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International
Labor Solidarity
By Art Mink
The last few days have seen extraordinary struggles taking
place in Korea
and in France.
Those struggles have also illustrated the need for the trade
union movement to have its own independent media. Let me explain what I mean.
France saw a huge wave of strikes this week.
This gigantic struggle is
the long-awaited counter-attack by
unions
to a right-wing government with an explicitly anti-union agenda.
I've been able to follow the coverage a bit in the British
media, and was not surprised to hear a discussion
yesterday on the radio about whether French President Nicolas Sarkozy would be
"tough
enough" to resist
the unions. As one reporter put it, would he be as strong a leader as Margaret
Thatcher
was back in the 1980s?
That's an extreme example, but the more common coverage has
focussed entirely on the difficulties faced
by commuters, with photos illustrating empty Metro stations in Paris to make the
point.
In other words, the news
story for most mainstream media has been about Sarkozy's toughness and the
suffering of commuters --
and not about the actual workers on strike and what they are calling for.
Korea this week provided us with what I think was an even more
extraordinary example of how mainstream
media covers labor disputes. Every
November, tens of thousands of trade unionists rally in the capital, Seoul. I
know because I was there ten years ago. This year's national workers' rally was
used by Korean unions to focus attention on the
free trade agreement between Korea and the USA, and thousands of farmers and
students joined in
the protest.
According to one eyewitness account, their protest was blocked
by some 25,000 baton-wielding riot police,
who proceeded to attack them with water cannon in an attempt to disperse the
demonstration.
The main foreign news
agencies such as Reuters and AFP reported this as an "anti-FTA"
protest, without
mentioning that it was
actually an annual trade union event. Normally reliable news sources like the
BBC
didn't even bother to
report the event at all. As a friend of mine in Paris put it, local coverage in
France of
the Korean rally
described it as "a bunch of rebellious farmers going wild about a trade
agreement with
the
USA which they mistakenly believe will deprive them of income."
What we have here are gigantic protests by national trade
unions in two of the world's most important industrialized
countries, which are either being under-reported or mis-reported. Nothing
could better illustrate the need for unions to have their own media -- including
great websites,
updated frequently -- and
in particular the need for a site like LabourStart.
Please spread the word in your union and make sure that your
fellow workers know about
http://www.labourstart.org/.
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