The Wanganui Chronicle FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 1927. RUSSIAN TRADE UNIONS—PAWNS OF THE SOVIET

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19989, 4 November 1927, Page 6

The Wanganui Chronicle FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 1927. RUSSIAN TRADE UNIONS—PAWNS OF THE SOVIET

For the British trade unionist, who lias often been invited to admire Soviet methods, there is a wealth of enlightenment in a report just published through tlie International Labour Office, Geneva. It shows how in Russia itself the trade unions have been made the merest senators of the Communist State.

Earlier in the year the International Labour Office prepared a useful study of trade union conditions in various countries, but it was soon discovered that the case of Russia was so complex, the status and powers of the unions so much at the mercy of the political dictatorship, that the matter could be dealt with adequately only in the present separate report of nearly 30G pages. In a very temperate survey of the events since the Revolution it is show how industrial “independence” has been reduced to a farce during the Red regime. From the first the Bolsheviks determined that the best thing they could do with the unions was to make them instruments of their own propaganda. Every worker was virtually forced to join-—otherwise he could get no employment—and his membership dues were deducted before he was paid any wages. Once inside it he found that the movement was mainly concerned with talking about the “proletariat dictatorship.” From time to time, when Moscow needed recruits for the civil war, the unions dutifully found them, and in other ways they performed odd duties that transformed them to all intents and purposes into menial “State departments.” But in no case was it the function of the unions to agitate that wages should be higher or more promptly paid. Seeing that the State owned everything and that “the people” were the State, it was explained bluntly that it was theoretically “absurd” for the workers to talk of striking against themselves, and in any event all strike murmurs were on principle promptly “suppressed.”

“LEADERS” OF THE UNIONS

The Soviet authorities had other means of preventing the unions from becoming “unruly.” In the first place they would allow no new union that would not pay obeisance to the superior authority of the Communist party. They also saw to it that each union had at the head of affairs a good Communist who regarded himself solely as the mouthpiece of Moscow. He was a State official, and he was entitled, if need be, to make liberal drafts on the funds of the State. It is estimated that some 100,000 of thes new bureaucrats, in name only trade union leaders, were distributed over several thousands of executive bodies, and their attitude towards the rank and file was often arrogant and overbearing. The “moral” result is said to have been that, although the unions together numbered some millions of members, they were reduced to abject futility, and recently Tomsky openly acknowledged that they were being “directed in the most centralised fashion” by the Communist party. Since Russia has adopted the so-called new economic policy, under which the system of private owenrship has been reverted to, the unions have been able to exercise in some measure the rights of collective bargaining, and they have also been invested with functions greater than those held by trade unions in any other country. Nevertheless, avowed Communists must still be in control of them, the workers are still deprived of the liberty of remaining outside them if they think fit, and the entire movement is still used as a pawn to “bolster up the State.” When the economic change was made the central executive were presented with a very nice problem. As the State is no longer the sole employer a strike is no longer a theoretical “absurdity.” The Soviet’s position, however, is so precarious that it is only too eager to give private enterprise every chance of re-establishing the country, and for that reason it is not held to be good tactics to brandish the strike weapon too aggressively.