International Federation of Transport Workers

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The International Transport Workers' Federation ( ITF ) is a global union federation that currently represents 4.5 million workers in the transport sector.

organization

The ITF is affiliated with 700 unions with over 16 million workers in the transport sector in around 150 countries. The association works closely with the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) within the framework of the Global Unions . The ITF's headquarters are in London ; Regional offices in Nairobi , Ouagadougou , Tokyo , New Delhi , Rio de Janeiro , Georgetown , Moscow and Brussels .

Member associations in the FRG are the DGB unions Ver.di and EVG . In Switzerland these are the SGB trade unions SEV , VPOD , Kapers and Unia .

A current focus of the ITF's activities is the support of the crews of ships sailing under flags of convenience; the ITF is also authorized in various countries to directly conclude collective agreements for the crews concerned. In November 1999 IMEC and the ITF signed the world's first international collective agreement for an industry, which has been in force since 2000. Its compliance is checked by 131 ITF inspectors in 43 countries (2004) as part of port union controls.

The union is one of the few workers' organizations that has already developed cross-border strike actions, including the first large international coordinated strike movement in history in 1911, when numerous European ports were paralyzed at the same time, and the strikes against the EU port directive "Port Package" in the year 2003.

history

The story goes back to the International Federation of Ship, Dock and River Workers, which was founded in 1896 and assumed its current name in 1898. After the end of the First World War, the ITF pursued a comparatively strong syndicalist orientation under its then General Secretary Edo Fimmen . In 1920 she played a key role in a boycott of the International Trade Union Confederation against the authoritarian Horthy regime in Hungary and independently carried out an embargo on ammunition transports to Poland during the Polish-Soviet war . In 1924/25, the ITF also initiated several - ultimately unsuccessful - initiatives to orient the trade union movement more internationally and no longer rely on national regional headquarters. During the British miners' strike in 1926 , the ITF organized a successful boycott of all coal shipments to the islands.

The ITF played an important role in the resistance against National Socialism between 1933 and 1945 , as it succeeded in providing effective logistical and financial support for various illegally working groups of transport workers in Germany as well as members working under German seafarers in exile and a continuous flow of information in both directions to guarantee. The illegal network around Hans Jahn should be emphasized, which benefited above all from the financial donations from the ITF. As early as 1932, the ITF had launched an initiative to gear the activities of the international labor movement more closely to the fight against National Socialism and presented a 13-point program for this purpose. At the beginning of 1933 she then offered the ADGB to put the ITF in the service of an offensive anti-fascist struggle in Germany, which, however, was opposed by the German unions, which in the spring of 1933 until they were broken up on May 2, 1933, opposed an "adjustment course" the Nazi regime had decided, was met with silence.

During the Nazi era , the ITF and Edo Fimmen were critical of the German social democracy and the German trade unions and initially made them responsible for the failure of the workers' movement against fascism, which is why they were also skeptical about cooperation offers from the exiled social democrats . In particular, the General Secretary of the ITF, Walter Auerbach , but also Edo Fimmen supported the left-wing socialist resistance group Red Shock Troop from 1933 to 1935 . From the ITF reserves, payments have been made several times to the Resistance Group Relief Fund for prisoners and their families. The ITF, which viewed the fight against fascism as an international one, was also involved in the Spanish Civil War . It prevented or delayed the transport of weapons to the area already conquered by Franco and helped the Spanish Republic to buy ships abroad.

See also

literature

about history

  • Dieter Nelles: Resistance and International Solidarity. The International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF) in the resistance against National Socialism. Klartext Verlag, Essen 2001, ISBN 3-88474-956-0 (Dissertation Gesamtthochschule Kassel, 2000).
  • Dieter Nelles: Resistance and International Solidarity. The International Federation of Transport Workers. In: Hans Coppi, Stefan Heinz (ed.): The forgotten resistance of the workers. Trade unionists, communists, social democrats, Trotskyists, anarchists and forced laborers , Dietz, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-320-02264-8 , pp. 73–90.
  • Siegfried Mielke , Stefan Heinz : Railway trade unionists in the Nazi state. Persecution - Resistance - Emigration (1933–1945) (= trade unionists under National Socialism. Persecution - Resistance - Emigration. Volume 7). Metropol, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-86331-353-1 .
  • Bob Reinalda (Ed.): The International Transportworkers Federation 1914-1945: the Edo Fimmen era. Amsterdam 1997, ISBN 90-6861-124-0 .
  • Hartmut Simon: The International Transport Workers' Federation. Possibilities and limits of international trade union work before the First World War. (Institute for Social Movements, Series A - Representations, Volume 5). Essen 1994, ISBN 3-88474-046-6 .

to the ITF today

  • Jörn Breiholz: SOS is a unique product - the ITF is the only global employee representative body. In: Rheinischer Merkur 6/2009, p. 13.
  • Heinz Bendt, Worldwide Solidarity. The work of global trade union organizations in the age of globalization, Bonn (FES) 2006, PDF, 135 p. , There in particular p. 97-103
  • Michele Ford, Michael Gillan (2015) The global union federations in international industrial relations: A critical review. Journal of Industrial Relations 57 (3): 456-475
  • Torsten Müller, Hans-Wolfgang Platzer, Stefan Rüb (2010), The global trade union associations face the challenges of globalization. In: International Politics and Society Online: International Politics and Society. - 2010, 3 ( PDF, 17 pp. , Accessed on February 24, 2018)
  • Walter Sauer, International Trade Union Work, Vienna (Publishing House of the Austrian Trade Union Federation) 2014, PDF, 60 pp.
  • Wolfgang Schroeder (Ed.): Handbook of trade unions in Germany. Wiesbaden (Springer VS) 2014, 790 p., Table of contents , in particular:
    Werner Reutter / Peter Rütters, “Pragmatic Internationalism”: History, structure and influence of international and European trade union organizations (pp. 581–615).
  • Hans-Wolfgang Platzer, Torsten Müller, The global and European trade union federations: Handbook and analyzes of transnational trade union politics, Berlin (Ed. Sigma) 2009, half volume. 1, 403 p. Table of contents , there in particular p. 199–226

Web links

Individual references, comments

  1. Via the ITF , accessed March 8, 2018
  2. https://warwick.ac.uk/services/library/mrc/explorefurther/images/itf/history/
  3. See details Siegfried Mielke , Stefan Heinz : Railway trade unionists in the Nazi state. Persecution - Resistance - Emigration (1933–1945) (= trade unionists under National Socialism. Persecution - Resistance - Emigration. Volume 7). Metropol, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-86331-353-1 and Dieter Nelles: Resistance and international solidarity. The International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF) in the resistance against National Socialism. Klartext Verlag, Essen 2001
  4. Dennis Egginger-Gonzalez: The Red Assault Troop. An early left-wing socialist resistance group against National Socialism. Lukas Verlag, Berlin 2018, in particular pages 179 to 205.
  5. See details Dieter Nelles: Resistance and international solidarity. The International Federation of Transport Workers. In: Hans Coppi , Stefan Heinz (ed.): The forgotten resistance of the workers. Trade unionists, communists, social democrats, Trotskyists, anarchists and forced laborers , Dietz, Berlin 2012 ( online )