year's election. (1)
An International Viewpoint correspondent, Tom Gustafsson, interviewed Goete
Kilden, a leader of the union opposition, chairman of the section committee at the
Volvo truck factory, and a leading member of the Socialist Party, Swedish section of the Fourth International.
Question. How would you describe the position of the Union Opposition at
Volvo today, after ten years of consistent
Answer. It is hard to express the influence of the Union Opposition in terms of percentages. The vote it gets differs from question to question, and depending on the general political situation.
But let's start with the results of the most recent elections.
In the election for the union-local leadership, the opposition ran one candi.
date, myself. The result was relatively of an intense struggle between the Social of the trade-union organization - the
They hold overwhelming majorities in good. I got 35% of the vote. The vote we got differed from shop to shop. all, there were ballot boxes in 23 shops. We got the majority in two, including the truck factory, where I work.
I ran as a candidate for the Union Opposition. But the Social Democrats in the engineering union have rigged the rules in such a way that I was obliged formally to stand under a party label, as a candidate for the Socialist Party.
The Social Democrats got about 65% of the votes. About 45% of the workforce voted. You have to keep in mind
Today there may be 75 or even a 100 shop stewards who are ready to support the opposition in an active way. They were elected because of their close relations with workers on the shop floor and use their posts as levers to advance union organization.
If you add to this the backing we have gotten in connection with conflicts with the management and on democratic questions in the union as a whole, we can estimate that we have a much broader base of support.
On the other hand, there are a series of problems in the way the union functions that obstruct our work. One example is that the national union has abolished our membership meeting and replaced it with a delegated one. These delegates are bureaucratically chosen, partly appointed. So, in the delegate meetings, we have only about 10% on our side. In the membership meetings we often got majorities on various questions.
And as I said, party labels are imposed on candidates running in union elections.
What sort of impact has the union work at Volvo had outside the plant?
A. The long years of work and the results it has achieved has made the Union Opposition at Volvo a factor in political life, something that people are aware of here in the Gothenburg district but also on the national level. most important industrial city. Volvo is
See "The Welfare State' Fades in Sweden"
Gustafsson in International Viewpoint, No 29, May 2, 1983.
questions in interviews with the local.
here, along with the port, shipyards, and various other industries. Everyone active in the unions or interested in the life of the unions knows about the opposition.
Over the last year, above all in connection with the most recent union elections, there has been a great deal of material about the opposition in the papers and on the local radio. So, a lot of people have had to take a position on what we are doing.
The opposition is inevitably a subject of discussion in union training sessions and conferences. Where there are representatives of the opposition, people seek us out and discuss with us. A lot of people are curious, interested by the attention our union work has gotten.
How have the conditions for your work changed in the past year?
The opposition made a certain comeback this year in the elections by comparison with the previous period.
When the bourgeois coalition was in power, especially toward the end of its time in office, it was more and more aggressively antilabor. But with the Social Democrats in opposition, the Social Democratic leadership in the union had a lot of maneuvering room. The Union Opposition was pushed back to a certain extent.
The abolition of membership meetings also hurt us. It seriously reduced democracy in the union and put another obstacle in the way of the membership having any say in the union. For the Union Opposition, this meant that we no longer had the kind of forum we had before where we could meet as representatives from various shops, work out statements, prepare contributions, and in general prepare proposals for orienting the union's work in a natural way.
The character of the opposition has also changed as a result of the decline of various political organizations that had been active in its work. Maoist and centrist groups coming out of the radicalization of the 1960s and 1970s just simply threw in the towel. Foerbundet Kommunist dissolved outright, nationally. And the powerful Maoist Sveriges Parti wasted away to a mere shadow of its former self. For some years now, it has had no real influence in our union.
So, we made something of a comeback in the recent elections. This reflected the beginning of a new situation, which has a lot to do with the installation of the new Social Democratic government.
This shift reflected the first protests, the first distrust, about the Social Democratic government's policy. The Social
Democratic Party has in fact introduced abruptly a series of measures aimed against the working people - devaluation of the Swedish crown by 16%, increases in indirect taxes, and an informal incomes policy through which the Social Democrats got the unions to make record-low wage demands in the latest contract negotiations.
In this situation, what were the main trade-union and political questions in the union elections this year?
A. After 1976, which was the last "fat the Swedish workers' living standard, the years of declining wages set in, and the thin years have been getting thinner under the Social Democratic government. Since 1976, the living standard of the average Volvo worker has dropped by about 12%.
At the same time, the Volvo concern has been making advances on a number of fronts - in its sales of both automobiles and trucks, of marine motors, motors, and busses. In the context of the general crisis in the automotive industry, Volvo has won new markets and raked in
In the union local elections, we could point out that the estimated profits for this year — about 4 billion crowns -represent 70,000 crowns for every Volvo employee in the country.
The union's national wage demand -and that was generally accepted as the standard - added up to between two and four thousand crowns.
The union-local elections led to an argument, a confrontation, between two the local negotiations, which were to begin in March or April. manded that the local should go after a local wage increment of three crowns
We can say that we got good results from this campaign. The union local leadership was forced to get involved in a real discussion about the workers' standard of living and finally for the sake of sheer self-preservation was obliged to we also fought hard on other fronts, raising an issue that has become sort of the theme song of the opposition - democracy. We demanded regular reports on the state of contract negotiations, the right to vote on the contract before it is signed (which is not the case today, and membership meetings instead of delegated ones, and so forth.
We also attacked examples of the way the leadership misused its mandate, such as the case of junkets to Portugal for members of the union local leadership, which the company paid amounted to money "under the table" from the bosses.
In the elections to the section leadership, a series of specific questions came up, such as reorganization of production and how workers transferred shops were treated by union representa-
A lot of the leaders of the Union
Opposition have political connections, often to the Socialist Party. How did that affect the union-local election campaign, and what is the relationship between the questions and the broader The very fact that I ran both as a spokesman for the Union Opposition and a member of the Socialist Party meant that I had to take up a whole body of renewspapers and radio reporters. Party actively supports the Union Opposition and that a number of the leaders are members of the party. But it is also well known that the Opposition is a broad current. It is open to everyone who is ready to work around the immediate class questions and to transform the union into a democratic and fighting organization socialists, workers who have voted for the Social Democrats but are critical of them,
The biggest newspaper in the area, the Goeteborgs-Post, which is read by Volvo workers, ran a nearly full-page inDemocrat on the theme Two Lines for Trade Unionists." necessary, to give a broader background to the concrete issues and also to put forward broader solutions, such as nationalization of the banks, and socializing the big companies.
The Social Democratic campaign was any discussion of buying power and austerity, but they could not get away with
They concentrated on evocations of the Social Democratic party's long experience and its long history of states-
And they did not fail, of course, to try to play the card of primitive anti-Communism, talking about how untrustworthy, etc. we and other small
Can you describe in more detail the relationship between the Union Opposition and the Socialist Party's work at
The Union Opposition has never been an organization. It has never had any statutes or any elected leadership, as would be standard operating procedure
We have always talked about the Op position as a current. Its activity has allargely on the tradewe have held. has been through these positions that we have been able to take a number of practical initiatives and unite as many workers as possible on the shop floor around the most acute questions of the moment, regardless of party affiliations. It has been a rallying ground for those ready to act.
therefore, that its strength has ebbed and flowed.
At the same time, the Opposition's relationship to various political forces has
I mentioned what happened to
Foerbundet Kommunist and
The official Swedish Communist Party,
Vaensterpartiet
(Vpk) was originally involved in the op.
position work. But it later fell way from it. Today, its very limited forces at Volvo and other workplaces in Gothenburg oppose the Opposition and are pursuing a policy of polite pressure on the Social
Democratic union local leadership.
At the same time, the position of the
Socialist Party has grown stronger in the
Goete Kilden (DR)
The fact that the Opposition's activity expands in certain periods and then may contract is understandable. Such a broad current obviously ebbs and flows depending on the general political conditions that affect it. Where there is an ebb, the political currents play a bigger direct role in maintaining the level of activity. And when there is a period of upturn, there is a broader basis.
We saw this in the most recent period. In the truck factory at Volvo, the upturn has led to the involvement of the older generation of workers, forty to fifty year olds, in the activity of the Opposition. This is an important development. The majority are politically unaffiliated, although most of them have voted for the Social Democrats in various elections.
The members and close sympathizers of the Socialist Party are organized in a separate trade-union club at Volvo as in a number of other workplaces in the country. This is the traditional form of party organization within the Swedish workers movement, there is nothing new or special about it.
You could say that the union club is our political fraction in the union and in the workplace. It coordinates and organizes the party's campaigns and trains the membership through meetings and discussion groups as well as running a number of social activities. 24
The last point should be stressed. Most of the members of the union club -and the same goes for the Union Opposition - have families. thing we have to take account of when we plan our activity, when we determine its content, forms, and rhythm. important both for getting workers to join the union club and for holding them.
So, the union club also runs film showings and trips to the country.
family parties with dancing and international music groups, with food
Every year we run a summer camp for families, with canoeing, political discussions, and so forth. In a nutshell we weld politics to everyday life.
It was only when we managed to broaden our activity in this way and to make polities a natural and integral part of our coworkers' lives and work that we were first able to begin to recruit "ordinary Volvo workers." We have continued this work so successfully that today our union club at Volvo has about fifty members.
Q. What conclusions have you and the Socialist Party as a whole drawn from your work at Volvo and in other workplaces across the country in opposing a Social Democratic leadership that still has nearly total control of the union movement on the national scale?
The most important thing is that we never flutter around like butterflies.
We have seen a lot of other groups and "pass through" the factory.
They come in from the outside, speak at meetings, make their proposals, sell their papers, pass out their leaflets, and then disappear, perhaps as fast as they appeared in the first place. They pop up like
"jack-in-the-boxes." You can never gain any real confidence that way.
We have operated in a completely different way. The most important thing is that we are in Volvo to stay.
there to earn our living, to get the best possible working conditions for ourselves and others, and to win the majority of the workers for a new trade-union orientation, for a socialist program, to build a new force in the Swedish workers movement. We can only do that by sustained activity over many, many years, rounded activity as individuals and as a group.
Even if there are concrete reasons why one or another individual has to leave or change jobs, that is never something we take for granted. Every such case weak.
ens the work and can only be regarded as an unavoidable evil.
We strive to win confidence on all levels, on the basis of being good work.
mates, to get a hearing and gain understanding for our socialist ideas.
When we started our work at Volvo we often got involved in solidarity paigns, for example in support of Viet-
But we were not able to win the support or the interest we should have.
A lot of what we said did not get a proper hearing because the great majority of workers had a natural skepticism about a new party in the workplace. They did not know if they could really count on us, if we would stay there through thick and thin.
Today we can draw a balance sheet. First, we have accomplished our task, assumed our responsibility for our fel low workers and for the union (often in
"day-to-day" questions such as insurance, transfers, forth), so that we could make real pro-
Then we showed that we could deal with these questions, with the problems facing us as shop stewards and members of the union leadership, that we could handle negotiations with the company, that we could gain something in the negotiations. We then also got more of a hearing for what we were saying in other areas. Then our fellow workers took more time to read what we were saying on broader political questions, to read our national newspaper and our factory sheet, to take part in our party meetings. It was not always that they agreed altogether but that at least they saw that what we were saying concerned them and their future.
Let's compare the effects of our international solidarity five, six, or seven years ago. Take solidarity with El Salvador for example.
On our initiative, and without any big opposition from any quarter, the union local leadership invited Gabriel Lara, the
FDR/FMLN's representative in Sweden, to a delegate meeting. platform to appeal for solidarity with the struggle in El Salvador. He had an hour to speak. And then the meeting decided to conduct an extended collection through the Volvo plant and that all the money would be turned over to the FDR/FMLN.
This was not only important for the Volvo workers. It is important for solother workplaces. plants, people can point to the Volvo ex-
This initiative would not have had this effect if we had not gained real confidence, a well-established position in the
Over the last ten years, there has been a veritable barrage of leaflets and newspapers aimed at Volvo. In certain periods of intensive activity we have put out two factory sheets a week, as members of the Opposition and as party members. has been very energetic activity. And it was very important to break the Social Democrat's monopoly on information.
In the section where I work, we can see that 90% of the workers read the leaflets we produce and which we distribute both inside and outside the factory. Even though people read what we print with varying degrees of attention and criticism, we can see that there is a completely different climate than when we started
We are no longer seen as just individuals, responsible for the good we do or the mistakes we make. ganized, collective work, and we have a presence in as many heavy production sections as possible.
Our trade-union opposition work has always had a conscious orientation of avoiding sectarianism. We have fought to defeat proposal after proposal, often coming from other political currents, would have transformed the position into a kind of ersatz party, with discipline and its own newspaper for political debate and other
We have argued that the Opposition would lose its force if it operated like
We have striven to maintain broad, open current, that could draw in everyone ready to get involved in developing an active, fighting orientation for the union, in fighting the management and a capitulationist and class-collaborationist union leadership.
Q. What have been the dividing lines between this line of developing opposition work and what the other political currents stand for?
A. We have always stressed the central role of trade-unions in Swedish polities, their central role in the Social
Democracy's control of the Swedish
Our first consideration has always the crucial importance in
Swedish union movement of the elected officers closest to the ranks, such as shop stewards, safety officers, and education officers, and - where there is sufficient support from below, positions in the leading bodies. Such positions are essential as underpinnings for our work as a means for organizing.
Let's compare this attitude with that of another political organization, the Kommunistiska Partiet, Marxist-Leninisterna (revolutionaererna). This is a unique organization in Western Europe. It has about a thousand members in the Gothenburg area. It has Maoist origins but today can be better characterized as a centrist organization.
The KPML(r) has always had a sectarian orientation in trade-union work. refuses to take positions of responsibility, and follows a generally propagandist-
Despite its original strength, which was based mainly in the broad Vietnam movement, and despite a conscious and consistent orientation of political work in
KPML(r) has in general failed in its industrial work, been isolated.
Its predecessor KPML(r).
Q. Volvo is a multinational company, which has an important part of its opera-
What has this meant for the work of the Union Opposition in solidarity with Volvo workers elsewhere?
We have regularly pushed solidarity questions, such as Vietnam and Salvador, but also questions directly related to Volvo's international operations.
We did this for example with a campaign to break the isolation of the union in Peru. We also gave impetus to a solidarity strike in support of Belgian Volvo
Of course, we have problems overcoming the obstacles to direct contact with other groups of workers, who are often far away.
The actions we have carried out have been an encouragement to further activity along these lines. It is easy to see today what belonging to an international organization such as the Fourth International can mean, especially if it succeeds in increasing its membership, its number of industrial workers, and its trade-union and political influence.
We have a broad basis here for taking part in, and backing up, such international initiatives as the campaign for a shorter workweek - 35-hour week with no pay cut (or a six-hour day, which is the way this demand has been popularized in Sweden). Our work in the Swedish automotive industry through the union oppositions and the party clubs at Volvo in various parts of the country and through our comrades at SAAB and at other automotive and airplane plants in Sweden can be used as a lever for reinforcing the international campaign on this
Q. Given the place that Volvo holds in Swedish industry and in movement, trade-union and political work at Volvo/Gothenburg has broader implications. The issues that you raise and push, and the results you get, have a clear national dimension. How can the party's work at Volvo be used as a lever for building the party in general?
It's obvious that there is a direct connection between the Volvo work and the role that we can play with respect to issues at the municipal and even national
The work we are carrying on in Volvo has its natural extension in the campaigns the party is conducting in the Gothenburg region or nationally.
We, as well as our fellow workers, are being hard hit by cuts in real wages, cutbacks, and unemployment. Questions such as child care, educational the media, environment, leisure-time possibilities all concern us.
For us, there are two things that knit together our activity as workers, rentpayers, and political activists. One is the programmatic answer we are fighting for in all areas of society. The other is our party's work as a representative of the interests of the working class in all those areas.
With our base at Volvo and in collaboration with activists in other places, we can confront the politicians in the city governments, the provincial governments, and the national government. With the base we have, we can demand that the Social Democratic Workers Party give an accounting for the election promises it made before the 1982 elections, and which it has done so little to keep.
We can demand that these election promises be fulfilled, and build broad united actions to force through measures that the Social Democrat leadership has reneged on. In this mass work, our party is winning a place. Through this work we can win the confidence that will make people more and more ready to listen to our overall political positions. Through it we will lay the foundations of a new socialist force in the Swedish workers movement.
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