Unions and high performance workplaces

Max Ogden reports on some interesting work New Zealand unions are doing around the concept of “high performance workplaces”. The country was hard hit by the neo-liberal agenda of the 80s and 90s, with successive governments doing their best to undermine the voice of workers up until 1999. Now, with the election of a centre-right government last year, unions are wondering to what extent the process of marginalisation will resume. The unions involved in this project* are proposing an interesting way forward; a path which focuses on the workplace, rather than the ballot box. They have produced a handbook which sets out their strategy, and we’d recommend you take a look: Building High Performance Workplaces – the Union Approach (PDF).

The handbook has been prepared for organisers, union reps and members, and looks at how high performance workplaces can be built with the help of strong unions. Such a process forms an important part of collective bargaining. In discussing this, the handbook explores issues which unionists all around the world are familiar with: worker participation, upskilling and lifelong learning, job security, decent wages, collective bargaining, fairness, unity and solidarity. However, and this is what makes the handbook so interesting, they have framed this discussion against issues of business performance.

 

Collective bargaining: from statutory right to human right

In 2007 the Canadian Supreme Court affirmed the human rights status of collective bargaining; moving it, in the Canadian context, from a statutory right to a human right. In order to put that decision into perspective,  network member Roy Adams traces the emergence and general characteristics of the modern international human rights regime, and then reviews the recent evolution and major aspects of collective bargaining as a human right. In this article from Just Labour: A Canadian Journal of Work and Society, Adams also suggests how to bring Canadian practice into alignment with international standards.  Download article.

 

How globalisation criminalises migrants

Illegal People - David Bacon’s third book on migrant labour in the modern economy – extends his previous focus on Latino immigration in the US to consider its global dimensions. Combining his signature of personal testimonies allied to politically informed analysis, he shows us that the two topics of globalisation and migrant labour are intimately related. For it is the neo-liberal globalisation agenda pursued by leading capitalist powers (and the institutions they control) that destroys existing livelihoods, uprooting peoples, who are then set in motion within ever increasing migrant flows. As immigrants in the rich countries, these migrants find themselves socially and politically marginalised: confined to low grade exploitable labour, without rights to organise, denied citizenship and facing manifold discrimination. They are the ‘illegal people’, but their illegality is one that has been created by the global economic and political system. Bacon argues the best political solution is not to confine migrants within second class ‘guest worker’ programmes (the preference of corporations and Western governments), but to press ahead and secure full social and political rights for all working people.

 

Intriguing New Study of Australian Union Songs

Australian unions have an interesting and complicated history, writes Mark Gregory - Australian labour activist, creator of the Union Songs website, and founding member of the New Unionism Network. His new book, Australian Union Songs, is an authoratative study of the intriguing music this movement has produced over the last 60 years.

Unions are often the largest longest lasting membership-based organisations in many countries. They play a key role in shaping policy, apart from working conditions and pay. They campaign for equity in a community and insist on democratic government, decent health and education, equal pay for men and women workers, decent housing and public transport. They are anti-racist and opposed to war, and they have an international outlook. The history of union involvement is a history of a battle for human rights. All these concerns play a part in labour movement culture, and this is certainly reflected in union songs.

 

Break or Weld? Trade Union responses to global value chain restructuring

In the era of globalisation, marked by mobile transnational capital flows and recurrent economic restructuring, what options do trade unions have to fight back? This is the underlying question facing all the contributors to this collection of essays overseen by Ursula Huws (London 2008). As her introduction notes, both national industrial relations systems and the national regulation of economic life have been severely weakened in recent decades, leaving trade unions without their traditional means of influence – especially their tripartite relationships with national governments and employers. Equally radical shifts in the direction of informal and precarious working patterns and relations have simultaneously disrupted the once familiar stable working environments, constituencies and identities unions operated within and upon.

 

Wrestling with Starbucks by Kim Fellner

How do we decide whether a company is good or bad? It is the relentless return to this question which makes “Wrestling with Starbucks” such an important and deeply satisfying book.

The union movement is riddled with communicators who condemn and deplore stuff. As a rule, we are outraged. It’s a style of communications which ultimately alienates the audience; the brain disengages and the angry buzz becomes just another background whine. This is a critical problem for the union movement, because the media persistently restricts their gaze to strikes and stories of abuse. How can we convey a workers’ perspective without sounding like punk squatters who have illegally occupied the moral high ground? We have tried humor; we have appealed to reason; we have targeted consumer pockets and community morals. But a worker-centered communications paradigm still eludes us. Union communications come across as self-rightous rather than democratic and participative, and the public just turns the page thinking: “well they would say that, wouldn’t they?”

Kim Fellner has changed the record. For that reason alone I would suggest that all unionists read this book.

 

Economics for Everyone by Jim Stanford

Subtitled “A Short Guide to the Economics of Capitalism”, this book is a 100% worker-friendly introduction to the study of economics. Stanford is a researcher with the Canadian Auto Workers and a member of the New Unionism Network, and he is very much a man on a mission. You can sense it in every paragraph. He is hell-bent on demystifying “the dismal science”. Quite frankly, it’s hard to imagine how he might have done a better job.

Stanford’s regular columns for Canada’s Globe and Mail have given him the ability to be both zappy and authoratative at the same time. He avoids jargon instinctively, and yet he dives back and forth between the simple and the complex, between the big picture and the daily grind, between ideologically-driven policies and household budget blow-outs. Perhaps it’s this sheer energy in his writing style that allows him to lay bare such daunting subjects as the development of neoliberalism, taxation, free trade agreements, competition, the commodification of labor, inflation, globalization, pensions, and financialization without ever once seeming to break stride. If these words intimidate you, or make your eyes glaze over, then you owe it to yourself to read this book.

It is good news for unions and other activist-based organisations that Economics for Everyone will soon be backed by a set of free web-based instructional materials, including a course outline, lecture notes, student exercises, and a glossary. To access these, and to order your own copy of this indispensible little book, see http://www.economicsforeveryone.ca/

 

Getting the Goods by Edna Bonacich and Jake Wilson

Edna Bonacich has long been concerned with the global dimension of modern production systems and their impact upon labour, initially in relation to the apparel industry. In a recent article on the mega retailer Wal-Mart (in Lichtenstein ed 2006) she argued a ‘logistics revolution’ was fundamentally reshaping patterns of global production and distribution, placing ‘big box’ retailers firmly in command, with dramatic consequences for manufacturers, distributors and their workforces. ‘Getting the Goods’ expands this analysis in a full length book, based upon her first hand research of the Los Angeles / Long Beach area of California, a key node of the new system.

 

Change at the coalface in China

China faces unprecedented challenges as it industrialises, leading to the largest rural-urban migration in the history of the world.

One aspect of this dramatic shift has been the battle to lift energy production. Part of the challenge for unions has been to improve health and safety “at the coal face”.

Dave Feickert’s excellent paper below will tell you more about China’s problems in the mining sector. Dave recently reported that Chinese and New Zealand unions have jointly run the first union-led mine safety programme in the country. The programme compared records for the industry in several countries and also looked at environmental issues, worker compensation and accident rehabilitation. A copy of the proceedings, including presentations and a meetings’ summary in English and Chinese, can be downloaded here.

 

Poor Workers’ Unions by Vanessa Tait

New Unionism Network member Richard Leitch reviews “Poor Workers’ Unions” by Vanessa Tait – a comprehensive survey of the alternative labour movement in the US over the last four decades.

We have here an unusual and very valuable book. Combining her skills as journalist, labour activist and librarian, Vanessa Tait has compiled a comprehensive survey of the alternative labour movement in the US over the last four decades. Her concern is to show how groups situated outside the AFL-CIO mainstream have struggled and organised themselves to achieve economic justice through the creation of ‘poor workers’ unions’ (PWUs). In so doing these independent organs have shown the wider labour movement a more expansive, democratic option that represents “the best possibility for the future” (229), a ‘social justice’ unionism which has now established a foothold in the mainstream. Within the hidden history she reconstructs Tait also points to the misunderstandings in our views of relations between labour and other social movements.