The Finnish workers' strikes that have engulfed the entire country and some areas of its life (which we wrote about earlier) have attracted the attention of everyone who follows the European labor movement. United by the SAK trade union, Finnish workers have been fighting for weeks against the anti-social reforms of the right-wing government.
On April 4, the leadership of the SAK Trade Union Association decided to suspend political strikes starting from April 8. Such a move is expected to encourage the “generous” government to negotiate [1].
Considering the fact that the bourgeois government did not even want to have a dialogue with the strikers and steadfastly endured all the costs of the strikes, the chances of this initiative are zero. But this is not yet a surrender, not the end of the struggle, on April 18, SAK will reconvene to assess the situation.
At the same time, it is worth noting that public support for strikes has been falling lately, the head of SAK agreed with this in the interview. According to him, this factor is not the key for them and the opinion of union members is much more important [2]. Most likely, this is caused by dissatisfaction with the inconveniences caused by the strikes in regular life, and in the absence of prospects for their success in the eyes of the society.
This approach is an example of economism when a trade union has limited itself solely to the relationship between its specific workers and specific employers. In this case, public support is extremely important, because the issue has gone beyond the specific employee-employer relationship. The trade union demands negotiations with the government, and by its actions is supposed to protect the rights of all hired workers. This is evident by their demands, which include protecting and expanding the right to collective bargaining as well as maintaining unemployment benefits. And it is the support of all workers in this matter that can give them the necessary power to change the situation. To deny the importance of this factor means not to understand what the main strength of strikes is - mass character and unity.
While there is no such workers’ power in Finland, the trade union has nowhere to get political experience, and therefore its struggle in this area looks quite hopeless. The Finnish working class can only form and put forward its political instrument, the Communist Party, to solve the political problem. Only a workers’ party can organize and co-ordinate various trade unions, public organizations and ordinary workers not only for the economic but also for the political struggle for their future.