Dan Gallin (1931-2025), internationaal vakbondsleider
Dan Gallin, voormalig algemeen secretaris van de IUF (International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations), is op zaterdag 31 mei op 94-jarige leeftijd overleden in zijn huis in het Zwitserse Genève. Zijn dood laat een enorme leegte achter. Zijn vele decennia van militante inzet en strijd in de internationale arbeidersbeweging vormen een rijke erfenis waarop de internationale vakbonden zeker zullen voortbouwen. Een in memoriam door Peter Rossman.
Dan Gallin was born in 1931 in Lvov (then part of Poland, now Lviv in Ukraine), where his Romanian father served in the diplomatic service. He moved with his family to Berlin during the war when his father was reposted there, but after several years was sent to safety in Switzerland as Berlin came under increasingly heavy bombardment.
At the close of the war, Dan was stateless in Switzerland. He received a scholarship to the University of Kansas (USA) in 1949 and became a student activist.
Won to socialism by the Independent Socialist League, whose ‘Third Camp’ (‘Neither Moscow nor Washington’) political outlook insisted that the struggle for socialism must be guided by the needs of the working class rather than the needs of the contending Cold War power blocs, Dan threw himself into the organisation’s youth work.
In McCarthy’s Cold War America, this was subversion. Dan was arrested and pressured to ‘self-deport’ from the United States in 1953.
“What I later fully realised,” he wrote many years later, “is that actually, there is no Third Camp, only two camps: ‘them’ and ‘us’.
The ‘Third Camp’ was a slogan for a world polarised between two superpowers, but its profound meaning was different. Later, when I started to give courses in the trade union movement, I explained it this way: the fundamental line of cleavage in today’s world is not the vertical one separating the two blocs; it is the horizontal one separating the working class from its rulers, and that one runs across both blocs.
“We are not ‘East’ or ‘West’,” he would add. “We are ‘below’, where the workers are.”
Sifting through these experiences, Dan imbibed a profound commitment to international solidarity as a guiding principle of working-class politics. The meaning—and practice—of solidarity had to be rescued from its evisceration and deformation under the Cold War.
If solidarity was a fundamental principle, it was also a project, one which could only be built through dedicated organisation; there were no shortcuts. If socialism could only be democratic, and if there was no democracy without socialism, this implied resolute opposition to all forms of authoritarianism, as well as constant alertness to complacency and conformism inside the labour movement itself.
In 1960, Dan began to work at the IUF secretariat in Geneva and was elected general secretary in 1968.
Under his leadership, the IUF developed into a combative, forward-looking organisation—a global solidarity network with a growing membership and growing ambition. Vigorous new regional organisations in Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America, many of whose members were fighting for their very existence against repressive governments, were one pillar of this growth.
Another was the commitment to building union strength inside the transnational corporations which were increasingly driving the global economy and the IUF sectors. Most importantly, the IUF provided a strategic orientation beyond the purely reactive.
This commitment was put to a severe test in the IUF’s global campaign in support of the union of Coca-Cola workers at the company’s franchised bottling plant in Guatemala City, whose leaders were being systematically murdered.
The Coca-Cola Company denied responsibility for the situation at the plant. Over the course of five years (1979-1984), with few resources but the support of its members, the IUF mobilised a series of ongoing international solidarity actions which eventually forced the parent company to do what it had stubbornly contended it would not and could not do: replace the franchise operator with an owner that would recognise the union, commit to collective bargaining, and pay compensation to the families of murdered union leaders.
It was the first international trade union campaign against a transnational company, and the first successful one. (There is an excellent account of the IUF Coca-Cola Guatemala campaign here.)
The IUF was a campaigning organisation, but campaigning could only be effective if it rested on a bedrock of solid organisation. To support—not substitute for—that organisation, the IUF pioneered what later came to be called global framework agreements, negotiating the first international agreement on trade union rights between a transnational company and an international union organisation with the French-based BSN (later Danone) in 1988.
For Dan, international recognition of the IUF had one purpose only: to secure the space for workers throughout a company’s operations to freely organise and negotiate the full range of their demands.
Building solidarity in transnational companies was only one component of the IUF’s work. The IUF was always there for all its members and reached out to workers organising themselves outside the established structures of the labour movement.
Dan welcomed India’s Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) into the international labour movement through IUF affiliation in the early 1980s (not without controversy), and the IUF became a consistent advocate for the rights and recognition of workers (overwhelmingly women) organising in what later came to be called the informal economy.
This laid the groundwork for the IUF’s later indispensable support for the International Domestic Workers Federation.
Dan fought for an international labour movement which would be more than the sum of its parts—an independent force for worker and social emancipation opposed to all forms of oppression and exploitation, and not a simple grouping of national unions or trade union centres.
He deplored the substitution of shallow consensus, accommodation, or passivity for labour movement principles and never shrank from a fight when he felt those principles were at stake.
During his time at the IUF and into his retirement, Dan generously and enthusiastically shared his experience and encyclopaedic knowledge of labour and socialist history as a contribution to building this movement.
Dan believed that labour’s history was about the future, not the past. He was fond of repeating that there are no permanent victories or permanent defeats, only permanent struggle.
Many of his writings, in various languages, can be found on the website of the Global Labour Institute, which he founded after his retirement. They deserve the widest possible diffusion.
Peter Rossman
Peter Rossman was Director of Campaigns and Communication for the IUF from 1991 until his retirement in 2020.
Dit in memoriam verscheen op 7 juni 2025 op de website van Global Labour Column: https://globallabourcolumn.org/2025/06/07/dan-gallin-labour-internationalist-1931-2025/
Lees ook:
Solidarity
A collection of 19 essays by Dan Gallin, the former general secretary of the Geneva-based International Union of Foodworkers (IUF). The essays include two autobiographical articles, three pieces from the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the remainder from the last two decades.
Gallin writes about a broad range of issues including the Algerian revolution, the French Left, Victor Serge, Scandinavian social democracy, the international labour movement, domestic work, the informal sector and much more.
Often controversial, always interesting, this is essential reading for social change activists, trade unionists and everyone on the left. 262 pages.
https://www.labourstart.org/solidarity
Resistance
LabourStart is delighted to publish this second collection of seven essays by Dan Gallin, the former general secretary of the International Union of Foodworkers (IUF).
In the seven essays collected in this book, written over the course of more than half a century, Gallin takes a close look at the international trade union movement, American labour’s Cold War history, the controversial philanthropist George Soros, the World Federation of Trade Unions, post-Communist Romania, the early African labour movement, and the Algerian Revolution.
Dan Gallin has been a leading figure in the international labour movement for many decades. In this and the previous book, Solidarity, he has made an important contribution to how we understand the labour movement.
As I wrote in my preface to the previous volume, “Dan’s criticisms of the labour movement, from a movement insider, are often sharp. I expect that some of you reading this will find parts of this book difficult going. For Dan, there are no sacred cows. He says what he thinks.”
Or to put it in Dan’s own words from an essay in this volume – in fact, the final words in this book: “Our responsibility … is to recognize the facts for what they are, to speak the truth and to take clear positions, regardless of the opposition or controversy we may meet.”
https://www.labourstart.org/resistance
Lees verder (inhoud juni 2025)
