INTERNATIONAL LABOUR GERMANY:

PROTESTING NEO-LIBERALISM IN GERMANY:

It's official now. You know that a ruling class plot has serious opposition when there are mass protests against it in Germany of all places. I speak of the practically worldwide move by governments to make the ordinary person suck it up for the bank and corporate bailouts of recent memory. Yes, even governments have to at least pretend to balance their books occasionally (despite social democratic illusions) or at least not get swamped in a visible sea of red ink. Thus Germany, like many other countries, is trying to download the cost onto its average citizen, and German workers are responding with opposition to this attempt to make them pay for a crisis they didn't create. Here's the story from Deutsche Welle. But I would not be true to form if I didn't make a plug here for my own people, the German anarcho-syndicalist union the FAU, and the German language section of the IWW. Look to them for more consistent opposition than social democratic unions are wont to present.

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Thousands march as German unions protest Merkel government

Tens of thousands of protestors took to the streets of a host of German cities, marching against what they say are unfair social policies espoused by the coalition government of Chancellor Angela Merkel.

A day ahead of an important gathering of heavyweights from Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU), tens of thousands have marched across Germany on Saturday protesting government policies and what they say is social inequality.


Umbrella union group DGB, which helped organize the demonstrations, said nearly 100,000 people marched in Stuttgart, Dortmund, Nuremberg and Erfurt to voice their disapproval with the Merkel government.


Chief among the complaints was the offloading of the costs of the financial crisis on taxpayers.


"We don't want a republic in which powerful interest groups decide the guidelines of politics with their money, their power and their influence," Berthold Huber, head of IG Metall, Germany's largest trade union, told demonstrators in Stuttgart.


The union is demanding higher wages and the introduction of a minimum wage, arguing that ordinary Germans should benefit most from the country's economic upswing following the financial crisis.
Pressure mounts on coalition


The protests were timed to coincide with the CDU's annual party congress, at which it's expected Merkel will be reelected to the leadership. The three-day gathering in Karlsruhe in Germany's south begins Sunday.


The congress will be held under the specter of sagging opinion poll figures for Merkel and the CDU. Just over a year into Merkel's second tenure as chancellor, many Germans are angry over a lack of progress on key campaign promises.


Her center-right coalition now trails the center-left grouping of Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens in opinion polls.


Merkel's government has also been dogged by infighting between the CDU and their government partners, the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) and the CDU's Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU).


Most recently, the public was angered when the Merkel government decided to extend the lifespan of the country's nuclear reactors. Nuclear energy remains deeply unpopular in Germany, witnessed most recently last week when tens of thousands protested the transfer of atomic waste from France to a storage facility in the north of Germany.


Merkel has also been criticized from the rightist faction within her own party, who believe she has not been conservative enough in her leadership of the CDU and the country.

INTERNATIONAL LABOUR-GERMANY:

'FLASH MOBS' AND LABOUR:

Here's an interesting little item from the German Deutsche Welle about how retailers in Germany are trying to have the tactic of "flash mobs" banned for use by labour during disputes. Well...if they dislike it so much that they are trying to have it banned then it stands to reason that it's a useful tactic and one well worth considering for use outside of Germany. Here's the story.

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Retailers launch legal bid to ban flash mobs:
German retailers say there is no room for flash mobs - large groups of people who assemble suddenly in a public place to perform an unusual action - when it comes to labor disputes.

The Association of German Retailers (HDE) has filed a legal complaint with the nation's highest court in an attempt to ban the use of flash mob tactics in labor disputes.

The term "flash mob" refers to the sudden assembly of a large group of people who perform an unusual action before quickly dispersing. Such gatherings are generally organized via mobile phone messages, social media websites like Facebook, or viral emails.

The lawsuit lodged with the Federal Constitutional Court is directed at the Verdi services union, which organized a flash mob at a supermarket where unionized staff members were striking in 2007.

The flash mob protest saw 40 participants block the store's checkout area for about an hour by simultaneously purchasing small items worth just a few cents. They also filled shopping carts with goods and abandoned them in the store for strike-breaking workers to clear away.
Questionable tactics
The latest complaint comes three months after the Federal Labor Court ruled that flash mobs are a legitimate form of industrial action given that they do not constitute a blockade of company facilities.

Judges recommended that store owners counter the spontaneous protests by closing their stores for a short time or banning participants from entering the premises.

But the HDE says that decision is both impractical and unfair.

"The people who suffer are customers who are not involved in the dispute," HDE labor expert Heribert Joeris told the Associated Press.

Joeris warned that the term 'labor dispute' would become disreputable if flash mobs were permitted to make a nuisance of themselves in retail outlets, or if store workers could only clear protesters from their premises by using physical force.

"That would be a legal situation that we retailers cannot and will not accept," he said.