‘Second to None in the International Fight’: Australian Seafarers Internationalism and Maritime Unions Against Apartheid

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 442-464
Author(s):  
Diane Kirkby ◽  
Dmytro Ostapenko
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Cold War ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
World Federation ◽  
The World ◽  
Working Together ◽  
New Research

The participation of trade unions in the anti-apartheid movement is a subject which arguably merits more attention. This article brings into focus a group of unionists whose activism against apartheid was in the forefront of key initiatives. Drawing on new research the argument recounts the role of Australian seafarers on the international stage, particularly its association with the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), and shows how knowledge of events in South Africa passed from the WFTU to educate the union membership. By the 1980s, Australian seafarers were taking the lead in bringing European unionists together in united action to enforce the United Nations' embargo on oil supplies to South Africa by founding a new organization, the Maritime Unions Against Apartheid (MUAA). Reconstructing these events demonstrates two aspects of significance: the growing importance of monitoring shipping as an anti-apartheid strategy coordinated and led by European unions, which we point out relied on ships’ officers and crews for knowledge, and the breaking down of the ideological divide between the WFTU and the anti-Communist International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) working together in the MUAA. The article contributes new understanding of connections between anti-apartheid activism and its Cold War context.

The Cominform: A Five-Year Perspective

1953 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 368-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard S. Morris
Keyword(s):  
Trade Union ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
World Federation ◽  
Union Activity ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Actual Role ◽  
The World ◽  
Communist Movement

Five years ago the Comintern loomed once again as a spectre on the European horizon with the founding in Poland, September 1947, of the Information Bureau of the Communist Parties of the USSR, Bulgaria, Hungary, Rumania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia (expelled June 1948), France, and Italy. It has since become both fashionable and convenient to identify the “Cominform” with all aspects of international Communist activity, ranging from the most general of policy directives to an isolated Communist-led strike. The indiscriminate identification of “Cominform” with international Communist activity provides the layman with a convenient stereotype which spares him the trouble of further inquiry. For the student of Communism, however, this lack of precision merely results in obscuring the actual role of the Cominform, as it is known to us, and more particularly, its function within the configuration of various covert and overt instrumentalities of the international Communist movement. To speak, for example, of a “Cominform” policy of collectivization or of a “Cominform” purge trial in the Balkans, or to suggest by “Cominform” the whole web of controls of national Communist parties maintained by the USSR is to ascribe a role and importance to the Cominform that it simply does not have. For without minimizing the importance of the function the Cominform has come to discharge, it may be said that its role is essentially that of a central, but by no means the most important, propaganda instrument of the international Communist movement, designed primarily to provide public guidance and information to the leadership of various national Communist parties. Thus Pravda and the USSR radio broadcasts furnish daily guidance to the international Communist movement, and the World Federation of Trade Unions is continuously engaged in attempting to bring trade union activity in line with Communist policy.

scholarly journals Asian Lessons in the Cold War Classroom: Trade Union Networks and the Multidirectional Pedagogies of the Cold War in Asia

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 429-453
Author(s):  
Rachel Leow
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
World Federation ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Trade Unionist ◽  
Chinese Overseas ◽  
Good Trade ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract This paper invites us to move beyond an elite, “pedagogical” view of Third World diplomatic non-alignment, by examining trade unions as sites of “subaltern internationalism” in the early Cold War. Trade unions were targets of both communist and anticommunist pedagogical programs, spearheaded principally by the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) and the rival International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), both of which competed to teach Asians how to be good trade unionists. But despite their ideological designs, I argue that these internationalist structures of the “Cold War classroom” facilitated, instead, unexpected encounters and fraternal connections that were experienced, and are best seen, at the level of the personal. After offering an overview of these Cold War macrostructures, the paper moves to the microhistorical scale to highlight one such set of personal networks that coalesced around a single “trade union expert.” George L-P Weaver was an African-American trade unionist whose pedagogical work took him to Okinawa and Singapore in the 1950s but whose dialogical encounters with Asian trade unionists had transformative effects on his ideological convictions afterward, challenging, in particular, his views on the role of the People’s Republic of China in the Cold War and of the “communism” of Chinese overseas communities in Singapore. In all, this paper suggests that trade unions offer us a rich site in which to recover individual dynamics that challenge and complicate, from below, the binary logics of the Cold War in Asia.

scholarly journals THE UN AT SIXTY THREE: PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS OF REFORMING A VETERAN

2009 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aneek Chatterjee ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
International Politics ◽  
New Economy ◽  
Power Calculations ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Consensus ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
The Cold War

The United Nations Organization has completed more than sixty-three years of existence. In these six decades, the world has moved far ahead, and power calculations have changed. The days of bi-polarity ended with the demise of the Cold War. International politics, though unipolar in nature at present, is showing tendencies of multi polarity. Globalization has introduced a new economy of free trade in the world. In this altered international political and economic milieu, demands for restructuring the United Nations, which is guided by an old, mostly outdated charter, have been gaining ground, particularly after the end of the Cold War. But reforming the United Nations would not be very easy, because amending the Charter is extremely difficult, and requires political consensus among members, which is not easily achievable. However, minor reforms that do not require the amendment of the Charter may be introduced to make the United Nations more adept to face today's challenges. The present paper analyzes the problems and prospects of the reform proposals, and shows that there is a gap between the hope and the reality.

Pre-Strike Ballots in Comparative Perspective

2020 ◽  
pp. 60-89
Author(s):  
Breen Creighton ◽  
Catrina Denvir ◽  
Richard Johnstone ◽  
Shae McCrystal ◽  
Alice Orchiston
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
The United States ◽  
Light Touch ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Comparative Review ◽  
The World ◽  
Formal Requirements

Chapter 3 contains a comparative review of pre-strike ballot requirements, describing the principal forms adopted around the world. It demonstrates that pre-strike ballot requirements can range from ‘light touch’ regulation specifying that union rules must contain provisions requiring the conduct of pre-strike ballots but attaching almost no consequence to failure to do so, through to highly prescriptive requirements which can have the effect of making it exceedingly difficult lawfully to take strike action. Chapter 3 then examines in detail the pre-strike ballot requirements that have been adopted in four jurisdictions: the United States, where there are no formal pre-strike ballot requirements; South Africa, where formerly stringent ballot requirements were replaced by light touch regulation in 1995; Canada, where there are formal requirements for the conduct of pre-strike ballots, but where they appear to be of only very marginal inconvenience to trade unions; and the United Kingdom which has adopted exceedingly complex provisions which betoken an almost obsessive desire to regulate the circumstances and manner in which strike action can lawfully be taken. The chapter also points to the case of Australia, which has adopted an approach that is, in many respects, similar to that of the United Kingdom—albeit with some significant differences. The similarities are such that the detailed study of the operation of the Australian provision affords many insights into the operation of the British provisions, and into the role of law as a means of regulating industrial behaviour more generally.

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