I get carried away. I do. So when I say this is the greatest book ever about work (in all its forms), you probably need to apply a couple of filters. That said, I’d go one step further. Guy Standing’s new book “Work After Globalization: Building Occupational Citizenship” offers us the kind of foundation we need to launch a new social-democratic program. And let’s face it, the old one is long since dead. And starting to get a bit smelly. This review will attempt to summarise the book, but do yourself a favour, don’t take my word for it. You need to read this book for yourself. We’ve even arranged a 35% discount for you. Click here for details. And no, we aren’t taking a cut!  

Dr Guy Standing

Dr Guy Standing is Professor of Economic Security at the University of Bath in the UK. He has also served time as a senior official at the International Labour Organisation, where he worked from 1975 to 2006. During that time he was director of labour market policies, co-ordinator of labour market research, and director of the Central and Eastern European departments, following the collapse of the Berlin wall. He also directed the Socio-Economic Security Programme. In 1998-99, he was in the “transition team” set up by the ILO’s new Director-General to help restructure the organisation. He has a PhD in economics from the University of Cambridge and MA in labour economics and industrial relations from the University of Illinois. more bio.

Most activists and unionists wouldn’t read a book like this in a month of Sundays. It’s a pity, because Standing has done a great job keeping the academic language to a manageable level. Me, I’m no academic, but there were enough stories, ideas and personal experiences to keep me reading with a growing sense of enthusiasm. If you’re ever going to read a book about work, make it this one.

Longstoryshort

1]   Standing argues that work is made up of a number of elements. Some work is for an employer (ie ‘labour’), some for family, some for self, etc. Last century the former (labour) became the defining feature of our lives. “Labourism” led us to build policies and institutions of social protection, regulation and redistribution around an assumed standard model of paid employment. Care work and own-account work were marginalised in this process. “If you laboured for wages, you built up entitlements to sick leave, unemployment benefits, maternity leave, disability benefits and a pension. If not, you picked up the crumbs”. (p.7)  In a pretty deep sense, citizenship was predicated on labour.

2]   With globalization we have seen a general rise in insecurity. The “precariat” is emerging as a major new class (ie from precarious + proletariat: workers without security). This, combined with the economic crisis, means that our model of citizenship, based on labour, is under threat. Of the various alternatives we might consider, Standing argues for a new kind of citizenship based on occupation.  “People do jobs; people are occupations.” (p.13)  There are some major implications for union coverage and collective bargaining in this. I’ll let you ponder. Better still, did I suggest yet you should read the book?

3]   He then goes on to review “the Great Transformation” of society in the 20th century, looking at such things as the right to work, commodification, the rise of professions and the limitations of labour regulation. With regards to labour’s voice, he notes: “…employees were provided with dependent security in return for accepting the managerial ‘right to manage’ and the ‘right to acquire and retain profits’.” (p.46). The implications of this unsigned deal have shaped unionism as we know it today. “Unions became identified as a body of employees, and that is how labour law defined them, when for the first time in history workers were defined as those in employment.” (p.46)

4]   Then, in the 1970s, ‘neoliberalism’ arrived. Everything, but everything, became subject to the rigours of competition, be it at the level of production, distribution, consumption, the firm, the nation or the self. Soon afterwards we saw the unleashing of finance capital. “At the end of 2007, the notional value of outstanding swaps and derivatives contracts reached eleven times the value of world output.” (p.59). Business, capital and employment went global. The ex-Soviet bloc, China and India added about 1.5 billion workers to the globalized labour market, effectively doubling its size. In some countries, this led to deindustrialization, outsourcing and ’social dumping’. In others it led to industrialization and urbanisation. Two of the consequences were mass migration and the rapid rise of the precariat. While this was happening privatization (and thus the dominance of competition) was extended into social policies, utilities and public services.  Effectively, this all meant that workers too were forced to become competitors. In many countries unions lost large chunks of their membership. Collective bargaining and labour regulation gave way to contracts, mediation and ’soft law’.

5]   While insecurity and inequality were growing on one side of the coin, a global elite developed on the other. CEO pay grew and “…the top 50 financial institutions controlled about $US 50 trillion in assets, a third of the world’s total.” (p.103)  Huge changes also occurred within social classes.  “Roughly speaking the top three classes are detaching themselves from state-based social protection, the bottom three are being detached by disentitlement to state benefits and services.” (p.115).

6]   All kinds of care work, support, training and education have been turned into commodities for sale or exchange on the open market. Something similar has happened within the professions. Lawyers, academics, doctors, church leaders and even managers have all seen a general commodification of their services. “The global market in professional services is worth over $US 1 trillion and exports have grown o account for a quarter of the world’s exports of commercial services.” (citing UNCTAD, p.177). Most people would say that state regulation declined dramatically during this period of neoliberalism. The truth is more complex. The state has intervened, above all, on the side of competition. In order to ensure this… “Probably more labour regulations have been introduced since the 1970s than at any time in history.” (p.85) Occupations have also been heavily regulated, above all else to enforce a regime of competition. Such regulation is also being extended globally.

7]   We are left to inhabit a world in which even our happiness and unhappiness are commodified. “The fetish of happiness has been extended through a market in unreality.  … The final sphere is the commodification of the wounded mind.” (p.221-2) People have become competitors, and have politically disengaged. Debt is systemic, injustice is applied unjustly, and social surveillance has been extended to frightening levels. “The defining malaise of the global market society is encapsulated in the word stress”. Study after study, case after case… this is evidence-based work, not angry polemic. One of the highlights of this book, for me, was Standing’s discussion of the decline of altruism, the shift from career to careerism, the rise of unpaid labour, and the gradual breach between the precariat and the traditional parties of the left.

8]   But Standing is no merchant of doom. This book offers a way forward. “It must involve a reconstruction of work, escaping from a preoccupation with labour… and a reconstruction of the ideas of career and occupation.” Somehow (shame on us!) we allowed the right — Hayek and the neoliberals — to lay claim to the word ‘freedom’. By this, they meant: “coercion in favour of building a market society.” (p.242)  There are much more progressive forms of freedom than this, Standing argues. One of these is the Google model, which he calls: ‘corporate paternalism’. Then there is workplace democracy. But both of these are freedom along labourist lines. A deeper social model would centre around ‘occupational citizenship’.  This liberates our identity, our personal development, and can be applied to all of the various kinds of work (such as care work, etc). This means making a shift from labour rights to work rights. With globalization, we have reached an age which offers a promising future for associations based around occupation, coupled with ‘informal networks of practitioners and communities of colleagues’. “In sum, occupational citizenship will require a combination of international associations, national associations and informal networks.” (p.276)

As a unionist, this is where I found Standing’s book especially interesting. He speaks of ‘collaborative bargaining’, a form which develops around (and within) occupational networks and associations. In short, what would happen if (say) a public services union were to support a core group of members in setting up a network for (say) social workers? The tools of Web 2.0 make this simple and cheap. They could easily run it themselves. What would these social workers discuss, whom would they want to discuss it with, and what would they see as beyond their sphere of interest? One thing is for sure; you can bet they would go a long way beyond the traditional parameters of collective bargaining.

I once spent some time working with a focus group interviewing non-members and trying to find out on what it would take for them to join a union. Without going into too much detail, I would say that this model of an occupational network, built on top of existing structures, fits the bill very nicely indeed. It would also allow the new precariat an entry point into the general orbit of unionism, irrespective of whether they were between jobs, temps, apprentices, volunteers or retirees.

Labour analysts in the past have noted that the associational form seems to work well for unions. But collaborative bargaining could also work internally, between workers themselves (eg setting standards, providing mutual support, monitoring the application of resources, etc), and between one occupation and another (eg doctors and nurses). His experience at the ILO gives Standing a wealth of experience to draw on here, and what emerges is a compelling alternative social programme. The way we deliver the rights and duties of citizenship should be based around work, in the larger sense — not employment, ideology, competition or profit.

9]   From here Standing goes on to discuss the democratisation of economics itself. Freedom of association is vital, in fact necessary. But we also have to get beyond the idea of democracy, if all we mean by it is an occasional process of voting. Rather, it should be about people having a real voice, and being able to use that voice to deliberate properly. “The failure of progressives was that… all the protests were against events, rather than for a vision.” (p.286)  By way of showing how such a vision might develop, on the basis of occupational voice, he gives the following example:

“…left to themselves as individuals, fishers compete against each other and deplete fish stocks, since short term profits dictate what they do. …Collaborative bargaining would tend towards the preservation and reproduction of fish stocks and would promote professional standards that would act to constrain individualistic competition.” (p.279)

It is a useful example, because it shows us how this new social democratic agenda might deal with climate change. Producers know that the environment cannot be separated from economics. Only a society ruled by an imposed regime of market competition could produce such a warped and lethal delusion.

10]   In looking at how ‘non-standard’ workers might develop a voice in society, Standing discusses the examples of the Self-Employed Women’s Association in India and the Freelancers’ Union in the United States. “The best option would be to draw the precariat into self-chosen occupational associations.” (p.292)

To what extent would these be linked into existing unions? I guess that is up to us to decide. But as he points out (and in my experience he’s right), traditionalist unions and employers may have a bit of trouble with this shift. “…labourism is resistant to legitimising non-standard work.” (p.293)  At this point, if I were a tale thumpin’ man, I’d have to let rip. Globally speaking, what we have regarded as ‘the standard model’ never did apply to the majority. Far less so since the employers’ drive for flexibility began in earnest the 1970s. Less still with the precipitous rise of the precariat during this century. And even less in future, as the economic crisis morphs into a jobs crisis. Globally speaking, the standard model is the exception, not the rule. (thump!)  Deal with it.

11]  Standing is more polished in his articulation, but I get the sense he feels the same way. He does not waste time with qualifiers when he says: “Insecurity is the defining feature of globalization”. (p.293)

At this point he starts to draw all the threads of his argument together. I won’t try to summarise this, because without the logical argument it would just come across as a series of disembodied policy recommendations. This is the stuff that the left will want to engage around (and you can bet there’ll be some straw men immolated in the process!). Suffice it to say that Standing reckons we must move beyond the old model, which made “the performance of labour the locus for social rights”. Instead, we need to start building a more inclusive model based around occupation. This would revive society and economics in such a way that “…achieving a healthy balance of work, labour, leisure and play (will) …put the market in its proper place…” (p.323).

(thump!!!!   thump!!!!)
review by Peter Hall-Jones, November 09.

Interested in reading the book for yourself?

Work After Globalization: Building Occupational Citizenship retails for a budget-busting £89.95. However, we wrote to Mr S and he has kindly negotiated with his publishers (Edward Elgar Ltd) a 35% discount for members and supporters. You can download a special order form here. Alternatively, you could wait till the paperback comes out in March.

Organizing, yes, but for what? Network member, author, organizer, activist, and historian  Richard Moser presents an intriguing summary of the current state of work and unionism in the U.S.. He argues that unions have tended towards an organizational culture which is resistant to change and unaccustomed to democracy. He traces the evolution of this process, mapping it against changes in work and society. Unions must develop a culture of organizing if they are to renew their influence and reconnect with their members. He then presents some recommendations on organizing, exploring the contradictory but creative tensions that animate union activity. These are the challenges faced by those who want to put the movement back into labor.

Part I

Organizing and the Fate of the US Labor Movement

Richard Moser

It’s all about organizing and that’s good news.  Good news because it’s in our hands.  Good news because if we attend to the core mission of organizing we can become the authors of a new labor history—and it is a far, far better thing to be the author of your own world than a critic of the existing one. There are good reasons to believe that we can develop the capacity for renewal if we tap sources now nearly forgotten or largely unknown: the traditions of organizing and the transformative potential organizing still holds for the labor movement. Opportunity knocks, but, even the best of opportunities must be taken.[i]

Organizing should be our top priority.  Why?  It is our most achievable major goal and fundamental to labor’s entire mission.

Of all the most important reasons for US labor’s stagnation—job loss and capital flight associated with globalization, aggressive resistance from employers, a hostile government and legal system, long-term demographic changes—we have the greatest  control over the activity, character, and direction of our organizations.[ii]

Barack Obama’s unlikely presidential campaign displayed the power of organizing for anyone wishing to see it.  His organization ran a strong face-to-face campaign on the ground that ceded no political terrain to his opponents.  Obama created a distinctive narrative that was not merely a subtext of his opposition’s platform.  His rhetorical strategy went beyond mere criticism of the existing order to propose a positive vision for change that tapped into the hopes and aspirations of a new public created by the social movements of the mid 20^th century.[iii] We should learn this too.

In true organizer fashion, we need to rebuild starting with the means at our disposal: ourselves, our unions, coalitions and associations, and our communities. It is unlikely that we can restore the labor’s health, without a movement capable of refreshing itself with the ideas and energy of millions of members and millions of new members and supporters.

Why then hasn’t organizing taken hold? Why have only a handful of unions dedicating significant resources to organizing?  Why can’t we manage to spend 10% let alone 30% of our resources to organizing work? How is it, after almost a decade of training efforts, national programs, and hard work in the trenches can sympathetic and trusted observers declare organizing a failure?[iv]

To begin with, we don’t embrace organizing because that would force us into an uncomfortable confrontation with ourselves and our true place in the world. Yet we have no choice but to start from where we stand.

Beginning from our day-to-day organizing experience we learn that workers in the U.S. tend to be insecure, fearful, and often skeptical about unions and collective activity generally.  While ideological opposition to unionism does exist, workers are more commonly doubtful about activism or forming unions due the failure of the labor movement to live up to its potential.  Withdrawal and passivity are understandable responses to unions that are not effective or democratic just as fear and cautiousness are reasonable responses to the authoritarian and arbitrary world of work. Organizing forces us to hear criticism, face up to shortcomings, and recognize that, as workers, we have limited power and freedom.

Despite our vaunted civic values and freedoms, despite the size, wealth and aspirations of our unions, Americans are the least free people, at work, of any in the democratic world. The historic exemption of the workplace from the Bill of Rights, the enduring legacy of slavery on all forms of labor, the extraordinary political and economic success and creativity of capitalism, the absence of an effective opposition party, and many other factors has resulted in an “at will” employment regime that leaves workers exposed and feeling so.

The current legal and political environment actually encourages employers to break the law, suppress union activity and workplace democracy. Labor’s plight is a measure of the health of our democracy and we are not well. Yet, research and experience suggests that millions of workers would get active in some way including joining unions if a good opportunity arose and we know that people the world over want a voice in determining their own lives. How can we fix our movement and begin to create a more democratic workplace, economy, and labor movement?

The best heard voices for reform—those associated with a series of dissident coalitions that eventually split the AFL-CIO in 2005 and regrouped as “Change to Win” —claim that the fault lies in the organizational structure of the labor movement.[v] The “Restoring the American Dream Proposal” made growth the central goal of the movement and proposes to dedicate plentiful resources to the job. But, while the renewed focus on membership is an important starting point, the structural reorganization proposed does not adequately address the causes of the problem.

The root causes of labor’s decline are much deeper and are to be found, I believe, in the culture of our unions–a culture that has changed little since the late 1940’s.[vi] To understand our problems we must look beyond questions of structure, strategy, resources, mergers and acquisitions, and jurisdictional disputes, as important as they are, to the ways in which the labor movement has created organizational cultures resistant to change, unaccustomed to democracy, and disinterested in organizing.

In the decades after WII the labor movement fell in love with power and understandably so. With a world war won, millions of new members and increasing material wealth for almost all sectors of the American working-class, labor took its place alongside business and government as guarantor of the nation’s welfare.  This tripartite régime, called the labor/capital accord or the mid-century social contract was based on a grand social division of labor in which corporations, governmental bodies, political parties, and unions cooperated but also held in check each other’s influence.

Unions advocated well for the benefit of their members, but within a legal and political framework that limited their tactical means and curtailed their ability to seek universal social benefits beyond what had been granted by the New Deal or envisioned by the Democratic Party.

Management’s right to make all meaningful decisions in the workplace remained unchallenged.  Nonetheless, labor leaders and union managers became important and powerful people and worked hard at the legal, lobbying, electoral, and service missions of unions. But the emphasis on the executive functions of the union came at the expense of organizing and community building efforts and resulted in a distinctive form of union consciousness and culture that corresponded to the social contract of 1945-1975. This type of conventional unionism came to be known as the service model.

The problem with the service model is not that necessary services were performed, of course, but that the purchase, delivery, and consumption of services became the union’s main work. Those activities encouraged a union culture based on narrow self-interest, managerial methods, and a clubbish, members-only attitude.

The social contract culture masked hidden weaknesses and the seeds of labor’s decline were sown during the peak of its power.  In the 1930s a massive rank and file upsurge created a culture of organizing and founded industrial unionism to fulfill a depression-driven desire for workplace and economic democracy. But, once grown up labor literally lost the sense it was born with.  All seemed well enough on the surface because the mid-20^th century was also the time of labors’ greatest power, prestige, and influence.  Although many labor leaders and union members found political power appealing, the mid-century social contract and labors exalted position in it was nonetheless a historical anomaly and short lived. We have paid the price of denial ever since.

As early as the 1960s, the density and numerical strength of the movement began to slip. Over the next three decades the unions were hollowed out, gradually losing the capacity to act effectively on behalf of its members, let along organize millions of new members.  Beneath these symptoms lay the real problem; unions were deprived of the distinctive and critical knowledge that comes with organizing, thereby losing access to an indispensable source for the renewal and transformation of movement culture.

The decades-long decline in new organizing or the lack of grassroots mobilization efforts among the already organized meant that significant numbers of staff and leaders have never personally experienced the humbling, gut-wrenching but potentially transformative experience of organizing one’s own workplace. Once the organizing experience ceased to be at the center of labor’s vision we lost our bearings.

The social contract culture of unions was predicated on a world that was fast disappearing by the late 1970’s and labor was unprepared for the challenges. Faced with harsh new economic realities and unsavory choices unions began to accept concessions and two-tiered arrangements that institutionalized class differences and class discrimination within unions and the work force.  By amplifying conflicts of interest rather than building communities of interest, multi-tiered settlements and the dual labor markets they allowed were a kind of planned obsolescence for solidarity.

By the mid-1980s the loss of political power was palpable.  Despite the fact that these failures were part of global economic restructuring, a renewed antiunion offensive by government and business, and linked to the decay of a legal system designed for times long gone, unions continued to act as if nothing has changed.  We continued to assume we had power where little actually existed. Leaders and staff continued to act as generals not noticing the army had deserted. And, we avoided organizing and community activism.

To the degree that organizing no longer shaped and modeled behavior, the traits of labor’s “partners” in business and government provided influential examples of how powerful people acted.  The executive, manager, politician, lawyer, or lobbyist shaped individual leadership profiles while the client and consumer became the default models for union members. Union executive boards often manage in the style of a government or corporate body issuing orders to staff or stewards rather than engaging in activism as a social movement organization might and should.

These leadership types and organizational styles tended to show a preference for individual and technical solutions to political problems.  At best, the service model translated into due process protections and efficient solutions for real human problems faced on the job. At worst, it meant a passive membership inclined to complain rather than act and an entrenched leadership inclined to employ quick fixes and back-room deals, always living in dread of competitive elections or “surprises” at membership meetings and conventions.

Despite the hopeful rhetoric and good intentions of the recent debate, the social contract culture has enormous inertia. On the local level, where most organizing still occurs, union leaders remain wary of change and protective of the status quo. Organizing is inherently risky: failure is expensive and success may upset the existing structure of power in the union as new leaders and constituencies emerge.  It is easier, politically safer, and more predictable to service members, lobby legislators, and rely on experts to provide savvy at the bargaining table.

The movement’s commitment to organizing can be clearly seen in union budgets, and in the working conditions endured by organizers. Organizing remains under funded and organizers continue to be overworked, stressed out, marginalized and at the bottom of the chain of command.

The social contract culture pushed the leadership models of the citizen, organizer, and activist to the periphery.  Some of the most interesting and potentially progressive work of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s occurred on the margins of the labor movement. Rank and file groups and dissidents were often viewed with hostility by local leaders and national unions.  The organizer as a movement type came into being in community organizing and the other social movements of the mid-20^th century.[vii] While this weakness could be turned to strength the marginalization of organizers continues.

Real renewal will require changing deeply imbedded work patterns and attitudes of leaders and staff. This is no small matter and means nothing short of transforming the culture associated with unions for the past half century. As the decline of the labor movement suggests, such changes may well be inevitable. It will happen through collapse or renewal or some combination of the two.

To its credit, much of the current debate addresses the problems but organizing is too often seen simply in terms of getting more members and more votes rather than as a source of cultural transformation.

Parts II and III below consider organizing and the issues that drive organizing as a source for the reconstruction of union consciousness and culture.  My project is to make visible and explicit the knowledge already present in the work that organizers do. If we want to get the movement back into labor, then the first task at hand is to dramatically improve the quantity and quality of organizing work. In ten years our goal should be to mobilize five percent of the 16 million union members into an army of 300,000 organizers—both rank and file and professional—each with a decade of experience.

Until very recently organizing was seen almost exclusively as a practice. It was, and is still, learned largely through direct experience in the field. Trade secrets are passed on as artisanal craft from one organizer to the next. The pressing need for hundreds of thousands of effective organizers now demands that we reflect on our work and make more ambitious efforts to educate activists.

The AFL-CIO, “Change to Win” and their affiliates sponsor training for organizers most notable in the Organizing Institute and programs offered at the George Meany Center.   These efforts complement a longstanding tradition of independent organizing schools such as Highlander School or Midwest Academy, and university courses on organizing taught in labor studies or social work departments. A number of books are available that provide important tool kits for organizers.[viii] All do a good job of training in the nuts and bolts of organizing and help people to develop the issues and better understand the basics of tactics and strategy.

On the other hand there is a theoretical and analytical literature created by scholars from labor studies, sociology, political science, history or social work and the radical intellectuals loosely affiliated with the World Social Forum. Then there is the more recent grand strategic discussion generated by union leaders and staff regarding the fate of the labor movement.  The scholarly works and political discussion are important sources for organizers in as much as they provide essential analysis on strategy and tactics, exemplars from the past, and the current context for organizing.  The scholarly literature and political discourse also make it abundantly clear the urgency and necessity of a renewed emphasis on organizing.[ix]

What follows aims for a middle ground between the toolkit approach used in organizer training and the more lofty theoretical, scholarly and strategic debates to offer a practical theory that addresses organizing on the level of method, principle, and rhetorical strategy.

Part II will help to orient organizers to the complex and contradictory terrain of labor union activity and the motley cast of characters unions produce and require. In it I assume, as I do throughout, that labor unions should be conceived of as the building blocks of a social movement and that movement-building will demand a revision in labor’s culture and activity.

Part III discusses organizing as a method, suggests a typical profile for organizers, and offers some advise on how to survive this kind of activism long enough to make a difference.

Here are some rules of the road offered in the spirit of the folk tradition: I hope to pass on a few things I have learned from my co-workers, teachers, and mentors for future organizers and activists to use and revise as their experience and situation suggests.

Part II

Representation, Organizing, and Community Building:
Organizational Culture and Labor Movement Activism

This article is intended to help organizers understand the different components of labor activism and their implications for the culture and character of our movement.

We are accustomed to finding the source of cultural differences in the ethnic, racial, gender, sexual, regional or class origin of people, organizations and institutions. That continues to be true. With unions, we also attribute much to the specific occupations, workplaces and communities from which unions arise. More recently “service unionism” and the “organizing model” have been discussed as opposing types to explain how the historic decline in union membership is linked to organizational priorities. This article suggests that much of the labor movement’s culture and character flows from the work done by unions.

Like other social movement organizations, unions pursue multiple agendas and employ various means to reach their goals. Successful unions represent their members and non-member constituencies, organize to engage and retain new members and new leaders, and build community and social networks inside and beyond the workplace. These three domains of activity–representation, organizing, and community building–produce a wide cast of characters, various work methods and styles, and a complicated, contradictory and conflicted organizational culture.[x]

Representation

Representation is the most visible and prominent type of union work.  Representation covers a range of activities that confronts or engages employers and legislators in an attempt to gain concessions and victories. Representation gets the lion’s share of resources and is what most people have come to understand as the totality of union activity: negotiating and enforcing contracts, settling grievances, lobbying politicians and influencing electoral campaigns, filing lawsuits, enforcing legal and safety regulations and, more rarely but more notoriously, leading demonstrations, strikes and job actions.

Representation often demands and certainly encourages command or executive leadership. The executive — usually an elected official or staff director — maps out directions carried out by a structured and efficient political machine comprised of members and staff. Exemplary political leaders tend to be ambitious, articulate and decisive, even charismatic, and have wide contacts and connections. Ideally, these leaders pay close attention to balancing union democracy with expediency and flexibility. At their best, executive-style leaders articulate a vision or plan for the organization, resolve internal conflicts, and clarify and recommend priorities for actions or tactics to members and representative bodies within the union.

Leaders in the executive mode usually prefer to achieve goals using an advocacy method and in practice lead unions to act much like other interest groups. Unions customarily identify specific issues that they wish to change in their contract or in law and bring pressure to bear by changing the terms of the debate with new research and analysis and through member or public education using newsletters, websites or other media. The message is carried by lobbyists, lawyers, or leaders to the negotiating table, before the appropriate government body, or to the courts. Members and constituents are called on to sign petitions or send targeted letters, emails, or faxes.

The executive or command model assumes the union is an established institution vested with political power and a legitimate part of the existing system society has created to address inequities. The executive is committed to “getting the job done” or “bring home the bacon” and the concern with timely results tends to trump all other issues including organizing, consciousness raising or community building.

Command leaders are prone to certain shortcomings, primarily tending to act with excessive expediency and failing to delegate. When each contract, crisis or issue is seen as crucial or a test of a leader’s ability, then a reasonable response is to rely on the experienced and trusted old guard and put off incorporating new leaders into important committees or work. There is frequently tension between established and emergent leaders, and the competitive nature common to executive-style leaders can inhibit the participation of new members and damage the organization’s long-term health. When unions operate like this for long, a few people typically become identified as the union itself, and staff or member leaders become a cadre of experts — easily perceived as separate and apart from the members.

At times, strong leaders make a weak people. Members can abdicate their responsibly to be activists and good citizens, and staff can compromise their independent judgments to become mere political operatives. Leaders deeply engaged in power politics often forget that real power at the bargaining table or City Hall is embodied in the number of people the union can educate and organize for concerted action. Clever negotiating tactics, insider contacts, secret negotiations, or actions by small numbers of activists, no matter how well executed, have proven insufficient to rebuild the movement or win lasting victories.

Closed-door power politics also invites scheming, especially if democratic debate is limited or uninformed, or the membership is uninvolved. Not only is palace intrigue an affront to democratic sensibilities but, as King Lear warns, can lead to myopia–fatally distracting leaders and staff from more pressing issues and external threats.

More typically, though, the executive model devolves into reactive crisis-management or a passive, narrowly focused casework approach. As working conditions have declined over the last half-century, many unions are overwhelmed with resolving short-term crises and addressing individual problems and complaints. This reinforces an expedient and spontaneous approach to union work, as short-term demands displace strategic planning and vital resources are depleted.

Despite the problems with representation it is in many ways the culmination of union activity.  The political strength of unions is realized in tangible and public struggles and without achievements and victories the union loses its reasons for being. Representation does not, however, stand on its own, for it has become painfully obvious that the failure to organize has diminished labor’s ability to successfully conduct executive functions and political activities.

Organize!

Since the 19^th century unionists have been exhorted to “Organize the Unorganized!” and organizing has been a distinctive and essential element of union culture. Despite the advent and usefulness of modern communications technology the core activity of organizers remains largely unchanged.  Organizers build relationships to help people unionize new shops or increase membership where unions already exist.  Organizers put people in touch with each other and work with new members to encourage their involvement and exercise their leadership skills.  With desire and a little training nearly everyone can become an effective organizer since it depends primarily on existing relationships and listening skills.  A good member-organizer does not have to sign-up hundreds just handfuls. Organizing tends to promote union democracy, group solidarity, and participation in the life of the union.

The primary work of organizing is face-to-face, personal outreach that raises consciousness and empowers individuals by creating effective local organization. The many forms of outreach — recognition campaigns, tabling, one-on-one visits, small group meetings, phone banking, educational events, petition drives — are based on personal contact and encourage personal relationships. Organizing uses existing friendship groups, social networks and neighborhood ties as conduits for political consciousness and activism.

Organizing works to undermine the persistent “othering” that makes unions appear as strange or threatening and distances them from members and would-be members.  Keep in mind that the vast majority of people in the US have had no direct contact with unions and draw their impressions from media and mythology.  When organizers initiate face-to-face contact, act with compassion, and willingly accept criticism as necessary for the union’s development, they help to overcome these barriers by putting a human face on the union.

Organizing is also an educational process through which union leaders and staff learn from members and prospective members. It’s a productive way of discovering new perspectives on topical issues and getting a better grasp on the state of everyday popular consciousness. Organizing works as a regular reality check that tempers wild idealism, curbs disembodied radicalism, or may push a lethargic and conservative leadership to catch up with its members.

Unlike the executive, organizers tend to assume not power but powerlessness on the part of the individuals and organization.  Power emanates not from existing institutional arrangements but in upsetting those relations by bringing large numbers of new actors bearing new ideas on the scene.  Organizers tend to discount the power of individuals acting alone, or of logic, facts, or reasoned argument alone, and envision empowerment as a product of a growing and engaged membership acting collectively around issues that members define as important.

While organizers are, as the customary view claims, drawn toward conflict and confrontation to solve problems, organizers adopt collegial, cooperative or partnership approaches when those are demanded by the experience and disposition of the members or when enlightened employers or equitable power relations allow.  Yet, organizers tend to see those in power as resistant to any demand for improvement or justice that would undermine their prerogatives regardless of how reasonable or productive such changes might be.  Organizers often assume that partnerships can only be authentic where a rough parity in power exists between the unions and employers.  If the asymmetries in power between union and employer are too great partnership can become paternalism or just another command-and-control technique.

Another distinctive feature of organizing culture can be seen in the emphasis organizers place on members and potential members in the arena of political action.  It is the organizers first priority to promote and nurture leadership and cement the solidarity of members and other non-member constituencies and only secondly to engage power.  That means the community is the primary audience for tactics and programs and only secondarily the employers or holders of power. It also means organizers must yield, at least provisionally, their own goals, vision and understanding of politics to that of their constituency. Still, organizers aim to raise consciousness. But they do it best, as a good teacher might, from a position just ahead of their constituency’s current understanding. A good organizer is always one step ahead of the members — always one but only one.

Organizing can ring hollow if it is devoid of political principles or a vision of community and democracy. Conventional organizing all too often devolves into simple-minded salesmanship that is concerned only with head counts and dues income.  Organizers can easily become crudely pragmatic by using whatever pitches work for the moment, cutting deals with employers, or promising unrealistic results to show short-term progress on the numbers.

At worst, organizing can slip into manipulation by the organizer that shortcuts worker activism and encourages cynicism and withdrawal by the members.  More typically, organizers simply burn out, get promoted to managerial positions in the union, or get distracted.  In an environment driven by service needs, organizers have a hard time resisting the continual demands that they abandon their slow, long-term projects and take on the seemingly more urgent servicing of existing members.

Given the current state of the labor movement, organizing is unquestionably the most pressing task for the foreseeable future. At present, too few organizers face a large demobilized and demoralized work force to make large-scale organizing successful. Despite the passive appearance of the unorganized, the need runs deep for freedom and democracy in the workplace and for working conditions that lead to decent lives and quality work.

It is important to remember that organizing is not a subculture unto itself but part of a larger body of knowledge and action that includes representation and community building. If unions can represent a growing and engaged membership, show victories or conduct praiseworthy struggles, then a new sense of community may emerge.

Community Building

Community building complements representation and organizing and is the third aspect of labor movement work. Community building has much in common with organizing since successful organizers are usually embedded in communities. Of all activity in the labor movement community building is most ignored and least understood. Very few unions hire staff or designate leaders that dedicate a portion of their efforts to coalitional work or community outreach.  Fewer still dedicate significant resources to the activities that can be the foundation of community. Although the AFL-CIO’s Union Cities initiative and the renewed vigor of local central labor councils both indicate the revival of community based unionism within labor ranks, much of this work has been conducted by an array of community-labor organizations outside of but linked to unions.

Before the 1940’s however, the labor movement’s power was grounded in local, usually urban and ethnic communities. Organizers did not restrict their activities to the shop floor. Local merchants, families, religious groups, ethnic associations, community organizations and intellectuals all participated in the labor movement. Community networks were created by neighborhoods or ethnic groups and the daily activity of working class people in sports, taverns, clubs, and local government.  Unions were integral to these networks and carried on outside the workplace in sport leagues, theater troupes, vacation resorts, mutual-aid networks and local political parties — all to the tune of a rich body of labor music.  The music displayed labor’s cultural sources by borrowing liberally from folk, gospel, and blues traditions.  Historians called this social unionism but it suffered the same fate as organizing when US labor came of age in the post-WWII world.

At the same time that unions turned away from social unionism and community building as no longer necessary, the upheavals of the mid-20th century transformed and revitalized identities and traditions, reshaping community among religious communities, people of color, youth, women and sexual minorities. These communities continue to be labor’s allies and underappreciated sources of strength. The revolution that occurred in consciousness and identity that we associate with the new social movements provides one of labor’s richest resources.  Movement culture helped to recast and broaden the range of oppositional social positions available to activists, then seeded the labor movement with people who were a part of, and could relate to, the increasingly female, ethnic, and immigrant workers that have been one of the greatest sources of new union members.  Even so, these communities are not stable resources waiting to be tapped because communities, like many workers, are contingent–sometimes they are there, sometimes not.

The global economic restructuring that began in a big way after 1975 weakened labor and eroded popular involvement in community. Stagnant compensation and increased work hours drained away our ability to participate in civic life beyond that necessary for the short term health and survival of our families. Yet, communities can be recreated and reformed but it takes intentional work.  As community organizers will tell you, “The community you get is the community you make”.

Today community building in Labor’s neighborhood commonly takes two related forms. The first and most successful have been the multi-sector or cross-class communities that have emerged from coalition work.  Jobs With Justice, Students Against Sweatshops, Central Labor Councils, the Living Wage Campaigns, and North American Alliance for Fair Employment have not just demonstrated that there is a labor community beyond individual unions but provided the movement with some of the most innovative and inspirational organizing in recent history.

Community building and coalitional work also promises a grassroots alternative for national and international labor issues. The Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor, for example, has helped to build community among part-time and non-tenure-track faculty members in Canada, the US, and Mexico. Similarly the coalitions working for justice in the Maquiladoras coordinate the activities of religious, labor, environmental, community and women’s groups throughout North America to address the catastrophic consequences of so-called free trade.

Local communities based on racial, gender, sexual, geographic, or political identity may resemble the older, seemingly more stable traditional forms of community but community has always proven difficult to create and sustain. Unions often see this work as a luxury they cannot afford yet it was once a pillar of union power.  A minimal investment in parties, receptions, happy hours, film series, book clubs, lectures, and other cultural events can promote a greater appreciation for unions activists as well rounded people, and create real bonds of trust and friendship.  The creative communities of poets, artists and musicians are particularly fertile fields.  The college campus offers an excellent opportunity for the development of community in which the union will be an important participant.  Staff, students, alumni and faculty, and enlightened administrators all have shared long-term interests.

A more community focused unionism would encourage workers to articulate their concerns as women, or citizens, or gays, or professionals, or people of color, or immigrants. As such community building could help labor realize its potential as a social movement by tapping into the considerable potential that remains in other identities and movements for justice. Speaking as part of the community also encourages the trend toward social movement unionism because it allows labor’s issues to become matters of the public interest.

Local communities are important venues for consciousness raising and for leadership development. The key, it seems, is finding well suited members willing to devote time and energy to cultural work rather than the so-called real union work of power politics.

Community builders use methods much like organizers but instead of the specific and local focus and politically charged manner of the organizer, the community builder emphasizes symbolic appeals aimed at including the broadest possible number of people regardless of their involvement with unions.  Community builders must emphasis universal values and articulate lofty aspirations because communities are the social form through which shared understandings and identities take on tangible life as human activity. Enduring attachments and deep-seated affinities between people cluster around affirmations of goodness that usually take the form of positive ideals, images, relationships, and values. We fail to win people’s support and allegiance because we too often rely solely on criticism, resistance, and opposition to the negative.  In human imagination, the greatest good usually resides not in critical discourse but in symbol or the narratives of tradition, myth or history. Activists should engage the cultural vehicles that carry shared meanings and identities if they aim to build community.

The hard-boiled union leader or macho organizer may snicker at such talk and the labor movement has largely retreated from symbolic work surrendering the field to the military, state, church, family, and mass media. The scholarly community too largely avoids the study of how meaning is constructed preferring instead the easier work of social criticism and critical theory. But without a sense of connectedness between individuals that share a common sense of history, interests, ideals, and values our movement is vulnerable.

Community lifts people beyond the enervating internal politics and grueling struggles of unions so they may reconnect with the deep reasons that motivated their activism in the first place. At their best communities prefigure a better world even if that sense of belonging and transcendence proves fleeting.

It is no coincidence that the civil rights movement, one of the most successful and enduring social struggles in modern history, was animated by a powerful, capacious sense of community. Martin Luther King viewed the creation of the “beloved community” as the ultimate goal of the movement and drew on the teachings of Jesus, Thoreau, Gandhi, and the style and sensibility of African-American Christianity to craft a powerful sense of belonging that proved to have global appeal.  The appeal was not to belonging for the simple sake of belonging.  The community aspired to universal values that prepared its members for the long haul.  “How long?” Recalling the words of 19^th century abolitionist, and theologian Theodore Parker, Dr. King answered, “Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Similarly, the labor movement must look creatively at its own traditions and find universal values that will both draw on and transcend existing worker identities.

If community builders focus too closely on prefigurative politics and distance themselves from day-to-day struggles they can often begin to presume the movement to be more powerful, the world or union more easily shaped, or people more easily perfected than is actually the case and so are tempted to raise barriers to participation. Communities lose their power by becoming too exclusive drawing a firm boundary between the purified and the fallen. Community builders can sometimes forget that all values are aspirational and lapse into holier or more-radical-than-thou moralism.  Successful community builders err on the side of inclusion and address problems with compassion and engagement, not condemnation, instant analysis or moral self-righteousness. In the end however community alone always falls short.  Since dominant culture and the political power of governmental and corporate elites are institutionalized and reproduced daily, the community efforts alone can envision the ideal but never realize it.

This essay suggests that the labor movement has three interrelated and contradictory projects. Representation, organizing and community building are all necessary, conflicting and complementary. In the same way we should accept and draw strength from cultural diversity, so this type of political diversity can also be a source of insight and power. We all need to locate ourselves within these different trends, and to see these diverse tendencies within ourselves.

The balance between the three is dynamic and shifts over time.  The ability of unions and other social movement organizations to effectively represent people was originally a product of extensive self-organization and struggle, the extension and recasting of community allegiances, and dramatic transformations in consciousness.  On that foundation the movement constructed a professionalized bureaucracy dedicated to representing and servicing its constituency. Despite the dedication of vast resources to representation these efforts slowly lost power and momentum. The focus of labor activism became the maintenance of organizations and institutions rather than the more risky work of movement building.  The time is way overdue for us to adopt organizing and community building activities more akin to the kinds of activism associated with democratic upsurges of the past.

Part III

The Culture of Organizing

What is the culture of organizing? What are its underlying assumptions, principles, methods, and tensions? What are the traits of a good organizer and how can they improve their prospects for survival?

Organizing is a way of seeing and being in the political world—a way we must cultivate if we are to rebuild and renew the labor movement. The culture of organizing develops through a sustained engagement with people and assumes that knowing the world and acting in it are inseparable parts of the same process.  Organizers value research and scholarship but usually assume that learning through experience and teaching by example are the most effective means of education. This emphasis on practice predisposes organizers to experimentation: we learn from failure as well as success. The organizers rhetorical and tactical repertoire is designed to produce social action because it is in the tumult of political life that leaders emerge, relationships develop and transformations in consciousness are realized.

One way to understand the culture of organizing is to explore a series of creative tensions that underlie the organizers work and view of the world.

Change and Continuity

Organizers work in the creative tension between change and continuity. Organizers usually become committed to their work out of deeply held desires for fundamental social and cultural change yet they must dedicate themselves to a life of incremental progress, individual engagements and evolutionary change. If you thirst for a place in the history books you are in the wrong line of work. Except in rare historical moments like revolutions, great depressions, and world wars, change occurs gradually. Even then organizers correctly suspect that behind the great dramas of history are slower preliminary shifts in the way people understood the world and acted in it.[xi] The organizers task is to contribute to the evolution of thought and action.

The glacial pace of cultural change means that organizers typically have a high tolerance for frustration or a historical perspective that sees the big picture reflected in small daily acts and efforts. There is no need to cling too tightly to memories of glory days or to hopes for the next upsurge. The world is constantly being made and remade and worthwhile projects await everyday and everywhere.

Organizers keep sight of long-term goals but also realize they must be practical in achieving them. They are wary of shortcuts, quick fixes and big promises and suspect that anything that does not increase the quantity and improve the quality of face-to face, one-on-one or small group encounters is likely to be just so much smoke and mirrors.

Of all the principles of organizing, the most enduring has been that organizers must begin with people and where people actually are situated politically and culturally, not where we wish they were. Saul Alinsky usefully schooled thousands of activists because he captured the kernel of organizing wisdom when he wrote “As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be.  That we accept the world as it is does not is any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be…”[xii]

Organizers engage the world and work with it but without abdicating their principles and resigning themselves to business as usual. This critical embrace of the world places the organizers on a kind of razor’s edge. Organizers do not stand high above the fray to criticize and deplore the world because self-righteousness is inimical to social action and solidarity. Nor do organizers indulge grandiose fantasies of power. Illusions of power lead the dreamer to think they will ride a wave of insurgency to wipe the slate clean and remake the world according to their ideology or become a inside player on equal footing with the rich and powerful.  Accept that there are many things you cannot control, but work with the world as you find it.

The organizers first skills are those of observation and assessment.  We always start at the beginning by trying to understand who we have to work with.  So let go a little, and listen up — be patient no matter what the crisis. When you arrive on the scene, avoid the temptation to immediately act like people need to be set straight.

Organizers should facilitate activism but if they substitute their own initiative for that of the members they can reinforce passivity, deference or cynicism and do more harm than good. Find out who the leaders are (they may not be the elected officials) and what they believe is appropriate political activity.  Assess the strengths and weaknesses of the members and resources so you will know what is possible.  Be mindful of the fact that your ambition to change things will tend to cloud your judgment.

When you do begin to speak and act the starting point should be within the experience and culture of your constituency.  You cannot have politics if you do not have a dialogue and for that there must be a point of contact and engagement. Ideologues make poor organizers.  They unintentionally depoliticize seemingly radical beliefs because they prize the moral superiority or aesthetic quality or intellectual consistency of their systems too much to risk real engagement with people. Ideologies do matter, and cannot be dispensed with in any event, but are useful for organizers as a general reference rather than a formula because ideological rigidity tends to foreclose the experimental sensibility organizer’s value.

Once you have built up trust by acting in ways people can recognize and understand then you can slowly move the point of the dialogue and action toward greater empowerment. In most cases it is one small step at a time.

The kind of thinking that expects great leaps, radical uprisings, and dramatic actions usually fails and leads to defeat and cynicism.  Despite intense scrutiny by scholars and other observers, no one really understands how the Sixties happened all around the world or how the Great Depression spawned a mass desire for workplace democracy.

It is the height of hubris to expect that we can create those rare transformative moments by our will and activism alone.  It is likely, however, that progressive social movements will someday gain the advantage and when they do well-grounded organizers could be decisive in winning lasting victories. Even then, it is the organizers job to lead people thought a succession of actions and ideas designed to make them a powerful constituency.

Since grassroots power usually grows out of community, successful organizers respect local culture and tradition.  Time-tested and revered values will sustain people’s courage for action and provide the ground on which new understandings will develop. Tradition can be a platform or a prison.  A good organizer makes it a platform by identifying what aspects of existing tradition have the potential to be renewed, recast and revitalized.  A good organizer keeps one eye on the past–it is one of the most valuable resources we have to work with.

If I have overstated the case for continuity and gradualism it is because an evolutionary approach seems best suited to bridge the peculiar disconnections we encounter between the distracted, fatalistic, and fearful majority and the idealistic, ideological, and enthusiastic leadership.  The organizing approach emphasizes that change is possible and demonstrates that by taking small steps that embolden people without expecting them to become instantaneous converts to full-time activism. The same evolutionary view helps to keep organizers engaged with the majority and prevents the creation of a radical ghetto. There are deep and powerful currents in American culture, and in the social movements generally, that under appreciate history and lead us to expect apocalyptic change and radical discontinuity.  In the long run, expectations for easy change actually disarm and demoralize organizers leading to the dead ends of corporate- style empire building, in-group thinking, or sectarianism.[xiii]

The Personal and the Political

Personal politics — deeply felt and enduring — might just be the only kind that really matter. Since the women’s movement of the 1970s, organizers have understood that problems seen as personal are often expressions of underlying political issues and raise consciousness by helping people connect the personal and the political.[xiv]

Individualism and the belief that rewards are distributed according to merit, so prevalent in popular culture, encourages people to understand their troubles as personal shortcomings and failings.  If the organizer allows those views to go unchallenged then people will be demoralized and passive and few will take the risk to become activists.  The organizer provides the relevant context—social, economic, political, or historical–to demonstrate that the grievances being experienced are not just individual matters but part of broader trends with solutions that can only be found in concerted action.  The point is to link individual problems with systemic causes. Then you can lead someone to discover an identity of interests with others. Common interests make collective action possible.

One must, however, be careful not to overemphasis large impersonal forces in history as that may promote victimhood or resignation in the face of the juggernaut.  The twin and indispensable part of connecting the personal with the political is the promotion of agency – the basic democratic belief that people have the ability to govern themselves and improve their lives.

Promote agency by breaking down isolation, fear and fatalism.  Embolden people by aiming for small victories and positive events that you have some measure of control over.  Connect modest struggles with larger issues and the broader movement.  Show how some small victory is linked to the struggle for workplace democracy—almost all workplace issues are. Although solidarity starts at home it can be very helpful to bring the experiences of other similar and successful struggles to light.

Organizers also promote agency through the long and patient effort to develop leaders. Ella Baker, one of the most influential organizers of the mid-20^th century, argued that movements needed “the development of people who are interested not in being leaders as much as in developing leadership among other people.”[xv] Sometime in their lives most people have developed a positive core of attributes that can be bought to bear on the political process.  In many cases people see these skills as personal ones appropriate to their role as parents or special to their occupations. It is the organizers job to be aware of an individual’s strengths and skills, and to cultivate them by finding political work that matches their abilities.

The final step in fusing the personal and the political is encouraging personal responsibility to activism.  The citizen, worker, or professional has rights and responsibilities and those responsibilities are both collective and individual.  In many ways, the organizers most important target is not the power holder and decision maker but the sources of passivity, avoidance, and denial within the union.  And, we should not deny that our problems are largely of our own making.  As Fredrick Douglass suggested, “Find out just what people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.” We make choices and those choices have consequences. There is simply no substitute for personal responsibility to political life.

Interests and Ideals

Organizers usually accept the idea that self-interest is the best starting point for empowerment and unions are predicated on serving the interest of working people.  Yet self-interest is never enough and if the labor movement is to recover and inspire people to great things organizers must help people connect matters of immediate self-interest to enlightened self-interest, and ultimately with the great ideals of freedom, democracy and justice.  History would suggest that social movements attain a potential for dramatic growth and social transformation only if they are able to convincingly connect interest and ideals.

Self-interest is an important starting point because it is a generally accepted value within modern commercial culture and firmly grounds a person in the reality of the issues.  A person with self-interest is much more likely to know the nuances and subtleties of the issue, and be more engaged for the long run if more guarded about taking risks.

Fighting your own battles is a potentially transformative experience in ways that advocating for others rarely is.  Self-interested struggles come with considerable risks and convene an inner dialogue testing and extending the limits of courage, understanding and commitment. The workplace is a hostile environment where interests clash and pursuing self-interest (given that its through collective means) is usually more difficult than fighting for ideals or the well-being of others although those are noble pursuits as well.

Self-interested struggles are incomparable learning experiences because the direct experience of risk and exposure to power reveals the discord between claims about freedom and democracy and hard reality of the “unfree” workplace.  Deeply felt dissonance is an effective way to revise peoples established view of the world and makes possible the transformation of deferential workers or dues-payers into activists and citizens. Successful efforts also reveal the boss to be less than omnipotent and people more capable than previously imagined. Activists who have not had the experience of organizing their own workplaces or communities sometime in their lives will have difficultly understanding the people they are trying to organize no matter how good their formal education nor how radical their ideology.

Despite the value of self-interested efforts, the underlying theories of “economic man” (that people react rationally and logically to their economic interest) have been proven utterly bankrupt.  If interests dictated behavior than how does one explain that millions of working class people, including millions of union members, vote for the Republican Party?

Good organizers seek to broaden self-interest into a community of interest by linking — first rhetorically then in organizing — the agendas of different constituencies. Enlightened self-interest is the pre-condition behind the cohesive relationships we commonly call solidarity. Enlightened self-interest exists when people realize that they must help others to help themselves. Solidarity begins when people understand that their job security will always be threatened unless everyone at work enjoys it. Solidarity grows when people realize that job security is a principle that should be universally applied not only because it could make them more secure but because it serves the public interest by introducing democratic practices into the workplace.

Since almost all workplaces are fractured by race, gender, age and class (meaning either rank or occupational differences or multi-tiered labor arrangements), internal conflicts of interest abound. Every work force or community can be divided. Conflicts of interest are most apparent in the immediate and short-term issues such as the distribution of scarce resources. A community of interest is more apparent in long-term interests reflected in issues surrounding workplace democracy, job security or quality of work. To promote solidarity, the organizer should connect each campaign or demand to the long-term interest of the whole work force or wider community. Needless to say this is a long-term project.

On the day-to-day basis this take the form of resisting zero-sum approaches imposed by management that attempts to shift costs and risks between different groups of workers favoring one group then the other in an endless game of divide and conquer.  Political favors to one group can become the basis for a setback for the wider community or workforce.  Employers and other elites rule not through bare-knuckle domination alone but by offering advantages to certain segments of the workforce.  They count on our complicity, but enlightened self-interest can help us see that some gifts can be detrimental to our shared long-term interests. The idea that a union’s mission is to always get the best deal for its members–no matter what–is all too common and easily plays into divide and conquer strategies.

Enlightened self-interest can bridge larger political efforts that need to evoke universal values to succeed. It is now obvious that no union-negotiated healthcare benefit in the United States is secure, because we do not have universal healthcare. The attack on private pensions systems and the weakening of social security are part of the same process of shifting costs away from corporations onto everyday people. Struggling for universal benefits is not just an altruistic luxury. Part of the current failure of US labor to satisfy the self-interested demands of members is a product of the historic collapse of enlightened self-interest.

A half-century ago, labor made an admittedly tough but fateful compromise and chose to create private welfare benefits for members through specific employers at the expense of universal benefits for all citizens. Such an approach undermined itself by allowing employers to cry competition and lower benefits in a “race to the bottom.”  Benefits that seemed like the special privileges of union workers made non-union workers resentful, harder to organizer and more willing to scab. Private welfare plans yielded decisive ground in US political culture:  health care or pensions became private matters for member’s only not political rights for all.

During the same period of the mid-century social contract the labor movement again violated its own principle of solidarity by joining with imperial elites and corporate interests to weaken militant trade unionism abroad usually under the mantle of anti-communism. By undermining unions, AFL-CIO foreign policy contributed its share to the availability of cheap labor abroad.  That cheap labor then became a central ingredient in the trends toward outsourcing, plant closing and the loss of jobs at the heart of labor’s current decline. The imperial ambitions of foreign policy elites and our own complicity undermined our unions and our way of life at home.

Peace and justice is not something we need just for the workers of the Maquiladores or Colombia or people of the Middle East. It is necessary to the well-being of working people. International solidarity grounded firmly in enlightened self-interest and that evokes universal values complements and balances idealistic solidarity that, while admirable, is often cast in the language of pity and morality and more easily devolve into paternalism or romanticism.

Peace and other foreign policy issues, universal health care and social justice issues are admittedly very difficult areas to work in, with union members long-trained in the narrow self-interest typical of service unionism. It is not a coincidence that narrow self interest, and the failure of domestic and international solidarity all occurred in an environment where organizing was devalued or simply not practiced.  Patient organizing is the best solution.

On the one hand union members will always express different political opinions and controversy cannot be avoided.  On the other leaders create barriers to membership and activism if official opinion strays too far from that of the rank and file or if external political matters are seen by members as a distraction from union’s core mission.

It is generally unwise to alienate members for the sake of high sounding but ineffectual resolutions no matter how noble the cause. Political stands arrived at without thorough discussion, explanation and the opportunity for dissent can backfire. Better to take on one or two issues and vet them well rather than pass dozens of unanimous resolution through an executive committee.

Members will be more willing to listen to the controversial views of their leaders if they feel the union is listening to them.  Are they engaged by co-workers or shop stewards? Have they been contacted by staff members? Are they served well by the contract?  Solidarity is learned in practice, by example, at home.  Exhortation will not work.  Long term education will. Workshops and seminars matter but it will take a multitude of the quiet conversations that are the foundations of organizing.

Self-interest, enlightened self-interest, and universal values are not necessarily stages of development that progress from one to the next.  It is useful to introduce ideals and values from the outset given that your constituency has already assented to them in theory.  You will draw power to your organization if you connect your day to day struggles with dignity, fairness, justice, freedom and democracy.

In many regards the workplace is the last frontier for the spread of freedom, so we have a very rich challenge ahead.  The Bill of Rights stops on the steps of the workplace and although we spend most of our waking hours there, it is where we are least free.  Arguably, Americans are the least free people at work in the democratic world. Why should political rights at work be so limited when it is obvious that the corporations are free to have boundless influence in our government and public life?

The intervention of private corporations in government has blurred the distinction between public political power and private economic power to the point where the two are inextricably connected. The lack of democracy in the economy has made the attainment of democracy in public sphere unlikely.  If corporations enjoy the full rights of citizens in the political sphere should workers not enjoy the full rights of citizens in the economic sphere? Democracy depends on the hope that someday the Bill of Rights will be respected in the American workplace as much as it is revered around the world.[xvi]

The job of the organizer then is to articulate the connections between job security, low pay, favoritism, or other bad managerial practices to democracy and the other values we claim to cherish.  This is particularly important in the recruitment and development of leaders and organizers and it will help to provide a sustaining spirit for the union.

Organizers draw strength and endure the trials and minutiae of their work knowing that the specific and particular is the form in which the universal ideals like democracy reveal themselves.  Your daily work may be to shore up the grievance procedure but you are really working on due process protections for democracy at work. Decent compensation frees people from survival concerns and allows them to realize their potential as citizens and humans.  Organizers blast through what may seem tedious details regarding small matters because they know that the struggle for freedom is found in the details of life. The details are the only place universal values are ever found–even in love or literature.

Planning and Opportunity

The vast majority of union work today is reactive.  In part that is a result of the defensive posture of the labor movement but it is also a reflection of the political culture of our organizations.  Many unions treat the historic decline in membership as a succession of surprises: one dissatisfied member, decertification campaign, runaway shop, or lost election at a time with each crisis calling forth the most expedient, narrow, legalistic, managerial and apolitical response possible. Without action plans and intentional campaigns leaders and staff can avoid accountability, play house politics, and settle into business as usual.

Effective organizers on the other hand “plan the work and work the plan.”  You can never, nor should you, avoid reacting to events or seizing opportunities, but working according to plan allows for better preparation and encourages organizations to envision a means of anticipating problems that addresses the political causes of the problem. That does not mean rigid adherence to past decision but it does mean that you have a text to revise, a yardstick to measure your progress, a way of learning from mistakes, and a hypothesis that can actually promote and guide experimentation. Planning does not prevent mistakes or bad luck; in fact they will be your constant companion.  Instead, get to know them well; one day they may introduce you to success and good fortune.

Good action plans are not produced solely by the vision of a few leaders and staff. Strategic planning is an excellent opportunity to practice union democracy and convene a union-wide discussion on the union’s future. Open ended discussion is necessary to discover new ideas and enlist the members in making the plan work.

Good action plans are also not scholarly reports or policy recommendations or wish lists. A lot of precious time and energy have been wasted on formulating pious wishes and lofty desires. Strategic thinking may involve history, analysis of current conditions, or statements of desired goals but is primarily characterized by a proposed course of action. Strategic questions ask “how?” How do we create the transition between what is and what ought to be?  An effective strategy proposes how existing consciousness, resources, and capacities can be marshaled to achieve a range of political ends.  Strategic plans try to answer the hardest questions of all—what to do next and how to do it.  Start with an inventory of your resources, match them to goals, plan the next step and you will be on the way to reenergizing your union.

Service Unionism and the Organizing Model

Organizers may detest service unionism but that is the world we are in.  Can we organize our way out of the so-called service model?  First, we need to recognize that the social contract culture of the last half century is deeply embedded and that meaningful change is likely to occur gradually if we are lucky.  Secondly, we should accept good service and efficient bureaucracy as necessary to effective unionism and organizing.

Rather than replicate the service/organizing duality that has both structured and limited the debate for the last decade perhaps an evolutionary model would allow an easier passage toward a more effective union model.[xvii]

An evolutionary approach, in which characteristics of earlier forms are necessary to and embedded in later forms and serve as references and resources, could move us away from an either/or choice to entertain the possibility that a good union model includes the positive components of all the major species of unions created by the labor movement.

Using the academic labor movement as an example let me argue that four types of organization: conventional trade unionism, professional unionism, public interest unionism and social movement unionism represent a continuum of union models we can learn from, draw on, and aspire to.

At one end is conventional trade unionism with a social contract culture. The focus is staff delivered service and members are largely consumers or called on during mobilizations that ask them to take fairly easy actions on behalf of decisions of the union leadership. The focus is on the specific workplace and the immediate and material self-interest of existing members.  Organizing is devalued and the advice of experts, lobbyists and lawyers holds sway.

Much maligned, the service model was nonetheless proficient at delivering the services and basic representation without which unions would not exist. The creation of professional bureaucratic staff was necessary for the survival of unions in the modern society and professional staff will continue to be indispensable given the size of both unions and corporations. Convention unionism often included a spirited defense of teachers as a special interest group. Most higher education locals go beyond convention unionism and act as professional unions as well.

Professional unions have similar characteristics but also act as professional associations that enlarge their purview to include members of the profession nationally and internationally. Professional unions go beyond narrow self-interest and specific worksites to develop ethic codes and professional standards for the benefit of the whole profession.  Professional unionism includes an educational function that schools it members and does not simply reflect or represent members opinion. Members are expected to live up to ethical codes of conduct.

Professional unionism in higher education is limited however by a belief that academic freedom and shared governance–that is, freedom and democracy in the workplace–are unique privileges appropriate only to those that teach and research rather than a standard all working people should aspire to.  In the current climate, the exclusivity typical of professional unionism tends to undercut working conditions because its special privileges become easy targets for resentful reformers, and corporate style managers. Still, the ethical codes of professional unionism are important because they provide a passage beyond narrow self interest toward issues concerning the common good.

There are times when professional unionism shades over into public interest unionism.  Public interest unionism requires a dramatic enlargement of the discursive and political terrain on which a union is willing to engage. The community being organized extends far beyond a campus to the people of a state or region.  Arguments about quality teaching and research connect to the interests of students and the larger body politic.  The teachers working conditions become the student learning conditions. Public interest unionism embodies enlightened self-interest and social solidarity and argues that education is essential to well being of the public at large.

Public interest unionism may begin by highlighting higher educations role in economic development but also introduces ideals such as citizenship into the public debate. Public interest unionism demands a much deeper participation by members who must tap personal contacts and professional expertise.  Mobilization efforts are common and involve a high level of activism. Political action goes beyond professional lobbyists to mass lobbying and coalitional work with students, alumni, parents, and other unions. The goal of public interest unionism is to intervene in the public discourse and change public policy.  Its success depends on the creation of a culture of organizing with growing numbers of members involved in direct personal contact with others members and other actors.

The rarest, most politically charged, and hardest trend to define or realize is social movement unionism.[xviii] In social movement unionism members, leaders and staff consciously belong to a larger national and international movement dedicated to the creation of freedom and democracy in the union, workplace, and in society. The sense of community reaches it maximum extension as unions claim to represent the interest of all.  Social movement unionists often adopt the language and agenda of citizenship movements by working to exercise and extend basic human and civil rights into the workplace.  Social movement unionism lays claim to democratic political traditions.[xix]

Social movement unionist aim beyond the workplace because they believe that workplace democracy will not likely be achieved outside of a broad social movement that can alter the structures of law and political power. For this reason, social movement unionists act in concert with other social movements and organizing and community building are given primacy. They value coalition-building, and for inspiration on vision and tactics, they look to the social movements, to unions closely associated with social movements (such as the early United Farm Workers), and to the pre-1940’s labor movement. Social movement unionism tends to embrace and express the full spectrum of alternative political identities and consciousness aiming toward the realization of democracy.

Social movement unionism has emerged most commonly in relation to local community struggles, often those of poor and immigrant workers. The complex international constellation of social movements, ideas, discussions and organizing that lead up to and were a consequence of the 1999 “Battle for Seattle” offer us a glimpse of what social movement unionism might look like today on a grand scale. The civil disobedience and protest that shook Seattle had a distinctly northwestern flair as local activists and labor and populist traditions set the stage for a gathering of international justice groups from the global North and South, as well as unions, women’s and  environmental organizations.

The coalition of “Teamsters and Turtles” proved fragile but Seattle remains a historical example of what might be. While 9/11 and the so-called war on terror profoundly interrupted the course of social movement activism and international solidarity, the new coalitions against the War in Iraq indicate that a movement of movements, like that which surfaced in Seattle, continues to be possible.

While these different versions of unionism are not necessarily higher and lower stages of development it is difficult to envision how a union could aspire to social movement unionism without a history of solid service to its members, a strong ethical foundation and the kinds of experience that comes from struggling over the defense of the public interest.

Once we reconceptualize unionism in this way two approaches recommend themselves for resolving the tension between service and organizing.  First we should attempt to latch on to service functions and improve them by finding the organizing potential within them. That means that organizers must develop synergistic programs between organizing and legislative, grievance work, or negotiations. In this way the organizer can avoid the zero-sum struggles for union resources and reconnect the lost link between organizing and the representative functions that were created by member activism decades ago.

Many unions already practice synergy by emphasizing community outreach by members during electoral campaigns, direct member interaction with legislators, member engagement with negotiations thought advisory committees, or face to face organizing teams that poll and educate members, or by entrusting union work, including grievances, to a shop steward type system.  At first this may be more work for staff and leaders but in the long run could mobilize members and prove that organizing is not just about getting more members.

A related approach is the traditional inside/outside strategy. Since the 19^th century dissident or marginalized groups have employed pressure to reshape the policy and practice of governments, corporations and unions using a two pronged approach. The inside/outside strategy depends on the creation of organizational centers outside the union that work in conjunction with clusters of interest and support inside the union.  The “outside” organization becomes a safe home for activists and supporters to exchange information, develop strategy, publicize their agenda and make their case free from internal union pressures or organizational rivalries.  The insider supporters funnel resources to the independent organization, legitimize its work, and bring its views into union discourse and practice. The key is to coordinate the efforts of people and organizations along a range of political and institutional positions. Successful inside/outside strategies demand an appreciation for the complementary use of both cooperation and dissent.  This tactical diversity and flexibility aims to create a push/pull dynamic edging the union toward more desirable activity.[xx]

The ability to work within the multiple oppositional tensions I have described requires a certain degree of balance and calls on the organizer to master dialectical relationships through the art of dialogue, connection, and commensurability.  Accordingly, organizers are liminal figures that straddle political thresholds and borderlines: the inside outsider, the person with one foot in the community and one foot out, the “other” within.  The political passage, betwixt and between, is trod as the organizer helps a community live up to ideals agreed to in principle but unrealized in practice by struggling to do the same.  Organizing practice often gives rise to a kind of dual consciousness not unlike that articulated a century ago by WEB Dubois.

The Organizer’s Profile

First and foremost, organizers have the desire to try.  The desire to change the world for the better comes in many acceptable forms and for organizers ideology rarely trumps practice. What matters is that the desire to act should be deep and lusty.

Organizers avoid expediency and have patience. Organizing is the mobilization of people and ideas, not the administration of tasks. It takes time to pass on skills and have other people lay out the newsletter when you can do it better and faster–but that is not the goal.  Tasks are a form of commitment and completing the work confirms peoples desire to be involved. An organizer identifies the potential in people and suggests appropriate roles and assignments for them. Good organizers delegate work and move on to more challenging tasks but given the gravity of managerial culture it is important that organizers continue to practice.

Good organizers realize their connection with the people they seek to organize and so act out of compassion not pity.

Organizers are likely to have an activist family background or better yet be a convert with a conservative background.  Many good organizers are people who themselves had experienced a transformation in their own political views. Usually this is the result not of discourse but of some wrenching experience like that gained from organizing your own workplace.

Effective organizers have multiple community contacts inside and outside of work (church, service organizations, environmental organizations, political parties). Organizing utilizes existing friendship groups, social networks or neighborhood ties. Good organizers have links to social movements beyond labor.

Organizers have good listening skills because organizing is about learning as much as it is about teaching. They are not dogmatic and meet someone with different opinions half-way.  An organizer cannot engage someone productively if there is no point of contact.  Find the point of contact in a discussion or discourse and attempt to move the point.

Organizers are like good teachers and lead by example.  They do not necessarily speak out their own thought or perspective but deploy and impart their knowledge slowly, tactically, in a gradual way as a teacher might. They show leadership by example rather than by exhortation. Good organizers are not necessarily polished public speakers but need to have good social skills in small groups or one on one.

Organizers know that tactics are not ideals and so are not wedded to either confrontational or cooperative tactics.  They practices both when and where necessary and do not mistake militancy for strategy, or vision, or democracy.

Good organizers pick their battles carefully. Because human resources are scarce organizers do not necessarily respond to every assault or outrage. Organizers do not let the boss set their agenda and avoid having their long term plans dissembled by every crisis of the moment. Organizers tend to emphasize tactics and strategy that effectively lead people over those that fight the boss because they know their true audience and source of power.

A good organizer is not a “know it all.” If someone show up to their first or second meeting or event and starts criticizing everything and offering advice they probably are not an organizer.

Organizers do not seek perfection, set pre-requisites for membership or insist on resolving problems prior to organizing since they understand that organizing is the way to solve problems. Comfort, without closure, certainty, or victory is an essential attribute.

Good organizers thrive on community, value democracy, encourage discussion and, while they are not mavericks, or voices in the wilderness, they strive to maintain a healthy sense of proportion and detachment from the passions of the moment.

Survival for Organizers is Renewal for Labor

Whether you are an elected leader, a member volunteer, a community supporter, or professional staff, your survival as an organizer is not just a matter of personal well-being or success but important to the renewal of the labor movement. How will the labor movement have a culture of organizing if organizers burn out after a few years? Can we improve the quality of organizing while degrading the organizer?

Organizing must be a sustainable activity or occupation that will allow a cohort of seasoned activist to develop institutional memory, collective knowledge, and the critical mass it will require to transform the culture of unions.  This can never happen under the existing norms of work in most of our unions.  Organizers are still too often treated as expendable resources and organizing the lowest form of union work. The Organizing Institute has had a positive influence by improving training, providing support networks, and lifting the status of organizers but we still have a long way to go. The decade-long debate about the future of the labor movement fails to address organizer burnout yet it may be the single most decisive factor on which the rebirth of the labor movement depends.

The romantic version of the young, single, tough, hard-living, workaholic, macho, stressed-out hero simply will not suffice for both practical and political reasons. This enduring heroic image may offer organizers some limited psychic compensation, but it is inadequate protection against nagging burnout.  By idealizing extreme working conditions for organizers, such romantic notions actually contribute to the failure of organizing by excusing unions from adequately staffing organizing projects.  Similarly, the male, macho, and individualistic qualities of the heroic organizer image are ill suited to an increasingly female workforce and a world reshaped by the political and social attitudes of the Sixties.

Travel or relocation and long and irregular hours are the most obvious source of distress but the political sources of anxiety are just as damaging. While the contradictions organizers engage can be sources of creativity and openness they are also fraught with dangers. The inside/outside position can too easily slip into isolation and the loss of resources, support, or influence. Unions that do not understand or are hostile to organizing force good organizers into a three-way struggle with the union leadership, the boss, and the people being organized.  A war fought on all fronts is hard to sustain even for gifted organizers. The abuse of idealistic young people, for example, almost guarantees that they will leave the movement or become service-oriented labor staff or officials.[xxi]

The bureaucratic managerialism the labor movement is sometimes criticized for is not usually a matter of ideological conservatism. It is more commonly an understandable, if detrimental, survival or advancement strategy for the individual.  Organizers become managers for their own mental and physical health or because that is the path to power inside the union. The absence of a large cohort of seasoned organizers generally means that few of the senior decision makers in union bureaucracies are engaged in organizing on a day-to-day basis.

The current structure of organizing work has already reached the threshold of diminishing returns. If we simply increase the number of overworked and underpaid organizers that scurry from one place to another then no amount of resources will do the job. Rank and file activists should be given leeway to do what they think is right and have access to support groups, training, release time, and recognition.  Organizers should be rooted in communities, work in teams, have some kinship with the people being organized, and have the time to enjoy normal social lives. While one might expect that an argument that connects good working conditions and compensation with quality work and rising productivity to find a ready reception among unionists–that is not necessarily the case. The exploitation of organizers under the guise of scarce resources must end or all our efforts to renew the labor movement will likely be in vain.

A good start in protecting organizers and other staff from abuse is unionization.  Unions are good, and not just for other people.  Unionizing staff is not just for the benefit of the staff member but a suitable means of protecting unions from their own negative tendencies.  The current state of the labor movement strongly suggests that union managers do not always get it right and would benefit from greater “worker participation” in decision making.  Staff unions can facilitate vibrant internal discussion by limiting the palace politics of favoritism, flattery, loyalty, and obedience, through job security protections.  Burnout can be addressed, if not completely prevented, by job rotation, generous vacation and leave policies and adequate compensation including portable pensions. To be a good organizer, it is often necessary to organize yourself. Don’t let the boss push you around.  For a good start short of unionization contact the National Organizers Alliance (see Practicing What We Preach:  Report on Policies and Practices for Justice Organizations).[xxii]

Organizers must find deep sources of strength within.  Look beyond the details of strategy, tactics and organizing drives to political visions, spiritual practices, religious beliefs, therapy, community support, travel, or combinations thereof.  Drinking and drugs will not work for long. The choice is highly personal but if you desire to become an organizer–and stay an organizer– you must develop your spiritual resources and take the time for personal reflection and renewal. Periodically reconnect with your deepest motivations and the greatest source of good in your life, and the trials you endure will seem smaller and fit more easily within the grand scheme of things.

Be fully present in your work. Be here now as Buddhist wisdom advises.  That often means choosing to do fewer things well rather than many things poorly. Organizers must become comfortable with things left undone. You will never accomplish it all, so focus on the job at hand.  Despite romantic appeals to the contrary, never forget the value of retreat.  An army that does not retreat can never win, let alone survive to fight another day.

Activists are results-oriented people but also come to understand that although we are deeply engaged in the world, we are not in control of it. Be dedicated to your work but let the results take care of themselves. Organizers endure, in part, because they learn how to suffer setbacks without being defeated and how to strive toward a vision of justice without ever achieving it.

Above all remember that history has not come to an end.   It’s just that we cannot know its pace or foresee its twists and turns. Despite the triumphant claims of global elites that there is no alternative to the present regime, this, too, shall pass. If history is a credible guide, new possibilities may grow right out of the heart of corporate and imperial dominion.

[ii] Dan Clawson and Mary Ann Clawson, What has happened to the US Labor Movement?  Union Decline and Renewal, Annual Review Sociology 199  25:95-119

[iii] For more on the new alternative pubic and its relation to the “Sixties” see Richard Moser’s introduction  “Was It the End or Just a Beginning? American Storytelling Traditions and the 1960s” in Van Gosse and Richard Moser eds. The World the Sixties Made: Politics and Culture in Recent America, (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2003).

[iv] Richard Hurd “The Failure of Organizing, the New Unity Partnership and the Future of the Labor Movement,” Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society, Vol 8 No 1 September 2004 pp5-25.  Kate Bronfenbrenner and Robert Hickey, “Changing to Organize: A National Assessment of Union Strategies” in Ruth Milkman and Kim Voss, Rebuilding Labor: Organizing and Organizers in the New Union Movement (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2004)

[v] http://www.changetowin.org/

[vi] For a description of the current labor culture at its birth see C. Wright Mills, The New Men of Power: America’s Labor Leaders, first published in 1948.

[vii] A 1997 study found that innovative locals commonly had “organizers with social movement experience gained outside the labor movement.” Voss and Sherman “Putting the “move” Back in the Labor Movement: Tactical Innovation and Contemporary American Unions.  Presented at Annual meeting of the American Sociological Assn., Toronto, 1997. Cited in Clawson p.107.

[viii] In addition to the training manuals produced by the AFL-CIO see, Jane Slaughter ed., A Troublemaker’s Handbook 2: How to Fight Back Where You Work–And Win, (Labor Notes May 2005); Martha Gruelle and Mike Parker, Democracy is Power Rebuilding Unions from the Bottom Up (labor Notes) Jan Barry, A Citizen’s Guide to Grassroots Campaigns, Rutgers University Press, 2000. Two works that focus exclusively on organizers and their practice are outside of labor but also very useful. See, Jacqueline B. Mondros and Scott M. Wilson, Organizing for Power and Empowerment (Columbia University Press, New York 1994). Kristin Layng Szakos and Joe Szakos, We Make Change: Community Organizers Talk About What They Do–And Why, (Vanderbilt University Press, 2007)

[ix] The best known example are Bronfenbrenner, Friedman S, Hurd RW, Oswald RA, Seeber RL eds,. Organizing to Win: New Research on Union Strategies, (Ithaca NY: ILR Cornell University Press, 1998) and Bruce Nissen, Which Direction for Organized Labor?: Essays on Organizing, Outreach, and Internal Transformations  (Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1999) Kim Moody, U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition: The Failure of Reform from Above, The Promise of Revival from Below (Verso, 2007).  See also Ruth Milkman and Kim Voss, Rebuilding Labor: Organizing and Organizers in the New Labor Movement (Ithaca NY: ILR Cornell University Press, 2004); Mike Miller and Michael Eisenscher, Renewing Labor: A Report from the Field, Working USA Fall 2001 p. 131-154; Michael Eisenscher Leadership Development and Organizing: For What Kind of Unions?, Labor Studies Journal; Summer 1999 Vol 24, Issue 2 p.3; Brofenbrenner and Robert Hickey, Winning is Possible, Multinational Monitor June 2003 p. 9.; Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, (Berkeley University of California Press, 1995).

[x] This essay was originally drafted in the 1989-90 while I was a graduate student at Rutgers University and addressed social movement activism in general.  It was redrafted in summer 2005 to focus more tightly on labor.  Later that fall while researching material for an internal organizing campaign, I visited the Communication Workers of America (CWA) website and discovered that the CWA had been using the “Union Triangle” as a conceptual tool to explain their union’s activity to members and to promote activism. While notable difference exist between this essay and the CWA’s approach the affinities are also significant. It is gratifying to know that one of the most democratic and vital union in the US labor movement has found this a practical and useful approach and it makes me proud to be a member of the CWA Local 1032 along with my colleagues on the staff of Rutgers AAUP-AFT.

[xi] Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power Nonviolence and the Will of the People (Metropolitan Books, New York, 2003).

[xii] Saul D. Alinsky Rules for Radicals, Vintage books 1972 New York p. xix

[xiii] Richard Moser, Was it the End or Just a Beginning? American Storytelling and the History of the Sixties, in The World the 60’s Made: Politics and Culture in Recent America eds Van Gosse and Richard Moser (Temple Univeristy Press 2003) .p37-51

[xiv] Sara Evans Personal Politics

[xv] Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960’s (Harvard University Press , Cambridge 1981, p.20

[xvi] For more see the Labor Party’s campaign for Worker Right http://www.campaignforworkerrights.org/; American Rights at Work http://www.americanrightsatwork.org/.

[xvii] For useful suggestions on transforming unions see Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Richard Hurd, “Political Will, Local Union transformation and the Organizing Imperative” in Which Direction for Organized Labor?, ed. Bruce Nissen, 191-216.

[xviii] Paul Johnston, Success While Others Fail: Social Movement Unionism and the Public Workplace, (ILR Press Cornell, 1994)  Vanessa Tait,  Poor Workers’ Unions: Rebuilding Labor from Below (South End Press, 2005) Kim Moody, ‘Towards an International Social-Movement Unionism’, New Left Review, No.225, 1997 pp.52-72. Immanuel Ness, Immigrants, Unions and the New U.S. Labor Market (Temple University Press, Philadelphia 2005), Steven Henry Lopez, Reorganizing the Rust Belt: An Inside Study of the American Labor Movement (University of California Press, Berkeley, 2004 Ruth Milkman, Rebuilding Labor: Organizing and Organizers in the New Union Movement (Cornell University Press, 2004)

[xix] “Organize for What? The Resurgence of Labor as Citizenship Movement”, in Harry Katz and Lowell Turner, eds., Rekindling the Movement: Labor’s Quest for Relevance in the 20^th Century (Cornell University Press, 2001); Richard Moser, “Autoworkers at Lordstown: Workplace Democracy and American Citizenship,”  The World the Sixties Made, p 289-315.

[xx] For more on the inside/outside strategy see Joe Berry, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education (Monthly Review Press) 2005, p.35

[xxi] Daisy Rooks, “Sticking it Out or Packing It In? Organizer Retention in the New Labor Movement,” Rebuilding Labor, Ruth Milkman and Kim Voss eds., Cornell 2004. p195-222

[xxii] Visit the National Organizers Alliance at http://noacentral.org/

The New Unionists of the late 19th century built trade unions as we know them by organizing the proletariat – the working class of the day. Similarly, today’s new unionists are beginning to organize the precariat – workers without security. To say this latter group represents the most rapidly growing sector in society entirely misses the point. The labour force has fundamentally changed. And according to many labour analysts, the real jolt is still to come:

“Most of the full-time jobs lost in this recession won’t come back. Most of the employees laid off in the past year won’t find permanent work. When the statistics catch up to the reality, people will be forced to confront the new normal.” [i]

Let’s start by looking at some facts and figures. Beware—this may become depressing! Please feel free to skip ahead at any point.

In 2004, the International Labour Organisation (ILO ) carried out the first ever global study of economic security levels. “An Economic Security Index (ESI) has been calculated for over 90 countries (covering 86% of the world’s population). …The report shows that about 73% of all workers live in circumstances of economic insecurity…”[ii]

And that was four years before the economic crisis!

To many labour analysts’ surprise, the rise of the precariat has been an international process. Let’s look at a few of the richer countries first:

In the USA: “One out of three workers worry about their own job security…. Only half are working the number of hours they want to work.”[iii]

In Japan: “The proportion of nonregular workers in the total labor force doubled to 33 percent in 2006 from 15 percent in 1984.” [iv]

In the UK: “51% of UK workers claim their career is the biggest worry for 2009, with more than 80% reporting job insecurity.”[v]

In Canada: “37 per cent of work is part-time, short-term or casual.” [vi]

In Europe, almost half of young people are now on temporary contracts[vii]. As for Western Europe: “…between a quarter and a third of the labor force now works under temporary and/or part-time contracts, with peaks in UK, Holland, Spain and Italy.” [viii]

Even good old Sweden is feeling the rot: “Among employed persons who are not organized in a trade union the share of those temporary (sic) employed is 27 per cent. …100,000 more women than men have precarious employment and therefore run a great risk of becoming unemployed due to the crisis.” [ix]

Meanwhile, down in Australia: “42% consider their job as less secure than it was this time in 2008.” [x]

However, the growth of the precariat is certainly not restricted to OECD nations. Just this month the ILO and the World Trade Organisation published a joint report showing that 60% of the 2.7 billion workers in poor and middle income countries are ‘informal’[xi]. By this, they mean: “…unreported, often temporary employment in domestic service, construction sites, transport, small-scale peddling, seasonal farm labor and so forth, with variable earnings and without significant guarantees of minimum wage, workplace health and safety or other labor standards.”[xii] Furthermore, the data suggests a huge pay differential between precarious workers and the rest: “…(the figures) suggest that informal-sector workers earn about half as much money as formal-sector workers.”[xiii]

An earlier ILO report had found widespread insecurity in the developing world: “…in urban areas of Brazil, 51% of all households said they did not have enough income to cover their healthcare need. In Ghana the urban figure was similar, the rural was 62%; in Russia, the corresponding figures were 47% and 58%. … in Tanzania only 4% of men and women think their financial situation in old age would be good. In Ghana and South Africa, only one in every five expects it to be good. In Ethiopia, two-thirds of young and middle-aged people are worried about having money for their old age. The situation in Eastern Europe is equally bad. In Ukraine, four out of every five people expect their income to be inadequate in old age. And in China, only 6% of young and middle-aged people think their income security in old age would be reasonably good.” [xiv]

In South Korea: “…by early in the 21st century, 60 per cent of all workers (and 70 per cent of women) were in insecure casual jobs…”

In South Africa: “…over a quarter of the employed could be classified as in the precariat…” [xv]

In India: “Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) data suggests that employment through contractors constitute 23.08% of total organized workforce in 2003 compared to 11.03% in 1992.” [xvi]

“…The Russian Federation, Ukraine and other countries of eastern Europe continue to operate with enormous numbers of workers on unpaid or partially-paid ‘leave’, with very little prospect of recall to paid employment. One in four workers in Ukrainian industry is on unpaid leave at any one time, or effectively in disguised unemployment.” [xvii]

With all this we have seen a huge rise shift towards temp agencies: “…Adecco, with 700,000 on its books, is one of the world’s biggest private employers. Pasona… was sending a quarter of a million workers out to firms every day by 2007.” [xviii]

And let’s not forget that three billion of us, half of the earth’s population, live in the rural Third World, where the major occupation remains tilling the soil. What with global warming and a food crisis, you don’t get much more precarious than that.[xix]

Moving right along

It might be fair to say that the data above, taken together, creates a general overstatement. But sometimes we need a bit of volume and treble to make us sit up and pay attention. It is time we admitted that most of us have failed to grasp both the prevalence and significance of precarity at work.

Meanwhile, young people in Italy, Spain and France have been reporting sightings of a character known as San Precario. He/she is the patron saint of the precariat. Apparently San Precario has appeared to believers at union rallies, supermarket openings, film festivals, temp agencies, and even on the catwalks of Milan Fashion week. There can be little doubt as to San Precario’s divinity; as well being able to change gender, he/she has the power to appear in several locations at once (especially on May Day).

In a way, it is not surprising that San Precario should manifest to young workers first. Verily, they have copped it hardest. The 2005 invitation to EuroMayDay reads like the launch of a new manifesto:

“So the proletariat eclipsed the petit bourgeoisie as producers and wealth creators, and now the precariat threatens to do the same to the proletarians. …While the traditional centralized industrial proletariat continues to exist, it plays an increasingly lesser role in the overall forces of production, while the role of the contingent, precarious worker continues to increase.” [xx]

The end of “labourism”

With the luxury of hindsight, we can see that certain organisations have been trying to wrestle with this problem for many years. The trouble was, they didn’t have a shared vocabulary. Rather, they had a number of words and new phenomena to juggle, and they couldn’t see the wood for the trees. The ILO, for instance, has had ‘atypical work’ on its agenda for years. Together with NGOs, they have also tried a number of strategies to address the ‘informal sector’. In the meantime, unions have experimented with various structures to organize ‘freelancers’, ‘temps’, ‘casuals’ and ‘part-timers’. Alter-globalists have protested against ‘McJobs”. Japan has lamented the rise of ‘freeters’. Academics have fenced over “post-Fordist” production, with some proclaiming the advent of ‘post-industrial’ society. And workers themselves have become painfully familiar with terms like ‘under-employment’, ‘short term contracts’ and (above all else) ‘flexibility’. It is no wonder that depression, stress and anxiety are now the primary cause of workplace absence in most developed countries.

Seeing all this as part of a single phenomenon – the end of labourism – is an option which many of us might not like to consider. We have assumed that there is a ‘typical’ mode of working – a template from which we are slowly departing. The venerable Eurofound described this standard as: “full-time, regular, open-ended employment with a single employer over a long time span. …with standard working hours guaranteeing a regular income and, via social security systems geared towards wage earners, securing pension payments and protection against ill-health and unemployment.

In fact, this standard model is more like a 20^th century anomaly. Nor did it ever really secure global dominance. Although it was central to policy-making and industrial relations, it is doubtful that it was ever really the dominant mode of work.

‘Labourism’ equates work with formal paid employment. Our rights, social benefits, labour laws and unions have been shaped around this model, and the assumptions that went with it As a result, care workers and own-account workers were marginalised in the 20^th century. Labourism is also at the heart of our difficulty in understanding the precariat. The many faces of the phenomenon make it seem nebulous to us, difficult to define and discuss, and almost impossible to strategise around. We have become so convinced that labourism is the natural regime that we can only assume that we ought to be turning “atypical” workers into “typical” ones. This is the guiding spirit behind the ILO’s ‘Decent Work’ campaign.

The standard model is also crumbling from within. Much has been written elsewhere about how the ‘job for life’ has become a thing of the past. By way of a single example, in the US younger baby boomers have held an average of 10.8 jobs from ages 18 to 42[xxi]. Even ‘typical’ employment is becoming insecure. The precariat is becoming the rule, not the exception.

This is the problem with the global campaign for ‘Decent Work’. It is like earlier campaigns for ‘the right to work’. It is an admirable sentiment, and it deserves all our support, but we need not be under any illusions. Rights don’t make a lot of sense unless someone somewhere has corresponding duties.[xxii]

The labourist model is a thing of the past. Today, if we were to tote up the world’s precariat, care workers, own account workers, unemployed, subsistence farmers and ‘detached’ workers, we would have to admit that most of the world’s workers represent a round peg being forced into a square hole[xxiii].

Precariat: a word in search of a meaning?

It seems strangely pointless to try and assign an exact meaning to the word “precariat”, given that we invented the term so recently[xxiv]. Besides, it suggests its own meaning. It is derived from precarious + proletariat – ie workers without security. However, it is worth noting here that such workers need not be poorly paid. This is one of the issues which has confused the discussions. Some freelancers are highly paid… however they can only find work one week in five. Others bring home a reasonable income by combining three or four income streams… however at any one time half of this work may be under threat. People used to have similarly earnest debates over the meaning of “proletariat”. Some sections of the working class were, after all, relatively highly paid. Some people, including Marx, held that the proletariat included salaried workers (or at least some of them). Others disagreed. Heated words were exchanged. Yadda yadda yadda. In the meantime, the proletariat continued to grow and change. The nature of work gradually transformed. And despite the ILO’s lofty pronouncement to the contrary, labour has long since become a commodity. It is bought and sold on the market, and whether the protagonists are waged or salaried, most working people are only too familiar with an increased pressure to produce measurable outputs… be they corn cobs, car tyres, billable hours or doctorates.

Union responses

Most unions have tended to see the precariat in terms of its constituent members, rather than as a whole. Over the last ten years there have been some innovative attempts to organize freelancers, care workers, agency workers, self-employed producers and subsistence farmers. For instance:

• Canada’s largest media union has set up a union for freelance workers (more).
• The U.S. Freelancers’ Union has grown phenomenally (more), and has developed a whole new model of membership.
• Agency workers are now fairly well organised in some countries, notably Belgium, Denmark, Finland and Sweden[xxv].
• In the UK, BECTU offers freelancers legal advice and online services (more).
• In Italy, three union federations have created structures internal structures to protect and represent atypical workers (more).
• Two Dutch federations have been signing up the self-employed (more).
• In India, SEWA has recruited about 700,000 self-employed women members (more).
• Spain and Georgia both have unions for the self-employed. Germany’s Ver.di offers freelance workers a support hotline.
• In Australia, 35% of APESMA members are self-employed (more), and this is the fastest growing sector in the union.
• The global union UNI recently set up a Freelance Network (more), along with a charter for unions who work with the self-employed (more).

Susan Hayter, senior ILO industrial relations expert, recently reported on efforts made to apply collective bargaining tools to improve the terms and conditions of employment of non-regular workers: “In Europe, some collective agreements covering temporary agency workers place limits on the duration of temporary contracts, after which workers become eligible for an open ended contract. In Chennai in the Tamil Nadu region in India, a growing number of collective agreements include provisions to make contract workers permanent when a vacancy arises. In Uruguay, recent agreements in the manufacturing sector also include measures aimed at regularizing employment. In countries such as Argentina and Korea, industry/ sectoral agreements have been instrumental in ensuring wage parity between regular and non-regular workers.”[xxvi]

This year, 75 unions affiliated to the European Metalworkers’ Federation agreed on a four year strategic bargaining agenda to address the consequences of precarious work. Other regional and global union federations have been considering similar initiatives.[xxvii]

Unions have also been a strong voice in the development of the ‘flexicurity’ model, whereby government seeks to provide a social framework which actively seeks to balance flexibility and security.[xxviii]

Closer to the ground, the fracturing of workplaces has led local unions to employ such marketing techniques as direct mail and cold-calling to try and locate new members. There have also been many experiments with Web 2.0 and social networking tools such as FaceBook, Twitter, blogs, Flickr and YouTube. In fact the labour movement has even developed its own social network: Union Book[xxix].

Does this change go deep enough to meet the needs of the precariat? A member of the New Unionism Network recently described these initiatives as: more of the same, only more so. Time will tell if he is right, but in the meantime I would suggest a simple test. Imagine that you are a young temp, referred by an agency, who has just landed 26 weeks work in (insert name of any industry your union represents). There is no union presence in the workplace. Now, what are the chances that you will end up becoming a union member? If your union does not have a concrete strategy in place to shorten these odds, then it needs one in a hurry. And if it doesn’t think it needs to bother, you might as well pack up and go home.

An opportunity for new thinking?

We began this discussion with a respectful nod to the New Unionists of the late 19^th century: the folk who brought us trade unionism as we know it (roughly speaking), by recruiting unskilled and semi-skilled industrial workers, male and female, instead of protecting a skilled elite. They were responding to qualitative changes in the nature of work. The new unionists found a way to offer voice to a new kind of worker; workers who would never find a home within craft-based unions. In fact, this latter group of skilled worker had a lot to lose, and tended to see the emerging class as a threat. Does this sound familiar?

With the labourist model in retreat, unions today need to take a similarly radical step. Those that don’t will continue their slow drift into irrelevance.

As HUCTW organizer Kris Rondeau once put it: “This is about us, not them”. Unionism is about building human relationships, not developing a client base. The precariat has everything to gain from coming together in solidarity. Unions need to be developing frameworks (eg occupational networks) which encourage the precariat to become involved and organize themselves. The alternative, a unionism which withdraws into 20th century traditions, will see many unions go the way of those earlier craft bodies. And the middle ground, based on helpdesks, contract advice and insurance services, can only slow the decline. Such an enormous new force as the precariat has little to gain (and unions little to offer) from a menu of services anchored around the word “help”.

On the bright side, the advent of new social networking tools (including the rise of mobile phones in developing countries) provides us with an ideal platform[xxx] to build this new solidarity. The fact that such tools are often free, and that the young have already mastered the medium (indeed, practically taken control of it), gives us the opportunity to build work-centered networks and associations on top of existing union structures. These might be initiated by a core group of union members, but if they are to address occupational issues properly, they will inevitably involve a growing cohort of the precariat.

For instance, a group of members of a service workers’ union might set up a care workers’ network. The agenda is theirs to define, but might include such things as the collection and sharing of data on pay rates, nationwide standards monitoring, lobbying over workloads, addressing problems within the industry’s culture, setting up exchange schemes, and working with occupational networks from other countries… whatever they see as relevant. Naturally, people could remain involved with the network if they became unemployed, or were reduced to part-time or contract work. Temps and staff provided by agencies could also become involved (if the group so decides), along with trainees, volunteers and/or retirees. Remember, this is about networking. It is not about setting up new structures or branches. It is informal, inclusive and dynamic.

This may just prove to be the 21st century equivalent of the radical inclusiveness of the earlier new unionists. Such occupational networks would help unions to develop a more concrete presence in the workplace, and within working relationships. Such a shift would also raise interesting questions about new types of ‘associate’ union membership.

Furthermore, once working people have more voice in the way work is organised, they will inevitably develop alternative views on what ‘the market’ requires. There is absolutely no reason that profit should be the sole end. Guy Standing cites a simple illustration of this:

“…left to themselves as individuals, fishers compete against each other and deplete fish stocks, since short term profits dictate what they do. Collaborative bargaining would tend towards the preservation and reproduction of fish stocks and would promote professional standards that would act to constrain individualistic competition.” [xxxi]

He goes on to argue that developing networks and a new citizenship around occupation takes us beyond the employer-centric trap of 20th century labourism[xxxii].

This would be the beginning of a fairly major shift in thinking for some unions. Essentially, the rise of the precariat and the parallel development of social networking technology leads unions closer and closer to a single watershed question: To what extent are we willing to entrust organizing to the members?

by Peter Hall-Jones, November 2009

Notes

[i] Job insecurity: the corrosive new normal by Carol Goar, Toronto Star, Canada, Oct 07 2009. See http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/706480. Downloaded 22 Nov 2009.

[ii] Economic insecurity is a global crisis, International Labour Organisation, 7 Sept 2004. See http://www.ilo.org/global/About_the_ILO/Media_and_public_information/Press_releases/lang–en/WCMS_075583/index.htm. Downloaded 22 Nov 2009.

[iii] From Job (In)Security to Opportunity? by Carl E. Van Horn, Business News New Jersey, 22 September 2008, Vol. 21 Issue 39, p14-14.

[iv] Precariat’ workers are starting to fight for a little stability by Toshihiko Ueno, Kyodo News, Japan Times Online, 21 June 2007. See http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20070621f2.html. Downloaded 22 Nov 2009.

[v] Strong sign of employee insecurity by Chris Hawkins, Human Resources (09648380), Apr 2009, p8.

[vi] Job insecurity: the corrosive new normal by Carol Goar, Toronto Star, Canada, Oct 07 2009. See http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/706480. Downloaded 22 Nov 2009.

[vii] Precarious Employment and Flexicurity – the perspective of a (trade union orientated) user of statistics by Karin Pape (Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing and Global Labour Institute) Geneva, Oct 2008. See http://www.wiego.org/reports/statistics/nov-2008/Pape.pdf. Downloaded 22 Nov 2009.

[viii] See Precarity (Euromayday), Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precarity_(Euromayday). Downloaded 22 Nov 2009.

[ix] Precarious employment is most frequent among women by Landsorganisationen i Sverige, 12 Mar 2009. See http://www.lo.se/home/lo/home.nsf/unidView/18B572A300C85975C1257577002DB24D. Downloaded 22 Nov 2009.

[x] Oasis of enlightenment a mirage by Leo D’Angelo Fisher, BRW, 3 Sept 2009, Vol. 31 Issue 35, p49.

[xi] Globalization and Informal jobs in Developing Countries – A joint study from the International Labour Organization and the WTO, by International Labour Organisation, November 2009. See http://www.ilo.org/global/What_we_do/Publications/Newreleases/lang–en/docName–WCMS_115087/index.htm. Downloaded 22 Nov 2009.

[xii] Sixty percent of developing-country workers are “informal”, Trade Fact of the Week, Democratic Leadership Council, 11 Nov 2009. See http://www.dlc.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=108&subid=900003&contentid=255088. Downloaded 22 Nov 2009.

[xiii] ibid

[xiv] Fact Sheet No. 1: Income insecurity: neglected aspects of poverty and inequality, by ILO Socio-Economic Security Programme, 30 Aug 2004. See http://www.ilo.org/public/english/protection/ses/download/docs/sheet_no1.pdf. Downloaded 22 Nov 2009.

[xv] From Work after globalization: Building occupational citizenship, by Guy Standing. Edward Elgar press, 2009. p.114.

[xvi] From Wage Inequality and Job Insecurity Among Permanent and Contract Workers in India: Evidence from Organized Manufacturing Industries by Amit K Bhandari and Almas Heshmati, The Icfai University Press, 2008.

[xvii] Economic Security for a better world, Socio-Economic Security Programme, International Labour Office, 2004. For a summary, see http://www.ilo.org/public/english/protection/ses/download/docs/sheet_no10.pdf. Downloaded 22 Nov 2009.

[xviii] From Work after globalization: Building occupational citizenship, by Guy Standing. Edward Elgar press, 2009. p.75

[xix] After the New Economy by D. Henwood, D., New York: New Press, 2003, pp.184-5.

[xx] 2005 Call of the EuroMayDay network See http://www.euromayday.org/index-2005.php. Downloaded 1 Nov 2009.

[xxi] Frequently Asked Questions: Number of Jobs Held in a Lifetime, by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, last modified 5 Aug 2009. See http://www.bls.gov/NLS/nlsfaqs.htm#anch41. Downloaded 22 Nov 2009.

[xxii] I am indebted to Guy Standing for making this point so clearly in Work after globalization: Building occupational citizenship, by Guy Standing. Edward Elgar press, 2009.

[xxiv] Although the first usage of the term is unclear, it has only gained currency in English in the last few years. In Italy in the Winter of 2000 attempts to mobilize precarious workers saw the use of the slogan: “Stop al precariato”. In French, the word précariat was used in l’Humanité in October 2004, and in German a ZEIT magazine article in April 2006 began: Job, Geld, Leben – nichts ist mehr sicher. Eine neue Klasse der Ausgebeuteten begehrt auf: Das Prekariat. To all intents and purposes, the word appears to be a 21st century neologism.

[xxv] Temporary agency work and collective bargaining in the EU byJames Arrowsmith, European Industrial Relations Observatory, 28 May 2009 See http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/eiro/studies/tn0807019s/tn0807019s_6.htm. Downloaded 22 Nov 2009.

[xxvi] Negotiating for social justice: Collective bargaining in times of crisis by International Labour Organisation, 19 Nov 2009. See http://www.ilo.org/global/About_the_ILO/Media_and_public_information/Feature_stories/lang–en/WCMS_117793/index.htm. Downloaded 22 Nov 2009.

[xxvii] EMF launches common demand on precarious work by Anital Gardner for the International Metalworkers Federation, 19 Nov 2009. See http://www.imfmetal.org/index.cfm?c=21419&l=2. Downloaded 22 Nov 2009.

[xxviii] For a good introduction to this debate, see http://www.euractiv.com/en/socialeurope/social-partners-flexicurity-labour-market-reforms/article-164260, 4 June 2007. Downloaded 22 Nov 2009.

[xxix] See http://www.unionbook.org/

[xxx] For a brief review of these tools and some thoughts on how they might be used by unions, see Union Networking by Peter Hall-Jones, April 2009, at http://www.newunionism.net/network.htm. Downloaded 22 Nov 2009. According to Andrea Mitchell, writing for the Mail and Guardian’s Thought Leader blog in South Africa in July this year:

• Facebook currently has over 200 million active users;
• MySpace had 76 million users at the end of 2008;
• YouTube has just under 100 million users, racking up 5.3 billion video views per month;
• Twitter has over 14 million active users, and grew by over 1000% between March ’08 and March ’09.

Perhaps the most successful political use of this technology to date has been the Obama election campaign. Adviser Scott Goodstein said: “…Our goal is to make sure that each supporter online, regardless of where they are, has a connection with Obama”. Obama had profiles on more than 15 social networks, including Facebook and MySpace. The count for this success: 3 million online donors, 5 million “friends” across 15 social network platforms (3 million on Facebook alone), nearly 2000 official YouTube videos watched more than 80 million times, with 135,000 subscribers and 442,000 user-generated videos on YouTube. (See http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/andreamitchell/2009/07/10/social-media-the-unapid-sales-force/ . Downloaded 22 Nov 2009)

[xxxi] Work after globalization: Building occupational citizenship, by Guy Standing. Edward Elgar press, 2009. The quoted section is from page 279.

[xxxii]. ibid. “In sum, occupational citizenship will require a combination of international associations, national associations and informal networks.” page 276.

Google’s SideWiki is a great new tool which allows you (yes, you) to add your thoughts to somebody else’s website. Your comments can then be viewed by anybody who has the Google toolbar, ie tens of millions of people, and rising fast. We’ve tested it by adding comments to Wal-Mart, Wikipedia and BBC news pages. There’s also one on this page; you’ll see a little tab symbol top left of the screen if you have the toolbar installed. Although there were a few delays before some of our comments appeared, they all got there in the end. One can just imagine some of the uses this technology will have, particularly where people’s patience has been eroded by spin doctors hiding the truth regarding abuses of corporate social responsibility. In effect, we suddenly have the ability to slip a leaflet into the company’s annual report.

Before we discuss this any further, we need to add a voice of caution. SideWikis are not anonymous. Security issues mean that you’d be well advised to think twice before using this tool as digital aerosol for subvertising! A link from your comment takes viewers back to your profile, which also includes links to any other SideWikis you have created. Your profile can also include (if you like) biographical information, a few droll details, and photos/video etc. There may be ways of using the SideWiki tool anonymously, but I wouldn’t bank on it. Nor, in looking at the history of this kind of application, is that necessarily a bad thing.

Workers’ rights activist Jeff Ballinger has written to us about earlier attempts to achieve this kind of functionality back in the ’90s. He even sent us an old clipping from the Dallas Morning News (1999), which contains this background:

“Known as viral applications, Web notes or overlays, this type of program began appearing… with Third Voice (www.thirdvoice.com) and has expanded with the recent release of various permutations, including Gooey, uTok, Odigo and Cliqueme.”

The ethos and model behind these earlier programmes was rather different, and led to some concerns within the Net community:

“On popular news sites such as CNN (www.cnn.com), it is not unusual to find thousands of annotations cluttered together in such mass that the page becomes almost unreadable.”

In fact a group of 500 Web designers set up a site (Say No to Third Voice) which monitored use of the application. They claimed:

“Many of these notes contain links to pornographic sites, vulgar  language and links to warez [illegally opened commercial software]“. A survey by the group showed that only 44% of the notes in 15 major commercial Web sites were content-related. As Jonathan Zittrain, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society put it: “It’s certainly not ideal for everyone to have it as a megaphone only for 12-year-olds and spam.” However, he then went on to add: “The underlying idea – enabling people to realize that others are surfing just as they are and that there might be information of interest to exchange – seems quite solid to me, though.”

It’s worth bearing these earlier experiments in mind when considering the way Google has implemented this technology. We have a great new tool, undoubtedly, but it has been introduced in a way that balances responsibility and freedom. Also, all credit to Google for realising that people are likely to make a few errors of fact and judgement along the way… they have considerately included both Edit and Delete functions.

There will be abuses, we can be sure of that. There will also be threatening lawyers’ letters and test cases. But more importantly, there will also be lots of great complementary information, critique, debate, counter-spin, insider gossip, consumer information, whistle-blowing and yes, smart-ass one liners.

You can download the Google toolbar here. Feel free to practice using it on this page. And if we make a point of clicking ‘Useful: Yes’ under each other’s comments, we’ll also be supporting each other’s SideWiki ranking (meaning that our comments will appear more prominently).

We’ll be updating this story as members’ experience with this technology grows. In particular, we’ll be looking for examples where SideWikis have lead to real change. Out in the real world; in real time. Please feel very welcome to send us your thoughts at… (damn, I was just about to add my email address!). Just

Network member Richy Leitch reviews the latest publication in the excellent ‘Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation‘ series, edited by Ursula Huws. The book can be bought here, and chapter abstracts are available here.

“Call-centre labour in a global economy” takes up a theme broached in earlier volumes: the emergence of the call centre as a new form of work organisation. In her introductory essay, editor Ursula Huws points out the complex and multifaceted nature of call centre employment. As a form of work, it has many features of Taylorism:  routine, highly monitored and scripted procedures undertaken to tight deadlines. However call centre work now covers a wide variety of situations – from routine selling and information provision, to specialised medical and IT expertise, and skilled public sector services (undergoing the process of ‘callcenterisation’). This breadth is creating some significant theoretical and political problems for the left, according to Huws. Where are we to place call-centre workers in technical and social hierarchies? How do occupational identities coalesce in such transient forms of employment? How can we build collective organisation?

This book (Merlin Press, 2009) addresses a number of issues confronting those who labour within the “post-industrial sweatshop” – from the particular dynamics of its labour processes to larger issues regarding the process of globalisation and wider social divisions, especially those of gender – in an effort to comprehend the specificities of the call centre phenomenon.

Though strongly associated with processes of globalisation, the call centre is not a globally uniform phenomenon, according to the research presented here. On paper they licence service relocation, via ICT and advanced telecoms links between employer and customer across wide spatial and temporal parameters, offering employers options for outsourcing, cost cutting and avoidance of collective bargaining / unions. The reality uncovered by the Global Call Centre Industry Project, as reported here by Ursula Holtgrewe and her collaborators, is significantly different.

“Transnationalisation” is limited and unevenly distributed – more likely where offshoring is related to English-speaking countries (Ireland, Canada, and India).  There are enduring cultural constraints upon this process: many call centres are found in close proximity to the language of the customer base they serve – a trend described as ‘nearshoring’. One case study of a German-speaking call centre, which serves a US electronics TNC, found these operations had to be sited in Germany and Slovakia, rather than emulating the actual offshoring the TNC used for its English-speaking market.  One lesson we can draw from this is that globalisation or call centre location is no economic juggernaut sweeping all before it: other determinants count too, opening up space for those trying to fight prospective work relocation or build union power on new sites.

What about the call centre labour process itself? The received wisdom is that call centres operate as a sort of virtual sweatshop. Automated telecom systems dictate the distribution, pace, nature and monitoring of the work, controlling operators’ interactions right down to the level of scripted conversations and measuring the time and quality of each call.  Workers from all parts of the global economy record their frustration with, and alienation from, such regimes in this collection. They cite de-skilling and lack of autonomy as major grievances of standardised labour processes.

Associated concerns of insufficient rest, lack of physical movement, overbearing management checks on quality and productivity, work intensification, physical security searches and loss of social interaction with work colleagues all reinforce their claims. Not surprisingly, many of the articles report high levels of stress and sickness amongst call centre staff subjected to such an environment.

The collection also highlights two more novel features of this labour process. One is the issue of ‘emotional labour’, which is closely tied to the question of gender relations within call centres and the wider society. As is well known, most call centres rely on female labour. The role of gender in the active side of call centre labour, i.e. the ‘emotional labour’ and communication skills displayed by operators to build customer relationships is less appreciated.  As both Paivi Korvajarvi and Claudia Mazzei Nogueira report, call centre operators have to navigate complicated customer interactions on a daily basis, to attract and retain customers. The role of the voice is crucial here: “language….takes on the nature of an instrument of work”.  Call centres specify both the content and the tone of speech, via their monitoring of calls and even in the recruitment process itself.  Here the work of the call centre intersects with wider social divisions, as employers and their clients draw upon received gender-traversed notions of product association and styles of speaking when determining employee hiring and daily performance.  An additional burden of this emotional labour is the requirement for operators to remain calm and professional when confronted by angry and abusive callers. Such emotional control, though obviously difficult to achieve, is reinforced in the worst cases by sanctions of disciplinary action.

The second aspect is one highlighted by Simone Wolff’s study of the changes wrought at a Brazilian telecoms company undergoing privatisation and organisational restructuring. She picks out the interplay between the standardisation of working practices via the application of advanced ICT systems and an attempt to harness workers’ knowledge and creativity for the profitable development of the new company.  Through new ‘participative management’ techniques, call centre operators are encouraged to contribute suggested improvements to their scripted conversations – only for these to then be standardised, incorporated into new software packages, and then function as additional constraints upon their daily performance.

Wolff describes all this as a form of ‘flexible automation’ and ‘informatisation’ of labour processes, where information acts as both raw material and final product. It is a new form of labour exploitation: the ‘involvement’ of the workers is limited, and forced rather than freely given.

Wolff’s study is one of many in this collection examining the process of ‘callcenterisation’, the transformation of labour processes and organisations along call centre lines, especially in relation to the commercialisation of public services.  As noted in the last issue of Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation (WOLG), commercialisation does not just involve a change of ownership. What follows is a wide-ranging restructuring and ‘modernisation’ of these services – involving new production techniques, work intensification, a geographical shift to centralised delivery (substituting remote call centres for publicly accessible offices), electronic forms of work distribution and operational subdivisions between in-house and outsourced units.

In ‘Working at the Interface’ two contrasting experiences of changes made in public service provision are counterposed. Norene Pupo and Andrea Noack’s account of the centralisation of Canadian federal public services foregrounds the negative consequences for its workforce of shifting to call centre models of delivery. Standardised, excessively monitored work left employees unable to fulfil expectations of providing a comprehensive service to callers who may have complex and multiple enquires, and lacking time to keep up with changing legislation and procedures.

In contrast Pia Branning and co. find the same process when applied to the Danish tax administration system led in different directions.  At first the workforce complained of the familiar deskilling and loss of autonomy; a subsequent set of positive responses by management coupled with a gradual but fundamental shift in workers’ professional identity improved the working environment. Branning and co argue here that the public servant mentality of rule following and comprehensive knowledge was gradually displaced by a new ‘problem solving’ mentality, balancing individualised caller service with time deadline and efficiency demands, learning how to handle the ‘anatomy of a call’: “professionalism had come to encompass form as well as content” (p127).

The authors caution however that these workers still confront a rigid working regime, whatever satisfactions they can glean from such new approaches to their duties. Elsewhere in the collection, ‘professionalism’ as an ideology resurfaces as the ‘cultural solution’ that workers adopt to cope with the harsh regime of the call centre.

And so, what prospects are there for collective resistance in the ‘post-industrial sweatshop’? There is only one article in the collection dealing with this issue head on, but other contributors recognise the challenges confronting union organisation here: flexible working patterns, temporary contracts, outsourcing, and subdivided operations. Ursula Huws argues there are additional subjective barriers relating to the absence of strong occupational identities in this transient form of employment, removing the traditional bedrock of union organisation. Despite all this, Enda Brophy’s research into the Canadian telecoms call centre Aliant uncovers a key act of collective organisation and resistance culminating in a strike by workers in 2004.

This dispute pitted new trends of corporate convergence and organisational restructuring within the telecoms industry against a novel union response of ‘convergent unionism’, each side merging hitherto distinct sectors and workforces to bolster their powers. Aliant had from its beginnings ( in a merger of four provincial public telecom organisations undergoing privatisation) used a combination of outsourcing, geographical transfer of work and the imposition of call centre discipline within labour processes to threaten union power. The success of the Canadian CEP convergent union (uniting communications, energy and paper workers) in organising Aliant’s New Brunswick call centre was a key moment of reversal, one the 2004 strike evidently confirmed.

The strike itself had outsourcing at its heart, and was one of a wave of disputes affecting the whole Canadian telecoms sector at the time.  Although the CEP has some success in disrupting Aliant’s operations, the union could not sustain its attack and eventually agreed to a settlement offering only temporary protection for its workforce. Post-strike, Aliant resumed its outsourcing, work centralisation and job reduction programmes – and then underwent a further corporate reorganisation (merging with Bell Canada) wherein further outsourcing occurred. The remaining unionised part of Aliant were now left in a state of slow decline, victims of a concerted employer ’war of attrition’ the CEP could not easily counter.

Brophy suggests this episode indicates a key flaw in the CEP’s application of the strategy of convergent unionism. Whilst the employer was using outsourcing to non-union firms and ‘callcenterisation’ to strike at the heart of workers’ power, the CEP were relying on traditional firm-level collective bargaining (albeit beefed up by the convergence undertaken to create more powerful bargaining units). Its weakness in the rest of the non unionised call centre sector of the New Brunswick economy – along with that of other unions – left it unable to effectively respond to Aliant’s manoeuvring. A more imaginative solution, according to Brophy, lies in adopting new organising strategies that use geographical or industry-wide approaches – along the lines of the ‘workers centre’ movement or ‘social movement unionism’ – to create new forms of workers power.  A large challenge – but none the less necessary.

Again, as in the last issue of WOLG, we are left with the clear message of the need for new organising if today’s workforce is to make significant advances against the neo-liberal corporate order.  In the case of the call centre, as this collection makes abundantly clear, there is a plentiful supply of political raw material (in the shape of angry, stressed and alienated workforces around the globe) for organisers to work with.

For many trade unionists the financial events of the last year have been troublesome, to say the least. What has been going on to create such economic turmoil: massive job loss, bankruptcies, credit freezes and incredible amounts of debt and bailout funds? Moral condemnation is easy – and certainly justifiable. But what lies beyond this – in the realms of analysis and political response? Paul Mason’s Meltdown: the end of the age of greed (2009) provides one answer, in its attempt to relate the spectacular economic events of autumn 2008 to long–term economic and political trends within contemporary capitalism.

As a journalist (he is economics editor of BBC TV’s ‘Newsnight’ programme), Mason moves easily between reportage on financial affairs and socioeconomic themes, charting the links between the so-called ‘credit crunch’ and policy turns towards deregulation, subprime mortgages, as well as emerging global imbalances in the world economy.

He manages to successfully illustrate the workings of those arcane financial instruments that have featured so heavily in the journalistic coverage of the crisis – collateralised debt obligations, credit default swaps and co. The main political theme of ‘Meltdown’ is Mason’s argument that this crisis signals the death-knell of the neo-liberal framework that has dominated the global economy for the last three decades. The final part of the book takes up this theme in depth, tracing its historical trajectory and considering possible alternatives to it.

‘Meltdown’ begins, however, with a series of dispatches from the heart of financial capitalism in autumn 2008 as the credit crunch and its run of banking disasters commanded the attentions of the world’s media and political elites over a number of weeks. Mason’s TV role takes him back and forth between US and UK financial centres, to EU and G20 summits, and earns him access to some of the major players in the unfolding drama.

It is events in the US that hold centre stage, one after another of the major banks falling into difficulty and forcing American financial and political elites to engineer a series of contradictory and insufficient responses: – letting Lehmann Brothers collapse, shoring up AIG, then attempting to capture the ‘toxic debts’ of the big banks in a separate institution and cleanse the whole system (preserving its private ownership in the bargain). None of these options proved an effective countermeasure to the contagion of an economic crisis that rapidly froze the everyday functioning of the banking system, now fatally dependent upon short term borrowing and inter-bank loans.

This turbulence was not confined to the US financial sector, as we now know. Mason tracks its progress through other major capitalist states, who were forced to step in and rescue their own banks as they were drawn into the turmoil – the likes of RBOS and HBOS in the UK, and their equivalents in Germany, Iceland and Ireland.  In Britain, excessive dependence of the banks on short-term borrowing froze the whole financial system, forcing New Labour to part-nationalise major banks and provide a £400 billion guarantee of bank loans.  Eventually all the other major governments were forced to follow suit to forestall global financial collapse. Nationalisation was resoundingly back on the policy and political agenda despite, as Mason notes, the ideological preferences of G7/G20 political and financial elites.

By the time these measures were taken, however, the effects of the crisis had spread fatally to the real economy, large and established firms now struggling for access to increasingly scarce finance and facing bankruptcy. Although by the end of 2008 an estimated $12 – 15 trillion bailout had been undertaken, Mason recognises that this had still not dramatically altered the fortunes of banking sectors, stock markets or the ‘real’ economic base across the capitalist heartlands.

What had created such a drastic situation?  Part two of the book identifies a number of causal factors, with prime focus given to the deregulation of the global banking system in the last three decades. Freed from previous limits on their operation (some going back to the New Deal era), investment banks rose to become the kingpins of a new banking system: excessive financial speculation, the creation of new financial instruments (futures and derivatives) and mega profits boosted by foreign exchange trading fuelling their exponential growth. By 2007, for example, global derivatives trading alone was an incredible eight times larger than the whole of the real economy.  The so-called ‘hedge fund’, a new vehicle for high-risk investment that was also to feature heavily in the 2008 crisis,  simultaneously rose to prominence.

Beyond this official framework, Mason describes the birth of a ‘shadow banking system’, of a piece with the ‘off-balance sheet’ accounting practices familiar from the Enron scandal, but on a much larger and more dangerous scale. ‘Shadow banking’ operates without any capital cushion (i.e. deposits as a % of loans), using off-balance sheet companies (registered in tax havens) to generate profits through complex lending and insuring operations. These grossly inflated real asset levels and effectively escaped all remaining regulation of banking practices.

The fatal flaw in all this chicanery was its interplay with the official banking system. When the chain of paper transactions involved in its ‘structured investment vehicles’ (SIVs) and ‘conduits’ ground to a halt, and began unravelling, investment banks suddenly found themselves massively exposed to huge volumes of bad debts previously kept off their balance sheets.

This deregulated financial system was closely involved in two other determinants of the crisis Mason discusses. First of these was an unexpected consequence of the rise of Asian capitalism, its surplus capital now travelling east to west for non-productive investment, facilitated by US investment banks.  Given historically low long-term interest rates, these funds rapidly became deployed in a series of short term ‘asset bubbles’ (alongside similarly withheld Western profits). The result was a set of destabilising booms and busts in the stock, housing and commodities markets.  Investment banks were major beneficiaries: “Wall Street sold high interest opportunities in a low interest world” (p71).

Major victims of this frenzy were undoubtedly those in the Global South, who found their basic consumption needs now at the mercy of spiralling fuel and food prices, as a burgeoning commodity futures market became the latest hot zone for speculative investment. In Mason’s opinion, this combination of Western greed and starvation, reflected in major food riots across the Global South, represents “the first truly global economic disaster”.

A second factor, with a similar dynamic of financial winners and losers, was  that of the subprime mortgage market. Mason takes the city of Detroit as illustrative here, its low-wage economy becoming a prime target for novel financial products that enticed America’s poor into home ownership. Subprime lending promised high rates of returns on investments and rapidly grew to cover 20% of all US mortgages. It functioned through a process of ‘structure finance’:  these high-risk loans were bundled together in ‘collateralised debt obligations’ (CDOs), risk assessed and insured, moved off the lender’s balance sheet (via the ‘credit default swap’), and then sold on as high risk investments to the likes of major investment banks, hedge funds – and more surprisingly, to local governments, building societies and pension funds. By 2008 there existed $58 trillion worth of these CDOs.

This whole apparatus soon imploded however. As ‘Meltdown’ details, the initial risks were miscalculated – falling house prices, mortgage default and rising unemployment sending the subprime market into freefall (with 20% of Detroit homeowners losing their property). Insuring these risks amplified the damage – $58 trillion would actually be equivalent to the whole of global GDP – and the credit rating agencies involved in verifying the CDO values were exposed as unreliable.

It was the linkage between subprime and the shadow banking system that transmitted this ‘virus’ across the whole global finance sector. The ‘SIV’ s and ‘conduits’ now faced massive losses on their investments, hedge funds collapsed, mortgage banks followed suit (Northern Rock in the UK); and the $58 trillion CDO bill sent short-term borrowing costs through the roof, exposing mainstream banks now heavily reliant upon this.

In the official banking sector, asset valuation was now practically impossible, massive debt write-downs occurred and huge losses declared, freezing future lending and generating mass panic. Furthermore the core problem underpinning the whole 2008 crisis – a huge, unregulated shadow banking system – proved immune to traditional policy counter-measures. Billions were poured into the system but instantly eaten up for urgent short-term borrowing, whilst bank recapitalisation faltered as share prices tumbled. In the end only a massive state bailout could stabilise the situation and head off global disaster.

So much for the events and determinants of autumn 2008. In the final part of the book Mason takes a further analytical step back, to consider the underlying ideology that has dominated economic policy for the last three decades and the relationship of the crisis to global economic trends.  The neo-liberal project and its mission – to implant market forces across the globe through the policy vectors of deregulation, privatisation and free trade – is clearly implicated in the 2008 crisis and its determinants. Furthermore, key personalities involved in the events of autumn 2008, like Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke sitting at the apex of the US financial system, were heavily committed to this project.

This all adds up, according to Mason, to the effective end of this ideology. Mainstream politicians have been reluctant to acknowledge this – repeatedly hoping that free market compatible solutions could restore the fortunes of the economic system and thus responding in a halting and ineffective manner to the crisis. More alarming for Mason is the parallel failure of neo-liberalism’s many critics (within the anti-globalisation movement and beyond) to grasp the role high finance plays in the modern economy and elaborate any coherent alternative programme or historical successor to reorder an exhausted economic system.

What historical possibilities exist here is a theme Mason broaches in his final chapter. The global economy stands, he says, at a unique point: economic crisis, technological revolution (the emergence of information as a productive force) and a series of global imbalances linked to the rise of Asian capitalism creating a conjunctural mix immune to simple solutions. Mason believes a new model of economic growth and banking can be envisaged, where a socialised financial system, under partial state control, acts alongside redistributive fiscal policy to power a more sustainable development.

However this option, which many trade unionists would support, must reckon with the urgent need to redress the global economic imbalances of investment, production and government finances spawned by the growth of China, Russia and co. Their resolution demands fundamental shifts within these economies, China shifting its production towards the domestic market, rescuing the debt-laden US economy and powering the world out of recession.  In turn, an equally dramatic alteration in the balance of class forces within China – enriching the mass low-wage migrant workforce within its export factories – will be essential, one heavily dependent on the course of their class struggles.

And it is with class struggle and the revival of organised labour as a social force that ‘Meltdown’ concludes. Today the global labour force stands at an unprecedented level, swollen by the extra 1.5 billion workers brought into play through developments in Asia.  Though this initially tilted power in capital’s favour, Mason argues the best chance of ‘re-regulating’ capitalism and harnessing the progressive of IT as a productive force lies with “the world’s working poor” and their struggle for social justice.  That struggle will only succeed to the extent that it goes beyond the contemporary practices of ‘community organising’ favoured by the anti-globalisation movement – that  “low-level, non-ideological, anti-political culture of resistance” (p170) increasingly found in trade union organising too.  To reform capitalism requires a clear focus upon the state as a vehicle for social justice – “You cannot reform the banking system branch by branch” – and the elaboration of a ‘big picture’ narrative.  As the neo-liberals had to reluctantly rely on the state to stem the 2008 economic crisis, so the Left cannot make any significant steps beyond it without recognising that ‘localism’ is never enough.

And so, if 1989 promised ‘the end of history’, twenty years on the search for an alternative future is definitely on. As the major vehicle of the ‘world’s working poor’ trade unions must take their place at the forefront of this search and struggle.  The works of Dan Clawson and Fletcher and Gapasin (previously reviewed on this blog), fill in some of the parameters of what a ‘social justice’ union orientation will involve.

Review by network member Richard Leitch, September 2009

“The best strategy for the trade union movement would be to concentrate our energies into one single union.” With these words Poul Erik Skov Christensen, general secretary of Denmark’s largest union*, has launched a radical proposal for union reform. “Let us start a debate on the development of the trade union movement. It is my vision that we, in the coming years, should work towards amalgamating the Danish LO-affiliated unions into one large single union…” Below is a translation from Christensen’s article in the Danish newspaper “Politiken”. 

One large, single union

by Poul Erik Skov Christensen
General Secretary, United Federation of Danish Workers (3F)
with thanks to Michael Keil for translation from the Danish

The best strategy for the trade union movement would be to concentrate our energies into one single union. Old hobbyhorses will have to be put out to pasture.

During the spring of this year the membership of LO-affiliated* unions fell to under one million wage earners. It was a symbolic mile post for a development which has been going on since the middle of the 1990s when membership began to fall after decades of uninterrupted growth. Some have on the basis of this predicted the approaching death of the trade union movement.

But is there a good reason for allowing the bells of doom to ring out over the Danish trade union movement? No, not yet anyway.

Membership figures and union density continue to be very high when applying an international yardstick, and seen with international eyes  we have a uniquely powerful influence regarding the development of society.

The Danish model, in which the trade union movement and the employers play a central role, has, through the passage of time, proved to be a brilliant way of regulating the labour market. Those parties which have their fingers on the pulse in relation to the labour market and its challenges have a decisive influence on and a co-responsibility for the area.

But in spite of this powerful point of departure, the development of the trade union movement in a negative direction in recent years is unequivocal – and many unions are feeling the pinch. Union density is declining and membership is falling.

Consequently, to the best of my judgement in the coming years, we will continue to see a range of structural changes in the trade union movement. In my opinion, the union amalgamations which we have already seen between the Danish General Workers Union (SiD) and the Women Workers Union (KAD), to form the United Federation of Danish Workers (3F), will mean that in ten years’ time there will be 6-7 unions in the Danish LO.

As trade union leaders, we can choose to allow this development to take place on the principle of laissez-faire, in which structural changes spring up according to some relatively short-term considerations within the individual unions.

Or, we can choose to use the crisis constructively and create a range of long-term changes which can put the Danish trade union movement into line with the enormous changes that have taken place in the working lives of ordinary wage earners and on the labour market in general.

Let us start a debate on the development of the trade union movement. It is my vision that we, in the coming years, should work towards amalgamating the Danish LO-affiliated unions into one large single union: a modern locally-based union and an effective trade union and political actor.

I know that this for many people sounds dramatic. But when I look at the challenges in the coming years I believe that it will be the best way of ensuring Danish wage earners a powerful, future–oriented trade union movement in a globalized world.

My vision is the conclusion of how we best can address the four central challenges facing the trade union movement in the coming years. I will now attempt to describe these in more detail.

The first major challenge is the change to a far more flexible labour market.

A generation ago, you became a skilled fitter, then you probably worked as a fitter until you were pensioned off.

Globalization has changed this model for ever. Manufacturing moves in and out of the country, workplaces emerge and are closed down at an ever increasing rate, and the individual wage earner has to constantly educate him/herself in order to keep up with the demands in the new job or move to another sector or industry by way of re-training.

At the same time Danish wage earners are changing jobs more frequently. A generation ago you could quite easily be employed at the same workplace during the whole of your working life and retire with a gold watch and a speech from the director for long and faithful service. In the future 25th anniversaries will be very rare. Forecasts show that a young Dane starting work today will, on average, change jobs nine times before retiring.

The big problem is that the Danish LO, with its division into individual trades, is to far too great an extent, geared to the old reality. This is no new insight – it was in actual fact one of the reasons why six LO cartels were set up in the 1990s, based on sectors and industries: manufacturing industries, building and construction, local government, central government, the media and trade, transport and services.

But in my eyes this division is also outdated. Wage earners don’t just change jobs more often – they change sectors as well; e.g. many of them who are being made redundant at the moment in traditional manufacturing industries are starting a new working life in the municipal  nursing and health care sector.

The sharp division into unions based on trades or sectors is a relic from the labour market of the previous century, and it creates a lot of unnecessary problems for the trade union movement for being locked into this framework. The trade union movement is very inflexible when it comes to working across the organisational divide. Organisationally many resources are spent on transferring members between the different LO unions and every year the movement loses thousands of members in conjunction with change of jobs.

In my opinion, the best answer is to create one powerful LO trade union for wage earners which you can depend upon throughout your working life, irrespective of job, trade or sector.

The second major challenge for the LO trade unions is development of membership, especially flagging recruitment amongst young persons.

A generation ago joining a union was a matter of course. It was a natural part of a young person’s entry onto the labour market and part of that set of values related to solidarity and fellowship amongst workers, which were often implanted by the young person’s parents who quite naturally were members of a trade union. That’s what you did.

Young people today have a far more individualistic attitude to being on the labour market. They think more about their own career and their own opportunities in life – in many ways a quite natural development in keeping with a more individual and flexible labour market.

You can be pleased about it or bewail it, according to your temperament. But it is a fact which the Danish LO will have to address far more actively. Young people no longer become members as a matter of course and do not know much about the trade union movement and the labour market. Much more information can be given by schools and from society in general on the matter, but the main task lies with us. We have to earn every single young LO wage earners’ confidence and inform them about the advantages and results achieved by the trade union movement.

The alternative is that the trade union movement will be in competition with the DanAge Association.

Let me use my own union as an example.

Almost half of 3F’s members are 50 or over. In 15 years’ time these members will have retired, and if the present pattern of membership development amongst young people continues, then 3F in 15 years’ time will be reduced by more than a third – corresponding to more than 100,000 members. If this development does not change, then it will not be workers from Eastern Europe who are a major threat to the Danish model, but Danish workers under 40.

In order to address and resolve these isssues, I believe we would be stronger having only one united union.
In part we can strengthen our work informing young people about trade union work and undertake special campaigns and offers directed at the young people.
And in part the trade union movement will in this way gear itself to addressing the working lives of young people. Often young people will only be in a trade or job for some few years – e.g. Think about a young person who works as a bartender for a few years, or on the till in a supermarket – and, therefore, will not join a union in the sector in question.

And finally, for many young people trade unions seem to be a Babylonian confusion of unions, local branches, main organisations, unemployment insurance funds, and I don’t know what.
Unfortunately this is not without good reason. As an example, it can be difficult to state what it costs to be a member of a union. It all depends upon the local branch and the sector you work in, etc.

In the coming years we have to put every ounce of our energy into strengthening organizing among young people. I believe it is best done in a joint trade union framework, in which we draw up a strong and comprehensible offer.

Thirdly, the Danish LO is facing competition from the so-called “yellow” trade unions, who entice people with cheap offers in the local radio and news bytes. In reality, they are not direct competitors, as none of them can deliver the major trade union product – collective agreements. It is only genuine trade unions that can do that.

But as many wage earners are being enticed by these inane yellow offers, we have to address them. I believe that here too the answer is to create a still-stronger, more effective, service-minded, democratic union.
Our fundamental goal is not to run a business. The foundation of the trade union movement is its local, democratic trade union base, and this base has to be maintained as our strength.

By amalgamating we can get rid of the work duplication which takes place in the unions and in the Danish LO, and there would be considerable large-scale advantages to be gained in trade union methods of working and operating.
It would be completely wrong to turn the trade union movement in the direction of being more business-oriented as a consequence of this new competition. On the contrary. Quite naturally we have to give our members excellent service. No doubt about that. But a strong united trade union has to strengthen internal democracy and emphasize that our movement is a trade union. This applies to the individual workplace, where a shop steward is elected among his/her colleagues, and to the position of General Secretary.

The trade union movement must be a strong and visible actor within local society, with membership centres on the main street of all Danish municipalities and a strong joint unemployment insurance fund. This would be a marked improvement on the service afforded to many Danish LO members today, who live a good distance from their local branch, or work in another place than where they live.

Finally, a united trade union movement would do away with all the demarcation and internal disputes which unfortunately mar the work being done by the Danish LO, and which create a distorted picture in relation to the results achieved.

Let me emphasize that my vision is not to create a bureaucratic colossus managed from the top. It is a decisive factor that an amalgamation of trade unions can create a space to encourage different trade union identities within a common framework. Therefore, an effective, large single union has to have a flexible structure, which ensures close proximity to the individual member’s everyday life, irrespective of his/her job and workplace. It is a balancing act which we are already aware of in the large trade unions.

Fourthly, during the last 5-10 years there have been dramatic structural changes in the organisational structure on the part of the employers. DI (the Confederation of Danish Industries) has, through a series of mergers, expanded considerably and now encompasses a larger area than its traditional manufacturing base. The desire to be all-embracing can be clearly seen in the organisation’s change of name, from the Confederation of Danish Industries to DI – the organisation for business and industry, which embraces persons working in an office environment. Apart from this, DI has expanded its membership to include a wide range of large companies selling services, e.g. ISS and PostDanmark. Today DI is the dominant actor on the employers’ side.

We have still to see the full consequences of this development, but it is quite clear that it will have consequences for political as well as trade union work in the trade union movement.

A strengthened DI has sharpened its political profile and influence on a willing government.
A long-lasting campaign to lower taxes for persons at the top of the pyramid was crowned by the tax reform in February, which historically will give maginal tax reductions to the richest members of society.

The strengthening of DI’s political work means partly that the Danish Confederation of Employers has died a de facto death as an independent political actor, and partly that the trade union movement must, out of necessity, sharpen its own political work in order to match that of the employers.

A single united LO trade union movement would have the muscle to be one of the most powerful lobby organisations in Copenhagen and Brussels, as well as in the Danish municipalities, for the benefit  and interests of wage earners.

Yet another more far-reaching consequence of these employer mergers is the concentration of influence during collective bargaining. DI has for a long time been the most important player on the employers’ side of industry, and dominates the trend-setting collective agreements in the manufacturing sector in the so-called ‘minimum wage’ area. After the merger with the Transport, Commerce and Services Confederation, DI has, however, dominated the other collective agreement area, the standard wage area, which covers the transport sector.

After next year’s round of collective bargaining we will have a much better idea of how far-reaching the consequences are of this development are. But in fact the situation is that a range of different constellations of trade unions will have to negotiate all these key collective agreements with a unified DI.

It is thought-provoking that a corresponding centralization has taken place in the public sector, where municipalities and The National Association of Local Authorities in Denmark (KL) will, in the future, be the single central actors, with the Ministry of Finance as the puppeteer.
It is here that the predominant part of future “welfare production” will take place, while the central government area will shrink and the regional areas will no longer have any economic independence.

You could ask yourself whether this would mean the creation of two unions – a public sector union and a private sector union. I believe this to be a bad idea. In the first place individual members will, to a greater extent, transfer between the private and the public sector. Take a look at the volatile out-sourcing and buying back of the ambulance services, which at the moment is taking place through regional tendering.

But still more important is preserving the alliance between private sector and public sector wage earners. We would risk creating two Frankenstein monsters which would run amok in a welfare society: a public sector trade union which would quite rashly demand irresponsibly high wages  and more of every thinkable service, and a private sector trade union which would always put the conditions in the private sector in pride of place, above the welfare society as a whole. It would be a tragedy for the trade union movement – and for the Danish welfare state.

If the trade union movement is to emerge strengthened from its encounter with the most pressing challenges it faces, the best strategy, in my view, is to join forces into one single union.

I’m quite clear about the fact that the thought of one large single LO union is a drastic vision to  place on display. There are many interests at stake – camels which have to be swallowed, and hobbyhorses which have to be put out to pasture, before such a vision becomes reality.

And other people probably have alternative ideas on how the trade union movement can gear itself up for the future. I’m willing to listen to them, but one thing is certain: we cannot just stand by and do nothing.

The crisis in the trade union movement will become a disaster if we, as trade union leaders, close our eyes and ears and muddle through using stop-gap measures. Instead, under the auspices of the Danish LO, we have to start a discussion with one another, and with our trade union representatives and members, about long-term visions for the trade union movement.

I’ve made a contribution.

*LO: Landsorganisationen i Danmark – the Danish Confederation of Trade Unions. See http://www.lo.dk/. Poul Erik Skov Christensen is the General Secretary of LO’s largest affiliate: the United Federation of Danish Workers (3F).

Richard Leitch reviews “Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice“  by Bill Fletcher Jr. and Fernando Gapasin  (University of California Press, 2008).

There are a number of books examining the crisis of trade unionism in USA. Fletcher and Gapasin’s account takes the recent 2005 split within the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) as its starting point, then works back to expose the split’s fundamental structural and ideological roots, before charting an alternative, “ a different theory and practice of trade unionism” which they call ‘social justice unionism’ (SJU).

Their core argument is that the ‘New Voice’ – ‘Change to Win’ dispute has achieved very little, failing to address the challenges confronting US labour and the long-standing limitations of ‘business unionism’. To do so requires a radical break with existing approaches, tackling the issues of globalisation, the constituency for modern trade unionism, and of the union role in processes of social change.

Part 1 of the book provides an overview of the historical development of the US labour movement, showing how today’s crisis has its roots in long running trends and divisions concerning the scope and agenda of trade unionism.  Most important here is the racist form that competition between workers has taken, creating a divide between white and non-white workforces (black, asian, latino) that ruling elites have fostered to maintain social control.  This shifting dynamic of inclusion and exclusion has crippled US trade unionism from its earliest days, allowing a narrow and exclusive ‘white’ option to flourish and concern itself with maintaining pay and conditions for skilled workers at the expense of unskilled, female and coloured labour.

From AFL craft unionism through the Gompers era of ‘business unionism’  and beyond, the predominant model for US labour has survived the challenges from more radical alternatives – the IWW, some of the CIO industrial organising of the interwar period, the radical caucus movement of the Sixties – and continues to shape the practices of today’s contending mainstream factions. Efforts to organise the masses of unorganised workers, to adopt a class-based perspective on union action, and to engage in political activities beyond electioneering, have all been resisted or diluted into safer forms. The result is a legacy of intraclass division and disunity.

The current crisis of US labour is one the authors see as detonated by the end of the post war boom, and the different responses of class forces to this. From above, USA capital and the political Right have elaborated a new model of neo-liberal globalisation, designed to restore profitability and social power at the expense of workers and progressive social movements.  Organised labour soon found itself under attack, economic recession and industrial collapse combining with a sustained political assault on its abilities to organise, strike and negotiated pay and benefit increases.

AFL-CIO’s business unionism was severely exposed in these changed circumstances, tied to a role as subordinate partner in the development of US capitalism that no longer delivered substantial economic returns. Dramatic restructuring of industry and economy further limited its ability to fight back against processes of outsourcing, deregulation and casualisation of labour. The Left in the labour movement, trapped at the margins, was unable to make any major advances, and saw its remaining organisational bases shrink, leaving activists either as solo operators in mainstream unions or moving outside to try new, experimental forms of labour organising.

By the early 1990s the scale of organised labour’s decline and the huge challenges it faced from industrial restructuring on a global scale prompted a reform movement within AFL-CIO.  Fletcher and Gapasin consider that this new ‘organising model’, embodied in the likes of SEIU’s ‘Janitors for Justice’ campaign, represented a genuine advance – substituting activist mobilisation and issue-based organising for the bureaucratic grievance procedures of post-war business unionism. They are, however, critical of its shortcomings, especially the singular focus upon organising without addressing other crucial elements of union renewal: those of representation (‘who is to do the organising’) which led to a top-down practices; of defining the overall goals of trade unionism; and the need for a membership education programme to give members an active role in the renewal process.

Similarly, the authors view the ‘New Voice’ reformist leadership that took control of AFL-CIO after 1995 as an incomplete project, producing a number of welcome changes but failing to transcend many aspects of the legacy of ‘business unionism’. These barriers were compounded by the significant economic constraints now faced by labour movements in the US and beyond. They list a number of factors here: production relocation to non-union sites (at home and abroad); expanded production networks, subcontracting and shifting divisions of labour transforming the organisational terrain for union activity and recomposing its working class constituencies; class stratification along racial and ethnic lines; and structural unemployment in areas of traditional union strength. Questions of where, who and how to organise in this unfamiliar and complex economic geography demanded new and creative responses, ones that the authors believe ‘New Voice’ failed to deliver.

Part of the problem lay in its failure to overcome the structural weakness of AFL-CIO vis-à-vis its affiliated unions, who retained the power to direct their own organising strategies and refused to take up new initiatives ‘New Voice’ tried to launch. The authors here note that promising attempts to encourage new forms of multi-union and geographically-based organising, in particular through reviving the Central Labor Councils (federal bodies operating at state, county and city levels) lacked sufficient support. The case of Los Angeles is instructive. While the labour federation at county level was able to revive union fortunes (in alliance with local immigrant rights and living wage campaigns) and to broaden its political reach and agenda, plans for a multi-union organising project in the manufacturing base of the Alameda Corridor were thwarted by affiliates’ lack of collaboration.

On other issues, ‘New Voice’ remained ideologically trapped within the parameters of AFL-CIO traditions. Its response to globalisation was restricted to a critique of TNC dominance and free trade, failing to connect the military strategies of US foreign policy to this overall neo-liberal project, in keeping with the historical complicity of business unionism in US imperial adventures. Thus ‘New Voice’ was repeatedly thrown off balance by international events – war in Iraq, 9/11 – which demanded a strong oppositional stance to US foreign policy. Domestically it never established an independent political position vis-à-vis the Clinton administration, nor set out a vibrant alternative to the Bush regime. Over the whole of its tenure, as the authors soberly note, the organising model supported by ‘New Voice’ actually witnessed a drop in union membership, down to a historic low of 12%.

The slow pace of organising was one of the central issues behind the historic split of 2005 in AFL-CIO.  However Fletcher and Gapasin find little to cheer in the strategic preferences of the ‘Change to Win’ breakaway movement (dominated by SEIU, HERE-UNITE, UFCW and the Teamsters). In place of an alternative confronting the most pressing issues ‘New Voice’ had overlooked, ‘Change to Win’ have instead restricted themselves to a narrow set of concerns on ‘organising’ and building union power.

‘Rationalising’ union structures and practices through organisational consolidation and establishing core jurisdiction loom large for the CTW’s lead union SEIU. These options are seen by the authors as oversimplifying the relationships between size and union power, neglecting the impact of economic changes on industrial boundaries (implying new organising approaches) and marginalising prospects for greater inclusiveness amongst female and coloured labour. It is not coincidental that CTW unions are generally located outside the manufacturing sector, and hence shielded from the challenges of organising along extended producer networks and across global supply chains. Additionally, CTW’s agenda has shied away from any concern with a political focus beyond tacking between the mainstream parties to gain maximum advantage for its members. Whether there is any mileage in this vis-à-vis courting Republicans must be open to doubt. The overall result, for Fletcher and Gapasin, is not a turn towards SJU but rather a ‘neo-Gompersian’ project, lacking any transformative vision and aiming only to extract the best bargains on offer within capitalism.

The final part of ‘Solidarity Divided’ offers a detailed discussion of the social justice unionism (SJU) alternative, drawing upon the authors’ extensive experiences within the US labour movement and its most innovative campaigns. For SJU, organising alone is not sufficient. Instead it looks to a profound transformation of both internal and external union relations, all designed to build workers economic and political power within society.

The starting point of SJU is the reality of class struggle and the development of a broad class agenda rooted in the workplace and beyond. Taking up class concerns around housing, welfare, employment and citizenship / immigration, SJU operates on a wide terrain and can create long-range alliances with progressive community groups and social movements. The recent growth of the Workers’ Centre, an innovative labour movement body dealing with unemployed, immigrant and contingent workforces at community level, is seen by Fletcher and Gapasin as having a central role in such workplace – community alliances.

Class struggle alone is insufficient for SJU. There are other social struggles around race and gender that need to be addressed to attain a “consistent social justice” (p 168). It is only by actively tackling such issues that a genuine class unity can be forged, within the workplace, at community level and in union structures themselves. Without this, competition and social divisions will continue to fragment and weaken the labour movement to the advantage of ruling economic and political powers. Again, this aspect of SJU puts the issue of allying with other progressive forces on the union agenda – recent efforts within the mainstream to support immigrant rights go some way towards this.

In terms of union organising itself, the book looks to a number of new strategies.  These include multi-union organising to tackle globally structured production networks; non-majority unionism as a means to build power in sectors or geographical regions where collective bargaining is absent; ‘political – geographical’ projects to boost the rights of black and immigrant workforces, incorporating non-union organisations. Central Labor Councils (CLCs) are identified as crucial actors here, local coordinating forces that can help build workers economic power. The CLC has a wider role too in SJU, becoming the base for efforts to create institutional structures (working people’s assemblies, strategic political blocs) that take forward the broad class agenda of SJU and sustain its organisational alliances in the arena of local politics. It is the key vehicle for unifying the progressive forces around a common set of objectives and strengthening working people’s power and influence in society – a vision far beyond the narrow electoral politics of traditional unionism.

For Fletcher and Gapasin, none of this can be achieved without a parallel transformation of internal union relations. Unlike ‘New Voice’ or ‘Change to Win’, SJU cannot be imposed from above, but only through a radical process of democratisation and membership education that brings political and cultural change to US unions. Existing power relationships must be ‘cracked open’ and shifted in the direction of greater inclusiveness and local influence, giving members a greater role in shaping the direction of union policy. Within this seismic shift, and a crucial precondition of it, Left forces promoting SJU (both inside and outside the unions) must establish some sort of institutional presence to underpin these new labour practices – initially a network but eventually crystallising into a political organisation.

And lastly, but never least, a genuine internationalism is central to SJU, one creating truly reciprocal relationships with unions in the Global South, and forging regional alliances against TNCs and international trade regulations. Furthermore, a complete break with the enduring subordination of US labour to imperialist foreign policy is essential, establishing political independence and a more combative response to instances of war, political repression and human rights abuses.

Such a broad internationalist agenda will boost efforts to link US labour with progressive social movements (e.g. that for global justice) and allies from the Global South in our common struggle against the destructive policies of neo-liberalism.

To what extent does the struggle for workplace democracy overlap with the struggle for human rights? In this interview we speak with Roy Adams*, one of the world’s leading figures in the field of labour rights, former professor of industrial relations, founding member and chair of the Society for the Promotion of Human Rights in Employment, and member of the International Labour Rights Commission.

1] How do you see the outlook for workers and their unions today? Do you think the current crisis will have a major impact?

My concern has always been with the broad phenomenon of labour rights as human rights. It’s a concern that was relevant prior to the current crisis, and will be relevant long after the crisis is no more than a memory. In short,

*  Labour rights are human rights
* Human rights are universal and indivisible
* Human rights are non-hierarchical – each is equally sacred and deserves to be treated with equal reverence
* Collective bargaining is a human right
* The right to refrain from bargaining is as bogus as the right to enslave oneself, or the right of minorities to freely choose a racist society
* We need to be concerned about the rights not only of workers in countries with poorly developed democratic political systems but also about the rights of workers in countries that are widely acclaimed to be advanced political democracies such as Canada, the US and Britain where labour rights violations are all too common.

When companies publicize their union-free preference, they engage in a form of harassment that is no less illicit than sexual harassment. The objective of remaining “collective bargaining-free” is as wrong as seeking to remain Black free or Woman free, or Old free. The pursuit of freedom from unions and collective bargaining, though currently legal in the United States and Canada and many other countries, is as much of a human rights violation as producing goods and services with slave labour, or with young children.

2] Might a rights-based approach help unions to rethink the nature and function of management, and perhaps even argue for a new model?
We North Americans have been participating in a huge contradiction. Externally we preach compliance with the global consensus regarding core labour rights as human rights. However, internally, we fully accept the daily violation of one of those rights – the right to bargain collectively. I don’t think this contradiction can continue indefinitely. The more North Americans hear about the global human rights consensus and its implications, the less they will be able to project themselves as a defender of human rights.

Ironically, the global pressure to conform is greater on transnationals with regard to their involvement in developing countries. That is where most global unions and NGOs have focused their efforts. The better material conditions of workers in countries like Canada and the US and Britain have been accepted as a sort of trade-off for acceptance of the denial of labour rights. Apologists for industrial autocracy paint collective bargaining as entirely about money. In fact it is about much more. It is the vehicle for realizing at work many of the values that are critical for being fully human: democracy, autonomy, dignity, equality.

Going back to the duties of employers, in my opinion no employer seeking to be considered a good corporate citizen may credibly engage in behaviour offensive to the standards developed by the International Labour Organization’s Committee on Freedom of Association. The CFA’s jurisprudence has been accepted as definitive by nearly all institutions within the UN system. It provides a fairly detailed roadmap for what it means operationally to respect the right to bargain collectively.

But many large, well-known corporations (and government agencies too) in advanced, supposedly democratic countries offend that jurisprudence on a daily basis. Indeed, it is the policy of most North American corporations to “discourage” their workers from organizing and seeking to bargain collectively. Although contrary to international law, union avoidance is not only legally tolerated but accepted as the norm in Canada and the US. If we are to continue to move towards a more democratic and human rights compliant world, that behaviour is not sustainable.

At this point most legal scholars are of the opinion that international labour law is not directly binding on employers. But there is a rapidly strengthening set of international norms which hold that international human rights – of which collective bargaining is indisputably one – are morally binding on all organs of society. In short, no corporation that wilfully offends international collective bargaining standards should be considered a good corporate citizen. Nevertheless, firms such as Wal-Mart which aggressively oppose unionization and collective bargaining commonly appear on lists of the best places to work. This is a huge conundrum that needs to be aggressively exposed.

3] And you see this as a fundamental issue in determining the nature of management and workplace culture?

That’s right. Productivity is the key to our standard of living. The notion that involving workers in production decisions can produce better results than arms-length, command and control management is now a well established principle. There is also considerable research that indicates that involving unions in worker participation programs makes those programs more stable and effective. Armed with that research, some of my colleagues have attempted to convince management to refrain from union avoidance and instead accept unions as partners in productivity coalitions. Some unions, too, have attempted to represent themselves as being cooperative instead of adversarial in hopes of reducing union avoidance.

For the most part, unorganized management has turned a deaf ear to these pleas. Management opposition to unions is not fundamentally about better productivity, competitiveness, profits. It is instead about power. That’s why companies like Wal-Mart are willing to spend almost unlimited funds on lawyers to fashion strategies to keep unions out. After carrying out research both historical and contemporary on four continents, I am convinced that there are very few employers anywhere that will voluntarily share power. Either by law, custom or raw countervailing power such as strikes and demonstrations, they have to be made to do that.

That comprehensive unionism is compatible with economic excellence is indicated by the performance of the Scandinavian countries. In Scandinavia nearly everyone has collective representation. Nearly all conditions of work are the result of collective bargaining. For many years now, several of these countries have been acclaimed annually as among the world’s most competitive. The generalization that unions are bad for business is nonsense. The Scandinavian example suggests the exact opposite.

In my opinion, the end goal of human rights advocacy is not “free choice” as the Employee Free Choice Act, making its way through the US Congress, seeks to establish. Free choice legitimizes not only the right to organize and bargain collectively but also, in the alternative, the right of workers to defer to autocratic power unanswerable to the governed.

The latter choice is an abomination of democratic and humanitarian values. Industrial autocracy, whether benignly accepted or forcefully imposed, has no place in democratic, human rights respecting society. From a rights perspective, employers cannot legitimately dictate conditions. If they want to promulgate measures that have serious effects on employees, they must negotiate.

In 2007 the Supreme Court of Canada constitutionalized collective bargaining because, the Court said most eloquently, collective bargaining “reaffirms the values of dignity, personal autonomy, equality and democracy that are inherent in the [Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms].”  Those are values that all decent, democracy-loving people want for the entire world. Universal collective bargaining is a key to fully realizing those values.

* Roy Adams is a foundation member of the New Unionism Network, and a former professor of industrial relations, with specialities in international and comparative IR and international labour rights. He is a founding member and chair of the Society for the Promotion of Human Rights in Employment, a member of the International Labour Rights Commission, and a frequent contributor to and editorial board member of International Union Rights. He works with Canadian and U.S. unions to promote recognition of labour rights as human rights, especially with regards collective bargaining.

Combining national case studies and comparative work, “The New Gold Rush: the new multinationals and the commodification of public sector work” examines the transformations involved for capital, labour, trade unions and service delivery in the drive towards public sector privatisation.

Editor Ursula Huws, in her introduction to the book, points out that the new public services industry comprises: “the very operations of our own government – the inner workings of the democratic machine and the services that citizens expect to receive” (p2);  ie health care, education, social security, and environmental protection, as well as all the associated information, communication and facilities support. This has all become a gold mine for capital, open to penetration by multinationals and powerful new corporations. Central to the shift is the transformation of public services into standard replicable commodities, with their labour power effectively ‘recommodified’.

Analysts on the left typically consider privatisation in all its various forms – commercialisation of public organisations, joint ventures, full private ownership – as capital’s gain and labour’s loss. This collection provides plenty of evidence to support that understanding.

Let’s start with the commodification process itself. Colin Leys, a leading analyst of the conversion to market-led models of public service provision, illustrates some of the prerequisites for this in a discussion of the creation of ‘independent specialist treatment centres’ in the UK health service. (These ISTCs are set up to perform simple elective surgery and run by private firms). The introduction of such bodies depended upon a prior standardisation of clinical services (their structures and processes becoming discrete, measurable entities) underwritten by government investment and shielded from risk (here in the forms of payment of guaranteed volumes of procedures and immunity from clinical negligence). Demand for the new services was stimulated by extensive ideological campaigns against existing waiting times and in the name of patient choice. Finally, the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) workforce was itself cajoled into staffing the private facilities through a clamp down on existing NHS working practices and autonomy and the inducements of private sector style incentives and structures within ISTC employment.

Huws suggests this model is applicable to other privatisations, and thus analytically valuable to us. The drive towards privatisation is often seen as prompted by the desire of trans-national corporations (TNCs) to open up new markets for profit-seeking – and many of these case studies show this to be a relevant factor. Leys notes, in addition, that the TNCs active in New Labour circles have not only market power but an increasing say in policy making too.

The role of capital in transforming public services is not confined to initial access, however. Having gained a foothold, a wide-ranging restructuring of public organisations soon follows, one covered in this collection in the fields of healthcare, telecoms, postal services and the rise of the call centre. A list of these organisational changes would include: unbundling of service processes, with non- core business procedures sold off (e.g. telecoms operations in postal service operators); ancillary functions such as cleaning, catering and transportation ‘outsourced’ to other private firms; centralisation of core functions in new, large sites (post distribution centres, megaclinics); and a reduced number of outlets open to the public (the call centre phenomenon).

More surprising has been the aggressive expansionism of ex-monopoly public service organisations, growing rapidly into multinational operators: the trajectory of Deutsche Post, E.on, Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, RWE etc. This has developed so far that a significant number of the Europe’s largest TNCs are now ex-public sector organs, as the research of Clifton and Diaz-Fuentes illustrates.

The overall shape of these public services alters too. In place of the old universal provider, a new market structure has emerged where the ex-monopoly retains a dominant position (whether fully privatised or not), though facing increased competition from private sector rivals attempting to ‘cherry pick’ the most profitable parts of the service. Hermann, Brandt and Schulten’s examination of postal service provision in Continental Europe draws particular attention to this dynamic.

This whole raft of organisational changes has dramatic consequences for labour forces which once enjoyed a high level of job security, remuneration and benefits. The commercial imperative has both reduced the number of jobs available (though not immediately) and fragmented employment patterns amongst its workforce. Many of the articles refer to the resulting ‘dual labour regime’ evident across call centres, postal services, telecoms and healthcare. Here, existing staff face a marked intensification in their workloads and a loss of autonomy / variety in their daily routines (one especially evident in the medical and IT professions). They do though usually retain a permanent, full-time contract. Newcomers in the ex-monopolies are even less fortunate, often finding insecure employment (temporary and part-time work), lower pay and fewer benefits.

These trends are multiplied in the new private competitors who are following a low-cost strategy to gain a foothold in the emerging market structures. The catalogue of labour conditions here includes: hiring agency workers, acceptance of ‘self-employed’ status (preventing any collective organisation), increased performance monitoring, unsociable working patterns and substantially poorer pay and benefits.

One extra factor certainly worth noting is the impact of privatisation processes upon gender workplace relations. Melanie Samson’s piece shows us that there can be dramatic consequences for women public sector workers when profit-seeking takes centre stage. In Johannesburg, the selling-off of waste management services left its predominantly female street cleaning workforce exposed to severe labour shortages and outflows of labour to more profitable aspects of waste servicing (collections dominated by male workers). This shift effectively turned existing street cleaning working routines upside down: – fewer women employed per street (increasing the danger of attack), intensified labour, a supplementary gang-sweeping system that increased management surveillance over the workforce and restricted autonomy. The result – an entrenched gender division and inequality in the service, alongside deteriorating working conditions for the street cleaners.

Trade union responses to this general restructuring process have varied in the face of a diverse range of labour regimes and precarious employment patterns, new power relations and a marked turn away from a consensual industrial framework. Barton and Fairbrother explore some of these new power networks in relation to the restructuring of public transport in two Australian states. The RBTU union lost its traditional channels of political influence when operational control moved to new managerial structures operating on private sector lines, away from state politicians. However, with this more adversarial context came an unexpected boost, insofar as the union fundamentally shifted its operations into a new organising framework – encouraging greater grassroots participation and rebuilding its industrial strength to confront its new opponents: “It has democratised and recollectivised its base” (p43), with membership growing by one third from 2000 to 2004.

This shift to a more combative industrial relations regime is also evident in Nils Bohlke’s analysis of the privatisation of the Hamburg city hospital group. The new owners (Asklepios) quickly withdrew from the state employers’ association and set up an alternative that immediately sought to cut pay and conditions for medical staff, a move the German union ver.di successfully resisted. For non-clinical ancillary staff, Asklepios established a new service company, outside any agreement with ver.di, leaving these staff vulnerable to attack in respect of their pay and conditions.

There are a number of strategic options available to public sector unions facing this ‘commodification’ of public services. Hermann, Brandt and Schulten contrast the most popular two – outright opposition and social regulation of privatised services – with the need to develop alternative models of public service delivery and the growing appreciation of the potential for coordinated international action. Ver.di have been especially active in the main two areas: conducting a high profile public campaign and city referendum against hospital privatisation in Hamburg; and challenging the poor working conditions for private sector postal staff in Germany via a minimum wage campaign.

Other continental unions have also addressed the precarious employment status of new entrant workforces, especially their designation as ’self employed’. Ultimately, it is this transformation of public sector employment into contingent and insecure forms that is the greatest challenge for the unions, forcing them to defend workers rights not only within restructured public bodies but, ever more, “in the heterogeneous organisational and employment configurations that lie beyond the public sector” (Annika Schonauer p145). This dual labor regime is no accident: as Schonauer notes, many organisations rely on ‘outsourcing’ to escape collective agreements, leaving workforces vulnerable to exploitation and unions facing greater organising challenges, especially in call centre environments.

The dual labor regime is therefore also a division of workers between still heavily unionised workplaces and unregulated, unprotected centres of precarious employment. So, as well as negotiation and regulation, today’s public sector unions are now forced to turn their attention ever more towards organising to deal with the harsh new realities of the ‘public services industry’ and its recommodified, casualised labour.

Like their private sector counterparts, the big issue is organise or decline. That is the stark political message of this book.

Reviewed by network member Richard Leitch, April 2009.

The New Gold Rush: the new multinationals and the commodification of public sector work.
Edited by Ursula Huws and Christoph Herrman (2008).
London: Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation, 2008, vol. 2, n°2.