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Last Updated: Sep 5, 2008 - 10:46:44 AM |
The truth is that conventional trade unionism is pretty much dead. It
is now time for post-mortems and for questions about what could come
next. Is another labor movement possible? Can existing trade unions
survive even if they manage to change or will new ones be needed?
Today only 8% of private sector workers in the US belong to a union.
Vast sections of the country are essentially union free. No wonder. The
organizational structures, laws, and institutional arrangements that
shape today’s labor movement have their roots in an earlier era
stretching back to the 19th century. And while capitalism has undergone
revolutionary changes in the past few decades, changes we generally
refer to as globalization, the labor movement has remained essentially
unchanged and nation based.
Three trends, in particular, stand out:
(1) Modern corporations roam the world looking for low labor costs, lax
regulations, and weak labor unions. This pits workers and communities
against each other in a classic race to the bottom to attract and
retain jobs.
(2) Corporations have abandoned the old vertically and horizontally
integrated organizational structures, in which companies sought to keep
most aspects of production and distribution in-house, in favor of newer
core/ring systems in which they perform only core functions while
farming out the rest to complex supply chains of contractors and
subsidiaries. Workers making the same product, or providing the same
service, may be employed by many different employers, making solidarity
and collective action difficult.
(3) Corporations divide the remaining in-house workforce into a core
group of workers with standard jobs and at least some expectation of
long term employment, and a secondary group of contingent workers:
part-timers, temps, contract workers, on-call workers, and day laborers
usually with sub-standard wages and benefits and little or no job
security.
These trends—capital mobility, “dis-integrated” corporate structures,
and contingent staffing strategies—all thwart labor’s ability to
organize and bargain effectively and make it much more difficult for
unions to do the kinds of things that would make them attractive to
workers and worth fighting for. For instance, on critical issues like
protecting jobs, unions have been unable to deliver, and in recent
years labor has had extraordinary difficulty even holding on to gains
made earlier in the 20th century.
Some argue labor should focus on less mobile service sector jobs, we
have written elsewhere why we think this strategy will not reverse
labor’s decline. Others argue that tweaks in US labor law like the
Employee Free Choice Act currently being promoted by unions and the
Democrats, which will allow card check recognition, will revive labor’s
fortunes by reducing anti-union employer pressure on workers attempting
to organize. But marginal changes in labor law do not address the
central dynamics of capital mobility, new corporate structures, and
contingent staffing strategies that characterize contemporary
capitalism and undermine organized labor.
Labor’s revival in the era of globalization will require a new kind of
labor movement, one that not only provides effective representation at
the workplace and in the economy but also helps workers represent
themselves in relation to the basic questions of society: of how we
will address the challenge of global warming; of how we can overcome
the polarization of wealth and the persistence of poverty; of how we
can build the essential cross border solidarity necessary in the era of
globalization.
In fact, the issues on which labor’s revival depends are not simply the
issues of craft, industry, or employers but are essentially class
issues that relate to the role of working people in shaping the
direction of the society.
The labor movement is still the bearer of a great heritage available to
those who will remake it for the world we live in now. There are people
inside and outside the existing labor movement ready to get down to the
work of building on that heritage and many unions retain considerable
resources that could contribute to building a new labor movement for
our times. Like any movement under attack, labor generally resists as
disloyal critical thinking that challenges established tenets and
practices. But today that won’t do. Now more than ever we need a free
and open debate about the future of labor, a debate that respects a
full range of opinions and perspectives. Launching such a debate would
be a good first step in labor’s revival.
Source:Ocnus.net 2008
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