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- Title
Partenariat social et indépendence de classe dans le mouvement syndical post-soviétique.
- Authors
Mandel, David
- Abstract
This article examines the role of social partnership in the defeats suffered by the labor movements after the demise of the Communist regimes in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Social partnership is a strategy ultimately based on the view that labor and capital share a fundamental, common interest in the success of the given enterprise and of the national economy as a whole. This harmonious view of employer-employee relations is predominant in virtually all countries. Its ideology has strong roots in reality, namely in labor's very real dependency upon capital. As a rule, the ideology is more prevalent when labor is weaker,and vice versa. At the same time, as noted ,social partnership itself contributes to, and reinforces, labor's weakness. Social partnership played its role, albeit differently, each of the three countries, but in each case it contributed significantly to the dramatic setback suffered by workers,who saw their savings wiped out, their real wages fall by more than two thirds, and the initial promise of democracy broken. The argument here is not that a different strategy would necessarily have allowed workers to come out ahead from the fall of the bureaucratic dictatorship. Objective circumstances, outlined below, did not favor labor but,at the least, the losses certainly could have been much smaller. The fact is that the unions did not make use even of the limited resources they readily had at their disposal to defend their members' interests. There were, of course, exceptions, but they were too few and isolated to affect the overall outcome.
- Subjects
RUSSIA; UKRAINE; BELARUS; LABOR movement; LABOR unions; INDUSTRIAL relations; IDEOLOGY
- Publication
Labour, Capital & Society / Travail, capital et société, 2003, Vol 36, Issue 1, p132
- ISSN
0706-1706
- Publication type
Article