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In late 2000 and early 2001, a dispute has broken out among member organisations of Luxembourg's CGT trade union umbrella body. Leaders of the ACAL road transport drivers' union are seeking to terminate a cooperation contract with the FNCTTFEL transport federation and join the ranks of the OGB-L confederation. To counter this move, FNCTTFEL has organised a referendum among ACAL members.
In 1955, the Association of Luxembourg Drivers (Association des conducteurs d'automobile du grand-duché de Luxembourg, ACAL), which was founded in 1930, concluded a cooperation agreement with the National Federation of Luxembourg Railway and Transport Workers and Civil Servants (Fédération nationale des cheminots, travailleurs du transport, fonctionnaires et employés du Luxembourg, FNCTTFEL) and affiliated to that organisation.
Both of these trade unions, along with the Luxembourg Confederation of Independent Trade Unions (Onofhängege Gewerkschafts-Bond Lëtzebuerg, OGB-L) and the National Federation of Book Production Workers (Fédération nationale des travailleurs du livre, FNTL), are members of the General Confederation of Labour (Confédération générale du travail, CGT).
In October 1999, OGB-L and FNCTTFEL announced the creation of a unified union structure in private sector transport, covering road, river, sea and air transport. The structure is called OGB-L-FNCTTFEL Transport and has about 2,300 members.
On 20 December 2000, the executive committee of ACAL called all its members, and representatives of OGB-L-FNCTTFEL Transport and of the transport workers' union affiliated to OGB-L, OGB-L Transport, to an extraordinary conference to be held on 14 January 2001. The reason for the conference was that ACAL was "looking for a new partner".
The ACAL executive committee believed that the new OGB-L-FNCTTFEL Transport would create more problems that it resolved, not least because new members, and in the medium term its current members, would have to join both FNCTTFEL and OGB-L, and because "you cannot dance to two tunes at the same time". In response to this development, the executive committee decided that OGB-L, with its 49,000 members and existing structures, would be the ideal partner for ACAL instead of FNCTTFEL. Accordingly, the call was issued for an extraordinary conference at which the decision should be taken to leave FNCTTFEL.
Attached to this call to ACAL members were a model letter of resignation from FNCTTFEL, an application for membership of OGB-L, and a more explicit report stating that:
The FNCTTFEL leadership reacted on 28 December 2000 with a circular to all ACAL members, in which it refuted the arguments developed by the ACAL executive committee, and stated that it had never been its intention to get rid of the ACAL name. It claimed that recent events were more due to the fact that some of the ACAL leadership, and particularly the abovementioned trade union secretary, were not up to the job and, instead of discussing the issues openly, preferred to shirk their responsibilities. Furthermore, it claimed that signatories to the 20 December 2000 letter calling ACAL members to a meeting were no longer empowered to speak on behalf of FNCTTFEL and ACAL, and that their activities were exclusively focused on dividing the transport sector.
FNCTTFEL leaders also criticised the actions of the ACAL executive committee on the grounds that they did not comply with the rules; they further pointed out that the call to an extraordinary conference could possibly be deemed illegal.
All ACAL members then received a postal invitation to an information meeting on 7 January 2001 at which all the problems were to be debated. The ACAL executive committee urged its members not to attend this meeting, and invited all delegates with voting rights to the meeting on 14 January 2001: the agenda for this meeting focused on terminating the cooperation contract with FNCTTFEL and affiliating to OGB-L.
The FNCTTFEL information meeting on 7 January was a failure: of the 2,093 members invited, only about 50 attended.
ACAL delegates attending the extraordinary conference on 14 January came down heavily in favour of terminating the cooperation contract with FNCTTFEL: of the 166 delegates with voting rights, 164 voted "for", and two abstained. As for affiliation to OGB-L, 160 delegates voted in favour and two abstained. In other words, both resolutions were passed almost unanimously.
In a further draft resolution, ACAL expressed resolute opposition to professional drivers having dual membership of both OGB-L and FNCTTFEL, and claimed that "in recent years, FNCTTFEL had done everything in its power to get rid of the ACAL (name)." The resolution also noted that ACAL's central committee would soon be reviewing the association's statutes "with a view to strengthening protection of the interests of workers in the road transport sector".
On 17 January 2001, following its decision to leave FNCTTFEL, ACAL began negotiating over how to go about affiliating to OGB-L. According to OGB-L, the first meeting produced an understanding on most of the issues to be resolved. OGB-L proposes to draw up a draft contract to deal with the transition, and to determine ACAL's future statutes. Both parties hope to conclude these talks in the near future.
A last-chance meeting called for all the parties to attempt to find a solution to the problem ended in failure as no representatives of either OGB-L or ACAL attended. The FNCTTFEL national committee decided on 18 January to organise a referendum among ACAL members, and to follow this up in February with a congress that would announce both the result and the measures to be taken. FNCTTFEL has no wish to stop organising the private road transport sector, and hopes that ACAL members will not allow any fragmentation of union structures.
The current events within CGT may be analysed in a number of ways, but it is not possible to ignore fundamental differences of opinion between one union, like FNCTTFEL, which mainly deals with the problems of civil servants, public sector workers and assimilated staff, and another union, like ACAL, that focuses for the main part on the private sector. Shared concerns like "transport policy" seem to have little chance of overcoming these difficulties at a time when basic discussions on differences between the private sector and public sector pension schemes are on the agenda. From this perspective, ACAL would appear to be better off in OGB-L. (Marc Feyereisen)