How Southern Autoworkers Can Reverse Decades of Job Quality Decline

BY MARC BAYARD - DEV WAKELEY

MAY 3, 2024

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Photo by Victor Sutty

The United Auto Workers recently scored the largest union victory in decades in the South. Their success at a Tennessee Volkswagen plant could be a turning point for labor in a region long known for governmental hostility to unions.

The next test will be a UAW election scheduled for the week of May 13 at a Mercedes-Benz factory in Alabama, a state that has attracted so much auto investment it has earned the nickname “the Detroit of the South.”

If the roughly 5,000 Mercedes workers vote to unionize, the ripple effects could empower workers nationwide.

For decades, Southern states have pursued “low-road” development strategies, luring investors with massive public subsidies and repressive labor policies. This has pitted workers across the country against each other, undercutting everyone’s ability to secure fair compensation.

Alabama has spent $1.6 billion to woo Mercedes, along with Toyota, Hyundai, and Honda. All these foreign companies’ operations in the South are non-union, in contrast to the unionized Big Three of Ford, GM, and Stellantis.

This foreign investment has created thousands of Alabama jobs — but with weak worker protections, the state remains one of the nation’s poorest. And while these companies have enjoyed rising corporate profits, they have left workers behind.

An in-depth report by the nonprofit group Alabama Arise found that inflation-adjusted average pay for the state’s autoworkers has dropped by 11 percent over the past 20 years to $64,682. Meanwhile, CEO pay stands at $13.9 million at Mercedes and $6.9 million at Toyota.

The foreign-owned firms’ payrolls also reflect Alabama’s long history of racial discrimination, with Black and Latino workers earning substantially less than their white counterparts. By contrast, the Economic Policy Institute has found that union workers make 10.1 percent more on average than non-union workers.

The benefits are even greater for workers of color. Unionized Black workers make 13.1 percent more than non-union Black workers in comparable jobs — and Latino union members make 18.8 percent more than non-union Latino workers.

Equitable pay practices boost local economies by putting more money in workers’ pockets for groceries, housing, and other goods and services from local businesses. And that’s good for families of every color.

But Alabama Governor Kay Ivey doesn’t see things that way. Before the UAW vote in Tennessee, she joined GOP governors from Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas to discourage VW workers from voting yes with unfounded threats of mass layoffs.

When 73 percent of those autoworkers voted for the UAW, it was a strong rebuke of the region’s low-road, anti-worker model. So corporate lobbyists in the region have enlisted state legislators and cabinet officials in a sustained campaign to blunt organizing momentum.

How will the election turn out in Alabama?

A new poll indicates that 52 percent of residents in this deep-red state support the autoworkers’ union drive, while just 21 percent are opposed. This echoes a 2022 poll commissioned by the Institute for Policy Studies in Jefferson County, Alabama, where workers were attempting to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer. That survey showed nearly two-thirds support.

While the Alabama Amazon campaign fell short in the face of aggressive anti-union tactics, increased public approval of unions is a testament to many years of community and labor organizing.

The fact that a large majority of workers at the Mercedes-Benz plant signed petitions earlier this year in support of the election is encouraging. We need a New South economic structure based on fairness and equity. Organized labor is an essential partner in that mission.

Marc Bayard directs the Black Worker Initiative at the Institute for Policy Studies. Dev Wakeley is Alabama Arise’s worker policy advocate.

In Relay Race to Organize the South,

Volkswagen Workers Pass the Baton to

Mercedes Workers

By Luis Feliz León

May 1, 2024

Source: Labor Notes


Mercedes-Benz workers in Alabama are slated to vote in May on whether to join the United Auto Workers. Photo: UA


Michael Göbel, president and CEO of Mercedes-Benz U.S. International, stepped down from his post yesterday, according to a video message that workers were shown.

Göbel had groused in an April captive-audience meeting about a worker’s claim that Mercedes had come for the “Alabama discount”: low wages. His departure is another win for Mercedes-Benz workers, who already scored pay bumps and an end to wage tiers—and they haven’t even voted on the union yet.

The company and Alabama politicians are ramping up their anti-union campaign as an election draws near. The 5,200 Mercedes workers at a factory complex and electric battery plant outside Tuscaloosa will vote May 13-16 on whether to join the United Auto Workers, with a vote count May 17.

They’re following close on the heels of Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, who notched a historic victory April 19—the first auto plant election win for the UAW in the South since the 1940s.

The VW vote was a blowout: 2,628 yes to 985 no, with 84 percent turnout. The National Labor Relations Board certified the results April 30, meaning VW is legally required to begin bargaining with the union.

BOSSES WAKE UP

Alabama Governor Kay Ivey and the Business Council of Alabama have been vociferous in their opposition to the UAW’s new drives. Ivey said that unions would attack “the Alabama model for economic success.”

The BCA expresses the will of the state’s most powerful corporations, including Alabama’s biggest utility company, health care provider, and bank, according to an analysis by Derek Seidman for Truthout.

Meanwhile auto workers at Hyundai in Montgomery have signed up 30 percent of their 4,000 co-workers in another ambitious drive to unionize.

“Gov. Ivey has been on the phone with both the leaders of Mercedes and Hyundai, and has said, ‘If there are issues, you need to fix this,’” said Alabama Commerce Secretary Ellen McNair last week on a TV talk show.

She said the union drives have “gotten the attention of all manufacturers across all states. It really is a wakeup to listen to your employees.”

FIGHT TO GATES OF HELL

If the Alabama workers vote yes, workers in South Carolina might stand up next: at Mercedes in Charleston, Volvo in Ridgeville, and BMW in Greer.

The 1,600 workers at that Mercedes plant produce Sprinter vans. At Volvo, 1,500 build S60 sedans and luxury SUVs, including the fully electric Volvo EX90. Volvo is owned by the Chinese multinational automotive company Geely, but it is still run by the Swedes.

The Greer plant is the largest BMW factory in the world, employing 11,000 workers. Workers there assemble the BMW X series and XM SUVs, vehicles, and coupes.

South Carolina also hosts numerous European companies, such as Michelin, which supplies BMW with tires, BASF, a supplier of emissions control technologies, and the world’s largest auto supplier, Bosch, which makes fuel injection systems.

The UAW will face a tough fight in the state, where only 1.7 percent of working people are union members. South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster said in January, referencing a dispute with dock workers, that he would “fight” unions “to the gates of hell.”

MOMENTUM FROM BIG 3 STRIKES

The UAW is riding a wave of momentum after winning landmark contracts at the Big 3 automakers last year. Workers in the South especially paid attention to these lucrative gains.

“We could see what other auto workers were making compared to what we were making,” said Yolanda Peoples, a member of the organizing committee on the Volkswagen engine assembly line.

Production workers at VW were starting at $23 per hour and topping out just above $32, compared to the $43 that UAW production workers at Ford’s nearby Spring Hill assembly plant will make by 2028 under the new contract.

In a vain attempt to head off a union drive, Volkswagen boosted wages 11 percent to match the immediate raise UAW members received at Ford. Peoples saw her pay jump from $29 to $32.

The UAW spent $152 million on strike benefits for workers in 2023, compared to the $116 million the entire labor movement spent in 2022, according to union researcher Chris Bohner.

But even in the Stand-Up Strike, the UAW didn’t win everything on its list of demands. Mercedes is leaning into the union’s failure to win pensions. “Is the UAW promising you a pension if you vote for them? They made the same promise at the Big 3 and then failed to deliver,” reads a flyer the company is distributing across the plant.

DENSITY IS DESTINY

In a Facebook Live video on April 23, UAW President Shawn Fain described the union’s dues investment in organizing the South as part of its strategy to keep building power to win those demands next time.

“This ain’t charity; this is power,” he said. “Density is destiny. In 2028, we’re going back to the table with Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis. If we want the leverage to win back our pensions and retirement health care, we need to organize the unorganized.”

“Their strategy has been to frame the organizing campaign as over a whole industry, not just against individual companies,” said labor organizer and writer Dave Kamper. “This allows them, for example, to have members who work for one automaker go campaign for workers at another company, and their messaging doesn’t try to pit workers from one company against others. It truly is a working-class strategy, appealing to class solidarity over company loyalty.”

The big nonunion automakers are strategic targets for the union. But crucial to the success at VW and the momentum of the other drives so far is that they’re also what organizers call “hot shops”—that is, workers are enthusiastic to organize.

“A top-down campaign can’t conjure the militant desire for a union out of nothing,” said Richard Yeselson, a writer about labor and a former union campaign strategist. This is where he has seen many other “strategic” union drives fall flat. Success “requires a fighting workforce to attract a union campaign—not a union campaign to contrive a fighting workforce.”

MASSIVE ORGANIZING COMMITTEES

At VW, “we didn’t think things would happen so fast,” said worker Victor Vaughn.

The organizing committee recruited 300 co-workers as election captains. “We have well over 90 percent coverage within the plant, every position, every line,” Vaughn said. “At that point we knew, ‘Yes, we’re where we need to be.’”

The workers got support from UAW organizers from the West Coast’s Region 6 in building a highly representative and well-trained committee. The organizers emphasized recruiting a broad range of leaders. They made it easier for workers to get involved—simply by agreeing to speak to their co-workers, sign a public “vote yes” petition with their faces on it, and wear union gear in the plant.

The volunteer organizing committee ran its own meetings, solidifying members’ leadership and confidence. As in the Mercedes campaign, the organizers also shared real-time data as cards came in, so the committee could see where there was support and where there were holes.

Many of the UAW staff organizers came from higher education—a sector where grad workers have recently been unionizing in large numbers, in worker-led campaigns.

The worker-led approach made it tougher for management to convincingly portray the union as an outside “third party.”

PUBLIC CAMPAIGN FROM DAY ONE

Unlike in previous drives, workers boldly showed their union support from day one.

“In 2019, you could have your union flyers, but you had to be hush-hush,” said Renee Berry, a logistics worker on the organizing committee who has worked at the plant for 14 years. “We had to hide flyers in our bag. We couldn’t lay them on the table.”

Both anti-union and pro-union workers had offices in the plant in 2019. “People were too scared to go over to the union office,” said Berry. If management caught her answering a worker’s question about the union on the floor, she was hauled in to HR.

Rather than challenge this culture of fear, UAW organizers back then retreated from direct confrontation. “The people that were pushing for the UAW, it was like we were part of a secret society,” said Peoples. “We didn’t want to get in any trouble with HR because we said the word union. So it was real hard for us to get the word around to our co-workers.”

In the winning drive this year, workers on the volunteer organizing committee were highly visible and confrontational when necessary. “We have VOCs that are really out front passing out handbills,” said Vaughn. “We’re right in the face of everybody—not afraid of anything that’s gonna come down the pike.”

Berry said workers had gotten so fed up they would openly defy management. “They don’t care, to the point that they are tired of being intimidated,” she said. “They are either going to fire me or write me up. You have to stand for something, or you’ll fall for anything. You’ve got to say, ‘I gotta keep on going, no matter whatever happens.’”

US VS. THE BILLIONAIRES

While politicians have lined up to oppose the union drives, the organizing committees at VW and Mercedes have striven to make the choice not about Democrats vs. Republicans, but about the working class vs. the billionaires.This idea resonates; workers have good reason to be angry.

“People for the most part are smartening up. And they’re not paying attention to the political crap,” said VW worker Angel Gomez. “The politicians know nothing about blue-collar work. They are born with a silver spoon in their mouths.” Take Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, heir to a family construction business with annual revenues of $220 million in 2019 when he became governor.

“We have a Democrat in the U.S House of Representatives out of Birmingham named Terri Sewell,” said Jeremy Kimbrell, a measurement machine operator at Mercedes. “She’s a corporate Democrat. She will give lip service to workers and the unions, but when it comes down to it, man, she’s bought and paid for by businesses.”

“For centuries, the Southern economy has been a rigged game—a scheme designed to enrich a select few at the expense of the many,” said Fain, rallying with Daimler Truck workers in North Carolina ahead of their April 25 contract expiration.

The wealthy and powerful have “dominated the state governments and written laws to protect their own interest,” Fain said. “They think of the world as divided between those who make the rules and those who are ruled… But now they sense that things are changing.”

On the brink of a strike, the union and Daimler reached a tentative deal, which workers will be voting on. The deal ends wage tiers, boosts wages 25 percent over four years, and adds a cost-of-living adjustment and, for the first time, profit-sharing.

“We set an example for the entire South,” North Carolina UAW Local 3520 President Corey Hill told Reuters. “I hope Mercedes in Tuscaloosa was paying attention to what we’re doing,”

A BOLD APPROACH

If workers have gotten bold on the shop floor, the UAW took the same principle to the national stage when it vowed to organize 150,000 non-union auto workers, especially in the South.

“They didn’t say, ‘Let’s start at one or two plants and see if we can make this work,’” Kamper said. “They targeted All The Plants, all at once, and have committed serious resources to that work. The willingness to invest in the campaign, to brag about investing $40 million, represents a brashness we don’t see enough of.”

“In order to launch these campaigns and move so quickly, the leadership had to relinquish some control and trust workers,” said Stephanie Luce, an author and professor of labor studies at the City University of New York. It goes to show: “We need leadership, investment, risk-taking, and creativity—from the top, and from the rank and file.”

Freedom Under Capitalism Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be

(RIGHT WING)Libertarians argue that capitalism is superior to socialism because in capitalism anyone is free to do anything — including start a worker cooperative. In truth, capitalism constrains our options, while socialism can liberate us to live as we please.

By Ben Burgis

May 1, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.



Oshawa is a small Canadian city on the shoreline of Lake Ontario. It was also the hometown of the late left-wing Canadian politician Ed Broadbent, who would go on to become the national chairman of the New Democratic Party, or NDP.

In Broadbent’s youth, a major employer in Oshawa was a glass manufacturer called Duplate, Ltd. When the Duplate plant closed in the 1960s, Broadbent was disturbed. Several decades later, in his book Seeking Social Democracy: Seven Decades in the Fight for Equality, Broadbent recalled the way the incident influenced his thinking about workers’ rights:

As I recall, there were about 300 workers directly affected by the management’s decision to relocate their Oshawa plant to another part of the province — and when you included their family members and the impact on neighbouring companies, the number of people actually affected by the closure was around 1200 in total. . . . So here you had hundreds of workers, some of whom had invested 30 or 40 years of their lives in Duplate, being profoundly affected by a decision they had played absolutely no part in — and a profitable company that packed up and moved just to make higher profits. . . . Their human dignity was denied outright.

This kind of story is precisely what leads many of us to conclude that capitalism is a profoundly unjust system. Broadbent himself was a practical politician focused on devising progressive reforms within the existing system. But while more immediate reforms like Broadbent’s are good and important, our long-term horizons shouldn’t stop there.

Capitalism is a system under which the means of production can be bought and sold by private individuals, and anyone who can’t afford to start a business of their own has to submit themselves to the domination of those who can if they want to make a living. Workers spend eight out of every sixteen waking hours most days of the week in workplaces that are run like totalitarian dictatorships — and it’s only eight hours, and only most days of the week, because of victories won over generations of workers’ struggles.

If the comparison to totalitarian dictatorships seems hyperbolic, it shouldn’t. In fact, capitalists often regulate far more intimate aspects of workers’ behavior — especially for relatively “unskilled” workers without much bargaining power — than do the laws of a typical totalitarian dictatorship. Employers frequently tell workers, for example, when they have to smile, when they’re allowed to talk to each other, and when they’re allowed to go to the bathroom.

For many libertarians, none of this adds up to a legitimate complaint about capitalism or a reason to want to violate the property rights of big capitalists like Jeff Bezos — by, for example, nationalizing their businesses and putting them under the management of the workers themselves, representatives of the broader community, or some combination of the two. They argue instead that capitalism is already, in the words of the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick, a “framework of utopias.”

In his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Nozick argues that the laissez-faire version of capitalism is already the best kind of utopia — a “meta-utopia.” Want a socialist utopia where workers control their own workplaces? No problem, he says. The rules of even a radically deregulated form of capitalism already let you start one up!Libertarian philosopher Jason Brennan sums up Nozick’s point in his book Why Not Capitalism? this way:


There is an essential asymmetry in the capitalist and the socialist visions of utopia. Capitalists allow socialism, but socialists forbid capitalism.

Libertarians like Nozick think that this permissiveness is what makes capitalism better. Are they right?

A Framework of Utopias

When Nozick lays out this argument in the final chapter of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, he starts from the highly reasonable premise that “people are different.” Therefore no detailed prescription for how people should individually and collectively live their lives will provide the best kind of life for everyone.

That’s true. Different people have wildly varying attitudes toward religion, monogamy, work, play, and damn near everything else, and a good society should allow for wide-ranging pluralism about what people think is the best life and how they want to pursue it. Democratic socialists agree.

Nozick is also right that some utopian writers, such as St Thomas Moore or various pre-Marxist “utopian socialists,” erred in painting pictures of life in the future that didn’t allow for this kind of desirable pluralism. A good society should have room for single-family houses inhabited by big Catholic families who all get up together to go to early-morning mass and polyamorous Wiccan compounds.

But what exactly follows from this about workplaces and the distribution of economic resources?

In a short section of an earlier chapter (“Workers’ Control”), Nozick says that for socialists whose objection to capitalism is that workers have to follow the orders of bosses who aren’t democratically accountable to them, “an easy way to give workers access to the means of production” is for groups of workers to simply “buy machinery, rent space, and so on, just as a private entrepreneur does.” He suggests various means by which capital could be secured, such as through convincing unions to invest their pension funds.

If these businesses were as profitable or more profitable than traditional firms, he suggests, it should be no problem to secure such funding or even funding from more traditional private investors. If they were less profitable, perhaps socially conscious consumers could be induced to support them for political reasons. And if they don’t, Nozick thinks, the failure of a worker-owned sector to flourish can’t be a symptom of any sort of injustice.

Insinuating that this hasn’t happened because workers don’t actually want to democratically control their workplaces, Nozick muses that it’s “illuminating to consider why unions don’t start new businesses, and why workers don’t pool their resources to do so.”

Real Cooperatives and Collective Action Problems

We don’t have to speculate a priori to address the question of worker cooperatives. There are many thousands of them all over the world, and extensive research has been conducted on them. The worker-owned Mondragon Corporation, for example, was founded decades before Nozick wrote those lines, and today it’s the biggest business in the Basque region of Spain. So it’s very far from true that no groups of workers have had this idea.

But the germ of truth in Nozick’s speculation is that, in every actually existing capitalist economy, the worker-cooperative sector is microscopic. Mondragon’s eighty thousand worker-owners make it an imposing behemoth by the standards of other worker co-ops. Still, it’s a rounding error next to the tens of millions of Spaniards employed by traditional capitalist firms.

Many libertarians take this as evidence that workers simply don’t care about having a say in what goes on in their workplaces. If they did, they’d be leaving their current employers in droves to start new cooperatives or join old ones. The libertarian economist Gene Epstein, for example, made great hay of this argument in a series of debates he did with Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara, Marxist economist Richard Wolff, and me.

But it’s a strange argument in many ways. For starters, it’s not obvious that the path to establishing a cooperative economy should run through worker co-ops outcompeting capitalist firms. Instead, mechanisms like union organizing at the workplace and building socialist political parties can accomplish socialist objectives much more effectively by democratically conquering political power. These are arguably far smarter strategies for achieving socialist ends than trying to outcompete capitalists.

To grasp this point, consider that the wages of low-wage workers are more likely to be raised by putting a proposition on the ballot in your state to raise the minimum wage than by exhorting people to only buy from companies that pay their lowest-paid workers a good wage, even though voters and consumers are the same people. The former strategy often succeeds, even in red states. The latter has never succeeded and never will.

One of the things libertarians who push these arguments choose to ignore is the existence of collective action problems, especially under capitalism. There are often situations where Option A would benefit everyone in a group if they all opted for it, but where the dynamics of the situation will make it unlikely for everyone to do so individually, and so it might be in the best individual interests of every member of the group to go with Option B instead. A classic example is the Prisoners’ Dilemma, described here.

Our economic lives are governed by capitalist rules that allow for concentrated individual power. Consequently, anyone whose motive for starting a co-op would simply be to have a better life than they would have as an employee has every incentive to shoot the moon and try to become an employer. The infant mortality rate for businesses of all kinds is extremely high, and getting a new enterprise off the ground — whether collectively owned or otherwise — takes an enormous amount of work. Why all do that on the slim hope of having a somewhat better position at a worker co-op instead of holding out for the — perhaps even slimmer, but also much more enticing — hope of having a much better life by building a miniature economic kingdom where you get to be the king?

These problems alone mean that socialist ideologues are much more likely than workers primarily motivated by their own individual interests to be involved in attempts to start co-ops. And socialist ideologues are likely to make the entirely reasonable calculation that their time and effort would have more impact on the overall shape of society if they spent it doing things like organizing unions at large employers, or campaigning for socialist candidates, rather than working ten hours a day to get some local cooperative coffee shop up and running.

Added to these already considerable obstacles, though, there’s a problem with financing. Worker co-ops are by their nature typically going to be started by groups of people with relatively limited means. They can’t reward investors with ongoing ownership shares without, to whatever extent they do this, losing their character as worker co-ops. And groups of working-class people are often a risky bet for loan officers working for banks. There are of course those union pension funds Nozick calls our attention to, but even if they didn’t have a responsibility to look out primarily for good investments for their members’ retirements rather than prioritizing ideological goals, Nozick presumably wasn’t foolish enough to think union pension funds investing in co-ops would be sufficient to create an economy dominated by co-ops.

Worse yet, if you could somehow get an economy where worker-owned firms dominated (but the ground rules of capitalist markets were unchanged), the result wouldn’t automatically be a stable form of market socialism. Even if you asked a magical genie to instantaneously restructure every existing firm to put it under the collective ownership and democratic control of its workforce, without changing anything else about the structure of the economy, the result would be an arrangement that market forces would eventually course-correct back into something recognizable as regular old capitalism.

Whether capitalist or worker-owned, firms inevitably go out of business, and the people who once worked there need new jobs. Co-ops looking to expand operations and increase the income of existing members have an incentive to hire new workers as regular employees rather than co-owners, and people who have been out of work for a while have an incentive to accept this reduced status. And whole co-ops would often be incentivized to move toward reverting to regular capitalist firms by selling ownership stakes to other, more successful co-ops or particularly successful individuals.

This doesn’t mean a democratic form of socialism where workers’ control is the norm isn’t possible or superior. But it does mean that, to realize that vision, we need to use the state to scrap the rules of the capitalist market, where ownership of the means of production is up for sale to the highest bidder, and build new socialist institutions instead.

Lots of socialists have written about what that might look like. Sunkara, for example, lays out how such institutions might work in the first chapter of his book The Socialist Manifesto (“A Day in the Life of a Socialist Citizen”). Socialist economist Mike Beggs dug into the technical details in an article last year for Jacobin. And the three of us are working on a book about it (The Blueprint) for Verso.
The Deeper Problem

When people ask why socialists, if they want workers’ control, don’t just start worker-owned firms — as Epstein likes to say in debates, his voice dripping with derision, if that’s what you want, “go for it” — they’re really saying two things. And the superficial plausibility of their argument comes from the ambiguity.

Their first argument is that if people really wanted workplace democracy, they’d have long ago gotten it by starting worker co-ops and outcompeting capitalists within the rules of regular capitalist markets. But that makes no more sense than saying that if voters in a state that’s passed a ballot measure to raise the minimum wage really wanted it, they’d achieve it in libertarian-approved ways by only buying products from firms that paid high wages.

Their second argument is that starting worker-owned firms within capitalism and trying to outcompete capitalism is the only morally legitimate method of achieving workplace democracy. But why should we believe that?

You can say it’s morally wrong because people are entitled to whatever they can get in a free market, but as an argument against socialism that just begs the question. Socialists believe that what everyone is morally entitled to is a roughly equal share of society’s resources and a say in decisions that profoundly impact their lives.

If you still don’t see why “why don’t you just outcompete capitalists within capitalist markets” is a silly question, think about why abolitionists didn’t just buy up all the slaves and free them, or why small-r republicans in the eighteenth century didn’t just put all their efforts into convincing the heir to the throne to voluntarily give more power to parliament.

Part of the answer is that these wouldn’t have been very effective strategies. But another part of the answer is that early modern republicans didn’t just want more power for parliaments. They disputed kings’ right to rule. Abolitionists didn’t just want more people to be free. They rejected slave owners’ property rights. And socialists don’t just want workers to have power. We fundamentally object to the idea that the means of production should be for sale to whoever can afford them — and thus the power to fundamentally impact the lives of many other people, as in the decision to move the factory from Oshawa that so disturbed a young Ed Broadbent.

Nozick says that while it’s easy to see how worker-owned factories could appear under capitalism, it’s harder to see how “private enterprise” could get a toehold in a “state system” of democratic socialism. But this shouldn’t be hard for him to see. It should be easy. All it would take is convincing most voters to support privatizing a factory or two. It’s illuminating to wonder why Nozick found that prospect so terrifying.
Socialism Is the Real Framework for Utopias

Again, it’s absolutely true that people are different, and the best kind of life for one person isn’t the best kind of life for another. But that doesn’t mean that we need to privatize some large businesses for the sake of people who have a fetish for being told what to do by an oligarch.

Instead, to create a society with the most pluralism possible along the most dimensions possible in practice, we need to meet everyone’s material needs and give everyone a meaningful say over what happens in their workplaces and how revenue is distributed. This would enhance everyone’s practical capacity to live whatever kind of life they want.

It’s all well and good to say that people can live in single-family houses with white picket fences and take their ten children to mass with them every morning or they can live in polyamorous communes. But in a society where people are overworked, overstressed, and have trouble making rent in their cramped apartments — and having ten children is about as practical a possibility for them as buying their own factory — the fact that they aren’t legally prohibited from pursuing any of these visions of a good life doesn’t add up to a much of a framework for utopias.

Libertarianism and socialism both evolved historically from Enlightenment liberalism. The idea that pluralism is desirable and it’s good to let people experiment with whatever forms of life they’d like is in both philosophies’ DNA. The difference is that socialists are realistic enough to know what every graduate student in the sciences knows: that being given permission to run an experiment isn’t worth much if their laboratory isn’t funded.

May Day 2024: There’s No Democracy Without Trade Unions

 By Luc  Triangle

May 2, 2024

Source: Equal Times


Demonstrators take part in an International Workers’ Day rally in Surabaya, Indonesia on 1 May 2023. (Juni Kriswanto/AFP)


This year, in what has been dubbed a historical ‘super election year’, around four billion people will vote in more than 40 countries. But, if we look at the state of democracy around the world, and particularly trade union rights, we see that it is seriously ill and needs care. The world’s largest social movement is the global trade union movement, we are a fundamental part of good democratic systems, and we have the democratic values and experience to stand up ‘For Democracy’.

The deterioration of democracy is clear. It is contracting in every region of the world. Every year since 2018 more countries are experiencing net declines in democratic processes than improvements, according to the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance’s 2023 Global State of Democracy report.

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index gave the world a total score of 5.22 in 2023, down from 5.29 in 2022, as war and conflict worsen existing, negative, anti-democratic trends. It found that while 45.5 per cent of the world’s population live in a democracy of some sort, only 7.8 per cent of people, or fewer than one in ten, live in a “full democracy”, and 39.4 per cent live under authoritarian rule.

This anti-democratic trend corresponds with global attacks on trade union membership. In the 2023 Global Rights Index (GRI), compiled by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), violations of key measures reached new highs: 87 per cent of countries violated the right to strike, while 79 per cent violated the right to collective bargaining. The GRI has tracked the worsening of these figures over ten years.

This rise in violations of trade union rights has been matched by a parallel rise in economic inequality and insecurity. Where countries have high rates of trade union density and collective agreement coverage, wealth and power are distributed more equitably and citizens have more trust in democracy. In 2023, the V-Dem Institute identified Norway – where trade union density is 49 per cent and collective agreement coverage is 72.5 per cent – as the world’s most deliberative and egalitarian democracy. However, researchers have also found that “union density has declined throughout the developed world, and in most countries the union wage premium has fallen as well.”

The rise of new forms of fascism, nationalism, populism and xenophobia have been further fed by capitalism’s austerity policies. A 2022 study of 200 elections in Europe found that austerity policies had led to “a significant increase in the vote share of extreme parties, lower voter turnout and a rise in political fragmentation.” Instead of delivering stronger economies to support a more inclusive social state, profits have been privatised and costs socialised.

This amounts to a betrayal of the electorate’s trust. In history we see that working people inevitably search for alternatives that promise to address their needs and populists exploit this to win elections and then dismantle the elements of democracy that handed them power.

No region of the world remains untouched by this rise in anti-democratic forces, and this is happening as we witness a convergence of global crises. Armed conflict is increasing, the climate emergency is accelerating, the debt crisis can no longer be ignored, and the unregulated growth of technology poses enormous social risks.

It’s time to stand up ‘For Democracy’

To address these trends, we need a truly democratic movement that crosses borders, unites all social groups and has the power and accountability to change the balance of power in every workplace, country and global institution. We are that movement, because democracy is a worker’s project.

It is time that we trade unionists took up our role as the foremost practitioners and defenders of, and fighters for, the democratic values we exercise every day.

That is why the ITUC has launched the For Democracy campaign, to defend the foundations of democracy in three critical arenas: at work, at the national level and globally.

For Democracy at work: Because there is no democracy without trade unions, we assert our right to freedom of association, to organise unions and to strike. We demand collective bargaining and social dialogue, equal treatment for all workers, equal power in decisions that impact our health, safety, environment, and employment prospects, an end to workplace violence and harassment, and democracy and representation in our union structures.

For Democracy at the societal and national level: We assert the right to protest and free speech; a free press is key to this. This World Press Freedom Day, we must defend the role of journalists as part of strong democracies to expose injustices and raise awareness, free from fear of attacks and persecution. We demand true gender equality, just tax systems to fund universal social protection and a Just Transition that supports all workers. We resist the hate-filled, far-right ideologies and the corporate capture of national policy making.

For Democracy at the global level: We demand the reform of international economic structures to create inclusive systems that prioritise public welfare, human rights and labour standards over private profit. We demand the protection and advancement of representative democratic multilateralism, and equitable global cooperation to achieve universal peace and common security.

At the heart of the For Democracy campaign is a New Social Contract; a redesigned global economy centred on workers’ voices and built on the pillars of jobs, rights, wages, social protection, equality and inclusion, to address the convergence of global crises. Only a democratic, participatory approach that allows workers to shape their futures can deliver a New Social Contract, and only a New Social Contract can ensure that democracy is sustainably rebuilt.

This May Day we must remember what trade unions have done for democracy in the past, and harness the collective power of trade unions to defend and rebuild democracy now and in the future. The For Democracy campaign is a clarion call to workers, trade unions and allies worldwide to rally for democratic change. Democracy is not only a political ideal but a lived reality that working people are best equipped to define, defend and advance.


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Luc TriangleX (Twitter)

Luc Triangle is the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation.

Activist Risk Taking, Then and Now

By Ted Glick

May 2, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Activists of all ages peacefully protesting the 2023 North American Gas Forum in Washington DC are surrounded by police. They continue chanting, playing music, and holding their banners in resistance. | Photo Courtesy of Extinction Rebellion DC

April 30 is a day I remember because it is my mom’s birthday. She died in 2005. But it’s also a day I remember because, on that day in 1971, while serving what turned out to be an 1l-month sentence in federal prison for my draft resistance activism against the Vietnam war, I was indicted with seven others by the Nixon Justice Department for a supposed conspiracy to destroy heating tunnels under DC and kidnap Henry Kissinger.

Those charges were bogus; when they finally got to a jury in conservative Harrisburg, Pa., they were hung 10-2 for acquittal, and that was the end of that particular “conspiracy” trial during the Vietnam War.

It is inspiring that on that April 30 day yesterday, several hundred people were arrested around the country, mainly students, as part of the massive worldwide movement to stop the Gaza genocide and end this war. And I saw an email just a couple hours ago from someone reminding people that on this same day in 1975, the United States military completely vacated Vietnam. This brought to an end the 30-year US effort to take over the colonizing and repressive role France had played for almost a century.

Here are some personal reflections on all of this:

-There is a level of intensity on the issue of the Gaza war that is very similar to the level of intensify many of us felt as young people during the Vietnam War, for good reason. When the daily body count is in the hundreds (Vietnam) and literal genocide—“ethnic cleansing” Bernie called it—is taking place in Gaza, intense and focused action is absolutely appropriate.

-Many of us who were students who took part in the Black Freedom and/or Anti-Vietnam War movements felt so deeply about these issues that some of us left school and we and others found a way to make a living while being a dedicated organizer for revolutionary change. Frankly, to have hope of success in our people’s movement for human and ecological survival and just and truly democratic societies, we need more young people to consciously take this step.

-It is clear that the overwhelming number of young people taking part in this spring justice uprising are doing so with a peaceful, if angry, spirit. Much of corporate media is spinning it very differently, painting the movement as violent and abusive. It is a responsibility of all of us to criticize these inaccurate characterizations and demand that the truth be reported.

-The dominant forces in the Democratic Party, and of course Republicans, really don’t like to have their policies criticized or their political power undercut by those of us willing to speak truth to power. Democrats respond one way when that happens, Republicans are much harsher. That’s been true for a very long time. As I wrote in my book Burglar for Peace, “The Nixon Administration that was in power 50-plus years ago was a repressive government, known for illegal wiretapping, inflammatory rhetoric, criminal prosecutions of peace and justice activists, and outright physical attacks, including killings, against Black Panther Party members. I had followed the Chicago 8 trial a year and a half before, a clear case of government repression against anti-war and Black Freedom activists, following the police riots during the Democratic National Convention in 1968.”

The years 1969 to 1974, when Nixon was President, were very rough for a lot of us, although most of us survived.

-The conditions for organizing are much more positive under Democrats than under Republicans. This would be particularly the case if Trump is elected this November. He and the Republicans have made clear that they have every intention of taking this country so far backward that the Biden Presidency would come to be seen as a very good four years. It’s not. Some things are good, yes, but some things aren’t, Gaza in particular right now. But compared to a Trump Presidency, it would be like night and day.

So as we keep fighting for a ceasefire and an end to the war and movement toward true Palestinian self-determination for that long-suffering people, let’s be sure to respond to the US electoral process accordingly. Trump and the MAGA Republicans must be defeated. Strong progressive candidates like The Squad need to be supported.

It’s all of one, multi-colored piece. Si, se puede.



Ted Glick has devoted his life to the progressive social change movement. After a year of student activism as a sophomore at Grinnell College in Iowa, he left college in 1969 to work full time against the Vietnam War. As a Selective Service draft resister, he spent 11 months in prison. In 1973, he co-founded the National Committee to Impeach Nixon and worked as a national coordinator on grassroots street actions around the country, keeping the heat on Nixon until his August 1974 resignation. Since late 2003, Ted has played a national leadership role in the effort to stabilize our climate and for a renewable energy revolution. He was a co-founder in 2004 of the Climate Crisis Coalition and in 2005 coordinated the USA Join the World effort leading up to December actions during the United Nations Climate Change conference in Montreal. In May 2006, he began working with the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and was CCAN National Campaign Coordinator until his retirement in October 2015. He is a co-founder (2014) and one of the leaders of the group Beyond Extreme Energy. He is President of the group 350NJ/Rockland, on the steering committee of the DivestNJ Coalition and on the leadership group of the Climate Reality Check network.

THE COUNTRY NOT THE STATE

Unrest in Georgia Over The “Foreign Influence Transparency Law”: “Whichever Way We Go Is a Step Back”

The outsized role that foreign-funded NGOs play in Georgia’s politics, policy-making, and public services has led the country into a chronic crisis of its democracy.

By Almut Rochowanski, Sopiko Japaridze 

May 4, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Police uses tear gas to disperse protestors in Tbilisi on May 1, 2024. Author’s photo.



There is a massive problem at the heart of Georgia’s peculiar political economy. It goes back a quarter of a century, predating the 2003 Rose Revolution. The late president Edvard Shevardnadze had given foreign aid agencies great leeway, so towards the end of his feckless and corrupt rule, NGOs were already a vocal presence in the country’s political discourse and maintained confident relationships with international donors. After years of turmoil and state collapse, Georgians with ideas and convictions had seized the moment to shape their society. It felt fresh, energetic, if driven more by social entrepreneurs than broad-based grassroots movements. After Shevardnadze’s former minister of justice, Mikheil Saakashvili, deposed him in the Rose Revolution, NGO professionals quickly filled senior government posts. The country’s policy space was thrown wide open to any and all foreign-led aid and reform experiments. The calculation behind this was that the net geopolitical and material benefits would far outweigh any drawbacks.

Consistently high foreign aid flows followed, and bilateral aid programs, the World Bank, UN agencies, international development aid groups small and large, and even private Western philanthropies opened well-staffed offices in Tbilisi. To spend all their money, implement their projects, and tick the box saying “consultation and collaboration with the community,” they all needed local NGOs. Demand creates supply, and today, more than 25,000 NGOs are registered in Georgia. According to Georgian authorities, 90% of their funding comes from abroad, but this average conceals that the vast majority of Georgian NGOs have no local funding at all. They would probably find the very notion of asking locals for money absurd, and if they gave it a try, in their current shape and form, they could hardly win fellow Georgians’ support.

Foreign aid agencies and their local NGO contractors have long colonized most areas of public policy and services—education, healthcare, court reform, rural development, infrastructure, etc.

In practice, this plays out something like this: a major development aid agency or international lender, for example, USAID, the European Commission, or World Bank, has come up with a new model for education reform, which it now plans to roll out not just in Georgia, but typically in a whole host of countries. To give it a veneer of community participation, the aid agency contracts Georgian NGOs to do the everyday footwork: introduce this or that new way of doing things to officials, schools, and teachers and train them in the new skills they supposedly need. No one at this or any other point asks teachers, parents, students, or, for that matter, the electorate at large, what they need and want and how they would improve things. People are left feeling unheard, ignored, patronized – and also inadequate when they fail to reach the benchmarks all this training was supposed to achieve.

The Georgian NGOs that are given grants to implement this work may be local, but they hold considerable power over the Georgian population. This power comes from their access to Western embassies and resources and the legitimacy this conveys rather than from grassroots support. In a functional democracy, the people elect lawmakers and the executive to serve them and represent their interests. In Georgia, unelected NGOs get their mandate from international bodies, which draw up and pay for to-do lists of policy reforms for Georgia. Local NGOs lack an incentive to consider the impact of the projects they implement because they are not accountable to the citizens in whose lives they play such an intrusive role.

This constellation has eroded Georgian citizens’ agency and the country’s sovereignty and democracy.

However, the draft law on “foreign influence transparency” tabled by the Georgian government for the second year in a row will not address this massive problem at the heart of Georgia’s political economy. It is not even intended to address this problem. The Georgian government doesn’t really care about Georgia’s sovereignty, and neither do the foreign donors and aid agencies nor the Georgian NGO elite.

Georgian Dream, the party that has been in power since 2012, has no intention to eradicate all foreign funding from the Georgian political economy. Quite the contrary, they are perfectly happy with the continued flow of foreign aid and how the donor-NGO-industrial complex churns out policies and (sort of) services. Georgia’s politics may be notoriously polarized, but Georgian Dream and most of the opposition parties are remarkably unanimous in their ideology: they all believe in technocratic, neoliberal, de-politicized governance, in which policies are designed by (foreign) experts drawing on supposedly objective data and technology. The more public services can be given over to the market, the better.

This is illustrated by the fate of the Liberty Act, landmark legislation that prohibits tax rate increases and progressive taxation and caps government spending at 30% of GDP. It was enacted by Saakashvili, has not been repealed in 12 years of the Georgian Dream rule, and Transparency International Georgia (the most implacable of the partisan NGOs leading the protests against the Georgian Dream) has campaigned to keep it. These political camps may fight tooth and nail over who gets to run the country, but then they all run it in the same way.

The continued outsourcing of policy-making, governance, and service provision to foreign aid donors, local NGOs, and the market suits the tastes of Georgian Dream’s leading cadres. Many of them studied in the West (typically law or public administration) on Western scholarships and started their careers in UN offices, bilateral aid agencies, and, yes, local NGOs. They are drawn from the NGO-professional-managerial industry, which functions as the largest social lift into the middle class (more accurately, the top 10%) in a country where academia, medicine, law, science, or entrepreneurship do not afford middle-class status or lifestyles. Georgian Dream’s leaders’ resumés are much the same as those of their fiercest opponents in the foreign-financed NGO sector.

In this ecosystem, it is rare to find someone who genuinely cares about people and their well-being. The local NGO landscape is a deeply competitive sector that incentivizes sharp elbows, self-promotion, and duplication rather than collaboration, let alone solidarity. For many industry professionals, working in an NGO is a fast track to high incomes, perks like foreign travel and embassy receptions, and being part of the elite.

If the Georgian Dream is all for technocratic, depoliticized, donor-driven Ersatz-governance and maintaining the large, foreign-funded NGO sector it requires, why would it risk protests at home and pressure from the EU and US to pass a so-called “foreign agent” law?

Because atop that massive problem at the heart of Georgia’s political economy sits another, much more limited problem, which is a major irritant to the Georgian Dream: a small but powerful clique of NGOs with annual budgets of up to millions of dollars/euros from foreign donors, some of them close to the previous government of Mikheil Saakashvili’s United National Movement, who use their perch to engage in openly partisan politics. For some five years, they have been denying the government’s legitimacy and calling for its ouster, and not just by supporting the opposition in elections, which already crosses ethical red lines for non-governmental organizations (and even more so when they’re funded by foreign states). They agitate for a revolutionary change of power outside democratic, constitutional processes. Previously, they demanded to be put in power as a technical government, but since no one (certainly not the Georgian electorate) picked them up on that offer, they have been venturing into street protests and storming parliament and government buildings. For good measure, they lobby the EU and US to sanction Georgian Dream leaders or slap travel bans on them.

Georgia’s “foreign agent” law, first tabled in spring 2023 and in its 2.0 version renamed the “law on foreign influence,” aims squarely at this hyper-partisan cluster of well-funded NGOs. There are many theories, some more baroque than others, for why Georgian Dream tabled this draft bill again a year after the abandoned first attempt. One of them is that Georgian Dream expects to win at arm-twisting this time because they consider the opposition weak. Another reason, cited by the Georgian Dream itself, is that for the past year, the government tried to come to an agreement with Western embassies and grant-makers so that they would no longer fund these partisan NGOs or moderate their partisan conduct through self-regulation. But this was rebuffed, if not by all, then at least by some key grant-makers. Behind closed doors, Western diplomats admit that the conduct of the partisan NGOs they finance crosses many lines and that something ought to be done about it. But when pressed on what they will do about it, they get testy.

Where does this leave Georgian civil society? In a worse place, without any doubt. All NGOs receiving foreign funding would face increased scrutiny and suspicion and would have to perform additional administrative tasks. Worse, such as fines, could be in store. Those NGOs that steered well clear of partisan politics, tried to be mission-driven and not donor-driven, practiced genuine solidarity, and respected citizens’ agency will get caught up in a policy that wasn’t even aimed at them. Never mind that this law would impose financial transparency on NGOs while the corporate sector faces no such obligation. This law won’t restore Georgians’ sovereignty, not in any meaningful sense of re-empowering citizens and re-politicizing policy-making. And for all that trouble, it probably won’t deflate the partisan NGOs or moderate their conduct. It isn’t just a blunt tool but a bad tool.

The frenzied, faux-patriotic claims of both the government and the opposition belie how little both sides have to offer average Georgians in terms of true democratic empowerment or hope for improving their lives. When one author met with members of a nurses’ union, their mood was unperturbed by the violent rhetoric and sense of crisis. These women were preoccupied with their work, with conflicts with their bosses and the minister of health. They expressed worry about how local authorities were slowly destroying their clinic, one of the few public hospitals left.

They try to make sense of how international donors and lenders, in close cooperation with the government, transform their communities and livelihoods without informing them, let alone asking them for their expertise and what they would like to see done.

Why would the World Bank rehabilitate a wing of our hospital? Our hospital supposedly had the budget to do this on its own, but now we don’t know what became of that money. We are not told how the budgets are spent or how decisions are made. When they needed us during COVID, we were called irreplaceable. Now, we are disposable.

In the most recent meeting, union members showed little interest in the law on foreign influence, didn’t care much about it, and didn’t want the union to take a stand on it one way or another. They were glad to hear that union activists would join neither the protests against the law nor support its adoption. They had heard rumors that it was a Russian law and decided to look into that, finding to their relief that there was nothing to that. As of this writing, this crisis has gone violent. Riot police are using water cannons, pepper spray, and beatings against anti-government protesters in Tbilisi. Pictures of bruises and bloodshot eyes are flooding social media. Over the past weeks, the political climate and public discourse have sunk to new lows, and that is saying something. Georgia’s public square is swept up in lies, hysteria, and manipulation. This, too, only takes Georgia farther away from reclaiming democracy and building progressive politics. There is a sense, expressed by a thoughtful and heavy-hearted Georgian observer, that “whichever way we go is a step back.”

Frustrating and tedious as it may be, we are forced to cut through the lies and the manipulation that swirl around this situation so we can begin to restore a rational conversation. It is galling to see foreign grant-makers lecture the Georgian public with a straight face that there is no such thing as foreign influence tied to foreign money, that donors only want to support a “vibrant civil society” and would never, ever dream of telling NGOs what they should do. Anyone who is at all familiar with how NGOs apply and compete for grants knows that donors set highly specific rules for which types of organizations, which kind of work, and what sort of issue they will even consider for funding, and this is before the unwritten rules and hidden biases determine the selection of grantees.

Activists in Georgia know all too well what is expected of them and which behaviors are punished and rewarded: being critical of the government on Facebook will net you more grants than being out in the community helping people. A few short years ago, when Western donors considered the Georgian Dream a valuable ally, they would tell Georgian activists to stop criticizing them. Now, they want activists to speak out against Georgian Dream. Donors even monitor activists’ social media profiles, and there can be consequences for posting the wrong things.

The shrill use of the moniker “Russian law” is another cynical manipulation thrown around liberally by Georgian activists, opposition politicians, and also Western officials. We’re told the draft law is copied from the Kremlin’s (fact-check: it’s not) and that it will turn Georgia into Russia and/or off the path of European integration. But this law is a symptom of specifically and uniquely Georgian political realities. Georgia in 2024 is nothing like Russia in 2012, when the latter adopted its foreign agent law – not politically, not in terms of its international alliances, not in terms of democracy and the rule of law, and certainly not in terms of the role played by NGOs. The objectives of Russia’s “foreign agent” law were nothing like those of the Georgian draft bill.

Even more absurd are allegations that Georgian Dream and its founder, billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, are Russian puppets, entirely in the Kremlin’s pocket, and that they tabled this law because Putin told them to. By the same logic, Putin must have also instructed Georgian Dream to pursue EU integration for over a decade, to enshrine Euro-Atlantic integration in the constitution, to score higher than other candidates on reform benchmarks, and to win EU candidate status. But this constant shrieking about a “Russian law” plays on the Georgian public’s fears and resentment as well as on Georgia’s Western partners’ geopolitical idée fixe.

The most cynical and dangerous game, however, is tying this law to Georgia’s EU accession process. Far-away Western observers get teary-eyed about Georgians’ standing up for their “vibrant civil society,” but on the ground, protesters say unprompted that they are not in the streets to defend NGOs and, indeed, do not much care about them. These vox pop impressions are backed up by years of polls showing Georgians’ low trust in NGOs. Instead, people take to the streets because they have been told that this is a make-or-break moment for Georgia’s future in the EU.

Georgia’s aspiration for EU membership is the rawest of all nerves in Georgian politics and culture. After three decades of post-Soviet impoverishment, of lives cut short, pain and trauma, chronic stress, insecurity, and humiliation, the idea of EU membership has become an eschatological project for many Georgians: it represents the promise of salvation after long and unjust suffering and sacrifice. The EU stands not just for dreams – of material well-being, safety, dignity, comfort – coming true, but for recognition of Georgians’ inherent “Europeanness,” their specialness, their cultural superiority compared to their “Asian” neighbors.

Then again, many Georgians out in the street with their EU flags have less metaphysical and rather earthier concerns: in recent surveys, Georgians rank the opportunity to emigrate as their number one reason for wanting to join the EU. Indeed, Georgians have been “voting with their feet”—in 2021 and 2022 alone, more than 5% of the population left, most of them into grim shadow labor markets in Europe.

But whether it is spiritual redemption or scarce material opportunities, the prospect of EU membership represents something existential for Georgians. This has allowed the opposition, its partisan NGO proxies, and their Western donors to manufacture the “foreign influence law” crisis into a desperate, epic battle for Georgians’ bright future. Worst and most irresponsibly, EU officials have joined in, repeating one after the other that such a law is incompatible with “EU norms and values.” “Norms and values” is conveniently vague, unlike actual EU laws, which do not prohibit regulation of NGO funding. Most recently, an EU spokesperson has stated that adoption of the law would go against the EU’s “values and expectations,” moving the goal posts into the evermore nebulous territory. The supposedly objective and meritocratic EU accession process has turned arbitrary and vexatious.

EU officials threatening to derail Georgia’s accession process feels like unseemly blackmail. Fundamentally, any government’s growing suspicion of foreign donors’ motives for funding hyper-partisan NGOs will only be fueled by forcing the government, via escalating threats, to continue letting such funding in. This is a game of chicken that could go very dark. In these circumstances, with the fronts hardened and people’s existential fears manipulated, a frank debate about the decades-old problems that led to this draft bill and about the law’s effectiveness and appropriateness is no longer possible.

 

Jeremy Corbyn & Stella Assange: The World Press Freedom Day Interview

Marking World Press Freedom Day, Jeremy Corbyn MP met with Stella Assange to discuss the political persecution of the publisher Julian Assange, his trial and its wider implications for journalism around the world.

By Stella Assange, Jeremy Corbyn 

May 4, 2024

Source: Project for Peace & Justice by Jeremy Corbyn