The trade-union revival - Bread roses - international in scope

New Internationalist, Dec, 2001 by David Ransom

If trade unions are dinosaurs, says David Ransom, we must all be living in Jurassic Park.

Otherwise, how to explain the presence of millions of trade unionists on city streets around the world every May Day? Why alt the blacklists and death lists of people who are doomed to extinction anyway?

The truth is that trade unions are still very much alive. They matter, and in future they are going to matter even more. For just so long as people have to sell their labour to someone else in order to survive, so will the 'freedom of association' at work be fought for and celebrated. For just so long as human beings do not turn into machines when they go to work, so will they aspire to a measure of dignity, self-expression and democracy at their workplaces. Those who wish this were not so are sitting on a periodically dormant but nonetheless active volcano.

A similar mistake has been made, many times before. For the first two decades of the 19th century in Britain, during the early years of the Industrial Revolution, trade unions were legislated away by the Combination Acts. In a paranoid political atmosphere, heavy with the smell of rebellion in the 'lower orders', employees were prohibited from even thinking to 'combine' against their employers, on pain of summary arrest, imprisonment and deportation. If not the first -- and by no means the last -- then this was certainly the crudest attempt to make freedom of association in Britain entirely subject to the sanction of the state.

It didn't work. The result, as the great historian EP Thompson tells us, 'dissolved the remaining ties of loyalty between working people and their masters, so that disaffection spread in a world which the authorities could not penetrate Having had this unintended effect, the Combination Acts were hastily repealed and the long, slow haul towards democracy at work resumed once more.

Richard Sennett, an equally acute observer of our present times, found a related anxiety among the ludicrously rich and powerful at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. It is, Sennett tells us, more like a court than a conference', held every, year in the ski resort where Thomas Mann wrote The Magic Mountain. 'They of course fear the resurgence of unions,' he writes, 'but become acutely and personally uncomfortable, fidgeting or breaking eye contact or retreating into taking notes, if forced to discuss the people who, in their jargon, are "left behind". They know that the great majority of those who toil are left behind.' (2)

Who, or what, remains to express the outrage such studied indifference merits; and organize to make a change? Trade unions have a long and vibrant tradition of gathering our collective strength. But they also have a history of human frailty. There are the corrupt union mafias and power brokers, the bosses like Jimmy Hoffa in the US or Fidel Veldsquez in Mexico, who was 96 when last elected to head up the official unions in 1997, for a term set to last until 2004. Trade unions have sometimes preferred to discipline, rather than represent, their own members. And they have been in decline for almost 30 years in the North, losing membership and influence, circling their defensive wagons around a restricted outlook and increasingly meagre ambitions.

One credible explanation for this is that they have been the victims of their own success. They have ridden the industrial capitalist tiger since it was born. In a bitter and bloody contest, usually against all the odds, they have induced it to behave in ways that offend against its true nature. Arguably, without trade unions there would today be little sign of what almost everyone in the North now takes for granted: the right to vote, to education, to good healthcare, to safety at work, to rest and leisure. The tiger has been tamed.

You don't have to look very far back to notice the change. Take Adelaide, South Australia, in 1930. In that year there were state elections, One of the parties stood on a platform that included the right to strike, equal pay for women, workers' compensation for sickness or accident, a 40-hour working week and two weeks paid annual holiday for all workers. Such a political platform today would be modest if not retrogressive. But, no more than a lifetime ago, it was advocated by trade unionists in the Communist Party, which at the time liked to think of itself as revolutionary. (3)

According to this explanation, so successful have trade unions been that most working people have now reached an accommodation with capitalism -- and trade unions have thereby done themselves out of a job. They have saved capitalism from itself

Unfortunately, capitalism does not want to be saved from itself. As sharks must keep swimming to stay alive, so capitalism must be free to roam the globe, forever accumulating yet more wealth, power and profits if it is not to collapse in ruins. Anything that stands in its way will be attacked.

So far, trade unions have shown what is possible only in a tiny enclave: the 20 per cent of the world's people who consume 80 per cent of its shrinking resources. You can understand why, in the North, unions might therefore wish to circle the wagons against the rest of the world. But the manoeuvre is self-defeating if the most important battles are being fought somewhere else -- which is why trade unionists have always been internationalist in their outlook. Thanks to corporate globalization, most of the world's industrial labour force now works in the South -- in conditions resembling those of early 19th-century Britain. And, in the South, people are turning to trade unions in increasing numbers, not least because there's nowhere else for them to turn now that their governments are effectively run by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.