By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — Since the days of perestroika, the US government, working through quasi-independent aid bodies and the main US labour federation, the AFL-CIO, has spent millions of dollars trying to fashion a new Russian labour movement.
Not everything in this collaboration has been negative. And if little good can be said of the US intervention in the Russian labour movement during the first half of the 1990s, an extensive house-cleaning in the AFL-CIO since 1995 has made the joint work in the most recent years relatively useful.
When envoys of the US labour movement first contacted Soviet miner activists following the great coal strikes in the summer of 1989, these direct links were an absolute novelty for the Soviet workers.
The US unions, by contrast, had carried on activity abroad for more than 40 years. Today's International Affairs Department (IAD) of the AFL-CIO traces its history back to the opening years of the Cold War.
Until the 1970s, the IAD was funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. Part of its brief was to optimise the labour environment in which US corporations operated abroad. Right-wing labour organisations in many countries were subsidised or, if necessary, set up from scratch. Militant trends were sabotaged.
In the mid-1970s, the Church Committee hearings in the US Senate exposed abuses by the CIA and opened the lid on the agency's work with the AFL-CIO. Funding for the IAD was then rerouted through the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and later also the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The ultimate source of the money, however, remained the US government.
By the 1990s, about US$40 million a year was being channelled through the American Institute for Free Labor Development, which ran USAID and NED programs in Latin America; the Free Trade Union Institute (FTUI), which conducted them in Eastern Europe; and similar bodies in Asia and Africa.
Moscow office
In April 1992 an office of the FTUI was opened in Moscow. Over the next few years, several million dollars were spent on a whole network of research, information and organisational structures.
In late 1992 appeared the first issue of "the all-Russian newspaper of social partnership Delo", funded and supported by the FTUI. An ambitious trade union education initiative was in place by the following June.
A paradox of FTUI's activity was that the organisation deliberately avoided contacts with the great bulk of Russia's trade union movement.
The AFL-CIO leadership had always shunned the Soviet trade unions, ostensibly because these were not real workers' organisations. When the "traditional" unions refashioned themselves into the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia (FNPR), the IAD chiefs refused to accept that anything important had changed.
The FTUI's representatives focused exclusively on the newly established "free" trade unions. These had been set up for the most part by militants following labour struggles. The new unions were supplied by the FTUI with office equipment, training and other help.
Ultimately, the FTUI's aid-giving had little to do with the legitimacy of the new unions, and much to do with their politics.
The members of the "free" unions were broadly anticommunist, identifying the Communist Party (or its surviving fragments) with the anti-worker repressions of the past. The support of these workers for the new Yeltsin regime tended to be conditional and guarded, but this did not prevent the FTUI from identifying the new unionism with the government and its program of restoring capitalism.
"The AFL-CIO is giving its solidarity and support to those independent trade unions which are consistently defending the course of the reforms", declared the subheading on a March 1993 interview in Delo with the then head of the FTUI's Moscow office, Tom Bradley.
The FTUI's efforts to help prepare Russia for US investors were impeded by the headlong collapse of the Russian economy in 1992 and 1993. Nevertheless, a coal industry project named Partners in Economic Reform was launched, with US coal firms among the sponsors.
The purpose of this initiative was described in its registration document as "aiding in the reconstruction of the centralised and state-controlled coal-mining industry"; in other words, the goal was to assist in privatising the industry.
Few results
For its efforts and money, the FTUI eventually had little to show. Delo made no significant impact. The "free" trade unions failed to thrive, remaining tiny compared with the FNPR.
Part of the reason was that the FTUI, wanting conservative, pro-regime unions, avoided encouraging them to democratise their structures. Also, the political support by most of the new unions for the government and its "reforms" had little appeal for workers.
Unable to function on their tiny dues base, and without the FNPR's income from property accumulated during the Soviet era, the "free" unions depended heavily on funds from western sources.
Competition for these grants heightened rivalries between union leaders. With a key role in directing the flow of money, FTUI employees interfered crudely in internal union affairs; by 1994 these practices were drawing sharp protests from union chiefs.
Changes in AFL-CIO
At the 1995 AFL-CIO convention, a reform slate headed by John Sweeney won the leadership. Sweeney and his supporters presaged a break with Cold War perspectives, and pledged to link up with unionists in other countries in order to thwart the efforts of multinational corporations to cut jobs and drive down wage levels.
The politico-economic logic that had driven the FTUI's work in Russia since 1992 — of seeking to build right-wing trade unions under strong US influence and, through them, to promote US investment — was now in serious question.
At the same time, US government budget cuts were curtailing the funds available for the AFL-CIO's international programs.
Over the past two years, the FTUI's operations in Russia have changed dramatically. Grants have been severely cut, forcing the FTUI to shed many activities not viewed as central. Delo is no more, and the FTUI's more deliberate efforts to multiply the number of "free" trade unions — the source of some of the worst frictions — have been abandoned.
Talking to Green Left Weekly, the FTUI's present Moscow director, Irene Stevenson, stated that her organisation's work is now focused heavily on education (using mainly Russian instructors), on the defence of workers' rights and on news gathering and dissemination. A further priority has been developing the legal aid resources available to unions.
The FTUI's assistance remains concentrated almost exclusively on the "free" unions. But according to Stevenson, this is simply because the FNPR has its own education, legal aid and other structures, and has less need of outside help.
"We're here to assist activists", Stevenson argues, indicating that their affiliation is no longer viewed as important.
Contradictions
For millions of trade unionists in Russia, the crucial issue of the past few years has been the failure by the government to force enterprises to pay wages on time — or indeed, to meet its own wage bills. As a matter of necessity, the FTUI has had to take support for Yeltsin out of its institutional shopwindow.
The organisation has not endorsed the FNPR's consciously political strategy of calling periodic mass protests centred on the wage payments issue. Instead, it has concentrated on educating unionists about the various avenues — often neglected by Russian unions — that can be used to force specific enterprises to pay up.
In most cases, Stevenson notes, Russian courts will rule in favour of workers who sue for their wages. But she admits that forcing the executive authorities to implement these rulings is extraordinarily difficult.
In their present form, the FTUI's programs are at least modestly useful to Russia's labour movement. But the contradictions are monumental.
Most fundamentally, the source of the money is still the US government, which has never needed strong and effective trade unions in the US, Russia or anywhere else.
Most likely, the US authorities regard the FTUI programs in Russia as a kind of "sleeper" operation. If this is the case, the help the FTUI provides for building the Russian labour movement is tolerated as part of the cost of maintaining contacts and building credibility against the day when the movement explodes into a serious struggle.
At that point, the pressure will become intense for the FTUI to switch to consistently serving its paymasters. That demand will pose a fundamental challenge not only to the staff of the FTUI, but also to the leaders of the AFL-CIO.