Labor Pains

John Monks, general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation, which represents 60 million members across 82 trade-union organizations in 32 countries, has a reputation as being one of the more modern and moderate leaders in the trade-union movement. Never a firebrand or a class warrior, he says unions have an important role to play as the economic crisis reshapes capitalism. A former head of the British TUC, Monks believes both employers and unions have to think and act for the long term. Monks, 63, spoke with NEWSWEEK's Stryker McGuire from his office in Brussels. Excerpts:

McGuire: Is the state of the world economy a crisis or an opportunity for labor unions?
Monks: It's both, isn't it? I'm much given to quoting Dickens these days: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," as he wrote about the French Revolution. It's the worst of times since the 1930s, but it's the best of times, too, in that we've got the opportunity to challenge the neoliberal model that became so dominant in the 1980s, the model that penetrated not just the right of the political spectrum, but a fair way across the center and into the left as well.

So where did we go wrong?
There were all those advocates of the Third Way who believed, as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair did, that letting the financial markets rip in a pretty unregulated way was the best way to create wealth, and the role of government was merely to spread it around a bit and improve public services and so on. That model has had a heart attack and is in intensive care, courtesy of billions from the taxpayer, with the state not so much seeking nationalization but having near nationalization thrust upon it.

How can the unions play a role in challenging the neoliberal model?
Things are bad, but there's also the opportunity to win the aftermath and to come up with a more social-market economy, as the Germans would call it, an economy with a stronger public dimension than a market economy. In the near term, unions are going to have to fight for as much attention to be given to the most vulnerable workers as is being given to the most vulnerable financial institutions. We're only in the foothills on the unemployment problem at the moment. Youth unemployment, keeping people in work—these seem to us to be areas that are demanding public support.

And in the longer term?
I don't think there's a new model; I just think there's the old mixed-economy model that Roosevelt pioneered in the States and grabbed deep hold in Western Europe after the war. I think that model has got to be revived. Trade unions deserve public support; they're part of the solution, not the problem, as the president [of the United States] said recently. Unions are a check and a balance on entrepreneurs; they keep entrepreneurs more honest. And they ensure that where collective bargaining is strong, [income] inequality is less. For those reasons, I think public policy needs to be pro-union rather than professing to be neutral but being, in fact, anti-union.

Do unions have to change as well? Do unions have to be less confrontational?
It doesn't work that way. In the good times, there was less need to be confrontational if real incomes were going up, which is certainly the European story for the last 10 years-plus. It was a great shock to me to realize that the average worker in the United States didn't get a real pay increase in the last 10 years. They got some real-estate inflation. On that basis, there were probably more grounds for militancy in the States than in countries that were getting a share of the productivity growth. True, there are a lot of strikes and demonstrations around, and people are facing job cuts, but also there are a lot of people trying to work out cooperative approaches.

Your trade-union confederation is seeking "a new social deal" in Europe on the back of "the reckless and greedy excesses of the business world." But what the ETUC is asking for sounds a little greedy, or at least unrealistic: more jobs, job protection in key industries, maintaining public services, stronger welfare states, better pay, higher benefits and so forth. How do you square that circle?
I think "greed" is the wrong word. We can be accused of going back to the future to the New Deal, where Roosevelt set out to promote trade-union influence through the Wagner Act and so on. We can be accused of looking to do that. But that system worked for the most part. And, yes, we ourselves have got to adapt, to change our system so that we're more effective in areas of employment outside of traditional "heartlands" like mines, mills and big factories; there aren't that many of those around nowadays. But the biggest problem is convincing people that there's a good union future.

You're aware of the so-called bossnapping trend in France. Is there something about French law or French society that explains this phenomenon, which seems confined to France?
As a close observer of France over the years, I'd say France is, well, different. In everybody's mind is the French Revolution. In the United Kingdom, 4 million people demonstrated against the Iraq War, and the government took no notice at all. In France, that's the sort of thing a president would fire ministers over. The French government gets nervous. Somewhere at the back of their mind is the picture of that guillotine, and the power of the street. On the other side there are the French people themselves. Their attitude is, "We don't take these things lying down; we do something. You know, we may go and park our combine harvesters on the Boulevard Périphérique for a couple of days, and get our deck chairs out in the summer and see what somebody does." And under French law, they've got absolute, fundamental rights; they've got wider legal opportunities than would be case in the States or the U.K.