Workers of the World Unite

In East Germanyin 1953, in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, in the Polish shipyards in 1970 and 1976, it was the workers who led the struggle against despotism. The stirring slogan ‘Workers of the world unite’ is used too often as a windy rhetorical flourish at international union jamborees, but an exchange of ideas and mutual understanding of the differing policies of trade unions in societies outside the closed, tyrannical system of the Soviet bloc is urgently needed. The double standards of Trade Union Confederation (TUC) are well brought out by its refusal to criticise the Soviet Union for its repression of dissenters, when those persecuted are manual workers. The lack of direct TUC contact with most of the underdeveloped world may help to explain the unthinking parochialism that besets the British unions. ‘Import controls’ is a ruling orthodoxy among the economic thinkers of the TUC.