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.

Richard Leitch updates his story on the exemplary solidarity work of two unions – the United Electrical Workers of America (UE) and Mexico’s Authentic Labor Front (FAT). Their relationship is an inspiring one for unionists, particularly as it draws heavily on rank and file involvement. The struggle for a new and independent unionism in Mexico involves ghost unions, corrupt bureaucrats, legitimised thuggery and battling drug cartels.

Last century a deeply restrictive ‘corporatist’ political machinery developed in Mexico during the 70-year dominance of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). This effectively constrained the development of the labour movement, imposing a network of official union bodies and labour laws which fiercely protect the status quo, and are backed by repression. Tying together state, official union and employer interests, this conservative ‘triple alliance’ has dominated Mexico’s social order for decades, posing real problems for any independent force.

Although the era of the PRI has passed, and multinational employers are displacing national ones, the old system remains strong.The FAT’s response to this has been to build its capacity where possible in strategic economic sectors and geographical localities. From its original base in low-tech manufacture, centred around the states of Guanajuato and Chihuahua, it has expanded to include new unions and federations in the transportation, public and service sectors. In addition, it has responded to corporate globalization by building international alliances with other progressive unions (in particular the UE).

Early on, it broadened its focus to act as a ‘social movement,’ taking up the concerns of other oppressed social sectors (farmers, urban communities, women) and developing a general political vision in opposition to neo-liberal globalisation. This approach has informed its activity within many political movements and independent labour federations. As we explained in our previous report (download), by the end of 2007 the FAT had managed to expand its organising activity to numerous sectors and geographical areas of the Mexican economy, including the public sector. It undertook some effective cross- border solidarity actions (with the UE and others), and helped mobilise  growing numbers of ordinary Mexicans.

2008 has proven a difficult year for independent unionism in Mexico. Beyond the structural barriers already identified, a dual crisis – both political and economic – has engulfed Mexican society, creating further problems for independent unionists. We need to recognise that there are other forces active in this area, especially within the Miners’ and Teachers’ unions. For further informaton on this, see 2008 MLNA bulletins here.

The current political crisis has coalesced around battles between drug cartels and the Mexican government, resulting in some 8,000 deaths in the past two years alone. This has instilled a climate of fear within society in general. Some now believe the state itself is failing in its exercise of legitimate power. As the national government sought to ‘militarise’ the drug war, and to draw on funds from the US in doing so (the so-called ‘Plan Mexico’), many in the Mexican labour movement foresaw a grave threat to labour organising. State power continues to function only too well in this arena. However, while drug wars have led to extreme violence, this has not yet impinged on the labor movement. Workers in some northern or border cities have been killed in the crossfire, but the drug lords have not become involved with employers or unions. It seems that employers have seen the dangers of involving drug cartels in their business: they would soon find themselves hostage to men as rich and powerful as themselves; men who are better armed and perhaps even more ruthless.

From the point of view of the labour movement, a major concern is the on-going economic, psychological and (at times) physical violence meted out to union activists who step beyond the boundaries of official union structures and seek genuine representation. The events at the Mexmode factory in Puebla, where SITEMEX union leaders were confronted by a paramilitary group (attached to the PRI), and threatened by local government officials, is only one example of this. However, Mexico is not Colombia. Employers and the government do not typically assassinate union leaders or organizers, at least not since the 1970s. Nevertheless, employer or “official union” thugs do sometimes beat workers, especially during union representation elections. And when there are big strikes, they must face repression from the government, with workers sometimes killed in the clashes (as happened a couple of years ago at the strike by the Mexican Miners and Metal Workers union at Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán). These firings, threats, and occasional beatings not only violate human rights, they also intimidate other workers and their unions.

Mexico’s economy is now so thoroughly integrated with that of its northern neighbour that the fallout from the US credit crunch has already transferred southwards. Falling exports, less FDI, fewer remittances sent from abroad, and rising prices are creating a situation where employment and monies for personal consumption and social expenditure are all under severe pressure. So far, the response of Calderón’s neo-liberal PAN government has been too timid (remaining tied to its overarching strategies of privatisation of petroleum and electrical power), and seems unlikely to meet the scale of economic and social challenges.

On the ground, FAT organising will surely be affected by these trends, although the organisation has faced such challenges before (e.g. during the 1980s) and has developed creative strategic responses.

In the realm of national politics, the FAT continues to play a prominent role in the myriad of oppositional movements, coalitions and campaigns against the neo-liberal strategy of Calderón’s government and wider global developments. Much of this activity is channelled through its participation and leadership in the independent labour federation, the National Union of Workers (UNT). In 2008, national protests were staged against petroleum and energy privatisation, and the impact of NAFTA on Mexican agriculture. These took place under the banner of ‘The Movement for Food and Energy Sovereignty, for the Rights of Workers, and for Democratic Freedoms’.

The UNT itself is now a decade old but, as la Botz notes, its promise of a ‘new unionism’ for Mexico has been limited by prevailing economic circumstances. It has staged many protests on the national stage and, although it is one of the major poles of attraction against neo-liberalism and official unionism, there is a more complex and fragmented configuration of forces which frustrates this work, both politically and within the union movement. The Mexican economy remains dominated by the phenomenon of ‘protection contracts’: pacts signed between employers and the ‘ghost unions’ who notionally represent them (often without the workers being aware of their existence).

Secret ballots in workplace elections are another long-standing goal of independent unions in Mexico. At present when workers do try to gain genuine representation, their efforts are systematically blocked by the presence of ‘ghost unions’. These claim prior representation rights, and the subsequent workplace elections must be carried out in public, in an atmosphere of extreme intimidation and corruption. Over the past year, the FAT and other organizations have undertaken major political campaigns against protection contracts, in favour of secret ballots for union elections. Studies undertaken in support of the FAT campaign suggest that less than 5% of union contracts registered with the state labour department involve active union organisations.

In an historic decision the Mexican Supreme Court granted workers the right to secret ballot elections in September 2008, a move hailed by the FAT and others as crucial step on the road to workplace democracy. However, as La Botz points out, employers are now adapting their anti-union tactics to recover lost ground. Moreover, the Calderón administration is once again threatening to introduce an extremely regressive labor law reform proposal, arguing that it is needed in light of the recession.

At the level of workplace union organising, the FAT has had mixed success in 2008. The spectacular victory of its September 19th affiliate at the Vaqueros Navarra plant in late 2007 (winning rights of representation for the workforce despite the lack of a secret ballot) was cruelly reversed when the employer refused to reopen the site after the Christmas break, a deliberate act of union busting. More promising was the victory of central market workers in Mexico City, who successfully defended their jobs when the government commission operating the market terminated its contract with their immediate employer, and substituted a new subcontractor and hired replacements in defiance of Mexican labour law.

Elsewhere the FAT was involved in struggles to reinstate sacked municipal workers in Chihuahua, to gain representation rights for workers at the Tornel rubber plant (previously controlled by the major official union body CTM), and to defend the rights of state employees in Nayarit. Not only did the FAT take on these challenges, but in most of the cases cited, they were able to mobilise cross-border solidarity.

International solidarity has indeed been an important strategic component focus for the FAT, in association with the UE and other allies. The struggles in Nayarit and Chihuahua, and in Mexico City, have all involved allies mobilising support to send email protests or utilize other methods to pressure the relevant employers and authorities. The campaign at Vaqueros Navarra was also heavily reliant on such international action. Two other strands of FAT cross-border activity were also evident this year. Reciprocal action in support of UE organising struggles was deployed for their ongoing efforts to secure collective bargaining rights for state workers in North Carolina. Here the FAT undertook legal protests and organised the participation of other Mexican unions in this campaign. And at the end of 2008, the UE workers occupying the Republic plant in Chicago were encouraged by FAT letters of support.

Beyond this, existing links between public sector workers, now an increasing focus of UE and FAT organising, were deepened through exchange visits and another annual ‘Public Sector Convergence’ meeting, drawing in allies from Québec, Canada and Japan. The meeting was followed by an international delegation to North Carolina to provide support for the campaign to win collective bargaining rights for public sector workers.

To conclude, in circumstances not of their own choosing, these independent trade unionists are genuinely making history. The road is long; independent unionism is a minority phenomenon in Mexico, but the structures of official unionism are unravelling and independent trade unionism is gaining strength. And, with major divisions within the most prominent left party, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), no unified voice yet exists to lead the democratic, pro- worker forces that are assembled (in shifting coalitions) onto the national stage.

(1) This article draws from the monthly Mexican Labor News and Analysis (MLNA) online journal, posted on the UE’s website here. I would like to thank its editor Dan la Botz and Robin Alexander, International Director of the UE, for their help in putting together this article.

The recent crop of stimulus packages presents us with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to compare economic strategies. The sums involved are staggering. How will we feel when we look back on this period in 10 years? Will we wish we had all adopted Thailand’s “trickle up” model, giving money straight to those who need it most? Or will we wish we had followed the US example, covering as many bases as possible? The European Union is turning the crisis into an opportunity, and taking significant steps towards a greener world. And then there’s the option of the big spend-up on infrastructure, as exemplified by countries like Norway. 

One thing is certain: unions must help bring economics under democratic control. The Age of Ideology is over.

Competing strategies 
  
   
1)  The Scattergun approach
This is the approach recommended by the International Monetary Fund, and it shows how far they have come since neo-liberalism ran aground. They recommend that governments apply a wide range of measures, including all kinds of spending increases and tax cuts.  “Governments don’t want to put all their eggs in the same fiscal basket,” said Carlo Cottarelli, director of the fund’s fiscal affairs department (more). However it is worth noting that the IMF is not promoting this approach because of inherent merits, but because of “uncertainty over what might work”. It might be argued that this is better than insisting on failed approaches, as they did in the 80s and 90s, but the world has paid an enormous price for their new agnosticism. Countries which are following their advice include the USA, France, South Korea, Singapore and New Zealand.

2)  Equity injections
We have already seen (UK, USA) that propping up banks will not necessarily produce an increase in credit. Economist Joseph Stiglitz sums up the result of Bush’s first package:  ”We poured money into the banks, they poured out money, to their executives in the form of bonuses, to their shareholders in the form of dividends. Some of what they had left over they used to buy other banks — to pursue strategic goals for which they could not have found private finance…” (more)    
The UK experience was similar. The government’s intervention no doubt saved banks from collapse, but:  ”…lending has actually fallen, while the cash has been used to shore up their profitability. The banks have incompatible obligations – to maximise profits for shareholders and meet ministers’ lending demands – while the government is already effectively shouldering their risks and liabilities…” (more)  
Spain and Japan have also taken this path  (see more  and more respectively).  One can only hope they are also working on Plan B.
  

3)  Investment in infrastructure and public services
This is the most popular response. When the dust settles and analysts start comparing strategies, it will also be the most difficult to assess. Investment in rail can mean one thing if it is publicly owned (ie bringing forward maintenance costs), and quite another if the service has been privatised (ie increasing the value of an asset which can then be sold). Similarly, money directed towards public services will not produce the same result as expenditure on private contracts (shoring up employment rates, as opposed to boosting economies of scale and dividends). There are overlaps in these results, of course, but the differences will make it hard to draw clear conclusions. Countries which are following this model include Germany, Norway, Finland, Australia, China, Sweden, Chile, Argentina, the USA, Canada and France.
  

4)  Job creation and green jobs
The European Union package is an interesting one. (download)  It includes measures to boost purchasing power and generate growth and jobs: “…by jump-starting the economy with investment in infrastructure, green technology, energy efficiency and innovation, the package aims to accelerate the transition to a knowledge-based, low-carbon society.” (more)   Similarly, the US package aims to make three-quarters of federal buildings more energy efficient and weatherize 2.5 million homes, leading to the creation of up to 4 million jobs. (more)    South Korea is:  ”(investing $38.1 billion) over the next four years on environmental projects in a “Green New Deal” to spur slumping economic growth and create nearly a million jobs”. (more)   The main thrust of Sweden’s plan: “is to help unemployed people find jobs and to counteract unemployment“.  (more)   Chile also aims to create 100,000 jobs (more) and Spain to create 300,000. (more) 
  

5)  Company tax cuts
Given the roots of the financial crisis, it is rather surprising to see some governments responding with enormous corporate tax cuts. It is also deeply unfair to the taxpayer. Such cuts are a prominent feature of the packages from India, Brazil, Finland, New Zealand, Canada, Singapore and the USA. 
  

6)  Social support and direct aid to workers
Dismayingly few of the stimulus packages feature prominent measures to directly alleviate poverty. Of course keeping people employed is the best solution, but there is no doubt that many will lose their livelihoods. Last year the ILO forecast a growth in global unemployment of 20 million. This figure has already been exceeded in China alone. (more) They also forecast that the number of working poor (those on less than a dollar a day) would rise by 40 million, and those on 2 dollars a day by 100 million. In this respect the best stimulus packages are those of Singapore, Thailand, China and Australia. Some of the UK’s tax reductions help a little in this regard as well. (more)

A warning from Japan
As we noted above, the infrastructure/public services option is the most popular. Let’s take a moment to consider the first part of this solution, infrastructure, in light of what has been happening in Japan. Since 1991 the country has spent $6.3 trillion on infrastructure in an attempt to deflect the downturn which began when the real estate bubble burst in the late 1980s. This spending was discontinued last year, with very few satisfied with the results. (more)

    ”…it matters what gets built: Japan spent too much on increasingly wasteful roads and bridges, and not enough in areas like education and social services, which studies show deliver more bang for the buck than infrastructure spending.”

”A 1998 report by the Japan Institute for Local Government, a non-profit policy research group, found that every ¥1 trillion, or $11.1 billion, spent on social services like care for the elderly and monthly pension payments added ¥1.64 trillion in growth. Financing for schools and education delivered an even bigger boost of ¥1.74 trillion…But every ¥1 trillion spent on infrastructure projects in the 1990s increased Japan’s gross domestic product, a measure of its overall economic size, by only ¥1.37 trillion, mainly by creating jobs and other improvements like reducing travel times. Economists said the finding suggested that while infrastructure spending may yield strong results for developing nations, creating jobs in higher-paying knowledge-based services like health care and education can bring larger benefits to advanced economies like Japan, with its aging population.” (1)
(more)

The role of unions
If there is one thing which unions do extremely well, it is keeping things real. This is exactly what we have missed over the last ten years. As unions were increasingly marginalised, economies grew further and further removed from people and the things they need. However unions have learned a lot during their time in exile. The ideological split of the 20th century (communist vs social democrat vs liberal unions) has sunk from view, and the focus now is on practical outcomes. 

Last year the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) made a solid contribution to the G20 crisis summit in Washington. They drew from the international experience of member unions – and their recommendations come from lessons learned the hard way. It is well worth reading their contribution, no matter which side of the fence you sit on.  (download – 10 pages) 

Here, in paraphrase, are some of the measures which they proposed to get things real again, and to keep them that way:

• Governments should bring forward infrastructure investment programmes that can stimulate demand growth in the short term and raise productivity growth in the medium term.

• They should adopt a “Green New Deal” to create jobs through alternative energy development and energy saving and conservation.
   
• Tax and expenditure measures should be introduced to support the purchasing power of middle and low income earners.
   
• A new growth regime should ensure balanced real wage growth in line with productivity increases.
   
• Fair, responsible and progressive taxation should neither facilitate the accrual of fortunes, nor provide incentives for the pursuit of speculation, but rather contribute to growth.
     
• Governments should enter financial markets to nationalise banks, guarantee deposits, buy up bad debts and recapitalise the banking systems… However, they should not nationalise losses while financial institutions privatise profits.
    
• A national and global regulatory architecture should be built so that financial markets return to their primary function: to ensure stable and cost-effective financing of productive investment in the real economy.
     
• In developing and emerging countries, governments should counter economic slowdown through monetary policy, by supporting job creation programmes and extending or creating social safety nets.
     
• Beyond infrastructure, this is also the time to invest in people – in their education and health, and in care for the very young and the aged.
     
• The worst error in the current circumstances would be to cut public sector budgets. There must be a renewed commitment to the provision of publicly financed, quality public services.
     
• The international community should swiftly expand emergency loans through the IMF and increase assistance from the World Bank and UN agencies.
     
• Governments should take equity stakes in the finance system and act as activist investors to protect public interest and ensure that taxpayers are eventually reimbursed.
     
• The ILO’s core labour standards should underpin a new financial governance system, with parity in voting between developing and industrialised countries.
     
• Working people should have a seat at the table in these meetings and institutions. They have little confidence that bankers and governments meeting behind closed doors will get it right this time. There must be full transparency, disclosure and consultation.

This final message is implicit in most of the ITUC’s other points. Indeed, initiating a process to democratise finance and production may be the greatest contribution unions can make. 

Unions get their hands dirty. They are pragmatic, they engage people in decision-making, and they build relationships. It is significant in this respect that the ITUC is not rejecting tax cuts or bank bail-outs outright. In the real world, these things are necessary. However, rather than turning this into a candyfest for miscreants, the ITUC is looking for public value in the way these remedies are applied. If governments must bail-out banks and corporations, they should become activist shareholders in the public interest as part of the process. These proposals lead towards demystification and participation. The current mess we are in would not have occurred if the gap between promise and reality had been under public scrutiny.

There will be those who simply cannot bring themselves to see unions as creative players in economic reconstruction. These people should study what happened in Ireland; a story which unfolded over roughly the same period as that of Japan described above. Beginning in the late 1980s, the country dug itself out of a deep crisis and went from being one of the poorest countries in Europe to one of the richest. To begin this process, the government called “all hands to the pumps”. They brought unions and employers together to initiate a public discussion which went far beyond consultation, to the point of comprehensive tripartite national planning. This approach enabled deep changes to be introduced. Since then, the country has been run in accordance with a series of national agreements between unions, employers and the state.  (2)

Similarly, Central Europe was rebuilt through a ‘social partnership’ between unions, employers and governments after World War II. The results demonstrate very clearly that union participation in the economy is good for stability, productivity and performance. In fact, there seems to be a strong correlation between high union membership and high levels of economic performance. (more) 

It is a pity Iceland did not pay more attention to its neighbours, in this respect. It is probably the European country most devastated by the financial crisis, to the point of forced regime change. Ten years of increasing abstraction and deregulation in the financial sector have left the economy in shreds, and after the failure of all three of its major banks it became the first industrialised nation to require IMF help in 30 years. (more)   “the principal fuel for Iceland’s boom was finance and, above all, leverage. The country became a giant hedge fund”.  (more)   Now, with the neo-liberal government deposed, centre-left caretakers are preparing the way for a new approach. National commentator Andri Snaer Magnason sums up the country’s mood:

“…there is power in all the political debate and lots of political and social energy – endless [political] parties popping up, Facebook groups, cells and idealists, and possibly a new constitution (not that we have read the old one), and people are speaking up. So, economic fear, political courage, shaking economy, and search for new values – we need profound change… We need less professional politics and more participation of the people.” (more)

Iceland might also consider the case of Argentina. In 2001 the Argentinian people brought down their government and then rejected three Presidents in two weeks. They demanded new rules, not just new leaders. Less than a year later, having defaulted on their debt to the IMF and unlinked their currency from the US dollar, the country started finding its own way forward. There was a process of reindustrialisation, some renationalisations, and large-scale investment in public works. Unemployed workers reclaimed factories and ran them democratically, and the public demanded engagement in decision-making in a way it had never done before. The result? The economy grew by at least 8 percent a year from 2003 to 2007. Like Ireland, the people of Argentina saved themselves.

There are signs that President Obama may move towards a more inclusive national model, given the way his “bi-partisan” approach is being rebuffed. It is a necessary step. As Professor Drew Westen puts it: “The problem with a message of bipartisanship… is that it makes it very difficult to tell the story of why things are so bad that we need dramatic change.”  (more)   The working relationship needed to save the US economy is not a bipartisan one between Democrats and Republicans, but a tripartite one between unions, employers and the government. 
 

Towards a new tripartism?
Traditionally, ‘tripartism’ involves workers and employers working with government to help shape social and economic policies, by way of negotiation between chosen representatives. On the union side, workers elect representatives in their workplace, who then elect leaders among themselves, who in turn elect (or appoint or employ) people who in turn elect (or appoint or employ) people, until at some stage somebody represents them all in tripartite negotiations. In the course of all this the link between working people and their voice in the social dialogue can become extremely tenuous. To what extent can such negotiators claim legitimacy in representing members’ views? At just about any point in the chain self-interest can trump democracy, so that representatives become accountable, rather than responsible, for their interpretation of the members’ views.

With the rise of NGOs at the end of the twentieth century and, in particular, the indigenous peoples’ movement, many unions have started augmenting representative democracy with deliberative democracy. This means putting measures in place so that members can speak for themselves, or with as little mediation as possible. It allows participation to become a process, rather than a scheduled event. The tools and techniques of deliberative democracy include such things as online polls, focus groups, surveys, questionnaires, argument mapping, open blogs and FaceBook groups, televoting, stratified sampling and structured interviews. These owe as much to developments in market research as they do to the golden age of Athens.

Obama’s election campaign contained many elements of such an open, deliberative process. Can he (or anybody else) now map this openness against a tripartite structure, so that social dialogue becomes more like “national conversation”?
 

If not…
Next year will be a rough one for many governments who do not engage the public and labour unions in rebuilding confidence. Business as usual is over. Stephen Harper found this out the hard way in Canada. At first, he tried to respond to the crisis in a “more of the same, only more” fashion. The only measure his conservative government were willing to consider was a wage freeze. Public outrage grew so strong that in the end he only held on to power by abruptly suspending parliament. Having recanted, he negotiated a stimulus package with opposition parties, and is now on short notice.

The same thing happened in Latvia. At first the country’s finance minister, when asked the cause of the crisis, responded: “nothing special”. Shortly afterwards the main bank had to be nationalised and the country was forced to seek IMF loans. Violent demonstrations swept the country and the Minister of Agriculture was driven from office. Then, in February, the Prime Minister was forced to resign. (more)  The causes are familiar: reckless bank lending, a housing bubble, lack of regulation and a government that just wouldn’t wake up to the fact that business as usual is no more.

The public does not want old answers to the new questions it is raising. Those governments who refuse to listen will not last long. By the same token, corporations and banks will face an unprecedented level of scrutiny. Unions and NGOs will be asked to shoulder responsibilities which some of them are ill-prepared for. However, as the ITUC has seen, these are good things. Until now economics has been a field for contesting ideologues. Models were taken on faith, rather than tested and proven. Now, trillions of dollars are being poured into a controlled test. Failures will be made very public indeed. Successes will be examined in minute detail, so that they can be emulated. Economics is about to become a regular science, rather than a dark art. 

What we lost along the way was only ever a confidence trick, anyway.

–end–

by Peter Hall-Jones and Conor Cradden,
February 2009

Notes
  
(1) Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com recently produced some similar data in assessing “bang for the buck” in the US stimulus package. He found that:
For every dollar spent on temporary increase of food stamps you get a $1.73 in economic activity.
For every dollar spent on extending unemployment insurance you get a $1.63 in economic activity.
For every dollar spent on infrastructure you get a $1.59 in economic activity.
For every dollar spent on general state aid you get $1.38 in economic activity.
For every dollar spent on refundable lump sum tax rebate you get a $1.22 in economic activity.
For every dollar spent on non-refundable lump sum tax rebate you get a $1.01 in economic activity.
For every dollar spent on making dividends and capital gains refunds permanent you get 38-CENTS in economic activity!
(download)

(2)  Sadly, Ireland’s success faltered in 2008, due to a housing bubble, poor financial regulation, ill-considered investments in infrastructure, and tax cuts. The cowboys had gained the upper hand.

This book by Dan Clawson (Cornell 2003) is the most thorough overview of innovative campaigning in the US labour movement seen so far, reports our intrepid reviewer Richard Leitch. 

Clawson is not content to simply record developments in union organising strategies — he claims they point towards something much bigger: a genuine revival of the labour movement, ‘the next upsurge’. He reminds us that historically US labour has never developed in a regular incremental fashion but through discontinuities, including periods of upsurge where membership soars and the existing forms and expectations of trade unionism are radically redrawn. The 1930s was one such period, witnessing a dramatic shift in organising focus from craft to industry-wide basis, that transformed labour relations and impacted upon wider economic and political environments. That upheaval led to the foundation of the ‘New Deal’ labour relations system that dominated the second half of the twentieth century. Now however this framework is unable to meet the realities of a changed social and economic environment, putting the issue of labour renewal firmly on the agenda.

Clawson believes today’s innovative campaigning contains trends that can counter the recent threats to US labour and make renewal a reality – i.e. its isolation from other progressive social movements, its lack of rank-and-file mobilisation, and the sustained employer assault. The future must be built from below, in alliance with other social forces, and outside the traditional NLRB procedures. His survey of ‘the new’ is preceded by a clear discussion of the characteristics and limitations of the ‘New Deal’ framework. Channelling the militance of the 1930s into controllable forms, in exchange for accepting organised labour’s right to organise and bargain, this system did deliver significant material benefits in the early post-war decades. However its narrow focus on servicing existing members, bureaucratic procedures and deal-making with employers, left US labour increasingly unable to mobilise its own ranks. It could not respond effectively to later legal challenges and the sustained assault on the framework launched by employers from the 1970s onwards (both in the workplace and political arenas), which together made it ever harder for labour to win within this system.

Belatedly recognising it too needed to launch a broad counteroffensive in response, US labour has so far been trapped within top-down reform programmes (like that of the ‘New Voice’ leadership of AFL-CIO), failing to fundamentally rebuild the house of labour from below as a vibrant social movement, embracing a diversity of organisational forms.

In the rest of the book Clawson explores the potential of innovative campaigns around issues of gender, community and globalisation to contribute to such an ‘upsurge’. The changing structure of the US workforce, where increasing numbers of service-type jobs employing women are found, carries with it a significant new agenda that unions must address. ‘New Deal’ assumptions of full-time male workers depending on a family wage and massed in manufacturing plants are now increasingly redundant, in an era where equal pay and ‘work – family’ issues are pressing concerns.

Clawson notes that the past failures of the labour movement to build links with the women’s movement has had a damaging effect here, missing a chance to connect with workplace groups established in the wake of the sixties that did address gender concerns – e.g. women’s caucuses and the likes of ‘9 to 5’. Equal pay remains a key concern for working women, gender-segregated employment and job design being arenas for a feminised labour movement to tackle. The successful struggle by Yale university female clerical workers to gain substantial pay and benefit increases through campaigning around issues of ’comparable worth’ is one example of this new agenda in action. The ‘work – family’ nexus meanwhile contains a range of issues – childcare, flexible working and overtime.

One breakthrough in this area has been the struggle of SEIU homecare workers in Los Angeles who successfully united concerns over childcare access with the poor pay and conditions face d by this workforce itself. Beyond this new agenda, Clawson also asks us to consider whether organising and campaigning styles need to be reworked in the light of this feminising of the labour force. A struggle by female clerical workers at Harvard University in the late 1980s illustrates what this could mean. Led by an independent organising body of ex-union officials, this  (HUCTW) campaign pursued a traditional pay an benefits agenda through a new organising style adapted to ‘women’s culture’. It replaced traditional macho militance and conflictual approaches with extensive personal contacts, ‘community building’ and a reduction of the fear and tension levels within the workforce during the union election run up. Subsequent high recruitment rates and an avoidance of traditional contractual agreements (beyond a commitment to joint problem solving) were equally distinctive features of the post – election period of campaigning. Though many have seen the HUCTW campaign as akin to ‘company unionism’ and prone to essentialist notions of ’women’s style’, Clawson defends its efforts, believing them to be appropriate for many white collar workforces and able to open up the hitherto uncharted area of private sector clerical workforces to union organising.

The key point to recognise, he says, is that worker mobilisation can take many different forms: “different kinds of jobs require altered strategies and create new kinds of unions” (p89). Innovation in the ranks of US labour has been especially associated with the twin realities of community and colour, sites of organising efforts that have operated on a geographical (rather than craft or industry) basis, campaigned on issues beyond the workplace and thereby helped redefine what a ‘union’ can be.

Clawson points out that community organising has intermittently played a crucial role in US labour history. It is becoming relevant again today due to changing material conditions and a shift in the overall balance of class power, along three axes. In the growing number of migrant labour communities, work is closely entwined with other inequalities (housing, transportation, citizenship) that offers a broad agenda for unions to work with; the spread of service-type employment has weakened possibilities for production relocation as a response to union campaigns; and the neo-liberal assault by employers is pushing US labour towards a recognition that it needs a radical alternative to regain strength.

Many of the examples Clawson refers to here are familiar from other labour movement literature – Justice for Janitors, the workers centres, etc. Less well-known is the Stamford organising project he looks at in some depth. This four union alliance in Connecticut combined workplace and community organising within the local service economy (targeting care workers, janitors and hotel staff), where affordable public housing was a major concern. Mobilising local communities, initially to oppose redevelopment plans, the project found its activities had positive knock – on effects when the participating unions began organising later campaigns for the workplace. The overlap between the two arenas expands our understanding of what unions can do and become: though dependent on AFL-CIO funding, their positive alliance with other progressive social forces and community action paved the way for the organisation of 4500 new workers and helped deliver strong contracts. Clawson says this approach is a far better bet for genuine labour renewal than efforts to rebuild a new social contract through political deals with employers and politicians.

The third area of investigation is that of globalisation. Seen by many as the greatest threat to the labour movement today, Clawson argues we need to clearly distinguish it from the associated trend towards neo–liberalism which is actually the greater danger; and take heart from the range of labour movement campaigns launched against the neo-liberal form of globalisation, which point towards a new alternative. There are a number of options canvassed by organised labour here. Advocates of capital controls, argue this can increase our economic leverage over capital and underwrite expansionary social and environmental policies. The struggle for international labour standards has been a main demand of US unions – but it has come up against serious barriers in terms of the voluntary nature of ILO conventions, WTO hostility to workers rights, and the toothless agreements attached to international treaties such as NAFTA.

Cross-border organising offers the prospect of labour and progressive social movements uniting around a common programme of “class and rights” beyond national borders. There have been some notable victories in this area of struggle – e.g. the organisation of a Philips Van Heusen maquiladora plant in Guatemala, and the Teamster campaign against UPS – with national unions, NGOs and retooled global labour organisations (the International Trade Secretariats) all playing their part. Clawson however devotes most attention to the raft of living wage and anti-sweatshop campaigns launched in recent years. These represent, he says, both a major advance and significant danger for US labour.

Targeting low-paid and difficult to organise workforces across cities and university campuses, living wage campaigns are pushing organised labour towards new organisational forms, acting for whole communities and forming effective coalitions with community groups in their mobilisation of political pressure upon municipal authorities and campus management. In so doing they have successfully increased pay for thousands of the lowest paid, especially in the public sector. Their anti-sweatshop colleagues have been equally vital, initially targeting TNCs such as Nike, to drive out low pay and extreme exploitation from their global supply chains. United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) took this campaign onto numerous university campuses, forcing universities into procuring non-sweatshop goods and apparel; and setting up an independent monitoring body – the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC) – to ensure effective inspection of suppliers.

Having said all that, Clawson sees a great danger in this activity, insofar as it tends to exclude those low-paid workforces it sets out to help from the direction of the campaign itself. This substitution prevents any effective self-organisation of these workers, thus undercutting the very rationale of progressive trade unionism itself. There are, however, some examples where this danger has been fought against – e.g. students working with union locals to organise university ancillary staff – illustrating the potential of living wage and anti-sweatshop campaigns to reshape labour organising in terms of its very constituencies, sites of mobilisation and strategies.

By way of conclusion, we can see that on this account a vibrant social movement unionism holds the key to labour’s future. And this entails, at the very least, a willingness on the part of organised labour to work in more collaborative ways with other progressive social movements; and to tap into the radical democratic potential embodied within labour unions – i.e. the right and power of workers to participate in decisions about their own lives and work. One final, but very important point follows from this. Labour renewal, according to Clawson, requires not only new organising but also an internal transformation of existing unions, democratising their structures and practices to involve the membership and develop their capacities for decision making. Such a change could also assist traditional organising activity, as outsiders would be attracted to vibrant unions exercising their powers and growing in strength.

Only if masses of people do become active will social movement unionism become a reality and labour fundamentally reverse its current decline.