Militant and Relevant

The Malta Independent On Sunday

Alfred Mifsud

It is almost tragic that media domination in the hands of the PN, and the one dimensional thinking of some powers in the GWU, have allowed the contest for the most senior posts of the union’s hierarchy being held this week, to be portrayed as a head- on fight between the militants and the moderates.

Firstly it should be emphasised that it is a sign of a dynamic and healthy organisation that de facto permits the possibility of incumbents to be challenged through the ballot box. It is this fact that the contestants and the organisation should have emphasised, rather that allow themselves to be depicted as militants or moderates in order to gain an advantageous position in the forthcoming contest.

The GWU should be proud that it is a true democratic organisation where deputies have no inhibitions about challenging incumbents and the contest is between colleagues who think they can do a better job in reaching common objectives.

Whether one is labelled or permits oneself to be labelled as a militant or a moderate, the ultimate aim is the same: that of defending social justice and create employment for the benefit of the working class.

And to do this GWU has to be militant and has to remain relevant. Let’s go into the details to define militant and relevant lest I am interpreted as favouring a constant belligerent attitude with employers whenever the union is in negotiations on behalf of its members.

The union, and this applies to all true unions and not just the GWU, must be militant when protecting the workers’ rights and social status and promoting social justice. There were days when legislation provided poor protection for the workers and when the workers were exploited. Unions then had to be belligerent to the point of taking industrial action, including strikes, in order to ensure that workers got their fair share of the economic wealth they helped create on the capital.

This attitude was particularly effective at a time when most economies were closed and inward looking and where capital had little mobility. That was yesterday.

Economy is now open and except for public sector employment most employers have freedom of movement with their capital. Maltese workers are competing with other workers all over the world from next door Tunisia to distant China and Vietnam. Globalisation has rendered capital and investment extremely mobile and forced unions to be very careful in making demands that could prejudice the competitiveness of employers.

News from international sources confirming this trend abound. Only this week Daimler Chrysler (Mercedes) and General Motors (Opel) announced various job cuts schemes in Europe as their production facilities migrate to lower cost locations in order to remain competitive. In the US, General Motors is in do or die negotiations with the unions to dismantle their legacy pension scheme and health care costs related to present or past employees to avoid having to resort to Chapter 11 bankruptcy procedures in order to achieve the same result, as many US airlines have had to do.

The dilution of union powers through globalisation has been further compounded by individualism at work resulting from new technologies. To remain competitive, employers in high cost developed economies have had to upgrade the technological skills of their employees making them more individually accountable for performance. The sense of collectivism and solidarity has lost its crowd power as employees’ tools have become the mouse and the keyboard rather than the production line.

For unions to remain relevant in the current days of unstoppable globalisation and technological innovation they must accept that the old version of union militancy is counterproductive and works against the interest of their members in the development of a strong economy where employees have the facility to move from one job to another with minimum friction and pain. The emphasis of the union has to shift to employability rather than preserving life-long employment through an unsustainable status quo.

So whoever leads the GWU, whose members are mostly in the private sector, must remain militant to ensure that private sector employees do not continue to be discriminated against. No union that prides itself on defending and promoting social justice can continue to protect the economic apartheid which exists in our employment sector where the least productive (public sector employees) have the most protection and the most productive (private sector employees) have to make do with little or no protection.

Whoever leads the union has to be militant in shaking the government to bring some rebalancing of rights and obligations across the whole employment sector – where public sector employees give up their excessive protection and unaccountability for performance and get to work in an environment comparable with private sector employees. This applies to hours of work, redundancy protection and remuneration policies, as well as general conditions of employment.

In compensation for some dilution of excessive rights and protection in public sector employment, the unions should get a deal to give added protection to private sector employment, where employees gain rights of re-training both during employment as well as in case of redundancy, and where employees are given additional right of information on the financial health and operating performance of big employers.

The union has to be militant in fighting unemployment and in forcing the government’s hand to institute compulsory training schemes for the long term unemployed, anything above six months, firstly to cut down entitlements abuse and secondly, to give a real chance to the long-term unemployed to become employable again, and to be assisted in pricing themselves for such re-employment.

If the union stays militant in the traditional way it will lose its relevance. So far it has seen its relevance fade away in the private sector but still managed to preserve it in the public sector. However this is unsustainable as defending the existing discrimination will further weaken its private sector members as government will have to allocate its scarce resources to continue funding waste rather than re-training.

Ultimately the public, who is seeing its tax money being wasted as the economy jams while our competitors race ahead, will elect a government with a democratic mandate to dismantle the residual union power in the public sector, reducing or destructing the union’s relevance even where it has survived up to now.

It is the duty of whoever is elected to lead the GWU forward to ensure that the union remains militant in preserving and creating employment and employability, as well as remaining relevant in the outreaching society of the 21st century.