Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin continue their defence of the Tsipras government’s acceptance of the troika’s austerity program in the latest Jacobin. This time, they use the analogy of a union leadership caught between the employer’s threat of plant closure and a militant membership unwilling to accept the employer’s terms of surrender. The analogy is apt, but the sympathetic portrayal of the Tsipras leadership as a beleaguered but well-intentioned union leadership forced to take the tough decisions neglects the most salient facts:
1. The Tsipras leadership does not, as the duo suggests, confidently return to the table with a strong strike mandate. One insider later reveals the leadership is dismayed rather than emboldened by the mandate given to it by its members. To the astonishment of the union’s secondary leaders and rank-and-file activists, it abruptly reaches out to the widely despised conservative union leadership it replaced on a reform ticket a few months earlier. Together they send a letter to the employer, proposing to settle on Troika Enterprises’s final offer, blithely ignoring the workers’ rejection of the proposed settlement only a day earlier. 2. Sensing the Tsipras leadership’s desperation for a settlement, the employer imposes even more humiliating terms of surrender on the union, with further deep cuts to employee pay, benefits, and workplace rights. 3. The Tsipras leadership attempts to defend its actions as a “victory” against a cruel and heartless employer. “There is no alternative”, it tells its members. “The employer was going to close the plant.” 4. Critics within and outside the union remind the leadership that threats to close the plant are a common bargaining tactic used to intimidate timid union leaders and fearful members, and that these threats are mostly not realised. It is true there is a powerful faction which genuinely wants to close down the small Greek operation. But though the plant is effectively insolvent, most in Troika Enterprises regard the plant as a very small part of the business, and the expectation is it can soon be restored to profitability by driving down its labour costs and robbing the pension fund. 5. In the background lurks the nagging fear, shared by all the company’s directors, of the contagion effect on its employees in its other subsidiaries should the union successfully take over the shuttered plant, modernize it, reorganize its administration, and begin to generate profits which are equitably distributed to its members. 6. In the aftermath of the climbdown, the Tsipras leadership begins to purge the union of its militant members, spurred on by Troika Enterprises and its former right-wing rivals inside the organization, and confident it can carry a disoriented and resigned base with it. It’s left-wing opposition vows otherwise. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/07/tsipras-debt-germany-troika-memorandum/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
