AFL-CIO become contradictory, "then we'll figure out a way to do the work, with our without government funding," Shailor promises. A day of decision is approaching, not only for unions in Russia, but for the AFL-CIO in relation to U.S. foreign policy. Speaking last February at the Davos forum of international bankers in Switzerland, Sweeney warned that "the neoliberal version of the American model now held out for export offers no answer to the fundamental economic challenges of our day." Yet this is exactly the economic model the U.S. has exported to Russia, and not just there. Already unionists like ICEM's Vic Thorpe are calling for a more fundamental reassessment. "We need urgently to revisit the ideas behind the Bretton Woods institutions and seriously to question whether they are still appropriate," he told the November conference on non-payment. "Their policies have destroyed attempts to base growth on more secure and socially-just systems of import substitution and self-sustaining development in favor of dependence on multinational banks and corporations and a limited social elite. It is time to acknowledge that the institutions have not worked ... that they were a bad idea, founded on an inappropriate model of growth." These are important voices, pointing out that the road of independence from U.S. foreign policy, both corporate and government, has its necessary and logical conclusion in opposition to free market reforms and the uninhibited growth of capitalism. But even they leaves a deeper question unasked. If Russian workers decide to look for an alternative, or for that matter, if workers in any other country do so, what can they hope for today from the AFL-CIO's new commitment to international solidarity? - 30 - sidebar - BATTLING THE TIDE OF PRIVATIZATION By David Bacon MOSCOW (2/16/98) -- The beneficiaries of the new order aren't just Russian nouveau-capitalists. In 1995, Proctor and Gamble discovered a way to use non-payment to buy one of Russia's largest chemical companies for pennies - NBKh - the old Soviet Union's leading manufacturer of detergents and cleansers. The enterprise employed thousands of people in a big complex in Tula. In the early 1990s the company installed the most modern Japanese production equipment. That made it a target of the government's program to privatize industry. Privatization is the central element of the economic reforms intended to dismantle socialism. The sale of state enterprises, required by the International Monetary Fund as a condition for vast loans from the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development, has been the source of widespread accusations of government corruption. The NBKh sale, according to an investigative report in the Moscow News, was pushed by Anatoly Chubais, formerly key advisor to Russian President Boris Yeltsin. In November, public outcry forced Yeltsin to remove Chubais as finance minister. Chubais got caught engineering the sale of another state company to a billionaire Russian banker, in return for $90,000 disguised as a fee for writing a "history" of privatization. Lauren Filipp, Proctor and Gamble general manager in Russia, belonged to the government's council for promoting investment. Other U.S. advisors helped to draft Russia's privatization laws. Shortly before Proctor and Gamble made its bid to buy NBKh, the factory started to hold back its workers' wages. Working without paychecks, NBKh workers logically wondered if their company was on the rocks. When the privatization program distributed ownership shares to the employees, they were only too happy to sell them to Proctor and Gamble for 40,000-150,000 rubles apiece (at that time, $1 was worth 5400 rubles). The U.S. company was able to pick up the entire enterprise for $14.6 million, just after new construction alone had cost the Russian government $142 million. Then the corporation announced it was eliminating the jobs of 700 employees and closing major production units. It began cutting production of chemicals used by other cleanser manufacturers, leading to suspended production there also. Meanwhile, imports of Proctor and Gamble detergents like Tide and Ariel rose. The corporation is now reportedly maneuvering to purchase Termos Public Joint Stock Company, Russia's second-largest cleanser producer. The most vocal critic of Proctor and Gamble has been the union for NBKh workers, and its chairman Alexander Alexeyev. "If we unite and act as a single force," he told the Moscow News' Lyudmila Butuzova, "we'll be able to assert our rights and interests." Alexeyev attacked Proctor and Gamble for the shady maneuvering involved in NBKh's privatization and the non-payment of wages. His union is fighting the downsizing. The privatization of NBKh exposes more than just the corruption of the sale of state enterprises. Privatization is being paid for by workers, who lose jobs, wages and benefits to pay the cost of increased profits. Those profits, furthermore, are taken out of the country, while imports flood in. The market produces not more competition, but larger monopolies, and Russia loses control over its own economy. But privatization is producing one positive change. The union at NBKh, formerly wedded to management like most other traditional unions, has become its fiercest independent critic. Privatization, non-payment of wages and economic reforms are cutting the umbilical cord between Russian enterprise manangers and the bulk of the country's unions. - 30 - --------------------------------------------------------------- david bacon - labornet email david bacon internet: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 1631 channing way phone: 510.549.0291 berkeley, ca 94703 ---------------------------------------------------------------