There’s very definitely something to be said for lying on a beach with no goal other than making sure you can fit a nap in between murder mysteries each and every day of your holiday. But there are ways to rest up and recharge the unionist batteries at the same time.
The expression one of my grandmothers used was ‘busman’s holiday’. Meaning that you went on vacation not to escape your work entirely, but to enjoy it from another perspective. Without the pressure of deadlines, supervisors and all the other things that try to take the fun and satisfaction out of work.
A surprising number of us seem to need to get away only from the paid bit, not from everything associated with what we do.
The hotel worker who checks into the Royal Suite for a weekend of room service and spa time. The flight attendant who flies around the world and actually gets to see each destination. The water worker who shows up at the door to the sewage treatment plant in Prague because she heard that they have this new equipment that will be coming to Canada someday soon.
Union activists are no different really.
The steward who pops in, asking to see what a membership meeting in Capetown or Managua or Kolkata or Hong Kong looks like is a lot more common that you might think. And definitely welcome.
Tours and contacts like these aren’t just a way to unwind and take the edge off. They’re a way to learn how other workers, other unions, are attacking the same problems we face. Because if globalization has done one thing to make our lives simplier it’s this: if it is bad for workers and it is happening anywhere it will soon be happening everywhere.
More of us would travel this way, at least as part of a larger holiday, but are intimidated by having to organize it. A tour of the UK TUC office in London is not something your travel agent can help with. So what follows are some tips, no tricks, for trade union travel. A kind of Lonely Planet for the conscious working class.
The Domestic Scene:
There are, of course, the museums and heritage centres. The Workers Arts and Heritage Centre in Hamilton being probably the best-known, at least in Ontario. But unless you live in New Brunswick or BC – and perhaps even if you do – you likely haven’t visited the labour history centres in those provinces (NB's here and BC's here).
Health and safety wonk as well as a history buff? Keep a copy of Ed Thomas’ Dead But Not Forgotten. Morts, mais pas oubliés. Monuments to Workers. Les Monuments aux Travailleurs in your glove compartment for that family coast-to-coast driving trip. Or if you’re a serious wonk, make the trip about those monuments. Acadian heritage too? There’s a tour for everyone.
Why more unions don’t offer workplace or city tours around conventions and conferences is a mystery. Paper mill workers in New Brunswick might just get a thrill from seeing how a local union operates in a similar workplace in BC. Yes, reading reports and summaries and hearing speeches can help explain how a breakthrough has been achieved at the other end of the country, but nothing beats being there, seeing it and getting answers to questions from the people who did the work on the ground to make it happen.
Most of the people reading this have a convention coming. Suggest something.
Working class or labour history tours of many Canadian cities are now available. And well known, at least outside the country – in Berlin last spring I took a union history walking tour that was inspired by the Toronto tour. And the same folks are working to emulate the Women’s Labour Walking Tour of Toronto. If they’re good enough to inspire folks halfway around the world, shouldn’t they be on offer at your union’s next Toronto event?
There isn’t a town or city of any size, including Cobourg Ontario (pop. 18,000) where I live, that hasn’t got the working class history to fill a walking tour of a couple of hours. It may not match Dublin’s or Istanbul’s for bloodiness, but we’ve got our own sources of historical inspiration.
Your tour doesn’t need to be organized either. Tourism offices and public libraries in cities like Winnipeg make available maps for labour history self-guided tours. Or, as in Vancouver, Labour Council can either provide a map for a self-guided tour or arrange a leader for a group.
Or if you’re
looking for some quiet time on your trip, what’s better than a nice long walk
in a cemetery? Pop into the mausoleums maintained by various Cuban unions
in Havana’s giant and fascinating Cemetario de Colon. Or when in Dublin
do what my co-worker Simon Collins did and drop by the gift shop at the
Glasnevin Cemetery and grab a copy of the map you can use for a self-guided
tour of all the union activists buried there (and there are a bunch!).
Why so cheap? Because the organizers and guides are all workers like you and I who have an enthusiasm for what they do. They might cover some costs with what you pay but they’re in it for their love of telling workers’ stories. To make the most of your tour ask the guide what she does when not guiding you past the spot where workers were shot or where Einstein taught math at a union night school. Your historian is likely a retail worker or bus driver.
Speaking of Amsterdam (was I not?), don’t forget to look for trade union museums if you find yourself in Europe. Museums focussing on unions are far more common than you might think. Certainly more so than here. And more broadly-themed facilities like the Peoples Museum in Manchester are a real treat if you’ve grown up with Canadian history being taught as the bios of a bunch of dead rich white men with nary a worker in sight. That Sir John A. Built the CPR will come as something of a surprise to the descendants of the Chinese labourers who did-workers honoured with a monument in the old rail yards of Toronto next to the Skydome by the way.
Your tour can come to you too. Your union is likely affiliated with one of the global union federations and, through the CLC or one of the other central labour bodies, the ITUC. The global unions and occasionally national unions like CUPE and the Steelworkers regularly if not frequently look for volunteers to host ‘hot’ sisters and brothers from countries like Colombia and Guatamala. ‘Hot’ in the sense that their lives may be at risk. So a union in the global north that their union is connected to will arrange for them to spend some time out of sight and off the paramilitaries’ radar.
Hosting a union activist in need is not just a good thing life-and-limb-wise for your guest. It can give you a chance to learn a great deal about another culture and all that good stuff. It can also expose your union work to an outsider’s eye. Both can be something of a shock for both you and your guest.
Exposure tours conducted by a union with a robust international solidarity programme or by union-friendly NGOs are the all-inclusive vacations of the trade union tourism world. Show up at the airport with enough cash for incidentals and all the details are handled for you. A small cut of the cost may go towards the work of the NGO. In my experience less than 10% is standard. But even so you’re getting a guided tour for less since the guides aren’t being paid from tour fees.
There is a hidden cost however: on your return you’ll be expected to write and talk-up the things you have seen, good and bad. I try to encourage union members taking tours with my local international development NGO, Horizons of Friendship in (oddly enough) Cobourg, to get their locals to sponsor them with a nominal $100 donation to Horizons. That helps build a relationship between the local and the NGO but it also makes it easier for the traveling member to get on the floor at a membership meeting for a report. Members who have paid for something want a report on how their money was spent. And that report is more likely to make it into the local’s newsletter or onto its website too. The local Secretary-Treasurer will want her money’s worth. :-)
The only down side I have seen to these tours is that the participants who have spent two weeks meeting with peasant union members fighting land grabs or the garment workers losing their homes because the Walmart supplier they worked for moved from Nicaragua to Ethiopia overnight while owing them months of wages are often frustrated by their inability to articulate what they have learned. Their lives have changed as a result and they can’t make it happen for others by talking at them.
Do them a favour and take such a trip yourself. Look closely and you’ll see that the price isn’t much more than a couple of weeks in Cuba, only you have to buy your own booze.
While You’re Packing:
Most of us don’t do a huge amount of research before heading out on a holiday. But a few minutes with your favourite search engine won’t go amiss if you look for a few simple things.
Local holidays are one. My partner and I have spent a few May Days in Europe. In Zurich we ate the best food of a month-long trip at the fair that followed the march.
Oh, yeah, and there was other stuff too like a march against precarious work and the realization that the reason Switzerland runs like clockwork (sorry, couldn’t resist) is because hundreds of thousands of ‘guest workers’ do the heavy lifting and fine tuning.
And there’s something about May Day in Marseille when the marshalling point for the march is a monument to the Marseille workers who marched to Paris to save the revolution (hence the title of the French national anthem).
Come to think of it, the food that day was pretty good too. As for the wine...
Search on labour history when travelling to the Netherlands and you’ll get links to the city’s trade union museum (great gift shop) and Dockwerker monument. The former is the old Diamond Cutters Union office and so a neat peek at what a wealthy union looked like in the 1800’s. The latter honours the dockers who triggered what became a general strike in 1941 when the Nazis started the mass deportation of Dutch Jews to the death camps. A miniature of the statue can be found, if you look hard, in the lobby of Toronto City Hall.
The Dockwerker strike was one of just four huge strikes against the Nazi occupation in the Netherlands alone. There were others all across Europe. Thousands died. Hollywood tells us that the resistance to the Nazis consisted of clean-cut individual heroes and heroines working underground, blowing-up trains in the night and saving Allied aircrew so they could fight again.
But while the clandestine struggle played an important role it is hard to imagine anyone braver than people like the Belgian streetcar workers who stopped work publically, openly, explicitly striking against the occupation and without any defence against the Nazis other than the solidarity of their co-workers.
Something that often escapes us because of the current state of the US labour movement is its long and incredibly bloody history. When in Chicago be sure and visit the May DayMonument where the whole thing got started. Less bloody but more insidious workers struggles also get the nod in monuments like the statue of A. Philip Randolph in Boston.
Don’t forget to check LabourStart for travel information. Get not only the poop on strikes and lockouts that might affect your plans, but also an idea of whose picket lines you can drop in on or what union represents folks who do the kind of work you do. Or just keep an eye out for a line or a demo.
Say hi, explain why you’ve come over to chat, that you’re from Canada (or wherever) and if you can escape without having a great time you’re able to move faster than I. The experience can sometimes be a bit disconcerting though. I once dodged through New Delhi traffic to a picket line, had a fine time for a half hour or so, then found myself holding the line on my own while the strikers headed off for a quick meeting and some food. Few things have made me feel more like the centre of attention than that did. And since I am a middle-aged man I count that half hour as one of the high points of 5 weeks in India.
Finally, though trade unionists are busy people (but you knew that) they are also incredibly generous and really do tend to treat each other like sisters and brothers. Getting a peek inside to see how they work and perhaps learn new ways of doing things back home is far easier than you might think. International contacts don’t need to be at the level of heads of unions. Though now and then you kinda wish you had a National President sitting next to you so you could duck out for a second unnoticed. I’m still wondering about the effects on the lining of my mouth of that stuff I drank while some transport workers tried to explain the differences between the various Italian left parties to me.
In Ahmedabad India I spent a couple of days with the leadership of the sewer workers union. Every union activist I know complains about how hard it is to get a timely meeting with management. I don’t, not any more. The Manhole Workers Union has trouble getting meetings with management because they, the workers, are ritually impure. A manager meeting with them has to be purified by a Brahmin priest afterwards. You can imagine how a manager treats dalit (the so-called ‘untouchable’) workers. It’s also a union that does amazing work in organizing and on the horrendous health and safety threats its members face as they maintain the city’s residential and industrial sewers with no personal protective equipment and no tools other than pieces of rebar.
If that’s the kind of thing that turns your crank, contact LabourStart and we’ll see if we can connect you with someone active in the kind of union you’d like to visit with. We get requests like this now and then and have a pretty good record as a travel agency.
Give Back:
Trade union tourism isn’t just about seeing interesting things and learning interesting stuff from interesting people. It’s also about getting the word about our interesting stuff out there.
So when asked (offering always makes me feel a bit pushy so I don’t, but that’s just me) I have done workshops on online campaigning in New Delhi, a talk to young union activists on the relationship between Canadian unions and the NDP in Ahmedabad and a lunch-and-learn for SIPTU organizers in Dublin.
Never Forget to...:
Have fun even when things don’t work they way they should. Like the time we didn’t make a tour of the CTC HQ in Havana because my Spanish got us a taxi ride to the (closed for renos) aquarium. Turns out there was a bar Hemmingway hung out in not far away (but then that’s true of everywhere in Cuba).
And always take some lapel pins. Always.
For contacts where you’re headed on vacation this year or for lots of useless advice on trade union travel generally, contact the author at derek.blackadder@sympatico.ca. Or join me at the 2015 graveside ceremony honouring the Tolpuddle Martyrs in London ON this spring. Get to the Martyrs Museum beforehand if you can, or order apparel to wear at the ceremony from its online gifts shop if you can’t.
