Where is the European Labor Movement?

The EU political class interprets the Power 8 program as a necessary element of a competitive neo- liberal rescue measure. Merkel, the CDU chancellor, said, “At first sight the principle of fair distribution appears to have been respected.” Tony Blair, Britain’s prime minister, reacted positively to the Power 8 plan while outgoing French President Jacques Chirac accepted it, but said the closure of plants must “occur in a fair social dialogue.” Chirac will be succeeded by the conservative Sarkozy who, following a meeting with French Airbus trade unionists, said he does not feel “bound to the Power 8 plan.” 

Work stoppages promptly followed the Airbus presentation of its Power 8 program. On February 28, and running into early March, 4,850 German and 4,300 French workers participated in wildcat and political strikes. German workers, who are not legally permitted to engage in political strikes, nonetheless struck three German plants. A political strike aims to influence a change in the behavior of the government, whereas an economic strike seeks to alter the employer’s conduct, in the sphere of labor negotiations. The Airbus conflict is turning into a complex interface between political and economic strikes, largely because Airbus is an amalgamation of public and private ownership. The French government, for example, maintains a 15 percent share of Airbus ownership. The German auto manufacturer Daimler-Chrysler, as well as a number of German regional states, also have sizeable shares in the company. Airbus is run by a French-German co-chief executive structure and symbolizes a kind of crowning achievement of EU business class economic power. 

An aim of Airbus, which was founded in 1970, was to compete with the U.S.-based Boeing Corporation, the world’s top selling manufacturer of passenger planes. The parent corporation of Airbus is the European Aeronautic Defense & Space Co. (EADS). Both Boeing and EADS produce large commercial planes, but are also leaders in the mushrooming military industrial complex. EADS’s plane division is booming economically, which helps explain why Michael Eilers, the IG Metall union chairperson of the works council in the Nordenham plant in northern Germany, deemed the plan to sell factories “unacceptable.” According to Eilers, Airbus “is filled with work orders and the prognosis looks very good” for the economic viability of the corporation. Airbus, whose main headquarters is located in Toulouse, France, where 11,500 workers are based, has 16 plants across Europe. In addition to the Nordenham plant, which manufactures fuselage parts, Airbus is targeting two other plants in Germany for sale, a classic expression of outsourcing with a view toward slashing union wages and benefits. 

Workers in Laupheim, in the southern German state of Baden- Württemberg, are “shocked and frustrated” about the Power 8 plan, according to the IG Metall union representative Michael Braun, who also noted they are showing a “willingness to fight.” The 1,200 union members in Laupheim who produce and design the cabin and cargo components, have shifted, following the wildcat strike, to an in-plant work-to-rule strategy. Braun said that workers are refusing to accept overtime work and special shift assignments. “The protest within the plant can be felt,” said Braun. 

IG Metall is Germany’s largest industrial union and dominates such sectors as auto, electronics and metal work. The union is arguably the most powerful industrial union in the advanced capitalist world and the pattern setter for collective bargaining negotiations in Germany. IG Metall—mirroring industrial unions like the United Auto Workers (UAW) in the U.S.—has, however, suffered massive membership losses and a deterioration of organizational and strike power. In 1992, following the unification of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) with the Federal Republic, IG Metall absorbed 900,000 new east German workers, and increased its membership base to 3.6 million members. However, the current membership has plummeted to 2,376,000 million members and the union recently experienced its first strike loss since 1954. In 2003 east German workers (in the former GDR federal states) sought to reduce their work week from 38 to 35 hours thereby standardizing their work hours with those of west German trade unionists. The strike affected the production of Volkswagen and BMW autos in the world’s leading export nation. The lack of sympathy strikes in the west German IG Metall plants, coupled with a woefully ineffectual pressure point campaign strategy in the east to mobilize union members and public opinion, turned a winnable strike into a humiliating flop. 

That a single German union represents practically all Airbus employees contributes to its bargaining and strike power, in contrast to France where five separate French trade unions represent Airbus employees. The coordinated IG Metall work-to-rule action is affecting production. Martin Schindler, a union representative for the Nordenham plant, reports that, “More is being discussed than produced” on the factory floor. Managers have been complaining about the work-to-rule action and that members are refusing overtime work. According to Schindler, “displeasure is widespread among the workers.” 

The third plant targeted by Airbus for outsourcing is Varel, which is located like its sister plant Nordenham, and produces fuselage parts. Hartmut Tammen-Henke, the IG Metall representative responsible for Varel, said that the 1,350 members are “very much in a fighting mode.” He said in an interview that the members “fear a sale” of the plant because of the loss of jobs and “collectively bargained conditions.” An astonishing 35 percent of the workforce in the seven German Airbus plants is already employed by subcontractors and temporary employment agencies. Airbus also employs “foreign workers” who are treated as second-class workers. 

A form of economic chauvinism blocked the attempt on March 16 to build a Europe-wide union demonstration in Brussels, Belgium and the protest against Airbus was relegated to the national level. When questioned about the role of nationalism, IG Metall representative Braun remarked that “[Nationalism] has not entirely gone away” among German workers. What prompted the cancellation of the rally, however, was a nationalistic flyer that the French union CFE- CGC disseminated. The flyer asserted the Power 8 restructuring plan is a “bonus for the incompetence” of the German plants. The CFE-CGC wrote: “Who is responsible for the delays by the A380: those who receive a third of the production line for the A320 plane.” The full production of the A320, according to the Power 8 plan, will be shifted to the German plant in Hamburg. 

The Hamburg IG Metall council chair Horst Niehus charged the CFE-CGC with encouraging “populism” and “nationalism,” according to a report in the French newspaper Liberation. Julien Talavan, a union representative from the largest French Airbus union Force Ouvriere (FO), said “We are prepared to block the assembly of the aircrafts.” The FO is insisting on retaining the work in Toulouse and thereby preventing the transfer of the A320 plane work to Hamburg. 

The emotional, nationalistic language and desire for local promotion is not limited to France. German protests following the employer’s Power 8 announcement resulted in such slogans as “Airbus belongs to Bremen” and “Airbus belongs to Hamburg.” The germ of German worker chauvinism with respect to the Airbus conflict could be found as early as May 2006. A bizarre group under the name of “Die Freien” secured 30 percent of the votes in a union election in the Hamburg plant, reported the anti- nationalistic left German weekly Jungle World. Die Freien warned of “the danger that retiring German senior management could be replaced with French management representatives.” Their program highlights their vehement opposition to the “outflow of authority to Toulouse” in France. 

The unsavory nationalistic language spilled over onto the largest Airbus demonstration in Germany where 20,000 union members from Airbus and supply parts firms rallied on March 16 to demand the withdrawal of the Power 8 plan. At the time, IG Metall had struck the seven Airbus plants in Germany and work stoppages hit Airbus production in Spain and France. In Britain, hundreds of workers rallied at the town hall in Chester, North Wales. 

Socialist critics blasted IG Metall for inviting right-wing CDU politicians to attend the massive rally in Hamburg. Günther Oet- tinger (CDU), the minister- president of the German federal state of Baden-Württemberg, said, “We are fighting for Airbus to remain in Germany.” Oettinger is currently tangled up in a row involving a funeral speech in which he turned his predecessor, Hans Filbinger (CDU), a Nazi naval judge, into an adversary of the Nazi movement—a scandalous form of historical revisionism. Oettinger stressed that “Filbinger was not a National Socialist” and “there was no verdict from Hans Filbinger by which a person lost his life.” His defense of Filbinger blanketed the front pages of the German dailies in April. Filbinger, who campaigned with the slogan “Freedom or Socialism” during his election race (1976) for the governorship of Baden-Württemberg, was a fierce opponent of the 1960’s German counter-cultural student movement and created a right-wing think tank that has close ties to reactionary intellectuals. The foundation is a hotbed of ultra-nationalist German thinking. Filbinger issued the death penalty to the WWII deserter Walter Gröger, a genuine resister of Hitler, whose 78-year-old sister, Ursula Galke, said, “A person of Oettinger’s intelligence should not be lying.... Mr. Filbinger was present during the killing of my brother. He read him the sentence of death and stripped him in a cynical way of his civil rights before his execution. The statements from Mr. Oettinger are barefaced lies.” 

The president of IG Metall, Jürgen Peters—in contrast to the protectionist German rhetoric of Oettinger—went to great lengths to not play the nationalistic card during the Hamburg rally. Peters said, “We are not fighting against our colleagues in France” and claimed that “workers do not allow themselves to be played off against each other.” 

Empty union slogans or a genuine attempt to bring about an anti-nationalistic union atmosphere? A telling example seems to suggest a case of phoney international union solidarity. Peters negotiated a new labor agreement (September 2006) with Europe’s largest auto manufacturer, VW. The main element involved employment security for 100,000 German workers until 2010 in exchange for an increased work week without additional pay. In December VW announced the dismissal of 4,000 workers at its Belgium plant and the transfer of the Golf VW auto production to two plants in Germany. This style of national-based labor negotiations at the expense of other workers helps to explain why behind the scenes Belgium trade unionists criticized the “crocodile tears” of their German counterparts. 

A segment of the German labor movement grasps the pressing need to change consciousness among German workers, yet many unions remain stuck in the Middle Ages

Political and economic nationalism remain hot button issues for German trade unions, largely because of the fascist politics in German history. Publik, the labor magazine for Germany’s largest service employees union Ver.di, devoted several articles in its December 2006 issue to the “Danger from the right” and outlined new academic studies documenting alarming percentages of racism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism in the German work councils. The cover story highlighted an EU study showing growing racial hatred directed at minority groups within the EU, according to official data from the European Monitoring Centre of Racism and Xenophobia in Vienna. A Free University of Berlin investigation established that 19 percent of German trade unionists maintain extreme right-wing attitudes. 

A segment of the German labor movement grasps the pressing need to change consciousness among German workers, yet many unions remain stuck in the Middle Ages. For example the German labor federation (DGB) in the Berlin- Brandenburg district dismissed the trade unionist and writer Esther Dischereit, who was responsible for the DGB’s anti-racism website —though an administrative labor law court reversed the termination and ordered the DGB to reeinstate her. Dischereit had criticized the accommodating posture of the labor unions to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party in May 1933. 

Acoordinated strike action of the four EU countries—Germany, France, Spain and England —to block the Power 8 downsizing program is an untapped bundle of potential for creating a wave of internationalism. Unfortunately the fragmented posture of the unions represents a failure to embrace the opportunity to defeat a multinational corporation and inspire worker activism across Europe. The German co-executive of Air- bus, Thomas Enders, told the magazine Focus, “We are at this point highly vulnerable. Long strikes would affect us severely and throw us still further back.” The turning inward of the national unions advances Airbus’s agenda. The left-leaning German daily Berliner Zeitung captured the disunity within the EU: “The case of the wobbly company Airbus shows just how widespread economic nationalism is. More than that, though, Airbus says a lot about Europe itself.” 

The most pressing and serious challenge for trade unionists on a regional level is to create measures to protect union standards in a globalized labor market. A hopeful move is the trans-Atlantic union merger among unions in the U.S., England, Canada, and Ireland. The planned fusion is still in its infancy, but officials of the British union, Amicus, which represents Airbus workers in England, and United Steel Workers in the U.S., announced a declaration to merge this past April. The multinational union would become the world’s largest worker organization totalling 3.4 million members.  

The merger plan, according to British and American trade unionists, is the only remedy against worker exploitation on a globalized level. A concrete example of globalized trade unionism is the labor protections secured for workers in the maritime sector. A document (Bill of Rights) outlines the health and safety protections for sea workers as well as wage and benefits standards for 1.2 million seafarers. This movement from national- based labor organizations to cross- border international unionism represents hope for working people of the world. 

Z 

Ben Weinthal lives in Berlin and  is a Labor Notes correspondent for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.