Mireli Sørensen
Mireli Sørensen | |
|---|---|
 Colourised portrait of Mireli Sørensen, circa 1945 | |
| Born | 12 February 1900 |
| Died | 25 April 1995 (aged 95) |
| Occupation | Trade unionist |
| Known for | President of the General Labor Confederation of Delkora (1940–1980) |
Mireli Sørensen (12 February 1900 – 25 April 1995) was a Delkoran trade unionist who served as the President of the General Labor Confederation of Delkora from 1940 to 1980. Considered one of the most powerful leaders of organised labor in Delkoran history, she is credited with making the Delkoran workforce one of the best-paid and safest in Eracura. She was an influential participant in the New Kingdom program, lionised as one of the leading figures of the radical left.
Early life
Mireli Sørensen was born on 12 February 1900 in Mæstfyn, a village in southern Banderhus. She came from a poor Traveller family, and was the oldest of several siblings. Her childhood was marked by the family's itinerant lifestyle and poverty, and she was exposed to anti-Traveller discrimination from an early age. She would later say that these conditions radicalised her politics early on.
Her education was deficient, and she left school aged 15. She worked as a farmhand and a miner. She joined the United Industrial Workers, and later progressed to being a full-time union organiser. She attended various union-organised educational programmes and became an avid reader. She began travelling throughout Banderhus as an organiser, and her service came to the attention of the broader General Labor Confederation of Delkora. She was elected a member of the state committee, and served on the LO's national council.
She first came to national attention during the Blockade of Banderhus. She despised first minister Søren Bjerre, a hatred made personal by Bjerre's attacks on Travellers, and ardently supported Sofia Westergaard's Universal Care Act.
At a local union meeting, she made an "astonishingly vituperative" speech, denouncing the doctors who opposed universal health care as "vipers, parasites, bloodsuckers, and the assorted trash of the planet", and urging a general strike in Banderhus, concluding that "if it takes another civil war, we'll gladly have a bloodbath to get healthcare for all Delkorans."
She was credited as influencing the Westergaard government's defense strategy before the Federal Constitutional Court, particularly by relentlessly accusing Bjerre of social murder.
Her stance during the crisis earned her a reputation as a "hard woman", and the staunch support of the LO's radicals, which she would retain throughout her career.
General Labor Confederation of Delkora
Sørensen was elected President of the LO in 1940. Initially, she faced criticism and opposition from more conservative-minded workers–"whether for my sex or my ethnicity, I don't know", she remarked. She overcame these criticisms by vigorously carrying out her duties, and carrying out several reforms to improve administration and strengthen internal democracy.
In public, she emphasised unity at all costs, seeing it as the source of power for organised labor. Her belief that, once a course was decided, it had to be pursued through united action, made her sympathetic to platformism and democratic centralism. In private, she sought to devise mechanisms to prevent the stifling of internal debate. She unapologetically identified herself with the LO's radical faction, and made her motto, "LO er rød til død!" ("The LO is red until it's dead!").
She also favoured moving the LO's head office out of Norenstal, arguing that another location, preferably central, would improve its connection to the country at large.
Depression
From the start of her tenure, Sørensen took a confrontational course towards the right-wing government of Veidnar Albendor. She encouraged strike actions in order to maintain consistent pressure on the government, and supported the 1946 Steel Strikes. She was willing to "fight dirty" to oust wavering or moderate union leaders, and welcomed the entrance of socialists, communists, and anarchists into local unions in order to strengthen the LO's militant turn.
Sørensen practiced a syndicalist philosophy, which emphasised the complete unionisation of Delkoran labor. She expanded the LO's ties with civil society and programs to improve working conditions. The LO grew into a dynamic social movement, providing all manner of educational classes, theatrical performances, sports clubs and leisure organisations, libraries, and cultural activities.
The ties between the LO and the mutual aid networks that would evolve into the Labor Underground would later be controversial. The Albendor government sought to use the Domestic Security Act of 1952 to also weaken the LO. Sørensen defiantly opposed the second red scare, and welcomed anarchists, communists, and insurgents as allies against the system.
The 1950s depression thrust the LO into a leading role in the opposition and deepening civil unrest. Sørensen saw the depression as the ideal moment to "tear down the whole rotten system", and helped organise massive cross-industry strikes intended to shut down the economy.
One of her innovative tactics was to organise flying pickets, allowing hundreds or thousands of committed strikers to be be bussed to critical strike points on short notice. Another was turning strikes into a "carnival against capitalism", bringing together striking Arts and Cultural Workers Union members to keep spirits up among those in attendance, culminating in several famous instances of performances by the royal opera and ballet companies on the picket lines.
Her militant rhetoric provoked controversy. After Chancellor Hjalmar Madsen was assassinated in 1959, she declared, "Madsen's dead, and his whole viper's nest of exploiters and social murderers will hopefully follow!". An avowed enemy of Delkoran Employers' Confederation president Hans Schou, she welcomed his assassination in 1960, infamously remarking, "Schou's spent his entire life asking for death, and he finally got it."
New Kingdom
National Labor's landslide victory in 1959 heralded a thriving era for LO, which now counted on a government that largely supported it. However, Sørensen insisted on maintaining the LO's independence, refusing to join a party or cabinet offers to become labor minister. She told the LO congress that year, "Our strategy remains the same: when the government's policy matches our priorities, we will support it, and when it doesn't, we will oppose it."
Sørensen was a crucial participant in the New Kingdom program, playing a vital role in bringing the labor movement on board. She supported the pro-labor policies of the New Kingdom, which included a job guarantee through the Federal Public Works Commission, the great expansion of the welfare state, and the structural changes begun by the Cooperative Economy Act of 1965 — co-determination, workers' self-management, and a long-term transfer of ownership to workers.
She declared the LO's main goals were full employment and income equality. Full employment was vital to abolish the reserve army of labor and strengthen organised labor, which could in turn win redistribution of income and wealth.
Her stance on the minimum wage shifted: favouring its initial reintroduction as a relief measure, and later agreeing with its abolition once the labor movement had secured enough power to obtain advantageous national income policy agreements. For the rest of her career, she derided calls to reintroduce a minimum wage as a conservative conspiracy to destroy the working class' gains, since a legal minimum wage would inevitably be lower than what national collective bargaining achieved.
Sørensen led the LO to the height of its influence in the 1960s–1970s. She helped secure significant wage increases and benefits for workers, including a sliding wage scale, indexed pensions, reduced working hours, stricter occupational safety and health standards, and generous early retirement for workers in 3D jobs.
She used the LO's clout to secure major union-friendly revisions to labor law, including lower thresholds for approving strike action, bans on union busting, company unions, yellow-dog contracts, and "take-it-or-leave-it" tactics from employers, and making the closed shop and union shop mandatory.
She put great emphasis on organisation of the workforce without stigma or exceptions, resulting in unionisation drives for neglected sectors like temporary workers, sex workers, and immigrants.
She favoured a diversity of tactics for the LO. Although strikes and flying pickets remained her mainstay, other methods included sympathy strikes, sitdown strikes, slowdowns, work-to-rules, walkouts, and workplace occupations and lock-ins.
She was highly effective in using name and shame tactics against intransigent employers, such as several instances of sending cadres to directly picket employers' homes and harass them. One biographer wrote that "she seemed to relish the opportunity to psychologically destroy her opponents in industrial confrontation".
Sørensen's tenure as President of LO is regarded by historians as an important bridge between the traditional forms of unionism of before and the emerging social movement unionism of the New Kingdom. She saw the labor movement as part of a larger transformation of Delkoran society, and allied it with a variety of social movements, including for women's rights, LGBT rights, youth rights, and environmentalism. In her battles with property developers, she pioneered the tactic of green bans, which had a significant impact on Tyran's environmentalist movements.
She emphasised the LO's need to maintain relevance to Delkoran society and adapt to new conditions. Often, she invoked the example of the Zenrōkyō, destroyed during the Summer of Freedom owing to its consevatism, as a warning for what the LO had to avoid. During the 1968 protests, she delivered a hard-headed speech at the general congress urging the LO to "confront our faults and our failures before we lose the people's trust".
She then served on the royal commission on the protests and pleaded for stronger economic redistribution and affirmative action policies to fight discrimination.
Sørensen's independence as President of the LO led to occasionally stormy relations with the government. She respected Mette Elvensar — commenting that "I disagree with her change of heart about the state, but I can at least understand her reasons" — and got along well with Eudoxia Pedersen — whose guild socialist ambitions for the National Industrial Administration largely matched her own priorities.
On the other hand, she saw Geirbjørn Feldengaard as an unprincipled fence-sitter more concerned with balancing National Labor factions than pushing revolutionary change. Feldengaard once famously told her during a dispute, "Miri, get your tanks off my lawn."
She was an internationalist who advocated greater cooperation among Tyranian labor movements. She campaigned for Delkora to join the Common Sphere in the 1965 referendum, telling one rally, "I've read the Treaty of Handon, and the great thing is that we can make anything we want out of it. With Delkora in the Common Sphere, we can make sure it'll be in the hands of workers."
She supported and instigated "black bans", sitdown strikes by maritime workers boycotting ships from Quenmin during the Hidebound Era and Æþurheim's Political Futurist dictatorship, bringing trade with those countries to a halt.
Reputation
Sørensen was known as a powerful speaker with "a voice that could rattle windows and shake floors", as Birgit Klausen described her. She found it advantageous to maintain a reputation as an uncompromising radical, and was willing to incur public hatred and controversy for her stances. Her nicknames included Tante Miri ("Aunt Miri") and Kvinden i rødt ("The Woman in Red") for her distinctive wardrobe of modest red dresses and small cloche hats.
Sørensen's hardscrabble background did much to endear her to Delkoran workers, who saw her as honest, hard-working, and genuinely concerned with their well-being. She openly expressed pride in her Traveller heritage, and was an outspoken enemy of anti-Traveller racism.
She purposefully kept her salary low in solidarity with the workers she represented, and took advantage of the media to communicate her message, attending as many strikes as she could in person. In one famous instance, she celebrated a successful settlement for miners by leading them in a "victory parade" back to their pits, accompanied by impromptu brass bands.
She found an ally in the NK Group during their tenure at the helm of the Delkoran Broadcasting Service, when they imposed a rule that any news related to the economy would only interview labourers and trade unionists. Glykera Damonides wrote in Working for the New Kingdom that "at least one or two generations of Delkorans grew up seeing economic news where the only thing that mattered was average income, and the old lion permanently demanding higher rewards for workers and villifying employers and bosses in an undeniably entertaining manner."
As one of Delkora's most powerful trade unionists, Sørensen aroused polarising reactions. She was a hero to the left — to the point that even Labor Underground members expressed admiration of her — and a hate figure for the right — who despised her eagerness for confrontation and unabashed syndicalism. Geirbjørn Feldengaard once remarked that an easy way to determine National Labor members' factional allegiance was their opinion of Sørensen: those who supported her were on the left, and those who feared her were on the right.
Sørensen was largely a "traditional" Marxist in economics, and usually referred to Das Kapital in arguing that all surplus value and productivity gains should go to workers in the form of higher wages and bonuses, rather than the "useless parasites" of capital and management. Her belief in the primacy of the strike action, not just practically but emotionally as well, was influenced by Georges Sorel and Gylian market anarchists Lucretia Pecunia Mercator and Ţaisa Eşal.
Although Sørensen had a reputation as severe and uncompromising, she also possessed a caustic sense of humour, which she usually turned on her opponents. At one conference, she was asked by a journalist if the LO's unionisation of all workers would extend to criminals. She retorted, "No, that's the Delkoran Employers' Confederation." Her relentless mockery and attacks on the Delkoran Employers' Confederation during media appearances became something of a running joke, and contributed to what the Conservative Party bemoaned as a "climate of pervasive hostility and discrimination towards entrepreneurship".
She was a republican and proponent of abolishing the Chamber of Nobles, and over the years grew frustrated with National Labor's "impotence" on the matter.
Final years and death
Sørensen worried that the prosperity of the New Kingdom would dampen the LO's militancy and lead to the moderates once again gaining at the expense of the radicals. She retired as President of the LO in 1980, on her 80th birthday.
She remained active in retirement and committed to union issues. Although she was now only an honourary member of the LO, she was seen as an elder stateswoman of the organisation, with her words carrying great weight. She concerned herself with several major issues confronting organised labor, including deindustrialisation, technological unemployment, and just transition.
During the 1980s, she attacked the Lars af Vellarand government's privatisation policy with an unexpected tactic: contrasting it with the progressive conservative government of Ran Tsukuda in Akashi, which was in the process of cooperativising non-performing public assets. She said, "In principle, I have no objection to state enterprises being turned over to their workers, turned into cooperatives."
Among her last public interventions were campaigning against Delkora leaving the Common Sphere in 1984, condemning the neoliberal conspiracy, and arguing for a "broad left" coalition of National Labor, the Greens, and Liberals to oust the Conservatives — a coalition that would ultimately be realised in 2010.
She died in hospital in Norenstal on 25 April 1995, aged 95. She was given a state funeral by Chancellor Emma Jørgensen, and that year's Labor Day rallies served as an additional memorial ceremony.
The LO's head office building in Norenstal was renamed the "Mireli Sørensen Building" in her honour, and includes a large mural of Delkoran labor history in its lobby which prominently depicts her.
Private life
She was married twice, both marriages ending in divorce, and had no children.
She led a simple, austere lifestyle. She did not drink alcohol or smoke, and only once remarked on Delkoran drug policy that "you can't solve a health problem with incarceration". She lived in a modest two-room apartment, did not own a car, and was a vegetarian who always ate the same lunch in her office: a sandwich and a cup of tea. She went to bed at fixed hours and was an early riser. As her career progressed, she came to be seen by newer LO generations as an ascetic, but also "a model of physical and moral rectitude".
In her spare time, she enjoyed hiking, jogging, and playing football and tennis. One of her favourite relaxation spots, in Norenstal's greenbelt, was renamed "Mireli Sørensen Park" after her death.