Adapted from a talk given at the “Labour Movements Under Authoritarian Regimes” webinar hosted by Global Labour Column, Salidarnast e.V., Industrial Workers Federation of Myanmar, and Hong Kong Labour Rights Monitor, February 2025.
Belarus is one of the ten worst countries for workers according to the International Trade Union Confederation’s Global Rights Index. It ranks among the world champions for human rights violations, including trade union rights. Since 2022, it has been classified as a country with no freedom of association. How did a nation in the geographical middle of Europe become a dictatorship with over 1,500 political prisoners?
It began over 30 years ago with the election of Alexander Lukashenko, who has remained Belarus’s president since 1994. He campaigned on promises to maintain workplaces, preserve economic ties with post-Soviet Russia, and secure cheaper resources. Lukashenko skillfully played on workers’ uncertainty, poverty, and fear of a deregulated market economy by promising a return to the ‘best practices’ of the Soviet past.
Lukashenko has maintained his iron grip on power for three decades through fraudulent elections, kidnapping political opponents, and transforming the Federation of Trade Unions of Belarus (FTUB) into an instrument of the state’s ideological apparatus. Since the 1990s, the regime has severely limited the space for democratic civil society in Belarus.
Nevertheless, this democratic civil society, including independent unions, managed to develop against the state’s will. Thanks to protection from international human rights institutions, the International Labour Organization, and the International Trade Union Confederation, the workers’ movement maintained some space to operate.
Independent media, non-governmental organisations, and democratic trade unions — united in the Belarusian Congress of Democratic Trade Unions (BCDTU – I suggest that we use a more common for unions abbreviation BKDP ) — provided an alternative path for Belarusians. This fragile ecosystem was dramatically disrupted in 2020.
The 2020 awakening
The global COVID-19 pandemic brought dramatic change to Belarus. After decades of passive survival, Belarusians finally awakened when facing a pandemic with virtually no public health protection by the state. Citizens were forced to organise at the grassroots level simply to survive.
The protest movement, fuelled by mistrust of authorities, emerged between the government’s pandemic failures and the presidential elections that proved fraudulent. When voters realised their ballots against Lukashenko had been stolen, they took to the streets in unprecedented numbers. Hundreds of thousands demonstrated for months.
Workers joined democratic unions and challenged the authorities with a general strike. Democratic structures began forming at nearly all state companies. For the first time, educational and medical workers started forming unions of their own choosing rather than being forced into the state-controlled FTUB.
Our strategy as democratic trade unions was straightforward: organise, organise, and organise. We aimed to provide working people from different professions with the experience of collective action — something that had been systematically denied under Lukashenko’s rule.
The crackdown
What ultimately defeated this democratic movement was the disproportionate force used against peaceful protesters, Russian interference, and the role of the state-controlled FTUB. Workers lacked trust in one another due to their inexperience with collective action — a deficit engineered by both Lukashenko’s regime and the compromised nature of the FTUB.
Hundreds of thousands of Belarusian families fled the country. All independent media were shut down, journalists silenced, and nearly any alternative viewpoint branded as ‘extremism’. Today, approximately 1,500 political prisoners languish in Belarusian prisons, including many unionists and Aleksandr Yaroshuk (we put the name of his in the belarusian transliteration as Aliaksandr Yarashuk), president of the BCDTU.
It was Yaroshuk who announced the BCDTU’s clear opposition to the war in Ukraine. Following the BCDTU’s anti-war statement, mass arrests of unionists occurred on 19 April 2022. Subsequently, all democratic unions were dissolved by decision of the Belarus Supreme Court.
To this day, over 30 of our brothers and sisters remain in penal colonies and prisons with restricted freedoms. Labelled as extremists and terrorists, they wear yellow tags on their prison uniforms to distinguish them from ‘ordinary criminals’ — marking them as enemies of the authoritarian regime.
Arrests continue daily at workplaces across Belarus for offences ranging from subscribing to independent news channels to appearing in photographs from the 2020 protests, donating to civil society initiatives, supporting human rights defenders, or assisting a political prisoner’s family.
Resistance in exile
The recent elections in Belarus saw the FTUB organising Lukashenko’s electoral campaign and staffing polling stations — further evidence of its role as a state apparatus rather than a workers’ organisation.
Now in exile, we have had to adapt our strategy. We cannot organise at workplaces in Belarus anymore. With democratic unions eliminated, there is no freedom of association in the country.
Those of us who escaped Belarus continue the international activities of the BCDTU, documenting workers’ rights violations and reporting them to the International Labour Organization and the International Trade Union Confederation. One of our main tasks is supporting our comrades who remain in Belarus.
We also work to safely reach Belarusian workers with alternatives to dictatorship. We believe that the principle that a strong trade union must be independent and democratic should not be forgotten by workers in any country, especially Belarus. We promote this idea through our media channels and through an online course for worker networks that we will soon launch.
Building International Solidarity
Building strong alliances with fraternal unions globally is crucial. We reach out to comrades worldwide, particularly those who might be deceived by the ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’ logic.
Dictators collaborate and learn from one another. Lukashenko and his yellow state union seek sympathy in the Global South, often gaining uncritical support for opposing United States policies while remaining deeply authoritarian and hostile to our shared values.
Today, no open act of protest is feasible in Belarus. The popular consciousness is focused on remaining safe — avoiding arrest and being branded as an extremist. We working people have no weapons. The tools we need to build a just society based on the principles of decent work and freedom of association must be provided by international solidarity.
Our task now, as a workers’ movement, is to protect the remaining mechanisms that can be used against violations of freedom of association, particularly Article 33 of the International Labour Organisation Constitution. I urge trade unionists from Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia to recognise that the Federation of Trade Unions of Belarus is not a genuine union but an instrument of dictatorship.
We at Salidarnast e.V. are launching a campaign called “Trade Union Activity is Not Extremism!” On 19 April, we will mark the third anniversary of the mass arrests of key trade union leaders in Belarus, including Aleksandr Yaroshuk. The International Trade Union Confederation will organise a campaign, and I ask you, on behalf of Belarus’s independent trade unions, to participate.
Lizaveta Merliak
Source: globallabourcolumn.org
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