[Marxism] Eric Lee on Zimbabwe Solidarity Campaign

[Greg McDonald <sabocat59@xxxxxxx>]

Eric Lee
Web design and Internet consulting for the trade union movement.
Workers rights and online campaigns: Why the unions must set their  
own agenda

[Industrial Worker]

I have been helping organize online campaigns in support of workers'  
rights for several years now. The latest campaign I'm helping with  
concerns Zimbabwe. It supports a call by the Zimbabwe Congress of  
Trade Unions demanding that President Robert Mugabe respect workers  
rights.

Very few of the campaigns that I have been involved in may be  
considered controversial – at least they are not usually  
controversial within the labour movement. When you attack a company  
like Wal-Mart, everyone on the left has only nice things to say about  
you.

But campaigns like the Zimbabwe one, and ones we have done in support  
of trade unionists in Eritrea and Belarus, have generated their fair  
share of critical comment.

More critical comments have come in about Zimbabwe than any other  
recent campaign – and despite these, it is still one of the largest  
and most successful online campaigns I've been involved in. There is  
only a tiny minority of activists who have an issue with this sort of  
campaign and this, more or less, is what they say:

Robert Mugabe, for better or worse, has made enemies of George Bush  
and Tony Blair. If they and their stooges in the media (CNN and Fox  
News) say Mugabe is a dictator, therefore Mugabe must be a pretty  
good guy. Any anyway, didn't he do some kind of land reform?



Full: http://www.ericlee.info/2007/04/ 
workers_rights_and_online_camp.html
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