Trade unionism and trades unions; an introductory perspective
Introduction
Trades unions have become key components of most modern societies be such societies democratic or totalitarian, advanced capitalist or backward post-colonial. The nature of trade unions and trade unionisms are however quite different, even in otherwise similar societies. The United Kingdom and the United States for example could be considered as similar as societies could be (being the leading “liberal market economies” in the world), but they have quite different types of trade unions and approaches to trades unionism. Similarly France and Germany, two leading “coordinated market economies” in the West, have clearly different trades unions’ characteristics. Coming closer home; on one hand there are distinct traits that mark the industrial relations systems and trade union practice as heritages of our colonial past i.e. along English-speaking and French-speaking Africa lines. On the other hand, there are specific features of trade unionism and trades unions even in the closest of systems (e.g. Nigeria and Ghana).
There are however some universal threads which define trades unions as a particular form of social organisation and trade unionism as a particular form of working class phenomenon. The explicit definition of these categories of concern (i.e. trades union and trade unionism), stem from conceptions, of the broader categories of industrial relations and society. The practice of trade unionism equally has been largely influenced by the conceptions of what a trade union is, or at least should aim to be.
This presentation is aimed at equipping trade union activists, emerging as work place representatives with a broad perspective of the contending conceptions and views of trades unions and trade unionism in general. Very much related to this of course is an historical analysis of the development of trades unions with particular attention to Nigeria.
I must categorically point out here that this is not an academic paper. Its aim is to deepen the awareness and consciousness of fresh workplace representatives on basic trade union issues, so that they are better equipped to provide leadership to workers, at the shop floor.
The paper starts with a section that looks at conceptions of the term “trades unions”. It considers the diverse views of what a trade union is, showing the relations between these and the different schools of industrial relations on one hand and contending world views on the other.
The second section addresses the relationship between trades unions and trade unionism. It sheds light on trades unions as organisations, pointing out the different types of trade union organisation. Trade unionism as a working class phenomenon and its dynamics with trade union-as-organisation are further clarified. The trade union movement is as well put in perspective with trade unions and the broader labour movement.
An historical perspective of the general evolution of trade unions and trade unionism is then presented in the third section. The relations between these and the evolution of modern industrial society are considered.
Finally in the conclusion, I look at possible challenges for trade unions and the trade union movement in contemporary (Nigerian) society.
IR approaches and conceptions of trades unions
It might seem quite straight forward, on the face of it, to answer the simple question: “what is a union?” A few definitions with differences do however exist. These are based on different conceptions of: what a trade union is; what its goals should be and; the centrality or otherwise of its place in social development. One key point that it would seem, all views are in agreement on is that trades unions are combinations of workers.
The different views on “trade unions” as a distinct category can be somewhat situated within the three main approaches to industrial relations in general. These are the: systems; pluralist and; labour process/radical, traditions or approaches. It is also not unusual to have some authors present the worldviews on what a trade union is reduced basically to two i.e. the Western and the “Communist” views. I think this is a very inadequate typology. First it assumes that the Stalinist monstrosities in the old Soviet empire were necessarily “communist”. Second it also assumes that there is one communist conception of trades unions contrary to the contending optimistic and pessimistic conceptions which we will address below.
It is important to note though that, the conceptual frameworks for defining trade unions are not holdall pegs. There are variants of views within each broad over-aching conception.
Systems view
The systems approach to industrial relations was the first school of industrial relations and emerged from the 1958 pioneering work of J. T. Dunlop; Industrial Relations System. At the crux of the approach is that the work setting or industrial relations is a system, very much like an organism. It has three parties, i.e. the state/governmental and related agencies and apparatus, employers/their associations and workers/representative trade unions.
The industrial relations system considers the three component parties as being bound by a common ideology as well as by common rules that guide their activities in the system.
The conception of what a trade union based on the system approach is one of incorporation. The trade union is seen -despite the recognition of possibilities of friction in relations within the system-, as part of a corporate totality. One could thus argue that in this sense, the trade union actually is conceived of as a conveyor belt for the interests of the system, which could however have built into it, feedback mechanism to-and-from the workers.
The systems theory was conceived of by Dunlop within the context of Western democracy. It could however be argued that the conception of trades unions which arises from it is as apt, when applied to the hitherto “actually existing” “socialist” systems of the defunct USSR and the East bloc and also the developmentalist states that drove the industrialization processes in Latin America (particularly Brazil) and South East Asia (particularly South Korea).
In short, this conception of trades unions could be applied to industrial relations under totalitarian regimes as much as within “free” Western democracies. This conception presents trade unions as combinations of workers (and in some cases, as in Nigeria, considers employers’ associations as trades unions!), whom while with their peculiar interests are bound to seek the common good of a system where they are bound by the same ideology with the other industrial relations partner(s) i.e. the state (and employers’ associations).
The spectrum of this systemic conception of trade unions I would say extends from the unitary, to the “limited intervention” of “guided democracy”. Examples of the former would be clearly corporatist states/social systems such as those of fascist Germany and Italy, Stalinist USSR and the East bloc, the Estado Novo in Brazil, and the post-colonial one-party states in Ghana, Zambia, Tanzania.
I would argue that the official conception of trades unions in Nigeria falls within this systemic conception, with its sense of “guided democracy” and consideration of employers associations as being equally trade unions.
Pluralist view
The pluralist approach has similarities with the system approach in the sense that it does see the existing social order within which workers and their unions operate as a going concern which is to be maintained, albeit with reforms. It however allows for more friction and the fact that trade unions could have different ideologies from the employers and the state.
The pluralist school in industrial relations arose in the post-War order as a part of the dominant pluralist spirit in politics, economics and the social sciences in general, which fed-off from and fed-into the Keynesian Welfare Nation-State paradigm of the Golden Age of capitalism, lasting into the late 1960s, in the West. Trade unions were recognized as critical institutions in society, and particularly within the industrial society. The concept of “industrial democracy” was propounded by Clegg and Bains, but as Flanders pointed out, that “democracy” is questionable as the workers “party” within it is bound to a state of opposition in perpetuity.
The establishment might only have come to pluralist conclusions in its conception of trade unions only after World War II, but a large number of trade unions in Europe had actually in practice, started enthroning a pluralist understanding of trade unions. At the heart of the pluralist sense of trade unionism is the process of collective bargaining. It entrenches the death of the bosses’ unilateral power to hire and fire or determine wages and conditions of employment arbitrarily. The most dominant perspective of trade unions in the United Kingdom, duly represented by Sidney and Beatrice Webbs and indeed the Fabian socialist society as a whole was rooted in pluralism.
At the heart of the pluralist conception of trade unions is its representation of workers as voluntary co-stakeholders in the industrial relations system. The pluralist conception of trades unions rests on their being workers’ representative organizations, within an industrial context of “partners in progress”. It is the most dominant conception of trade unions in today’s world and guides the ILO for example.
Radical/labour process view
The labour process approach to industrial relations which is also described as the radical or Marxist school rests on a class analysis of society. Concepts of classes, exploitation and class struggle are central to its world view. Employers are seen as capitalists who exploit the labour power of workers in the process of production during which labour creates wealth.
It is a conflictual approach which sees the self-emancipation of the working class as not only desirable but as indeed something necessary for the continued qualitative advancement of society through the social transformation that would be part of and further blossom in the process of such self-emancipation. On the face of it, one could assume that with this there is or should be one “communist view” of trades unions and trade unionism. However; “there has never existed a single unambiguous Marxist theory of trade unionism” (Hinton and Hyman, 1975, 58).
It is not our intention to go into why this seems to be the case here. The task is to identify what these different conceptions of trades unions are within the radical school’s multifarious traditions. In this light, there are two broad poles of the spectrum of conception. These are the, optimist and the pessimist. Essentially the optimistic perspective sees trades unions as schools of struggle for the working class through which they come to realize their antagonistic relations with individual capitalist employers as something as being part of a broader class struggle. Conversely, the pessimistic perspective considers trade unions (particularly their bureaucracies) as sites through which the capitalist employers and the state manage to apply brakes on the revolutionary fervour of the working class or what Trotsky describes as “lieutenants of capital in the intensified exploitation of the workers”.
A thread that runs through the myriad Marxist conceptions of trades unions is that they are defensive class organizations of workers. Related to this is that whereas pluralist conceptions stress the representative essence of trades unions, they stress the mobilization essence, as being for the working class (optimist) or being deflected for the capitalists (pessimist).
TUs, trade unionism and the trade union movement
Trades unions might be conceived of in different ways as shown above, there are however some general defining characteristics of unions based on what they do and how they do these. These are at the crux of trade unionism. There are also different types of unions based on structure or approaches of practice. We put these in perspective in this section and as well sharpen perspectives on the trade union movement in relation to trade union organisations.
Trades unions and trade unionism
Trade unions are organizations of workers who come together with the aim of bettering their lots. There are, generally speaking, five major substantive issues which are at the heart of the workers’ quest in combining, these being: wages and other material remuneration; working conditions; job security; working time and; respect and dignity. Trade unionism is that drive, that quest for improvements in these substantive issues. This drive precedes even the formation of trades unions. Thus we see that while trade unionism might be the “business” of trades unions, it is actually a working class phenomenon, which precedes and even leads to the formation of trades unions themselves. Trade unionism is the natural tendency of workers to economic self-defence.
Combinations of workers in furtherance of trade unionism start with the spread of solidarity based on their shared circumstances. Trades unions are the more lasting forms of such combinations and they then drive the trade unionism as a process.
How a trade union movement conducts its trade unionism is influenced amongst other things, by: the dominant conception of trades union within it; the history of its emergence and; the economic and politico-legal framework which the IRS is situated in. With the winning of recognition as legal and legitimate social actors, the major means through which trade unions pursue the economic aims of trade unionism is collective bargaining. Other ways are through: mutual aid to union members; industrial action, particularly strikes and; political liaisons.
Trades union organisational structures
Trade unions are organisations and have types of structures. Trade union structure itself in industrial relations theory is something different from the organisational structure of trade unions, although it is used as a phrase to mean the same thing. Trade union structure refers to demographic variables bearing on the organized workforce e.g. geographical spread and gender disaggregation of organised workers. We are here concerned with trades unions’ organisational structures.
First are the types of organisational structures which trades unions take, in the sense of which workers they organize and what the scope of where they organize is.
Craft Unions: these are unions which organise workers with particular (professional) skills. The earliest unions (these were in England) were craft unions and this is in fact where the term “trades” came to signify unions . That is because the earlier unions then emerged from guilds of craftsmen who formed “trade clubs”, to be able to restrain trade as the mercilessness of factory-based large-scale manufacture sucked them into it and rendered almost useless the petty production of the cottage industries of those of them that tried to stay out of it, often to no avail. The National Association of Nigerian Nurses and Midwives (NANNM) and the Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) are examples of unions organized as craft-based combinations of workers.
General Unions: these are unions that organise workers of different skills and across trades and (possibly) industries. They tend to be larger than craft unions, (but this is not necessarily always so). They sometimes have sections or departments specifically responsible for the distinct sections of industry or group of skills of workers that they cover. A good example of a general union in Nigeria is the Amalgamated Union of Public Corporations, Civil Service Technical and Recreation Employees (AUPCTRE), which emerged from the amalgamation of three public sector unions in 1996.
Industrial Unions: these are unions which organise all workers in a particular industry, irrespective of skills or occupational differences. It is considered by many trade unionists as very progressive and the cry “one industry, one union”, is a popular cry for example in the South African trade union movement. One common myth that the Federal Military Government initiated in 1976-78 is that trade unions in Nigeria have been streamlined on industrial unions. Many unionists also describe our trade unions as “industrial unions”. On the converse, the very process that was supposed to have led to the re-organisation of unions on industrial basis split all unions in industry into “junior workers” unions and “senior staff associations”. It as well created several unions in sectors where it was difficult to maintain the junior/senior workers dichotomy, e.g. in the health sector we have at least the nurses union, Medical and Health Workers’ Union and the union of pharmacists and professionals allied to medicine, not to talk of the Nigeria Medical Association. One of the sectors closest to having an industrial union in the real sense of the word in Nigeria is the petroleum sector, and this is with the NUPENGASSAN collaboration which has involved joint National Executive Council meetings of both NUPENG and PENGASSAN.
The second aspect of trade union organizational structure has to do with the component organs and levels of organisation from the shop floor to the national centre of the union.
Most unions, in Nigeria of today at least, operate on three levels. These are the local branch, state (or zonal) and national levels. These are however not given for “every trade union”. Indeed until 1976 most unions in Nigeria operated only at the enterprise level, i.e. had only one level of operation . This is still common in most francophone countries on the continent and in Latin America, particularly Brazil. Such enterprise unions within the same or similar industries or geographical areas could then coalesce into federations. We will here consider the three-tiered level of union organizational structure.
National level: there are usually three organs at this level.
The National Delegates Conference (or National Congress), is the supreme decision-making organ of the union. Its meetings could be annual (e.g. in the UK), biennial, triennial (e.g. South Africa, Ghana and most TUC-affiliated unions in Nigeria). In most cases, its periodicity is often the same as that for the National Delegates Conference of the trade union centre a union is affiliated to. It comprises delegates usually (or in most cases assumedly) elected from the shop floor or state/zonal council. It is vested with the powers of reviewing/amending the union constitution, determining policy and electing national officers of the union.
The National Executive Council (in some unions e.g. AUPCTRE; National Governing Council) usually comprises of the elected national officers and representative officers (usually Chair and Secretary) of the State/Zonal Councils of the union. It tends to meet usually, quarterly, bi-annually or annually; with this periodicity usually determined by that of the NDC (e.g. unions with quadrennial NDCs are likely to have annual NECs, while those with annual NDCs would most likely have quarterly NEC sessions). It is responsible for ensuring that policies and other resolutions resolved on by NDC are operationalized, guided by the spirit and letters of such resolutions. It also generally has oversight functions on the union in-between NDCs.
The Central Working Committee (in some unions, National Administrative Committee or Central Executive Committee). It usually comprises elected national officers, with – more often than not – some co-opted members and the national secretariat (a General Secretary and deputies, plus heads of departments and the like). While it is supposed to be subordinate to the other “superior” organs at the national level and in the union general, it actually wields de facto power more than any other organ. This is due largely to the greater frequency and depth of its meetings. It could be argued that the extent to which internal democracy reigns in a union can be gauged by just how subordinated it is to the other broader organs.
State/Zonal levels: unions with members in all states of the federation, tend to have state councils (this is the case for example with public sector unions). They could then as well have zonal structures which might or might not be stipulated in the constitution for administrative convenience or political expediency. Unions such as those in the extractive sector tend to have memberships concentrated in those particular states that are sites of their industries (although it is possible for some to be (almost) national in spread due to the distribution chains along which they have memberships). Such unions tend not to have state councils and instead have zonal councils that could cover a number of states.
The organs within the state/zonal councils and the functions they perform, are very much like those at the national level; delegates conferences, executive councils and working or/and administrative committees.
Workplace/shop floor level: this is the major site of life for trade unionism. In most workplaces limited to one site, there are just two organs; the executive committee and the general meeting where direct democracy prevails. Where such workplace is quite large (as with some tertiary health institutions even where limited to one location) or where you have dispersal of sites, there most likely would be units as sub-branch structures.
We pointed out earlier while looking at conceptions of trades unions that pluralist conceptions stress the representative role of unions for workers while radical views stress the mobilizational aspect. Every union in practicing unionism does however in some proportion or the other blend both the representative and mobilizational functions.
What one could add here is that the higher the level of the organs in a trade union’s organizational structure, the more dominant the representative function is perceived . At the shop floor though, the mobilizational thrust tends more to come to the fore spurred by and deepening rank and file dynamism.
Types of trade unionisms
There are different approaches to trade unionism adopted by different (and possibly at different times, by the same) unions. These are approaches to fulfilling as they best think they could, the goal of a better life for the worker.
It might be useful before going further here to point out the two broad goals of trade unionism as being substantive goals e.g. better pay, shorter working hours, increased vacation period and procedural goals i.e. control over the work process . In a sense the different approaches do place different weights on each of these two broad categories of goals, as we will see. It would however not be strictly correct to distinguish this or that approach to trade unionism on the basis of a strict concern for either substantive goals over procedural goals or vice versa, just as much as while we shall note their relevant congruence with conceptions of trade unions, they can not be reduced to those.
The four basic approaches to trade unionism could be said to be: corporatist; “economistic” (business); political (partisan) and; social movement unionisms.
Corporatist unionism: this would be the approach to unionism promoted by a union within the unitary-systemic conception of trade unions. This could be the described as the form of trade unionism in state capitalist, fascist, totalitarian or one-party states. The way towards fulfilling the aim of a better life for the working class is seen in total support for the broader political system more often than not under the control of a behemoth party. Such unionism it would seem would place less priority on mobilization, being more often than not perpetuated by trade unions that were formed by or owe their “powers” to the state more than to the workers.
The situation however might not be so simple. The practical reality of exploitation and alienation drives workers even within such unionism to seek interstices of resistance. It could start by still claiming corporatist support to the powers that be, or as a drive for more radical unionism by the time it emerges through fermentation. Examples of these include how Solidarnosc emerged from the Polish docks and the to same extent the situation in Zambia where the ZCTU that had given tacit support at some point in time to the one-party dictatorship would become the rallying centre for the Movement for Multi-Party Democracy.
Economistic/business unionism: this form of unionism asserts that trades unions should be concerned strictly with bread and butter issues of wages and working conditions. During the Cold War, it was the dominant paradigm of “free” trade unionism. It rests largely on a pluralist conception of trades union and indeed of society as a whole. Its classical home is the United States and 20th Century trade unionism in Britain largely falls into this approach as well.
Some myths need to be dispelled in understanding this brand of trade unionism. It is not necessarily always conservative. It could be radical in pushing what the unions’ want, which as Gompers the founding President of the American Federation of Labour and its arch proponent summed up is “more”. More wages, more leisure time, etc, but not necessarily more direct control over the political steering wheel of society.
This brings us to the second myth which business unions themselves perpetuate i.e. trades unions have no business with trying to change society (read; politics). The American trades unions ties with the Democrats is no secret, and the British trades unions actually birthed and (even despite Blairist “new labour”) still wield considerable direct influence in the Labour Party. Not only is overt political support given by business unions to non-radical parties, the roles of some of them played during the cold war, particularly the AFL-CIO , was one could be constrained to say, despicable.
Thus essentially, even business unionism is more often than not political, somehow or the other in its pursuit of largely substantive union goals. It however upholds the primacy of the capitalist system and seeks accommodation within it.
Political unionism: this is a form of unionism which is not only more overtly political, but more importantly, where the trade union usually, is affiliated to a political party, formally. When this form of unionism is described in most pluralist literature, a picture of left-leaning unions co-joined to radical left parties gets conjured. This is however not a correct reading of the situation.
First is the fact that the political party a trade union which practices political unionism is affiliated to might very well be centrist (as with the unions affiliated to the Socialist International parties), right-wing (as with “solidarity” affiliated to the fascist BNP in Britain) or religious (as with theFrench Confedration Francaise Democratique du Travail, in its earlier incarnation and some affiliates of the WCL, before its 2006 merger with the ICFTU to form the ITUC).
Second, the term political unionism gives the impression at first glance that (left) union movements with this approach are not concerned with economistic issues, mobilizing simply to overthrow the capitalist system. Nothing could be further from the truth. The French Confederation Generale du Travail, which with its close ties to the French Communist Party, could be taken as a classical example of a trade union movement committed to political unionism as been at the fore of such economistic struggles as the defence of jobs, wages and pensions.
Third, some of the leading trade union movements with direct links with workers parties or liberation movements have maintained their independence somewhat, despite such affiliations, and could hardly be reasonably said to practice political unionism. The two most striking examples are the Congress of South African Trade Unions (in a tripartite alliance with the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party) and the Brazilian Central Única dos Trabalhadores, which has very close ties with the ruling Workers’ Party (PT).
This might give a clue to the shift away from political unionism where the trade union movement mobilizes around a partisan political line by left-leaning union movements. Experiences of the diktat that characterized the political unionisms of trade unions affiliated to “Communist” Parties during the Cold War and the changing seams of the social issues which confront today’s society and the current dimensions of the perennial conflicts between the classes of the haves and the have-nots, might have contributed to this shift towards social movement unionism.
Social movement unionism: this is a form of unionism which combines struggle for the substantive bread and butter concerns of trade unions with the procedural goals of greater control on the work process and broader demands for social, economic and environmental justice. It represents workers and workers interests within the industrial relations system but realizes that these can not be separated from the mobilization of the broader mass of working people, women, youths and communities for a better world.
Social movement unionism is a strategic approach of building United Fronts of organized labour with other oppressed and marginalized strata of society. In a sense the trade union movement in Nigeria with the role it plays n the popular struggles against petroleum pump price increases for example approximates a social movement approach to its unionism. Only one union has however tried to think this out, integrating it as a policy in its statute books, i.e. AUPCTRE. Several unions do however implicitly uphold it for example PENGASSAN in positing its tasks for the future boldly asserts that: “we must speak not only for our members but also for the Nigerian people”. This spirit essentially, is at the heart of social movement unionism.
Indeed the most vibrant and left-tending trade union movements today are the bastions of social movement unionism. CUT in Brazil, COSATU in South Africa and KCFTU in South Korea are fully committed to this mode of unionism as are trade union movements in the Philippines and to a limited extent the US.
This brings us to the need for a clarification. Social movement unionism is not limited as an approach to left-leaning trade union movements. Its becoming fashionable in contemporary times can be traced to the attacks on the working class and trades unions by the bosses over the past three decades of neo-liberalism as the face of capitalist triumphalism. The consequences of these included declining memberships of unions, weakening of the social and political influence of trade unions and a material reality’s concrete challenge of economistic self-reliancism in such business unionism-oriented trade unions as that of North America.
Related to the foregoing is also the emergence, growth and development of civil society organisations and the increasing spaces of identity politics since the late 1960s when the Golden Age of capitalism entered its decline and degeneration mode. Subsequently, environmental concerns and the contemporary globalization (of both capital and resistance to it), became critical issues which could not but bear on the strategy and tactics of any serious trade union movement concerned with having a future ahead of it.
Thus, not surprisingly, trades unions in the United States, particularly the Services Employees International Union (SEIU) have been at the forefront of the return to social movement unionism .
At the heart of social movement unionism, particularly in the Western industrial relations systems, is also a replacement of the services model (common to them) with the organizing model, of trade union organizing. This model which is also known as the building workers’ power model, would be looked at more closely in a subsequent paper at this workshop.
Social movement unionism might not necessarily lead a trade union movement to rise beyond trade unionism. It does however in building workers’ power and counter-hegemonic united fronts present the working class with the school of real life on the limitations of trade unionism towards its self-emancipation.
Organized labour; trade unions and the trade union movement
The terms; labour movement, organized labour, trade unions and, trade union movement and are often used synonymously. This sub-section tries to clarify the differences and relations between these categories for trade unionists.
The labour movement is a broad category which covers the various efforts of working people, at combining their forces, by building collective organizations. It involves the trade unions and trade union movements, producers (and to a limited extent consumers’) cooperatives, peasants self-organized groups , and socialist (and anarchist ) parties/tendencies.
Labour movements desire better life for toilers i.e. working people in general. Different segments of the broad labour movement do however have differences of opinion on what this amounts to i.e. that it could be achieved strictly through continued reforms or tokens from the propertied elites (reformist); that reforms only help to chain the working people and only a revolutionary overthrow of the existing system can lead to any meaningful wellbeing for the working people (anarchists and ultra-left socialists) or; that while reforms should definitely be pursued and won with this resulting not just in improvements in the living and working conditions of workers, but as well strengthening the working class as the revolutionary agency for progressive social transformation, the ultimate resolution of the antagonism between the classes of the bosses and those of the working people can only be through the workers’ self-emancipation, as the culmination of a revolutionary process (revolutionary-democratic socialist).
Trade unions have we have explained earlier are organizations of the working class, i.e. wage-earning working people who are directly exploited by the capitalist system i.e. private employers or as “public servants” by the capitalist state. The trade union movement is however a broader category than trade unions.
The trade union movement is what could be aptly described as organized labour. It encompasses the trades unions and trade union federations/confederations at sub-national, national, international/regional and global levels. Trade union centres such as NLC and TUC are usually described as trade unions. I would argue that they are not trade unions. Trade unions are organizations of workers, but trade union centres are organizations of trades unions. The differences are not merely formal as experience in the trade union movement could reveal. The relationship between both is very much like that between bread and butter, with the unions as the bread and the centres as the butter.
At the international and global levels there are equally federations of different sorts. There are regional trade union federations such as the Organisation of African Trade Union Unity (OATUU) and the European Trade Union Council (ETUC). There are sectoral Global Union Federations (GUFs), which until the turn of the century used to be known as International Trade Secretariats. They have as affiliates, trade unions in specific sectors but a number of unions belong to two of them . There are eleven GUFs in the strict sense of it. But the Global Unions Council which binds them through quarterly consultative meetings and joint actions has thirteen “Global Unions”. This is because the ETUC and the ITUC (a global union confederation) are also part of the council.
Global Union Confederations are part of the trade union movement and they have as affiliates, national trade union centres. These are the International Trade Union Confederation and the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU).
We have looked primarily at the dynamics between trades unions, trade union movements and society. The challenge would be realizing how the material realities of our work and lives situate these within the tasks of the labour movement.
The historical development of trade unionism
The engagement of this section might not be as elaborate as its title would suggest due to space and time constraints. What I will try to do is to present a thread of snapshots through the lens of history on how unions emerged and developed in general and in Nigeria. This is with the aim of putting in perspective how in practice a number of the issues addressed thus far came to become.
The early beginnings
Trade unions or trade clubs as they were then called emerged as illegal combinations of workers who, faced by the inhumane and despotic exploitation that went with the industrial revolution in England, decided to take their fates in their hands and fight. They were illegal partly because even before the industrial revolution, i.e. in the period of England’s transition from feudalism which spanned a few centuries, combinations had been outlawed! This was with the fourteenth century Ordinance of Artificers , four hundred years before industrial revolution and the formation of the earliest trades unions. At the end of the seventeenth century when the industrial revolution was in full using and trade clubs were being formed, specific laws against the emerging unions were enacted. These were known as the anti-combination laws.
Unable to bargain since they were illegal and seeing the machines which produced on a large-scale sending them out of jobs and driving down wages, the most spectacular tactic of the earliest trades unions was sabotage. They smashed the machines. This phenomenon is described as Luddism. The penalties for being a union member then varied from prison sentences to deportation and included as well, execution.
One of the first battles of the earliest unions was to win recognition and for their activities to be able to move from the penumbra of illegality. These were not dis-linked from the struggles for better working conditions and wages, but as the 1819 Factories Act, the first of its kind showed, with workers not being able to speak for themselves in their own name, there was little victory that could be won in the way of better terms and conditions of work.
In 1824 the anti-combination laws were repealed. The repeal law was amended the following year due to the spate of strikes immediately after the repeal. But with this the jinx had been broken; the first step to trade unions as legal entities, recognized albeit grudgingly by the bosses, had been won.
On the continent of Europe at this time, unionism was still in embryonic forms. In the United States though, the first unions were as well being formed. These comprised of skilled artisans, and the dominance of craft unionism was o prevail somewhat for a while under the American Federation of Labour into the first half of the 20th century. The first union in the United States which drew workers of different trades together was however formed in 1827. Subsequently the carpenters formed their own unions as well.
These early unions in both the UK and the US were based on the organizing model and their unionism was very much like what we now in contemporary time consider as social movement unionism. They demanded social reforms, including universal adult suffrage and free public education.
With workers being able to organize openly as trade unions, their struggles drove home in their consciousness the need for ever expanding solidarity. Shortly after the repeal of the anti-combination Act, several efforts at forming trade union federations were made. This led to the establishment of the National Association for the Protection of Labour, in 1830. It was however short lived. Probably the most influential trade union federation at this genesis period in the UK was the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, formed in February 1834, based largely in London and Liverpool. It started becoming moribund by November of the same year due to dissensions on methods and strategies.
The 1840s were quite decisive for the emerging working class’ trade union organizations. In the UK, the trade unions took the route of Chartism i.e. demands around a charter for democratic rights which included universal adult suffrage. On the continent with the raging revolutions and counter-revolutions that peaked in 1848, socialist ideas became a spectre rising from within and taking hold of the sols of the working class to the chagrin of the bosses.
The later half of the nineteenth century saw organized labour’s turn to “internationalism” a term used for the first time by workers in the 1850s. On September 28, 1864, the First International was formed as the International Working Men’s Association. It was the first international organization of workers, including trades unions. It collapsed after the 1871 Paris Commune’s demise.
In 1889, the Second International was formed, largely by workers’ parties. In the period between the First International and the Second, socialist parties had risen to prominence on the continent of Europe. Most of the trade unions in these countries, particularly in Germany and France, were formed by these parties. 1889 was also the year in which the first of what today we call Global Union Federations emerged. Here we find the first step towards the separation of the partisan elements of the labour movement from the strictly trade union and as well beginnings of sectoral unionism at the international level.
The nineteenth century was in a sense the century of trade unionism’s early beginnings. It also bore the gems of the slide towards reformism that would mark business unionism.
Trade unionism in the short 20th Century
Hobsbawm, a leading labour historian described the twentieth century as an age of extremes from 1914 to 1991. This age of extremes was marked by two World Wars, the Great Depression, the Russian revolution, the Cold War and the decolonization of the Third World. All these had severe impacts on the development of trade unionism which we are constrained from going into here. The thread of our perspective here is to try picking the important kernel for our analysis.
The First World War marked a significant turning point in the development of the international working class and trade union movement. It put the various trades unions and socialist parties’ commitment to workers’ internationalism to test and most of them failed. Except for a few socialist leaders and activists, in most countries outside Russia, socialists, trade unionists and their parties and unions supported “their” elites in a fratricidal war that pitted soldier against soldier, worker against worker, peasant against peasant. It was a near mortal blow for working class and trade union movement internationalisms.
The Russian revolution at the twilight of the war was an event that shook the world deepening cleavages that had been emerging within the international working class movement between those who stood for reformism and those committed to a revolutionary resolution of the contradictions between capital and labour. The Great Depression which commenced on the Black Thursday of October 29, 1929 hit workers like no crisis of capitalism before then. That the state capitalist USSR with its socialistic propaganda was not affected by the depression was cause for concern in the hallowed chambers of captains of industry and statesmen in the metropoles of capital.
For the working class, it was a time for revolt. Mass strikes and protests followed the soup lines on which workers thrown out of employment and housing queued to feed. The Congress of Industrial Organizations broke out from the more conservative AFL in the US. Keynesian economics and the welfare state construct became the political settlement which the bosses sought with the trade union movement. A class compromise that ushered in the Golden Age of capitalism was arrived at and with it the polarization of the international trade union movement after the Second World War, when in 1948 the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions broke ought from the World Federation of Trade Unions, which seemed ever so briefly to offer hope of a united international trade union movement on the heels of the triumph of the allied forces.
These as we shall soon see had great consequences on the path of development of trade unionism in Nigeria, up to the 1970s.
Trade unionism in Nigeria, a synopsis
The earliest form of workers’ combination in Nigeria was, as with the US, by mechanics, who formed a mutual provident fund society, in the late 19th Century. It is however not considered as a trade union in the strict sense of the word, even though in 1921 in a new format (i.e. expanded with some railway mechanics in the ranks of its subsequent incarnation) it led a successful strike against threatened wage cuts. Thus, the (Southern) Nigeria Civil Service Union, formed on August 19, 1912, is accepted as the first trade union in the country.
There had however been some extent of robust trade unionism even before the formation of this union. This is demonstrated by the 1897 strike action of Public Works Department workers in Lagos, which they won. This confirms our earlier assertion that trade unionism often predates the formation of trades union, which then could deepen it.
The Nigeria Civil Service Union was considered “soft” by a number of civil servants particularly those in the railways who formed the Association of Nigerian Railway Civil Servants, a few years after the NCSU was formed. It was however under the blows of the Great Depression that more unions were formed. In 1931, the Nigeria Union of Teachers was formed. That same year, daily-paid African marine workers as well formed their union and in 1932, the Railway Workers’ Union which would later bring M. A. O. Imoudu to prominence was as well established.
The earliest trade unions in Nigeria emerged in the public sector partly due to the colonial state’s being the largest employer of labour. They were however to remain “illegal” until April 1, 1939, when the Trade Union Ordinance passed the year before came into force as law. Trade unions had to be registered to be recognized. This was not an act of benevolence. The establishment of trade unions in the British colonies was guided by the Lord Passfield memorandum which made clear its systemic approach to trade unionism. The trade unions were to be granted legality so that they could be tutored and mentored in ways that would not make them amenable to the radical ideas of nationalist politics and liberation movements.
The 1938 Ordinance had in-built in it as well a mechanism to encourage mushroom unionism by making the minimum number of persons that could form a union to be two. This was partly at the root of there being over 1,000 house unions in the country by the early 1970s.
The 1940s was when the first trade union federations were formed and split. Much noise is made of this by a lot of authors, but as we see with the first attempts at forming trade union centres even in the UK, that such early efforts fail is not at all unusual. This could be a natural learning process for a trade union movement.
The distinctness of the splits in the Nigerian trade union movement which lasted some three decades was not in the differences over methods. Only the first split and which was the only split that predated the international split along WFTU-ICFTU lines was based solely or even mainly on differences in theoretical approach i.e. the role of the trade union movement in politics – to be affiliated to or not to be affiliated to the NCNC. All subsequent splits were driven by and had at their centre splits over the East-West ideological divide.
In 1974 – 75, the trade union movement itself rose to overcome this legacy of division. On September 21, 1974, S.O. Oduleye a leader of one of the four trade union centres then was being buried at Apena cemetery and there and then on the platform of what has become known as the Apena Declaration, the four unions decided to dissolve themselves and form one central labour organisation. This they did on December 19-20, 1975, when they formed the second Nigeria Labour Congress .
This was enough to cause the ruling elites a great deal of fright and the Federal Military Government moved in with its doctrine of “limited intervention” and “guided democracy”. It proscribed the formed organization and banned 11 of its leaders from trade unionism for the rest of their lives.
Part of the “limited intervention” and “guided democracy” policy was the re-structuring of the trade unions, supposedly along industrial lines but rather in a manner to divide along junior-senior staff lines and through automatic check-off systems (for the more militant “junior worker” unions, establish a foothold for incorporation. It was an attempt, which however failed, to enthrone a form of systemic trade unions regime.
The NLC and senior staff unions which became organized as SESCAN and by 2000 as the Trade Union Congress emerged at a time that the world was entering the era of neoliberal globalization. This has had profound impact on the nature of trade unionism that has become dominant in the country.
A form of yet self-unconscious social movement unionism took roots and has flourished particularly over the last decade. Trade union and social issues have become linked in a dynamic yet episodic manner. The greatest of the challenges that faces the Nigerian trade union movement might be the reclaiming of the consciousness it lost, in an attempt to harmonise its radical (“progressives”) and moderate (“democrats”) factions, within the context of the globalization of working people’s resistance.
The 21st Century holds many questions and yet much more hopes. Our future is in the making and lie in our hands.
In lieu of a conclusion
This essay has tried to put in perspective trade unionism and trades unions in a way and manner that could give some introductory perspective on salient issues bearing on them and the dynamics between them.
I have tried to put in perspective the: different conceptions of trades unions; contending approaches to trade unionism; types of unions and union organizational structure and; historical development of the trade union movement in general and specifically in Nigeria.
The challenge a paper like this must confront is to go beyond interpretation to positing possible directions towards deepening what we have done well, overcoming or at least limiting our inadequacies and ultimately changing our circumstances and the world.
I would state first that there is the critical need for unionists in Nigeria to better understand the social movement approach to unionism so as to better appreciate and build on its blind social movement unionism.
Second would be the challenge of theory and ideology. We were in a sense casualties of the Cold War, not just because of the divisions within it which swallowed our movement into its rubric, but because it led eventually to de-ideologizing the trade union movement. Theory surely matters. We are made to believe that it doesn’t such belief itself is ideological, such that de-ideologizing the movement actually amounts to denuding it of radical and revolutionary ideologies and theory. Critical theory in the sense of scientifically rooted socialist perspectives still stand clearest as the beacon for the working class. The most apt demonstration of the inadequacy, nay, murderous intent of capitalism and its ideologies, not the least neo-liberalism is in its own contradictions which the current global economic crisis clearly portrays.
Third would be the issue of unity. The need for unity at workplace/union (e.g. NUPENGASSAN) and broader national e.g. NLC-TUC levels can not be overemphasized.
Practically speaking for trade unionists at the shop floor, building alliances with the communities, building social and environmental justice issues into CBAs, persistent working class-ideological education, mandate-seeking and reporting back to the rank and file, are critical steps to building a vibrant workers-centred trade union and trade union movement.
Thank you
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being a presentation at the June 5, 2010, 1-day National Industrial Relations Workshop I organized for the Total E&P branch of Petroleum and Natural Gass Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN), on the platform of J'Aiye Management Conultants (JMC); with sincere appreciation to my long-lasting comrade, Deji Kolawole, National Chair of the Branch and Professor Sola Fajana; Comrade Femi Aborishade; Comrade Bernard Ugbi, Comrade Senan Murray and; Barristers Bamidele Aturu and Anyanwu, who all resourcefully made it a resounding success.
Trades unions have become key components of most modern societies be such societies democratic or totalitarian, advanced capitalist or backward post-colonial. The nature of trade unions and trade unionisms are however quite different, even in otherwise similar societies. The United Kingdom and the United States for example could be considered as similar as societies could be (being the leading “liberal market economies” in the world), but they have quite different types of trade unions and approaches to trades unionism. Similarly France and Germany, two leading “coordinated market economies” in the West, have clearly different trades unions’ characteristics. Coming closer home; on one hand there are distinct traits that mark the industrial relations systems and trade union practice as heritages of our colonial past i.e. along English-speaking and French-speaking Africa lines. On the other hand, there are specific features of trade unionism and trades unions even in the closest of systems (e.g. Nigeria and Ghana).
There are however some universal threads which define trades unions as a particular form of social organisation and trade unionism as a particular form of working class phenomenon. The explicit definition of these categories of concern (i.e. trades union and trade unionism), stem from conceptions, of the broader categories of industrial relations and society. The practice of trade unionism equally has been largely influenced by the conceptions of what a trade union is, or at least should aim to be.
This presentation is aimed at equipping trade union activists, emerging as work place representatives with a broad perspective of the contending conceptions and views of trades unions and trade unionism in general. Very much related to this of course is an historical analysis of the development of trades unions with particular attention to Nigeria.
I must categorically point out here that this is not an academic paper. Its aim is to deepen the awareness and consciousness of fresh workplace representatives on basic trade union issues, so that they are better equipped to provide leadership to workers, at the shop floor.
The paper starts with a section that looks at conceptions of the term “trades unions”. It considers the diverse views of what a trade union is, showing the relations between these and the different schools of industrial relations on one hand and contending world views on the other.
The second section addresses the relationship between trades unions and trade unionism. It sheds light on trades unions as organisations, pointing out the different types of trade union organisation. Trade unionism as a working class phenomenon and its dynamics with trade union-as-organisation are further clarified. The trade union movement is as well put in perspective with trade unions and the broader labour movement.
An historical perspective of the general evolution of trade unions and trade unionism is then presented in the third section. The relations between these and the evolution of modern industrial society are considered.
Finally in the conclusion, I look at possible challenges for trade unions and the trade union movement in contemporary (Nigerian) society.
IR approaches and conceptions of trades unions
It might seem quite straight forward, on the face of it, to answer the simple question: “what is a union?” A few definitions with differences do however exist. These are based on different conceptions of: what a trade union is; what its goals should be and; the centrality or otherwise of its place in social development. One key point that it would seem, all views are in agreement on is that trades unions are combinations of workers.
The different views on “trade unions” as a distinct category can be somewhat situated within the three main approaches to industrial relations in general. These are the: systems; pluralist and; labour process/radical, traditions or approaches. It is also not unusual to have some authors present the worldviews on what a trade union is reduced basically to two i.e. the Western and the “Communist” views. I think this is a very inadequate typology. First it assumes that the Stalinist monstrosities in the old Soviet empire were necessarily “communist”. Second it also assumes that there is one communist conception of trades unions contrary to the contending optimistic and pessimistic conceptions which we will address below.
It is important to note though that, the conceptual frameworks for defining trade unions are not holdall pegs. There are variants of views within each broad over-aching conception.
Systems view
The systems approach to industrial relations was the first school of industrial relations and emerged from the 1958 pioneering work of J. T. Dunlop; Industrial Relations System. At the crux of the approach is that the work setting or industrial relations is a system, very much like an organism. It has three parties, i.e. the state/governmental and related agencies and apparatus, employers/their associations and workers/representative trade unions.
The industrial relations system considers the three component parties as being bound by a common ideology as well as by common rules that guide their activities in the system.
The conception of what a trade union based on the system approach is one of incorporation. The trade union is seen -despite the recognition of possibilities of friction in relations within the system-, as part of a corporate totality. One could thus argue that in this sense, the trade union actually is conceived of as a conveyor belt for the interests of the system, which could however have built into it, feedback mechanism to-and-from the workers.
The systems theory was conceived of by Dunlop within the context of Western democracy. It could however be argued that the conception of trades unions which arises from it is as apt, when applied to the hitherto “actually existing” “socialist” systems of the defunct USSR and the East bloc and also the developmentalist states that drove the industrialization processes in Latin America (particularly Brazil) and South East Asia (particularly South Korea).
In short, this conception of trades unions could be applied to industrial relations under totalitarian regimes as much as within “free” Western democracies. This conception presents trade unions as combinations of workers (and in some cases, as in Nigeria, considers employers’ associations as trades unions!), whom while with their peculiar interests are bound to seek the common good of a system where they are bound by the same ideology with the other industrial relations partner(s) i.e. the state (and employers’ associations).
The spectrum of this systemic conception of trade unions I would say extends from the unitary, to the “limited intervention” of “guided democracy”. Examples of the former would be clearly corporatist states/social systems such as those of fascist Germany and Italy, Stalinist USSR and the East bloc, the Estado Novo in Brazil, and the post-colonial one-party states in Ghana, Zambia, Tanzania.
I would argue that the official conception of trades unions in Nigeria falls within this systemic conception, with its sense of “guided democracy” and consideration of employers associations as being equally trade unions.
Pluralist view
The pluralist approach has similarities with the system approach in the sense that it does see the existing social order within which workers and their unions operate as a going concern which is to be maintained, albeit with reforms. It however allows for more friction and the fact that trade unions could have different ideologies from the employers and the state.
The pluralist school in industrial relations arose in the post-War order as a part of the dominant pluralist spirit in politics, economics and the social sciences in general, which fed-off from and fed-into the Keynesian Welfare Nation-State paradigm of the Golden Age of capitalism, lasting into the late 1960s, in the West. Trade unions were recognized as critical institutions in society, and particularly within the industrial society. The concept of “industrial democracy” was propounded by Clegg and Bains, but as Flanders pointed out, that “democracy” is questionable as the workers “party” within it is bound to a state of opposition in perpetuity.
The establishment might only have come to pluralist conclusions in its conception of trade unions only after World War II, but a large number of trade unions in Europe had actually in practice, started enthroning a pluralist understanding of trade unions. At the heart of the pluralist sense of trade unionism is the process of collective bargaining. It entrenches the death of the bosses’ unilateral power to hire and fire or determine wages and conditions of employment arbitrarily. The most dominant perspective of trade unions in the United Kingdom, duly represented by Sidney and Beatrice Webbs and indeed the Fabian socialist society as a whole was rooted in pluralism.
At the heart of the pluralist conception of trade unions is its representation of workers as voluntary co-stakeholders in the industrial relations system. The pluralist conception of trades unions rests on their being workers’ representative organizations, within an industrial context of “partners in progress”. It is the most dominant conception of trade unions in today’s world and guides the ILO for example.
Radical/labour process view
The labour process approach to industrial relations which is also described as the radical or Marxist school rests on a class analysis of society. Concepts of classes, exploitation and class struggle are central to its world view. Employers are seen as capitalists who exploit the labour power of workers in the process of production during which labour creates wealth.
It is a conflictual approach which sees the self-emancipation of the working class as not only desirable but as indeed something necessary for the continued qualitative advancement of society through the social transformation that would be part of and further blossom in the process of such self-emancipation. On the face of it, one could assume that with this there is or should be one “communist view” of trades unions and trade unionism. However; “there has never existed a single unambiguous Marxist theory of trade unionism” (Hinton and Hyman, 1975, 58).
It is not our intention to go into why this seems to be the case here. The task is to identify what these different conceptions of trades unions are within the radical school’s multifarious traditions. In this light, there are two broad poles of the spectrum of conception. These are the, optimist and the pessimist. Essentially the optimistic perspective sees trades unions as schools of struggle for the working class through which they come to realize their antagonistic relations with individual capitalist employers as something as being part of a broader class struggle. Conversely, the pessimistic perspective considers trade unions (particularly their bureaucracies) as sites through which the capitalist employers and the state manage to apply brakes on the revolutionary fervour of the working class or what Trotsky describes as “lieutenants of capital in the intensified exploitation of the workers”.
A thread that runs through the myriad Marxist conceptions of trades unions is that they are defensive class organizations of workers. Related to this is that whereas pluralist conceptions stress the representative essence of trades unions, they stress the mobilization essence, as being for the working class (optimist) or being deflected for the capitalists (pessimist).
TUs, trade unionism and the trade union movement
Trades unions might be conceived of in different ways as shown above, there are however some general defining characteristics of unions based on what they do and how they do these. These are at the crux of trade unionism. There are also different types of unions based on structure or approaches of practice. We put these in perspective in this section and as well sharpen perspectives on the trade union movement in relation to trade union organisations.
Trades unions and trade unionism
Trade unions are organizations of workers who come together with the aim of bettering their lots. There are, generally speaking, five major substantive issues which are at the heart of the workers’ quest in combining, these being: wages and other material remuneration; working conditions; job security; working time and; respect and dignity. Trade unionism is that drive, that quest for improvements in these substantive issues. This drive precedes even the formation of trades unions. Thus we see that while trade unionism might be the “business” of trades unions, it is actually a working class phenomenon, which precedes and even leads to the formation of trades unions themselves. Trade unionism is the natural tendency of workers to economic self-defence.
Combinations of workers in furtherance of trade unionism start with the spread of solidarity based on their shared circumstances. Trades unions are the more lasting forms of such combinations and they then drive the trade unionism as a process.
How a trade union movement conducts its trade unionism is influenced amongst other things, by: the dominant conception of trades union within it; the history of its emergence and; the economic and politico-legal framework which the IRS is situated in. With the winning of recognition as legal and legitimate social actors, the major means through which trade unions pursue the economic aims of trade unionism is collective bargaining. Other ways are through: mutual aid to union members; industrial action, particularly strikes and; political liaisons.
Trades union organisational structures
Trade unions are organisations and have types of structures. Trade union structure itself in industrial relations theory is something different from the organisational structure of trade unions, although it is used as a phrase to mean the same thing. Trade union structure refers to demographic variables bearing on the organized workforce e.g. geographical spread and gender disaggregation of organised workers. We are here concerned with trades unions’ organisational structures.
First are the types of organisational structures which trades unions take, in the sense of which workers they organize and what the scope of where they organize is.
Craft Unions: these are unions which organise workers with particular (professional) skills. The earliest unions (these were in England) were craft unions and this is in fact where the term “trades” came to signify unions . That is because the earlier unions then emerged from guilds of craftsmen who formed “trade clubs”, to be able to restrain trade as the mercilessness of factory-based large-scale manufacture sucked them into it and rendered almost useless the petty production of the cottage industries of those of them that tried to stay out of it, often to no avail. The National Association of Nigerian Nurses and Midwives (NANNM) and the Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) are examples of unions organized as craft-based combinations of workers.
General Unions: these are unions that organise workers of different skills and across trades and (possibly) industries. They tend to be larger than craft unions, (but this is not necessarily always so). They sometimes have sections or departments specifically responsible for the distinct sections of industry or group of skills of workers that they cover. A good example of a general union in Nigeria is the Amalgamated Union of Public Corporations, Civil Service Technical and Recreation Employees (AUPCTRE), which emerged from the amalgamation of three public sector unions in 1996.
Industrial Unions: these are unions which organise all workers in a particular industry, irrespective of skills or occupational differences. It is considered by many trade unionists as very progressive and the cry “one industry, one union”, is a popular cry for example in the South African trade union movement. One common myth that the Federal Military Government initiated in 1976-78 is that trade unions in Nigeria have been streamlined on industrial unions. Many unionists also describe our trade unions as “industrial unions”. On the converse, the very process that was supposed to have led to the re-organisation of unions on industrial basis split all unions in industry into “junior workers” unions and “senior staff associations”. It as well created several unions in sectors where it was difficult to maintain the junior/senior workers dichotomy, e.g. in the health sector we have at least the nurses union, Medical and Health Workers’ Union and the union of pharmacists and professionals allied to medicine, not to talk of the Nigeria Medical Association. One of the sectors closest to having an industrial union in the real sense of the word in Nigeria is the petroleum sector, and this is with the NUPENGASSAN collaboration which has involved joint National Executive Council meetings of both NUPENG and PENGASSAN.
The second aspect of trade union organizational structure has to do with the component organs and levels of organisation from the shop floor to the national centre of the union.
Most unions, in Nigeria of today at least, operate on three levels. These are the local branch, state (or zonal) and national levels. These are however not given for “every trade union”. Indeed until 1976 most unions in Nigeria operated only at the enterprise level, i.e. had only one level of operation . This is still common in most francophone countries on the continent and in Latin America, particularly Brazil. Such enterprise unions within the same or similar industries or geographical areas could then coalesce into federations. We will here consider the three-tiered level of union organizational structure.
National level: there are usually three organs at this level.
The National Delegates Conference (or National Congress), is the supreme decision-making organ of the union. Its meetings could be annual (e.g. in the UK), biennial, triennial (e.g. South Africa, Ghana and most TUC-affiliated unions in Nigeria). In most cases, its periodicity is often the same as that for the National Delegates Conference of the trade union centre a union is affiliated to. It comprises delegates usually (or in most cases assumedly) elected from the shop floor or state/zonal council. It is vested with the powers of reviewing/amending the union constitution, determining policy and electing national officers of the union.
The National Executive Council (in some unions e.g. AUPCTRE; National Governing Council) usually comprises of the elected national officers and representative officers (usually Chair and Secretary) of the State/Zonal Councils of the union. It tends to meet usually, quarterly, bi-annually or annually; with this periodicity usually determined by that of the NDC (e.g. unions with quadrennial NDCs are likely to have annual NECs, while those with annual NDCs would most likely have quarterly NEC sessions). It is responsible for ensuring that policies and other resolutions resolved on by NDC are operationalized, guided by the spirit and letters of such resolutions. It also generally has oversight functions on the union in-between NDCs.
The Central Working Committee (in some unions, National Administrative Committee or Central Executive Committee). It usually comprises elected national officers, with – more often than not – some co-opted members and the national secretariat (a General Secretary and deputies, plus heads of departments and the like). While it is supposed to be subordinate to the other “superior” organs at the national level and in the union general, it actually wields de facto power more than any other organ. This is due largely to the greater frequency and depth of its meetings. It could be argued that the extent to which internal democracy reigns in a union can be gauged by just how subordinated it is to the other broader organs.
State/Zonal levels: unions with members in all states of the federation, tend to have state councils (this is the case for example with public sector unions). They could then as well have zonal structures which might or might not be stipulated in the constitution for administrative convenience or political expediency. Unions such as those in the extractive sector tend to have memberships concentrated in those particular states that are sites of their industries (although it is possible for some to be (almost) national in spread due to the distribution chains along which they have memberships). Such unions tend not to have state councils and instead have zonal councils that could cover a number of states.
The organs within the state/zonal councils and the functions they perform, are very much like those at the national level; delegates conferences, executive councils and working or/and administrative committees.
Workplace/shop floor level: this is the major site of life for trade unionism. In most workplaces limited to one site, there are just two organs; the executive committee and the general meeting where direct democracy prevails. Where such workplace is quite large (as with some tertiary health institutions even where limited to one location) or where you have dispersal of sites, there most likely would be units as sub-branch structures.
We pointed out earlier while looking at conceptions of trades unions that pluralist conceptions stress the representative role of unions for workers while radical views stress the mobilizational aspect. Every union in practicing unionism does however in some proportion or the other blend both the representative and mobilizational functions.
What one could add here is that the higher the level of the organs in a trade union’s organizational structure, the more dominant the representative function is perceived . At the shop floor though, the mobilizational thrust tends more to come to the fore spurred by and deepening rank and file dynamism.
Types of trade unionisms
There are different approaches to trade unionism adopted by different (and possibly at different times, by the same) unions. These are approaches to fulfilling as they best think they could, the goal of a better life for the worker.
It might be useful before going further here to point out the two broad goals of trade unionism as being substantive goals e.g. better pay, shorter working hours, increased vacation period and procedural goals i.e. control over the work process . In a sense the different approaches do place different weights on each of these two broad categories of goals, as we will see. It would however not be strictly correct to distinguish this or that approach to trade unionism on the basis of a strict concern for either substantive goals over procedural goals or vice versa, just as much as while we shall note their relevant congruence with conceptions of trade unions, they can not be reduced to those.
The four basic approaches to trade unionism could be said to be: corporatist; “economistic” (business); political (partisan) and; social movement unionisms.
Corporatist unionism: this would be the approach to unionism promoted by a union within the unitary-systemic conception of trade unions. This could be the described as the form of trade unionism in state capitalist, fascist, totalitarian or one-party states. The way towards fulfilling the aim of a better life for the working class is seen in total support for the broader political system more often than not under the control of a behemoth party. Such unionism it would seem would place less priority on mobilization, being more often than not perpetuated by trade unions that were formed by or owe their “powers” to the state more than to the workers.
The situation however might not be so simple. The practical reality of exploitation and alienation drives workers even within such unionism to seek interstices of resistance. It could start by still claiming corporatist support to the powers that be, or as a drive for more radical unionism by the time it emerges through fermentation. Examples of these include how Solidarnosc emerged from the Polish docks and the to same extent the situation in Zambia where the ZCTU that had given tacit support at some point in time to the one-party dictatorship would become the rallying centre for the Movement for Multi-Party Democracy.
Economistic/business unionism: this form of unionism asserts that trades unions should be concerned strictly with bread and butter issues of wages and working conditions. During the Cold War, it was the dominant paradigm of “free” trade unionism. It rests largely on a pluralist conception of trades union and indeed of society as a whole. Its classical home is the United States and 20th Century trade unionism in Britain largely falls into this approach as well.
Some myths need to be dispelled in understanding this brand of trade unionism. It is not necessarily always conservative. It could be radical in pushing what the unions’ want, which as Gompers the founding President of the American Federation of Labour and its arch proponent summed up is “more”. More wages, more leisure time, etc, but not necessarily more direct control over the political steering wheel of society.
This brings us to the second myth which business unions themselves perpetuate i.e. trades unions have no business with trying to change society (read; politics). The American trades unions ties with the Democrats is no secret, and the British trades unions actually birthed and (even despite Blairist “new labour”) still wield considerable direct influence in the Labour Party. Not only is overt political support given by business unions to non-radical parties, the roles of some of them played during the cold war, particularly the AFL-CIO , was one could be constrained to say, despicable.
Thus essentially, even business unionism is more often than not political, somehow or the other in its pursuit of largely substantive union goals. It however upholds the primacy of the capitalist system and seeks accommodation within it.
Political unionism: this is a form of unionism which is not only more overtly political, but more importantly, where the trade union usually, is affiliated to a political party, formally. When this form of unionism is described in most pluralist literature, a picture of left-leaning unions co-joined to radical left parties gets conjured. This is however not a correct reading of the situation.
First is the fact that the political party a trade union which practices political unionism is affiliated to might very well be centrist (as with the unions affiliated to the Socialist International parties), right-wing (as with “solidarity” affiliated to the fascist BNP in Britain) or religious (as with theFrench Confedration Francaise Democratique du Travail, in its earlier incarnation and some affiliates of the WCL, before its 2006 merger with the ICFTU to form the ITUC).
Second, the term political unionism gives the impression at first glance that (left) union movements with this approach are not concerned with economistic issues, mobilizing simply to overthrow the capitalist system. Nothing could be further from the truth. The French Confederation Generale du Travail, which with its close ties to the French Communist Party, could be taken as a classical example of a trade union movement committed to political unionism as been at the fore of such economistic struggles as the defence of jobs, wages and pensions.
Third, some of the leading trade union movements with direct links with workers parties or liberation movements have maintained their independence somewhat, despite such affiliations, and could hardly be reasonably said to practice political unionism. The two most striking examples are the Congress of South African Trade Unions (in a tripartite alliance with the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party) and the Brazilian Central Única dos Trabalhadores, which has very close ties with the ruling Workers’ Party (PT).
This might give a clue to the shift away from political unionism where the trade union movement mobilizes around a partisan political line by left-leaning union movements. Experiences of the diktat that characterized the political unionisms of trade unions affiliated to “Communist” Parties during the Cold War and the changing seams of the social issues which confront today’s society and the current dimensions of the perennial conflicts between the classes of the haves and the have-nots, might have contributed to this shift towards social movement unionism.
Social movement unionism: this is a form of unionism which combines struggle for the substantive bread and butter concerns of trade unions with the procedural goals of greater control on the work process and broader demands for social, economic and environmental justice. It represents workers and workers interests within the industrial relations system but realizes that these can not be separated from the mobilization of the broader mass of working people, women, youths and communities for a better world.
Social movement unionism is a strategic approach of building United Fronts of organized labour with other oppressed and marginalized strata of society. In a sense the trade union movement in Nigeria with the role it plays n the popular struggles against petroleum pump price increases for example approximates a social movement approach to its unionism. Only one union has however tried to think this out, integrating it as a policy in its statute books, i.e. AUPCTRE. Several unions do however implicitly uphold it for example PENGASSAN in positing its tasks for the future boldly asserts that: “we must speak not only for our members but also for the Nigerian people”. This spirit essentially, is at the heart of social movement unionism.
Indeed the most vibrant and left-tending trade union movements today are the bastions of social movement unionism. CUT in Brazil, COSATU in South Africa and KCFTU in South Korea are fully committed to this mode of unionism as are trade union movements in the Philippines and to a limited extent the US.
This brings us to the need for a clarification. Social movement unionism is not limited as an approach to left-leaning trade union movements. Its becoming fashionable in contemporary times can be traced to the attacks on the working class and trades unions by the bosses over the past three decades of neo-liberalism as the face of capitalist triumphalism. The consequences of these included declining memberships of unions, weakening of the social and political influence of trade unions and a material reality’s concrete challenge of economistic self-reliancism in such business unionism-oriented trade unions as that of North America.
Related to the foregoing is also the emergence, growth and development of civil society organisations and the increasing spaces of identity politics since the late 1960s when the Golden Age of capitalism entered its decline and degeneration mode. Subsequently, environmental concerns and the contemporary globalization (of both capital and resistance to it), became critical issues which could not but bear on the strategy and tactics of any serious trade union movement concerned with having a future ahead of it.
Thus, not surprisingly, trades unions in the United States, particularly the Services Employees International Union (SEIU) have been at the forefront of the return to social movement unionism .
At the heart of social movement unionism, particularly in the Western industrial relations systems, is also a replacement of the services model (common to them) with the organizing model, of trade union organizing. This model which is also known as the building workers’ power model, would be looked at more closely in a subsequent paper at this workshop.
Social movement unionism might not necessarily lead a trade union movement to rise beyond trade unionism. It does however in building workers’ power and counter-hegemonic united fronts present the working class with the school of real life on the limitations of trade unionism towards its self-emancipation.
Organized labour; trade unions and the trade union movement
The terms; labour movement, organized labour, trade unions and, trade union movement and are often used synonymously. This sub-section tries to clarify the differences and relations between these categories for trade unionists.
The labour movement is a broad category which covers the various efforts of working people, at combining their forces, by building collective organizations. It involves the trade unions and trade union movements, producers (and to a limited extent consumers’) cooperatives, peasants self-organized groups , and socialist (and anarchist ) parties/tendencies.
Labour movements desire better life for toilers i.e. working people in general. Different segments of the broad labour movement do however have differences of opinion on what this amounts to i.e. that it could be achieved strictly through continued reforms or tokens from the propertied elites (reformist); that reforms only help to chain the working people and only a revolutionary overthrow of the existing system can lead to any meaningful wellbeing for the working people (anarchists and ultra-left socialists) or; that while reforms should definitely be pursued and won with this resulting not just in improvements in the living and working conditions of workers, but as well strengthening the working class as the revolutionary agency for progressive social transformation, the ultimate resolution of the antagonism between the classes of the bosses and those of the working people can only be through the workers’ self-emancipation, as the culmination of a revolutionary process (revolutionary-democratic socialist).
Trade unions have we have explained earlier are organizations of the working class, i.e. wage-earning working people who are directly exploited by the capitalist system i.e. private employers or as “public servants” by the capitalist state. The trade union movement is however a broader category than trade unions.
The trade union movement is what could be aptly described as organized labour. It encompasses the trades unions and trade union federations/confederations at sub-national, national, international/regional and global levels. Trade union centres such as NLC and TUC are usually described as trade unions. I would argue that they are not trade unions. Trade unions are organizations of workers, but trade union centres are organizations of trades unions. The differences are not merely formal as experience in the trade union movement could reveal. The relationship between both is very much like that between bread and butter, with the unions as the bread and the centres as the butter.
At the international and global levels there are equally federations of different sorts. There are regional trade union federations such as the Organisation of African Trade Union Unity (OATUU) and the European Trade Union Council (ETUC). There are sectoral Global Union Federations (GUFs), which until the turn of the century used to be known as International Trade Secretariats. They have as affiliates, trade unions in specific sectors but a number of unions belong to two of them . There are eleven GUFs in the strict sense of it. But the Global Unions Council which binds them through quarterly consultative meetings and joint actions has thirteen “Global Unions”. This is because the ETUC and the ITUC (a global union confederation) are also part of the council.
Global Union Confederations are part of the trade union movement and they have as affiliates, national trade union centres. These are the International Trade Union Confederation and the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU).
We have looked primarily at the dynamics between trades unions, trade union movements and society. The challenge would be realizing how the material realities of our work and lives situate these within the tasks of the labour movement.
The historical development of trade unionism
The engagement of this section might not be as elaborate as its title would suggest due to space and time constraints. What I will try to do is to present a thread of snapshots through the lens of history on how unions emerged and developed in general and in Nigeria. This is with the aim of putting in perspective how in practice a number of the issues addressed thus far came to become.
The early beginnings
Trade unions or trade clubs as they were then called emerged as illegal combinations of workers who, faced by the inhumane and despotic exploitation that went with the industrial revolution in England, decided to take their fates in their hands and fight. They were illegal partly because even before the industrial revolution, i.e. in the period of England’s transition from feudalism which spanned a few centuries, combinations had been outlawed! This was with the fourteenth century Ordinance of Artificers , four hundred years before industrial revolution and the formation of the earliest trades unions. At the end of the seventeenth century when the industrial revolution was in full using and trade clubs were being formed, specific laws against the emerging unions were enacted. These were known as the anti-combination laws.
Unable to bargain since they were illegal and seeing the machines which produced on a large-scale sending them out of jobs and driving down wages, the most spectacular tactic of the earliest trades unions was sabotage. They smashed the machines. This phenomenon is described as Luddism. The penalties for being a union member then varied from prison sentences to deportation and included as well, execution.
One of the first battles of the earliest unions was to win recognition and for their activities to be able to move from the penumbra of illegality. These were not dis-linked from the struggles for better working conditions and wages, but as the 1819 Factories Act, the first of its kind showed, with workers not being able to speak for themselves in their own name, there was little victory that could be won in the way of better terms and conditions of work.
In 1824 the anti-combination laws were repealed. The repeal law was amended the following year due to the spate of strikes immediately after the repeal. But with this the jinx had been broken; the first step to trade unions as legal entities, recognized albeit grudgingly by the bosses, had been won.
On the continent of Europe at this time, unionism was still in embryonic forms. In the United States though, the first unions were as well being formed. These comprised of skilled artisans, and the dominance of craft unionism was o prevail somewhat for a while under the American Federation of Labour into the first half of the 20th century. The first union in the United States which drew workers of different trades together was however formed in 1827. Subsequently the carpenters formed their own unions as well.
These early unions in both the UK and the US were based on the organizing model and their unionism was very much like what we now in contemporary time consider as social movement unionism. They demanded social reforms, including universal adult suffrage and free public education.
With workers being able to organize openly as trade unions, their struggles drove home in their consciousness the need for ever expanding solidarity. Shortly after the repeal of the anti-combination Act, several efforts at forming trade union federations were made. This led to the establishment of the National Association for the Protection of Labour, in 1830. It was however short lived. Probably the most influential trade union federation at this genesis period in the UK was the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, formed in February 1834, based largely in London and Liverpool. It started becoming moribund by November of the same year due to dissensions on methods and strategies.
The 1840s were quite decisive for the emerging working class’ trade union organizations. In the UK, the trade unions took the route of Chartism i.e. demands around a charter for democratic rights which included universal adult suffrage. On the continent with the raging revolutions and counter-revolutions that peaked in 1848, socialist ideas became a spectre rising from within and taking hold of the sols of the working class to the chagrin of the bosses.
The later half of the nineteenth century saw organized labour’s turn to “internationalism” a term used for the first time by workers in the 1850s. On September 28, 1864, the First International was formed as the International Working Men’s Association. It was the first international organization of workers, including trades unions. It collapsed after the 1871 Paris Commune’s demise.
In 1889, the Second International was formed, largely by workers’ parties. In the period between the First International and the Second, socialist parties had risen to prominence on the continent of Europe. Most of the trade unions in these countries, particularly in Germany and France, were formed by these parties. 1889 was also the year in which the first of what today we call Global Union Federations emerged. Here we find the first step towards the separation of the partisan elements of the labour movement from the strictly trade union and as well beginnings of sectoral unionism at the international level.
The nineteenth century was in a sense the century of trade unionism’s early beginnings. It also bore the gems of the slide towards reformism that would mark business unionism.
Trade unionism in the short 20th Century
Hobsbawm, a leading labour historian described the twentieth century as an age of extremes from 1914 to 1991. This age of extremes was marked by two World Wars, the Great Depression, the Russian revolution, the Cold War and the decolonization of the Third World. All these had severe impacts on the development of trade unionism which we are constrained from going into here. The thread of our perspective here is to try picking the important kernel for our analysis.
The First World War marked a significant turning point in the development of the international working class and trade union movement. It put the various trades unions and socialist parties’ commitment to workers’ internationalism to test and most of them failed. Except for a few socialist leaders and activists, in most countries outside Russia, socialists, trade unionists and their parties and unions supported “their” elites in a fratricidal war that pitted soldier against soldier, worker against worker, peasant against peasant. It was a near mortal blow for working class and trade union movement internationalisms.
The Russian revolution at the twilight of the war was an event that shook the world deepening cleavages that had been emerging within the international working class movement between those who stood for reformism and those committed to a revolutionary resolution of the contradictions between capital and labour. The Great Depression which commenced on the Black Thursday of October 29, 1929 hit workers like no crisis of capitalism before then. That the state capitalist USSR with its socialistic propaganda was not affected by the depression was cause for concern in the hallowed chambers of captains of industry and statesmen in the metropoles of capital.
For the working class, it was a time for revolt. Mass strikes and protests followed the soup lines on which workers thrown out of employment and housing queued to feed. The Congress of Industrial Organizations broke out from the more conservative AFL in the US. Keynesian economics and the welfare state construct became the political settlement which the bosses sought with the trade union movement. A class compromise that ushered in the Golden Age of capitalism was arrived at and with it the polarization of the international trade union movement after the Second World War, when in 1948 the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions broke ought from the World Federation of Trade Unions, which seemed ever so briefly to offer hope of a united international trade union movement on the heels of the triumph of the allied forces.
These as we shall soon see had great consequences on the path of development of trade unionism in Nigeria, up to the 1970s.
Trade unionism in Nigeria, a synopsis
The earliest form of workers’ combination in Nigeria was, as with the US, by mechanics, who formed a mutual provident fund society, in the late 19th Century. It is however not considered as a trade union in the strict sense of the word, even though in 1921 in a new format (i.e. expanded with some railway mechanics in the ranks of its subsequent incarnation) it led a successful strike against threatened wage cuts. Thus, the (Southern) Nigeria Civil Service Union, formed on August 19, 1912, is accepted as the first trade union in the country.
There had however been some extent of robust trade unionism even before the formation of this union. This is demonstrated by the 1897 strike action of Public Works Department workers in Lagos, which they won. This confirms our earlier assertion that trade unionism often predates the formation of trades union, which then could deepen it.
The Nigeria Civil Service Union was considered “soft” by a number of civil servants particularly those in the railways who formed the Association of Nigerian Railway Civil Servants, a few years after the NCSU was formed. It was however under the blows of the Great Depression that more unions were formed. In 1931, the Nigeria Union of Teachers was formed. That same year, daily-paid African marine workers as well formed their union and in 1932, the Railway Workers’ Union which would later bring M. A. O. Imoudu to prominence was as well established.
The earliest trade unions in Nigeria emerged in the public sector partly due to the colonial state’s being the largest employer of labour. They were however to remain “illegal” until April 1, 1939, when the Trade Union Ordinance passed the year before came into force as law. Trade unions had to be registered to be recognized. This was not an act of benevolence. The establishment of trade unions in the British colonies was guided by the Lord Passfield memorandum which made clear its systemic approach to trade unionism. The trade unions were to be granted legality so that they could be tutored and mentored in ways that would not make them amenable to the radical ideas of nationalist politics and liberation movements.
The 1938 Ordinance had in-built in it as well a mechanism to encourage mushroom unionism by making the minimum number of persons that could form a union to be two. This was partly at the root of there being over 1,000 house unions in the country by the early 1970s.
The 1940s was when the first trade union federations were formed and split. Much noise is made of this by a lot of authors, but as we see with the first attempts at forming trade union centres even in the UK, that such early efforts fail is not at all unusual. This could be a natural learning process for a trade union movement.
The distinctness of the splits in the Nigerian trade union movement which lasted some three decades was not in the differences over methods. Only the first split and which was the only split that predated the international split along WFTU-ICFTU lines was based solely or even mainly on differences in theoretical approach i.e. the role of the trade union movement in politics – to be affiliated to or not to be affiliated to the NCNC. All subsequent splits were driven by and had at their centre splits over the East-West ideological divide.
In 1974 – 75, the trade union movement itself rose to overcome this legacy of division. On September 21, 1974, S.O. Oduleye a leader of one of the four trade union centres then was being buried at Apena cemetery and there and then on the platform of what has become known as the Apena Declaration, the four unions decided to dissolve themselves and form one central labour organisation. This they did on December 19-20, 1975, when they formed the second Nigeria Labour Congress .
This was enough to cause the ruling elites a great deal of fright and the Federal Military Government moved in with its doctrine of “limited intervention” and “guided democracy”. It proscribed the formed organization and banned 11 of its leaders from trade unionism for the rest of their lives.
Part of the “limited intervention” and “guided democracy” policy was the re-structuring of the trade unions, supposedly along industrial lines but rather in a manner to divide along junior-senior staff lines and through automatic check-off systems (for the more militant “junior worker” unions, establish a foothold for incorporation. It was an attempt, which however failed, to enthrone a form of systemic trade unions regime.
The NLC and senior staff unions which became organized as SESCAN and by 2000 as the Trade Union Congress emerged at a time that the world was entering the era of neoliberal globalization. This has had profound impact on the nature of trade unionism that has become dominant in the country.
A form of yet self-unconscious social movement unionism took roots and has flourished particularly over the last decade. Trade union and social issues have become linked in a dynamic yet episodic manner. The greatest of the challenges that faces the Nigerian trade union movement might be the reclaiming of the consciousness it lost, in an attempt to harmonise its radical (“progressives”) and moderate (“democrats”) factions, within the context of the globalization of working people’s resistance.
The 21st Century holds many questions and yet much more hopes. Our future is in the making and lie in our hands.
In lieu of a conclusion
This essay has tried to put in perspective trade unionism and trades unions in a way and manner that could give some introductory perspective on salient issues bearing on them and the dynamics between them.
I have tried to put in perspective the: different conceptions of trades unions; contending approaches to trade unionism; types of unions and union organizational structure and; historical development of the trade union movement in general and specifically in Nigeria.
The challenge a paper like this must confront is to go beyond interpretation to positing possible directions towards deepening what we have done well, overcoming or at least limiting our inadequacies and ultimately changing our circumstances and the world.
I would state first that there is the critical need for unionists in Nigeria to better understand the social movement approach to unionism so as to better appreciate and build on its blind social movement unionism.
Second would be the challenge of theory and ideology. We were in a sense casualties of the Cold War, not just because of the divisions within it which swallowed our movement into its rubric, but because it led eventually to de-ideologizing the trade union movement. Theory surely matters. We are made to believe that it doesn’t such belief itself is ideological, such that de-ideologizing the movement actually amounts to denuding it of radical and revolutionary ideologies and theory. Critical theory in the sense of scientifically rooted socialist perspectives still stand clearest as the beacon for the working class. The most apt demonstration of the inadequacy, nay, murderous intent of capitalism and its ideologies, not the least neo-liberalism is in its own contradictions which the current global economic crisis clearly portrays.
Third would be the issue of unity. The need for unity at workplace/union (e.g. NUPENGASSAN) and broader national e.g. NLC-TUC levels can not be overemphasized.
Practically speaking for trade unionists at the shop floor, building alliances with the communities, building social and environmental justice issues into CBAs, persistent working class-ideological education, mandate-seeking and reporting back to the rank and file, are critical steps to building a vibrant workers-centred trade union and trade union movement.
Thank you
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being a presentation at the June 5, 2010, 1-day National Industrial Relations Workshop I organized for the Total E&P branch of Petroleum and Natural Gass Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN), on the platform of J'Aiye Management Conultants (JMC); with sincere appreciation to my long-lasting comrade, Deji Kolawole, National Chair of the Branch and Professor Sola Fajana; Comrade Femi Aborishade; Comrade Bernard Ugbi, Comrade Senan Murray and; Barristers Bamidele Aturu and Anyanwu, who all resourcefully made it a resounding success.
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