International Secretariat of National Trade Union Centres

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The International Secretariat of National Trade Union Centres (ISNTUC), often simply referred to as the International Secretariat and later renamed the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), was an international consultative body of trade unions. Founded in 1901, it broke apart and became defunct during the First World War.

A trade union, also called a labour union or labor union (US), is an association of workers in a particular trade, industry, or company created for the purpose of securing improvement in pay, benefits, working conditions or social and political status through collective bargaining and working conditions through the increased bargaining power wielded by creation of a monopoly of the workers. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiates labour contracts with employers. The most common purpose of these associations or unions is "maintaining or improving the conditions of their employment". This may include the negotiation of wages, work rules, complaint procedures, rules governing hiring, firing and promotion of workers, benefits, workplace safety and policies.

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Founding

Jens Jensen, initiator of ISNTUC. Jensjensen.jpg
Jens Jensen, initiator of ISNTUC.

ISNTUC was founded in Copenhagen, Denmark, on August 21, 1901. Founding members of the new International Secretariat were the German, French, British, Belgian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Finnish trade union centres. Together the founding organizations had a combined membership of 1 168 000. [1]

Copenhagen Capital of Denmark

Copenhagen is the capital and most populous city of Denmark. As of July 2018, the city has a population of 777,218. It forms the core of the wider urban area of Copenhagen and the Copenhagen metropolitan area. Copenhagen is situated on the eastern coast of the island of Zealand; another small portion of the city is located on Amager, and is separated from Malmö, Sweden, by the strait of Øresund. The Øresund Bridge connects the two cities by rail and road.

Denmark constitutional monarchy in Europe

Denmark, officially the Kingdom of Denmark, is a Nordic country and the southernmost of the Scandinavian nations. Denmark lies southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and is bordered to the south by Germany. The Kingdom of Denmark also comprises two autonomous constituent countries in the North Atlantic Ocean: the Faroe Islands and Greenland. Denmark proper consists of a peninsula, Jutland, and an archipelago of 443 named islands, with the largest being Zealand, Funen and the North Jutlandic Island. The islands are characterised by flat, arable land and sandy coasts, low elevation and a temperate climate. Denmark has a total area of 42,924 km2 (16,573 sq mi), land area of 42,394 km2 (16,368 sq mi), and the total area including Greenland and the Faroe Islands is 2,210,579 km2 (853,509 sq mi), and a population of 5.8 million.

The idea to build an international trade union structure had been a proposal of the Danish union president Jens Jensen. In 1900 the British General Federation of Trade Unions leader Isaac Mitchell supported the idea, whilst the leader of the German Generalkommission der Gewerkschaften Deutschlands (which had one million members at the time) Carl Legien pledged to provide financial and administrative support to the new international organization. [1]

LO, The Danish Confederation of Trade Unions was founded in 1898 and is an umbrella organisation for 18 Danish trade unions.

Jens Jensen (trade unionist) Danish trade unionist

Jens Jensen (1859–1928) was a Danish trade unionist and Social Democratic politician. Jensen was a painter by profession. In 1879 he moved to Copenhagen. In 1883 he became the president of the Painters' Trade Union, and in 1898 he was one of the main founders of the United Trade Unions. Jensen was elected president of the union federation. During his tenure Jensen took the initiative to the first international trade union coordination, the International Secretariat of National Trade Union Centres.

General Federation of Trade Unions (UK) trade union

The General Federation of Trade Unions (GFTU) is a national trade union centre in the United Kingdom. It has 35 affiliates with a membership of just over 214,000 and describes itself as the "federation for specialist unions".

Parallel to the ISNTUC were various International Trade Secretariats, most of them based in Germany and, like the ISNTUC, dependent on support from the German unions. [2]

In 1903 Legien became Secretary of ISNTUC and the headquarters of the organization was moved to Berlin. [3]

Berlin Capital of Germany

Berlin is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3,748,148 (2018) inhabitants make it the second most populous city proper of the European Union after London. The city is one of Germany's 16 federal states. It is surrounded by the state of Brandenburg, and contiguous with its capital, Potsdam. The two cities are at the center of the Berlin-Brandenburg capital region, which is, with about six million inhabitants and an area of more than 30,000 km², Germany's third-largest metropolitan region after the Rhine-Ruhr and Rhine-Main regions.

Political divisions

The activities of ISNTUC were largely limited to exchanging information between unions and providing support to development of national union federations. Politically, the organization was subordinated to the socialist Second International. The majority within ISNTUC, led by the German trade unions, were firmly Social Democratic and emphasized the need to leave the political affairs to the political international. However, this subordination was not uncontroversial. The French Confédération générale du travail (CGT) adhered to the syndicalist line and harshly criticized the lack of independent political advocacy of ISNTUC. This dispute was notable both at the 1907 (Stuttgart) and 1910 (Copenhagen) congresses of ISNTUC. [2] CGT withdrew from ISNTUC in 1905 and returned in 1909. [4]

The Second International (1889–1916), the original Socialist International, was an organization of socialist and labour parties formed in Paris on 14 July 1889. At the Paris meeting, delegations from twenty countries participated. The International continued the work of the dissolved First International, though excluding the still-powerful anarcho-syndicalist movement and unions and by 1922 April 2 at a major post-World War I conference it began to reorganize into the Labor and Socialist International.

Syndicalism Proposed type of economic system, considered a replacement for capitalism

Syndicalism is a radical current in the labor movement and was most active in the early 20th century. According to the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, it predominated the revolutionary left in the decade preceding World War I as Marxism was mostly reformist at that time. Major syndicalist organizations included the General Confederation of Labor in France, the National Confederation of Labor in Spain, the Italian Syndicalist Union, the Free Workers' Union of Germany, and the Argentine Regional Workers' Federation. The Industrial Workers of the World, the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union and the Canadian One Big Union, though they did not regard themselves as syndicalists, are considered by most historians to belong to this current. A number of syndicalist organizations were and still are to this day linked in the International Workers' Association.

Stuttgart Place in Baden-Württemberg, Germany

Stuttgart is the capital and largest city of the German state of Baden-Württemberg. Stuttgart is located on the Neckar river in a fertile valley known locally as the "Stuttgart Cauldron." It lies an hour from the Swabian Jura and the Black Forest. Its urban area has a population of 609,219, making it the sixth largest city in Germany. 2.7 million people live in the city's administrative region and another 5.3 million people in its metropolitan area, making it the fourth largest metropolitan area in Germany. The city and metropolitan area are consistently ranked among the top 20 European metropolitan areas by GDP; Mercer listed Stuttgart as 21st on its 2015 list of cities by quality of living, innovation agency 2thinknow ranked the city 24th globally out of 442 cities and the Globalization and World Cities Research Network ranked the city as a Beta-status world city in their 2014 survey.

But there was also a third category of organizations in the ISNTUC apart from the syndicalists and Social Democrats, namely politically non-aligned neutral union centres, like the American Federation of Labor and the British GFTU. The CGT and AFL, albeit for politically different reasons, sought to distance the ISNTUC from the Second International and give ISNTUC more of a coordinating role. Whilst the German unions were unwilling to accept any real changes in the character of the organization, they were able to accommodate the CGT and AFL in symbolic gestures. At the 1913 Zurich congress of ISNTUC the name of the organization was changed to International Federation of Trade Unions. [4]

Outbreak of the war

At the time the IFTU was becoming a more well-functioning organization, active in publishing trade union literature. In 1913 the organization had affiliates in 19 countries, with a combined membership of seven million. At the eve of the First World War, the IFTU secretariat in Germany had 12 full-time employees (4 British, 4 Swiss, 2 Germans, 1 American and 1 Danish). [5] [3]

When the war broke out, the foreign staff left and the publication of the IFTU organ Correspondence Syndicale ceased. [5]

IFTU was divided into Allied, German and neutral camps. The trade unions in the Allied countries demanded that the IFTU secretariat be moved out of Germany. Legien tried to appease this demand by setting up a liaison office in Amsterdam, in cooperation with the NVV leader Jan Oudegeest. This did not please the French and British unions, however. In July 1916 a trade union conference was held in Leeds, which decided to set up a Correspondence Office in Paris, under the supervision of Léon Jouhaux. [6]

Refoundation

In 1919, after the end of the war, a new International Federation of Trade Unions was reconstituted at a conference in Berne. [7]

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References

  1. 1 2 Goethem, Geert van. The Amsterdam International: The World of the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), 1913–1945 . Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. pp. 14–15, 59
  2. 1 2 Goethem, Geert van. The Amsterdam International: The World of the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), 1913–1945 . Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. p. 15
  3. 1 2 "Pelloutier.net | Towards a Syndicalist International : the 1913 London Congress". Pelloutier.net. Retrieved 2008-11-04.
  4. 1 2 Goethem, Geert van. The Amsterdam International: The World of the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), 1913–1945 . Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. p. 16
  5. 1 2 Goethem, Geert van. The Amsterdam International: The World of the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), 1913–1945 . Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. p. 17
  6. ↑ Goethem, Geert van. The Amsterdam International: The World of the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), 1913–1945 . Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. pp. 17–18
  7. ↑ Goethem, Geert van. The Amsterdam International: The World of the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), 1913–1945 . Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. pp. 1, 21
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