With elections nearing, unions are circling every more intensely around parties. One of the champions of political ambitions, the National Trade Union Block, clearly said it would lend political support only in exchange for the presence of some of its members in eligible places on election lists, most probably PDSR’s.
A reorientation now, because in the previous negotiations, in 1992 and 1995, BNS’s object of political attraction was CDR, then CDR and USD.
In communist times, union leaders were regarded as second-rate activists. They could never overcome their condition, because the role of “UGSR people” was quasi-decorative and propagandistic. Their only function was to manage spa reservations, hostel places and sports activities.
In the last ten years, singing in two voices, the social and the political, union leaders in Romania have preserved and consolidated their status as second-rate politicians.
Apparently, unions have a score card they can be proud of: they gave Bucharest a general mayor, who later became none less than prime minister, they gave one of Romania’s biggest parties a vice-president.
At one point, in 1995, during the Vacaroiu government, one of the proletarians-in-chief at CNSRL-Fratia achieved the performance of having one leg in the cart of the union barricade and another in the ministerial carriage of Transportation, becoming state secretary.
In their desire to negotiate with parties, especially the presence on electoral lists and in functions, much less social protection policies, unions have become a kind of political mutants, trailing behind parties with an ever more eroded credibility.
In justification of their appetite for the promising areas of political power, union leaders may cite the career of
Lech Valesa, who made it to country president. But in the case of Solidarity, social struggle has mandatorily involved political struggle, because it could not have been done otherwise back then.
Hence the “natural” metamorphosis of the Polish trade union movement into a political movement.
In a period where almost everything must be rethought and rebuilt, especially in the economic sector, a society’s seriousness and organisational health depends on the existence of trade unions.
Company management and economic management in general suffers inevitable skids, and unions, at least in an ideal behavioural model, have precisely the role of correcting the exaggerations of certain decisions of some decisions and to defend and recover some of the rights of their own members.
The ongoing political bargaining in the contest to become party incubators, beyond the unnatural of the situation, does afford the existence of an easily manipulated mass that can be taken into the streets every time the master political party demands it.
The amount of social discontentment will remain significant even after the elections. And with unions playing the part of errand boys to parties, we can always expect repeats, more or less violent, of the miners’ uprisings and road blocks.
Unions have the privilege of being frequently accepted through government doors for negotiations. He question arises: who will the future government negotiate with: trade unions or parties’ messengers?
Marxism-Leninism has launched the concept of unions as the transmissions belts for the (single) party’s policy.
This concept remains valid, of course, with a few changes, of which the most important is that these belts are being reconditioned between two general elections depending on the highest-bidding party.