Police-organized labour unions today?

[Die Neue Zeit]

I was wondering if there are regimes today with police-organized labour unions. I thought this anecdote by Lars Lih in June 2010 would be useful, certainly when comparing the effects of such unions to ordinary business/"yellow" unions:

http://www.socialistdemocracy.org/RecentArticles/RecentWeMustDreamLenin.html

Zubatov was a tsarist police official who, around 1900, had the brilliant idea of beating the Social Democrats at their own game. Remember that not only political parties but even trade unions were illegal before the 1905 revolution. Zubatov’s idea was that the police themselves would set up semi-legal trade unions so that workers could pursue their economic struggle in a peaceful way, while still remaining loyal, even grateful, to the tsar […] Now, if Lenin thought that workers were naturally reformist, one would think that he’d be pretty worried about these police unions, since the tsarist government was trying to show it could genuinely carry out needed reforms.

In fact, Lenin’s attitude was very brash – indeed, it could be summed up as “Bring it on!” According to Lenin, these police unions were good for the revolutionary underground in every way. For one thing, the police took over the job of providing legal workers’ literature, so that the underground could concentrate on smuggling in the stronger stuff. For another thing, there was no chance that the workers would be taken in for any length of time by the anti-democratic, anti-revolutionary message of Zubatov and his minions – of course, assuming that the Social Democrats did their job of vigorously refuting Zubatov’s message […] In January 1905, a follower of Zubatov, Father Gapon, led the workers to present a loyal, peaceful petition to the tsar, and they were shot down by the government on Bloody Sunday, January 1905, leading to a radicalisation of large sectors of the working class.

[Jose Gracchus]

Who cares, pretty much all of that situation is peculiar to a newly industrializing economy locked in under a throwback absolutist monarchy.

[Die Neue Zeit]

So what about the big Russian unions affiliated with United Russia then? Or similar unions in various Central American regimes until recently?

[jake williams]

Who cares, pretty much all of that situation is peculiar to a newly industrializing economy locked in under a throwback absolutist monarchy.
This is basically the case in a number of places around the world. Not monarchies per se, but I think you could make considerable analogies with a number of Arab countries. The failure of officially sanctioned unions in those countries has, I think, more to do with the absence of a revolutionary movement capable of using them on par with that in Russia than it does with the impossibility in principle of taking advantage of such organizations.

It probably is the case, however, that such organizations have less potential to be useful at all in the most advanced industrial countries which have legal independent unions.

[blake 3:17]

DNZ -- What we're talking is about institutions with reactionary leaderships which bring oppressed and exploited people together. That's unpredictable.

Thanks for the link to the Lih piece.

[jake williams]

DNZ -- What we're talking is about institutions with reactionary leaderships which bring oppressed and exploited people together. That's unpredictable.
They are unpredictable, but revolutionary situations are always unpredictable. I think the point is that in particular circumstances, it's possible for the working class to take advantage of risky strategic decisions, but it deserves careful consideration.

[Die Neue Zeit]

DNZ -- What we're talking is about institutions with reactionary leaderships which bring oppressed and exploited people together. That's unpredictable.

Thanks for the link to the Lih piece.

FYI, I'm using this as part of my defense of private-sector collective bargaining representation becoming a free- and universal-access public monopoly operated by some independent government agency acting in good faith (kinda like a Commonwealth country's Crown Corporations).

[jake williams]

FYI, I'm using this as part of my defense of private-sector collective bargaining representation becoming a free- and universal-access public monopoly operated by some independent government agency acting in good faith (kinda like a Commonwealth country's Crown Corporations).
That's a very different thing to call for. I find it hard to believe that this would be a step forward in advanced countries. Also for the work it would take to implement, it makes sense to organize independently. Crown corporations aren't going to be calling general strikes. Lenin was advocating the use of state-sanctioned unions to make it easier to organize workers independently.

[North Star]

DNZ I see what you're getting at but I have to disagree. I think the police can be won over, it will be difficult though but let's look at precedents:
whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/latest/Police.html
presstv.ir/detail/171352.html

[Die Neue Zeit]

That's the point. More radical action should question the rule of bourgeois law.

Whether they're Crown Corporations, bodies that are equivalent in "independence" to the Auditor-General, or some sort of labour judiciary (like the labour courts in European countries, but with more responsibilities), such non-political organs are more trustworthy to get the job done or side with the bourgeoisie than the slippery yellow union bureaucracies.

I also wrote that employees of such bodies be compensated such that their living standards are like those of a median skilled worker.

[jake williams]

That's the point. More radical action should question the rule of bourgeois law.

Whether they're Crown Corporations, bodies that are equivalent in "independence" to the Auditor-General, or some sort of labour judiciary (like the labour courts in European countries, but with more responsibilities), such non-political organs are more trustworthy to get the job done or side with the bourgeoisie than the slippery yellow union bureaucracies.

I also wrote that employees of such bodies be compensated such that their living standards are like those of a median skilled worker.
If what you're calling for is a partial politicization (on the side of workers) and extension of powers of, say, the provincial labour boards, then that would be valuable. But I'll say again: in basically all of the advanced capitalist world, independent unions are legal, and virtually universally better than any equivalent under the bourgeois state.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Oops, I forgot to post the link to the original article:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/private-sector-collective-t124045/index.html?t=124045

In my work the linked commentary has been edited to include Lih's stuff. My point is that the functions of more radical unions themselves should change and dump private-sector collective bargaining representation (the "right to collective bargaining" is quite different from the "right to strike").

[pastradamus]

Im not sure I understand the initial question of this post. Do you mean unions which are heavily influenced by and puppeteered by police or do you mean a labour union of the police force (representing the interests of policemen and women)?

[Die Neue Zeit]

The former. This has nothing to do with unions representing police interests at the bargaining table.

[pastradamus]

Well to just touch on the whole collective bargaining issue.

Collective bargaining is a system whereby the Government and Private Bourgeois anti-union entities actively seek to corrupt the labour movement by disguising itself as a negociating body. The result is a workers union which, rather than striving for class struggle and fighting back against employers and industrialists, instead seeks to appease its union members by temporarily gaining for them slight improvements in their conditions or pay whilst at the same time taking from them their union subscriptions.

The union then becomes a business.It profits off a combination of workers subs and its tax exempt status. This process is called "social partnership" here in Ireland. The second the economy went bust over here, the gains made by trade unions over the past twenty years have been reversed overnight. In other words the government believes workers rights and conditions are conditional based on the economic status of the state.

Some unions however dismiss the idea of social partnership and collective bargaining. I personally believe that it is not only completely impossible but actually insulting to a worker to pretend you are providing him solidarity and assistance whist at the same time negociating with the very people who are trying to keep him on his already existing low pay and conditions.

[PhoenixAsh]

I agree with pastradamus.

Social partnerships are build around the idea we all have to cooperate together to keep the system running as best as possible. The modern unions are complicit in actually perpetuating the pipedream of a humane capitalist system in which everybody can benefit.

Workers are being fed an idea, and illusion that the modern union will work in their best interest, while in fact it counter acts that interest by actively collaborating to maintain the system which causes the problems for workers in the first place.

That does not mean they do not hamper the speed of rollbacks and austerity measures. They do. Or they win small victories (often at the expense of huge "invisible" concessions). But all of this only perpetuates the system and gives workers the idea they are actually having success and that this is the way foreward at the expense of more radicalised action and unions operating outside the system.

Thats incidentally why social pertnership was invented and implemented...to incorporate the unions into the system and clip their wings. Unions in this system are bought for and sold and will sell out the workers at the drop of a hat if they can profit. They will shed NO tears and will say with a straight face that under the circumstances they made the best deal possible.

If you are part of a social partnership union leave it for a radical one ASAP. Do not think for one minute that the voting process will change anything.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Some unions however dismiss the idea of social partnership and collective bargaining. I personally believe that it is not only completely impossible but actually insulting to a worker to pretend you are providing him solidarity and assistance whist at the same time negociating with the very people who are trying to keep him on his already existing low pay and conditions.

It gets worse when there are academics suggesting we replace "collective bargaining" with "collaborative bargaining." :glare:

[Jose Gracchus]

Is that Guy Standing?

[Die Neue Zeit]

That would indeed be him, but upon further reading he's suggesting a form of collective bargaining based on craft unionism, rather than "collaborative bargaining" in the sense of opposition to "greedy unions running companies out of business" (a la GM). It's still bad, though.

[Jose Gracchus]

Wait what? How would craft unionism help the "precariat" with their casualized, de-skilled, interchangeable labor? :rolleyes:

This is why liberals shouldn't bumble around in the workers' movement. Standing sounds like an idiot.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Wait what? How would craft unionism help the "precariat" with their casualized, de-skilled, interchangeable labor? :rolleyes:

This is why liberals shouldn't bumble around in the workers' movement. Standing sounds like an idiot.

Supposedly (my best guess here) you've have some union of retail servers (bartenders, waiters, and the like), some union of cleaners, some union of grunt office workers, and so on. They would be similar to the de facto closed-shop guilds of lawyers, doctors, etc.

He is politically deficient, but I already have another thread critiquing him (and you posted there critiquing me, too):

http://www.revleft.com/vb/guy-standings-book-t152067/index.html