Global Unionism: The Parecon Model

In a speech given at the Global Labour Institute summer school in Manchester earlier this year, life-long trade unionist Dan Gallin stated:

The need of the hour is a serious challenge to global transnational capital and to the world order it has fashioned, but such a challenge cannot be mounted unless the movement recovers a common identity based on an alternative vision of society. (1)

Also adding:

Our movement is in a deep crisis, a two-fold crisis: a crisis of the trade union movement and a crisis of socialism, and we should be aware that these are related, so much so that it is impossible to deal with them separately.

Here I think Gallin is spot-on!  The reason organised labour cannot mount a serious challenge to global capitalism is due to a crisis of socialism which has had an inevitable weakening impact on the international trade union movement.  It therefore follows that in order to overcome the crisis in the trade union movement we first need to address the crisis of socialism.

Drawing on the work of Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel I will briefly explain why I think socialism is in crisis.  I will also propose an alternative economic vision to that of socialism (informed by ‘participatory economics’ theory) as a means of overcoming this crisis.  Finally I will describe how this new economic vision could be used to inform global unionism – presented here as an alternative to the current international trade union movement – as a means of organising the desperately needed challenge to the current insane system of capitalist destruction and greed.

 

Global unionism: The Supply-Chain Model

How do we build global unions?

That is, how do working people come together across borders to support each other, to protect the environment and to start shifting the goal posts… from competition and profit towards cooperation and sustainability?

We already have international union federations – in fact some of them have been around for more than 100 years. But our global structures are only as influential as we can make them.

Here’s the first in our series of visions on how working people can build a deeper and wider international base – a new global unionism – from the workplace upwards. The New Unionism Network will be meeting to discuss this vision over the next two months.

 

Managing union management

Management is a function, as well as a class of people. In this article, network member Ken Margolies discusses the management function within unions. It’s a subject he knows pretty well, having written a thesis about it. However, despite some great work by Ken and others, we are still a long way from a union theory of management. We know that command-and-control leads to endless problems, but we are still scratching our heads over what to do instead. Perhaps one place we could start is within our own organisations – labor unions. It seems unlikely that we can meet the challenges ahead unless we learn to manage ourselves (and others) better.

 

Employment relations quality assurance

It’s not enough to produce widgets, we must produce quality widgets that can be sold for a profit. This expectation applies across the board — to the service industries as well as commodity production. However, “quality” is a notoriously elusive concept[i]. For this reason blue collar workers (and an increasing share of white collar workers) have grown accustomed to the checklists and graphs that come with quality assurance. Here’s an interesting idea: what if we extended quality assurance processes to employment relations?

 

Unions and job satisfaction

What makes a good job? And is it in management’s interests, as well as the union’s, to try and make jobs better?

Job satisfaction was once a hot topic in academia. From the 1960’s through till the late 1980’s, management theorists looked at the question from every angle, trying to find ways to create a contented labour force. By this, they meant: “one less concerned with money rewards and less inclined to  unionise[i]”. Researchers expected to find a strong correlation between job satisfaction and productivity. However, when this proved elusive, research funding dried up. More recently, a bunch of new research has helped the democratic labour movement better understand what workers want, and how we can deliver it.

 

Democratizing work through participative design

As Merrelyn Emery has shown (here), the democratic approach to work out-performs other approaches across the board. It’s a conclusion she has tested and proven over and over again in the course of her career. But how can workers create democratic workplaces, starting from the traditional autocratic base? As any unionist will tell you, democracy can’t be installed from above; it must be resolved upon and built from the bottom up. As Hal Draper put it, “Only by fighting for democratic power do (workers) educate themselves up to the level of being able to wield that power.” In this article Emery helps unions in this struggle by describing the “participative design” process, which sets out to change organizations from autocracies (or laissez faire systems) to sustainable democracies.

 

After capitalism – democracy at work?

“We are a movement that builds, not destroys.”
— César Chávez, U.S. union organizer

Some people see history as a battle of ideas — each attracting adherents in a struggle for rational progress. Others see it as a battle of forces — each recruiting supporters in a struggle for power. Taken together, these two traditions have been busy lately — producing a powerful new critique of capitalism. It can’t be dismissed as the usual lefty rhetoric either… the contributors include a growing number of Nobel-winning economists, World Bank staff and consultants, senior figures at the IMF, Wall Street traders, corporate executives and other defectors from free market ideology. (1)

If you’re not keen on reading any of the key books in this critique (2), you could try watching The Corporation, Capitalism – A Love Story, Inside Job and/or The Shock Doctrine. Here are some extracts from another recent movie:

Between them, these writers and film-makers have revealed the dreadful costs of free market economics. They have shown its flawed rationale; its necessary links to crisis and despotism; and its recurrent failures in practice. They have put hard numbers on the transfer of wealth into the hands of those who had the most already. They have shown what this has cost the poor, and how it has left us all with a looming crisis in “externalities” that threatens our survival on this planet.

Too bad to be true? Remember – this is not just the view of “the usual suspects”. This is coming from those who were there when the decisions were made. It comes from the exposure of primary sources, first-hand testimony, key documents, independent reviews, official statistics, analysis by Nobel-winners, and even (especially since Enron) legal affidavits and court records.

BUT.

No matter how well-reasoned, criticism will get us nowhere unless it inspires action. As He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named said: “Philosophers have merely interpreted the world… the point, however, is to change it.” (3)

The process of change, when it comes, usually features an escalation in protests and strikes. We are certainly seeing this. It is also accompanied by a thirst for new ideas. So what has been tabled in the past ten years, beyond calls for a return to social dialogue, state socialism, and/or the regulatory regimes of the twentieth century?

The point of this article is to look at four recent proposals for a new way forward. As you’ll see, each of them has something rather interesting in common. If you take nothing else away from this article, just make a mental note of one thing, right now: each of the proposals is predicated on the democratization of work.

 

Democratizing work: Why and how

Merrelyn Emery draws on an international body of theory and practice to support her case for the democratization of work. In discussing how this can be achieved, she looks at the surprisingly simple world of organizational design principles, and argues for an employee-centered redesign process. Worker participation needs to be supported by binding enterprise bargaining agreements (EBAs). By extension, in transition and in day-to-day practice, workplace democracy needs healthy, independent unions.

 

Mapping the production process

The Transnationals Information Exchange (tie) was set up by a group of union activists at a meeting held at the Transnational Institute (TNI) in Amsterdam in 1978. Today there are groups working to strengthen democratic and pluralist unionism in Bangladesh, Brazil, Germany, Mexico, Mozambique, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Turkey and the USA. Örsan Şenalp, a member of the New Unionism Network, has worked with tie in the Netherlands since 2007. He is as an external project advisor, as well as being a key figure in the development of “social network unionism” (see http://snuproject.wordpress.com/). Wearing all three hats, Örsan has sent us some intriguing material on the MAPEO process, which tie has developed to help workers map and influence the production process. It’s an intriguing advance in what is sometimes called “shop floor internationalism”.

 

Business unionism vs workplace democracy?

Wanda Pasz, the author of the article featured below, is a 30 year veteran of North America’s labour-management system. She has worked as both a union and management representative and a labour relations mediator – and is currently a writer and researcher on workplace issues. What she says will be dismissed by those who believe unions can do no wrong. Fair enough… she’d dismiss them as well. However I recommend this article to everybody else. You may feel, as I do, that Ms Pasz overstates her case. For instance, there are many unionists who support the workplace democracy agenda  – in fact the New Unionism Network is made up of them. But as you read this article think about her real target: ‘business unionism’. Are we just here to build up a base of customers who want higher wages and better working conditions? Studies have shown again and again that members want more(1). I’m sure many of us will share her view of what unions should be(2), irrespective of whether or not we agree with her assessment of what they are. More to the point, how many working people feel the same way? Business unionism has been in decline for decades, but new unionism, which emphasizes organizing for workplace democracy, is still a work in progress. At this point, it might pay to listen up.

by Wanda Pasz, 2010

There is a general assumption that workplace democracy is achievable through unionization. But this isn’t so. Unionization, in North America at least, doesn’t even create representative democracy in the workplace, much less real participatory democracy. Indeed, in North America, the objective of the legal framework that governs union-management relations is to control workers and ensure that they accept their subordinate status in the workplace. Yes, the law does give workers certain rights, but there’s a big trade off – freedom, equality, democracy. I think it’s important for people to understand that this misconception of the unionized workplace as a workplace democracy, is a major impediment to people getting their heads around what workplace democracy really is.