Mapping the World of Labour

Abstract

international labour rights, I have been struck by the lack of accessible and complete information about the international labour movement. When I arrived at ICTUR in the 1990s, there was a small library and a few dozen magazine subscriptions. Probably the best of these was the American grassroots union magazine LaborNotes. It at least had a bit of wit and character, contrasting sharply with the dull and dreary copies of the WFTU’s World Trade Union Movement and its mirror image, the ICFTU’s glossy Trade Union World. The Christian WCL’s publication World of Labor was the least inspiring. These magazines set out positions and arguments on then current affairs in various parts of the world, and contained quotes from union leaders allied to “their” political cause. An independent effort, International Labour Reports, had to close following a defamation row, but there were a number of others that arrived regularly from every corner of the earth, most notable were probably the China Labour Bulletin, the South African Labour Bulletin, and India’s LabourFile, though among many others GAWU’s militant Combat newsletter from Guyana was – and still is – worth reading. What none of them did very well – or even at all – was to try and coherently map the trade union landscape around the world, and for a while I struggled amidst a sea of confusing acronyms, with little real sense of who these organisations were. At the ICTUR office, what passed for a “guide” to the global labour movement was an old Czech photo album stuffed with trade unionists’ business cards, which was no help at all. When I acquired an old copy of Trade Unions of the World (at the time essentially a commercial publication that drew heavily on the CIA’s World Fact Book), it was a revelation. That this should be the main guide for an organisation founded in opposition to Western imperialism was somewhat ironic, but apparently, it was ever thus, as Peter Waterman recalled of his time working at the WFTU, thirty years earlier: