Union Initiatives

The strike that has Ansiani and her union facing off against unidentified thugs has been going on since July, and is one of the largest in recent Georgian history. The employer in question is Evolution Gaming, a Swedish company providing live casino services to clients around the world. Attracted by Georgia’s deregulated economy, its low wages, and perhaps also its notoriously weak labor movement, Evolution came to Tbilisi in 2018, and its studio has since become one of the country’s largest private employers.

Part of the reason that the company (or government officials, whom the union suspects have stakes in it) has resorted to such blatant intimidation may be that its adversary, the trade union Labor, of which Tamar Ansiani is a vice president, is not the lackluster kind of representative that Georgian workers can usually expect. Rather, it is one of several new union initiatives, which in recent years have imbued the Georgian labor movement with new militancy.

“In contrast to most other unions, we are about organizing people and putting up a fight, and I think it makes us troublemakers in the eyes of the government,” Ansiani says, as her comrade, union president Giorgi Diasamidze, nods proudly. According to them, the struggle for improvements in Georgian workers’ conditions is necessarily political. In the spring, the union actively participated in the protests against the government’s Foreign Agent Law. The government has argued that the legislation, which forces stringent auditing requirements on any noncommercial entity receiving over 20 percent of its funding from abroad, will bring much-needed transparency to the country’s sprawling, foreign-funded NGO sector.

Labor, however, sees it as an authoritarian measure, threatening its organizing. Since Georgian workers hardly have a dime to spare for union dues, grassroots unions are reliant on solidarity from abroad. That Labor has been able to provide strikers with legal aid and equip the picket line at Evolution with tents, for example, is thanks to support from international partners like UNI Global Union and the Danish Trade Union Confederation.

“When we protect Georgian workers from foreign companies, with support from international partners, while the government is not doing anything for them — how does that make us foreign agents?” Diasamidze asks. If Labor was to comply with the new law, which, as a matter of principle, it refuses, Ansiani says they would be required to submit personal information about its members and planned actions to the authorities, among other things. Bent on stopping what she perceives as the ruling party’s authoritarian tendencies, Ansiani plans on leaving Tbilisi for the first time since the beginning of the strike, to cast her vote in her hometown. “This election is about Georgians deciding what they want — Europe or Russia,” she says.

It may sound odd for her to use the same geopolitical rhetoric as Georgia’s liberal opposition, given her union’s current battle with an EU-based company. But the hopes she and her fellow trade unionists attach to the notion of Europe differ from those of the liberals.

Although Ansiani and Diasamidze hope to see Georgian Dream ousted, they are not exactly fans of the current opposition either, given how much of it still clings to the libertarian ideology that wrought havoc on labor rights under Saakashvili. “Most Georgian politicians are really misguided when it comes to notions of Europe, deregulation, and the free market,” Diasamidze says, referring to both ruling party and opposition representatives. “The previous government dismantled the labor safety inspection authority, arguing that it was corrupted. But the police was corrupted too, and somehow there it was deemed sufficient to simply reform it,” he laughs. “And when Georgian Dream eventually reinstated the agency, it was only to do lip service to international pressure demanding they do so,” he explains, adding: “As we see it, Europe means some basic regulation.”

Autocratic

The trade unionists’ fear of Georgian Dream’s autocratic tendencies is shared by many on the Georgian left. “What we are most concerned about is this increasing authoritarianism,” says journalist Any Giorgadze. But to her colleague Natia Karchiladze, geopolitical terminology isn’t the best shorthand to summarize the issue. “When we’re talking about democracy and authoritarianism, it isn’t actually about geopolitics,” she says. Both women are part of the leftist online media outlet Mautskebeli, which focuses on covering social struggles like the ongoing strike at Evolution. Its main office is located on a quiet residential street near Tbilisi’s central train station, with a bookshelf on its barren walls featuring titles by David Graeber and Yanis Varoufakis.

Like Ansiani and Diasamidze’s union, Mautskebeli also falls under the Foreign Agent legislation, but has so far refused to comply with it. Mautskebeli operates on funding from European donors, like the German Greens–affiliated Heinrich Böll foundation. Although the journalists concede that it’s not an ideal arrangement, given that such funding comes with its own strings attached, they see it as the best option available to those wanting to cover crucial issues.

“Once we were in communication with a potential American donor, but after we published a few posts on Palestine, the way we feel it should be covered, they disappeared without giving a reason,” Giorgadze recalls. And while Mautskebeli is hoping to decrease its dependence on foreign grants by setting up crowdfunding solutions, this is not a viable alternative on its own, given the destitution of those average Georgians whose realities Mautskebeli aims to cover. And they say funding from Georgian political parties or businesses, which finances much of Georgia’s larger media — pro- and anti-government alike — would mean far less independence than Mautskebeli enjoys.

It’s a reality they see evidenced by the fact that, despite the ongoing election campaign, some of Georgia’s most urgent social conflicts are hardly being picked up by the country’s main news media. According to Giorgadze and Karchiladze, big businesses like Evolution or the mining giant Georgian Manganese, which has been the target of a weeks-long hunger strike by villagers from central Georgia whose homes are being wrecked by its operations, provide enrichment opportunities for politicians from both the government and opposition camps. Symptomatically for Georgia’s democratic deficit, media outlets affiliated with these party and business interests thus have little interest in providing critical coverage.

But while Georgia’s dominant political factions largely ignore the struggles of working Georgians, grassroots left initiatives are trying to build new alliances. One site of such attempts is Praktika, a self-styled “working-class café,” established near Tbilisi’s city center in 2022. “All we had starting out was an oven for baking bread, donated by a supporter,” recalls Giorgi Khasaia. He is sitting in a cramped back room of the café, with his comrades Giorgi Kartvelishvili and Akaki Chikobava. The three academics are members of Khma, the socialist movement that runs Praktika.

“We try to introduce some socialist politics into the public sphere,” Khasaia explains the movement’s ambitions. In terms of political agitation, this has included various campaigns, demanding, for example, that the state provide free meals for children at schools. Rather than foreign grants, Khma’s meager finances are generated by Praktika.

The café is filled with the smell of coffee and the buzz of animated conversations between its mostly young patrons. Offering cheap drinks and meals to cash-strapped students and workers, the café is meant as a gathering place for social movements and initiatives that, despite shared interests, might not otherwise connect.

Given the dearth of explicitly left-wing spaces that might facilitate such connections, the café provides a unique piece of infrastructure for class organizing.  When striking miners at Georgian Manganese brought their demands to Tbilisi last year, Praktika gave them free accommodation during their stay in the capital. Like the journalists of Mautskebli, the Khma activists believe that the Georgian political landscape’s ostensible dividing lines largely obscure society’s more fundamental class contradictions.

Two Right Wings

While the ruling conservatives and their main pro-Western liberal opponents accuse each other of being puppets of Russia or the West, respectively, neither offers voters much in terms of economic or social policy. “To paraphrase the [Lawrence] Ferlinghetti poem: the Georgian political class is a bird with two right wings,” Khasaia says. In his view, not even the geopolitical commitments promulgated by these two “right wings” — Georgian Dream’s promises of greater national sovereignty, or the opposition’s pledge to secure a European future — have much substance.

For the activists of Khma, the government’s Foreign Agent Law is a case in point. Though they agree that some large, Western-funded NGOs have had a detrimental effect on Georgian politics, for example by lobbying against progressive taxation, they’re convinced that those organizations have the resources to adapt to the law or pay resulting fines if they don’t. In their view, it is grassroots social movements that will be hit hardest. According to Kartvelishvili, it is the latter that are likely the true targets of the legislation. “When top Georgian Dream politicians were advocating for this law, they said it would help uncover the agents behind recent protest movements against hydroelectric dam projects, that are not even registered NGOs”, he explains. “And the so-called foreign funding in these cases largely consisted of donations from Georgian migrant workers in Europe and the US,” Chikobava adds.

They view the liberals’ proclaimed anti-Russian stance as similarly dishonest. According to Khasaia, “this savage form of neoliberalism, which was brought to Georgia by Saakashvili and his oligarch ally Kakha Bendukidze” was more inspired by the Russian architects of the economic shock therapy introduced there in the 1990s than by any Western models. “Georgian capitalism is Russian-type capitalism,” Kartvelishvili says. “Whereas we demand the nationalization of Russian capital, the liberals cannot overcome their free-market ideology and do the same,” Khasaia laughs.

And yet the Khma activists, too, see the elections as important. “It is about defending democracy, in the sense of keeping the ruling party in check, and preventing them from becoming this victorious, authoritarian bourgeoisie, which will enforce even more rapid capital expansion,” Kartvelishvili says.

Though the elections may be a chance to halt further political deterioration, none of the opposition parties promise much in the way of immediate improvements for workers — let alone any major overhaul of Georgia’s distinctly anti-labor status quo.

But for Khma, and others hoping for a postelection reality allowing for left-wing movement building, there are some encouraging signs of change. “Many young people are becoming more interested in socialist ideas,” Khasaia says. “Even some of those studying at the private university established by [Kakha] Bendukidze, the father of Georgian neoliberalism, are, by simple common sense, attracted to progressive politics,” Kartvelishvili laughs.

What is more, at least one of Khma’s campaigns has managed to penetrate the ongoing election campaign. “Almost every party has included a free school meals promise in their programs,” says Khasaia, who is convinced they did so as a result of Khma’s campaigning. While the activists admit that it’s awkward to see politicians hijack the demand, they welcome it as a change from the usual routine, of only ever demanding that things not get worse. “We convinced a huge part of the people that this idea is good, that it would work, and that it would help them in their everyday lives. We won that battle,” Khasaia says.

Whatever the outcome of the elections, the perseverance of labor and social movements will remain crucial in the struggle for a different, more just future Georgia. And as far as Tamar Ansiani and her striking coworkers are concerned, their fight will continue until demands are met. The union underlined its determination earlier in October, when it brought an RV trailer to the picket line as additional shelter for the strikers. “Sure, winter may be coming, but we’ll stay here no matter what,” Ansiani says defiantly.