Czech unions agree to work with the Communists at expert level

by Ken Biggs

Relations between the Czech Communists and the main Czech trade union centre improved significantly on February 10 after leaders of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia held talks with representatives of the Czech Confederation of Trade Unions (CzCTU), which organises about a third of the country’s workforce.

The CPBM delegation was led by the party’s chair Miroslav Grebenicek MP and the CzCTU delegation by its chair Milan Stech, who is a Social Democratic senator. As the front-page headline in Halo Noviny, the Czech communist daily, put it the following day, ”CzCTU and CPBM to cooperate.”

Among topics discussed by the two sides were the Social Democrat-led ”right-left” coalition government’s deeply unpopular plans for pension and tax reform, amendments to the Czech Republic’s Labour Code and government plans to reduce the higher VAT rate from 22% to 19% and transferring other items to the higher rate.

Interviewed in Halo Noviny on Feb.18, Vojtech Filp MP, another member of the CPBM’s delegation and the Chamber of Deputies’ communist deputy-speaker, said that both sides agreed that the VAT change would not result in lower prices for consumers. Businesses would simply use the reduction ”to increase their margins”.

Filip also added that in his view the CPBM’s policies for dealing with the economic and social crisis facing the country were ”more radical” than those of the trade union centres. ”The unions’ demands are the CPBM’s minimum programme, and so we support their calls for basic foodstuffs and housing-related services to be zero-rated. But we go further on a whole number of other issues.”

The two sides also discussed the June elections to the European Parliament, when the CPBM hopes to win its first seats in Brussels. As Senator Stech told Halo Noviny, the Czech unions are holding talks with all parties represented in the Czech Parliament with a view ”to familiarising them with the position of the European unions and winning their support .”

With 41 MPs the CPBM is the third strongest party in the 200-seat Chamber of Deputies and leader of the Left opposition to the ruling coalition. Opinion polls currently put the Communists neck-and-neck with the Social Democrats, the largest party in the government led by Social Democrat Vladimir Spidla and well ahead of its junior partners, the centre-right Christian Democrats and the right-wing fundamentalist Freedom Union-Democratic Union. The fact that the polls indicate that the FU-DEU would not win a single seat in elections to the legislature only goes to show how unpopular the Spidla government has become since the Social Democrats chose to renege on the manifesto on which it won the 1998 parliamentary elections under pressure from its junior coalition partners rather than talk to the Communists about forming a Left government backed by a 22-seat majority in the Chamber of Deputies

Senator Stech told Halo Noviny there were no significant differences in the views of the two organisations on the topics discussed. ”Our aims of ensuring that retired workers are secure in their old age and that workers have secure jobs are very similar or the same.” The two sides agreed that their experts would work together to develop alternative policies.

The 120,000-strong CPBM has developed a highly-effective system of standing expert commissions, which draw on the now-defunct Communist Party of Czechoslovakia’s 40 years of experience in running the country and at the same time are developing an alternative economic and political strategy for the country. They analyse the statistical data and make recommendations about party policy on everything from defence and security issues to education.

Since the events of 1989, the Czech trade unions have undergone immense changes. One of the principal aims of the Havel-led counter-revolution was to destroy the Revolutionary Trade Union Movement (ROH), set up in the closing days of World War Two as Prague was about to erupt into open revolt against the Nazi occupiers.

The ROH was founded on May Day 1945 at an underground conference held in the Czechoslovak capital. At the time of its dissolution in March 1990, it consisted of 17 industrial unions, a formidable force which had wielded considerable power during the 40 years of socialism. Foreign industrial relations consultants like Price Waterhouse brought in during the ”economic reform” of the 1990s admitted as much and master-minded the attack on trade union influence.

15 years later the Czech trade unions are much weaker in terms of both membership and influence – mainly because of the employers’ success in destroying the principle of ”one industry–one union” compounded by a variety of other negative influences – like the emergence since 1989 of mass unemployment (currently officially standing at a record figure of well over 10% of the workforce and in real terms at an even higher rate as workers, especially women and older workers, have withdrawn from the labour market), fear of victimisation (which in some well-publicised cases has obliged trade unionists employed by foreign companies to organise secretly), the 1990 ban on political activities at the workplace, massive privatisation of the state sector, a shrinking labour force, the breakup of Czechoslovakia’s traditional heavy industries and coal mines and, last but not least, CzCTU’s failure to give real leadership to its affiliated unions in the fightback against retrenchments.

There are now four trade union centres. Two – the CzCTU and the Confederation of Cultural Workers – are officially recognised by the government for the purposes of maintaining the fiction of post-1989 tripartite ”social partnership”. Discontent with the CzCTU’s role in facilitating ”transformation” of the pre-1989 state sector-led socialist economy in the 1990s led to the farmworkers’ and rail unions breaking away from the main centre and forming a third centre, the Association of Independent Unions (ASO).

The fourth centre – the Trade Union Association of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia (OSCMS), formed in the early 1990s – is communist-led, but open to all workers regardless of their views. Its industrial muscle is weak since its members are mostly retired workers. Communist workers still active in trade unions often prefer to work in CzTUC, where they are at least in direct touch with people of working age.

Trade union rights are under constant attack, especially in the private sector. The right to strike exists only theoretically and is restricted to situations created by the breakdown of annual pay and conditions negotiations. On the few occasions since 1989 when trade unions have called major strikes, employers have usually declared the strike ”illegal” and tried to take the unions to court.

The Czech Labour Code mirrors EU industrial relations legislation, but at office and shopfloor level, in the absence of strong workplace unions, many private employers ignore or flout it.