Union Renewal discussion
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Strike Back
Building power under neoliberalism
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Actually I wonder whether we need to be reading wider than just union renewal literature in order to answer these types of questions - eg. I know there has been a revival of Karl Polanyi recently as a way of theorising globalisation (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...) ?
Something worth reading (for those who can access it) is John Buchanan's 'Observations' speech to the Australia Disrupted Conference last year. It was in the prep reading for the most recent ACTU union leaders forum. He covers a lot of ground in the speech, but his points about the fragmentation, disaggregation and the end of the classical wage earner model of employment are worth considering. Unions could resist neoliberalism not just by being defensive, but also by rethinking the virtues of autonomy and solidarity for the modern world.
Great - I haven't read it yet but just found a copy of the speech online for those who are interested (sorry about the really long link):https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&am...
There were a few interesting chapters, like the one on social movement unionism which succinctly distills the differences between public and private sector union strikes. He says that public sector unions can't just conduct strikes in the same way that private sector unions can - for instance, when public sector workers go on strike, we actually save govt's money! The author says: "if a public employee union attempts to conduct a strike like its private sector counterparts, it will likely lose. Instead, the task is to combine the community support of social unionism with the workplace-based nature and power of the strike. In true social unionism, workers themselves forge deep ties to the greater community." But he cautions against "fuzzy" social unionism and says that we can't substitute community relationships for traditional workplace organising - we have to still directly confront employer power.
It was a good book that makes an argument for grassroots militancy to renew public sector unions, and makes the argument through looking at historical lessons from PS union struggles. The issue I have with it is that the argument (which is really common on the far left) is that we should just look back to the 60s and 70s and utilise those same strategies and tactics, because they worked back then. I think there's a lot we can learn from looking at these struggles in the past, but I think this line of argument is a bit simplistic and lacks a proper analysis of how the world has changed since then. For the past 30+ years we have been living under neoliberal capitalism. Under neoliberalism we have seen a radical redistribution of wealth and power in society from the workers to capital - from public to private hands. A lot has changed - privatisation has changed the way the public sector looks and the way citizens interact with public services, the nature of work and the workplace has changed, etc. So while I agree that to rebuild unionism we need worker militancy led from the grassroots, I think it's a little more complicated than just trying to emulate what workers did 40 or 50 years ago. We need to start from an analysis of the current political situation, and develop strategies and tactics from there. These strategies should be inspired by the struggles of the past, but the world looks a lot different now than it did then, and so the way we revive the labour movement might look different too.
I'd be interested to know what others think of this - the extent to which 'neoliberalism' (which I'm using in the David Harvey sense - neoliberalism is a class project aimed at the redistribution of wealth from labour to capital) means that the union movement has to change our strategies in order to build power? How might building union power today look different to the 60s and 70s? Anyone read anything that might help with understanding the impact of neoliberalism on the union movement and how we might organise effectively under neoliberalism?