With over 3,000 participants, around 80 workshops, forums and sessions, the Rosa-Luxemburg Foundation’s 6th “Trade Union Renewal” Conference from May 2–4, 2025 in Berlin was the largest left-wing trade union conference in recent decades. This was double the number of participants that attended the 5th strike conference in Bochum in 2023. This year registration had to be closed in advance as the expected high number of participants would have caused the venue to burst at the seams.
It was impressive to meet so many trade union activists, some of them very young, and to feel how much energy is building up. These people from different sectors and industries came together to network and learn from each other. In the large plenary sessions in the Berlin Technical University auditorium, there were standing ovations for workers in struggle, including for the touching appearance by employees from Charité Facility Management (CFM), whose current strike for the implementation of the TVöD (public sector collective wage agreement) and against wage reductions was enthusiastically celebrated. The applause and the donations collected at the conference will hopefully give the strikers a lot of strength.
At the end of the conference, members of the trade union youth groups called for a fight against rearmament and military service from the stage of the auditorium. “Let Merz and Pistorius go to the front themselves!” said a young worker and apprentice representative from Bosch.
Many participants will have gone home inspired. So many people thinking along the same lines and showing solidarity gives us the courage to organize something locally. In this respect, the conference was a great success and will help to develop struggles. At the same time, it was weak in terms of content.
Not Too Much Criticism
Although there was criticism of the introduction of the 42-hour working week in the current draft of the public sector collective wage agreement (TVöD) and the concessions made in the wage agreement at the VW Group with the de facto agreement to cut 35,000 jobs, no fundamental criticism of the union leadership’s approach was expressed from the main podiums.
This is a fundamental problem with the conference format: a lot is touched on, there is a militant mood, but there are too few concrete results, no decisions, and no strategic direction for the trade union left.
The conference was organized by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and trade union members from the Berlin region. There seems to be a fear of losing allies if the trade union apparatus and leaderships are criticized too clearly. Many of the workshops were designed in such a way that their results were also welcomed by the executive boards of Ver.di or IG Metall (Germany’s largest trade unions).
Practical workshops were given a lot of emphasis: How do I approach colleagues? How do I paint banners? Skills like these are necessary, but the substantive debate came up short. The workshops to assess various struggles and collective bargaining rounds and on building networks were often helpful for participants, but debate on strategy was avoided.
There was a lot of talk about “organizing”—new methodological approaches to building workplace structures. Organizers presented their successes in several workshops and these methods were indeed important, e.g. in the strikes for the collective wage agreements in the clinics in Berlin and North Rhine-Westphalia. But no matter how good organizing is, it reaches its limits when the union leadership stops or does not even lead struggles, when they sign bargaining agreements without mobilization that lead to real wage losses.
The organizers are mostly contracted through private companies that are paid by the unions for their services. This limits their ability to express criticism. They operate outside the democratically elected structures of the union and have to deal with their employers. It’s difficult to criticize those who pay you.
In addition, organizing that focuses solely on basic class interests reaches its limits when it comes down to participating in the debates about rearmament and the shift to the right that are also taking place in workplaces.
Signal for Resistance
SAV (ISA in Germany) was present with 25 members from eight cities. Like other activists from the Network for Militant Trade Unions (VKG), we contributed to the debates with more far-reaching contributions. At the IG Metall industry meeting, a member of SAV sharply criticized the agreement at VW and explained that this was an invitation to the bosses of all companies to attack employees on a wide scale. This was met with approval from other workers.
During the debate on the crisis in the car industry, the panel became bogged down in details and did not present any solutions. Speakers from SAV, VKG and some workers from the car industry addressed the need for a change of strategy by the IGM, based on the need for expropriation, democratic planning by the workers, a shift towards public transport and a reduction in working hours with full pay.
The VKG invited workers who were interested to a nationwide online meeting on May 16. They explained: “This conference must send out the signal to build a resistance movement, otherwise there will be no counter-weight!”
SAV members also took part in debates on rearmament, militarization and war and emphasized that the fight against rearmament must be linked to the demand for comprehensive investment in public transport, education, housing, health and social care. The demonstration initiated by ROSA and the SAV in Hamburg on Care Workers’ Day was well received as a concrete example.
Movement Against Merz
In the workshop on “The Tasks of the Trade Unions under the New Federal Government”, former Left Party leader Janine Wissler explained that the Left Party should not only talk about limited reforms such as a 1% wealth tax, but must fundamentally question property relations. The more social democratic representatives of IG Metall and the German Education Union (GEW) next to her on the podium, however, looked for positive aspects in the coalition agreement. They warned against too much criticism of the SPD, and said they were hoping for sensible investments from the €500 billion special fund and saw the task of the trade unions as carrying out defensive battles in the workplace.
However, the Merz government has set out to drive the “change of era” further: rapid rearmament and an attack on the eight-hour working day are already underway, and employers’ associations are demanding a restriction on the right to strike. A coordinated fight against this by workers in workplaces, trade unions and the Left Party is necessary.
The conference can be a contribution to this. The sheer number of participants shows the relative strength of the left in the trade unions and has helped to motivate participants in difficult times.
More concrete action could also have been possible: a joint nationwide day of action against the new government could have been decided at the conference—against the attack on the basic income and the eight-hour day, and against the rearmament package. The 3,000 participants would have gone home as multipliers for this action and could have taken this idea into workplaces and trade union branches.
The opportunity to do this at the conference was missed. But the activists are still there, and together with the many new members of the Left Party, it is possible to launch initiatives on the ground and to coordinate them regionally and nationwide.
