I am a member of the Dutch union FNV-KIEM (the union for the creative Industries in the Netherlands. Als such I regularly receive email from LabourStart and specifically from Mr. Lee, urging me to sign some internet-petition against some injustice somewhere in the world. Usually I feel very unconfortable when I am called by Mr. Lee, because more and more, it seems, Mr Lee is absolutizing the Unions as the absolute Good. In the case of his action against Fairphone, I am sorry to say, I feel that Mr. Lee is making me ashamed to be a member of a Union. Not only does he carry a strange cause, but also I see that hundreds of people copy the line he suggests without looking at the case at all. I am afraid we have here one of the reasons why the Unions as such have lost the appeal to the new generations in the West. As a matter of fact, I had never heard of Fairphone. So, the first thing I did was to peruse the Fairpone site for their policies in the matter of workers rights, and to took me very little time to find the document made with Care (Social Assessment Program). I mentioned this document in the Thread that Mr. Lee had started, and not long after, Mr Lee responded that he had now read this document. He obviously did not seem to realize that the fact that he did not read this document before he started the the thread was in itself absurd. But more problematic; he did not seem to see that this document shows that this employer is well aware of the kind of demands that unions all over the world try to negotiate, and that the conditions that Fairphone offers are clearly based on these demands. Now all of us who are remotely interested in the problems of unionizing in many countries in Asia know that western interventions in these issues can be highly counterproductive. Reading between the lines of made with Care I can easily see that Fairphone is aware of the risks in this field. But Mr Lee chooses not to do so. I now see a mechanism at work that I have learned to fear. I see how Mr. Lee has risen to some status in the (international) Union, and that this has given him some sort of power. One element of this power is, obviously, that he has access to the individual e-mail adresses of union-members. How this is organised, I have no idea, because normal members of the unions in Holland do not have that right. Now Mr. Lee is using this power to start action as a form of a personal whim. He does not, at first, put a question to us like: I have the feeling that we have a problem here, should we take action, and if Yes, what kind of action? No. He is at the top of the unions pyramid, he finds a target, and he calls us to arms. And many union-members are accustomed to this top-down structure, and respond without thinking. At the core of the problem is the shift from good working conditions to the union. And the result of this shift that the fight for the union is replacing the fight for good conditions. Self-criticism is not a strong point of the Unions I am afraid.....
Posted on: Wed, 03 Dec 2014 21:24:53 +0000
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