An Indestructible Union: blog series

[Die Neue Zeit]

http://tradeunion.wordpress.com/2012/03/17/an-indestructible-union-part-1/



We have reached a moment in the technological development of human society (where at least temporarily for the moment will pass rapidly) where we are limited not by our collective physical resources but by our collective imaginations. We will be judged as a generation, as a civilisation, on whether we have the collective capacity to think our way through the iron cage we have encased ourselves in. Because if we don’t, no other generation that follows us for thousands of years will have the same opportunity.

Those of us lucky enough to inhabit the top of the iron cage imagine it’s not in their interest to escape it. We cannot expect that some super-rich oligarch will absolve us of the responsibility to act. No, the question I’m posing is to the rest of us prisoners. What can we do? That we will need to act for ourselves is obvious. But what is the form of the ship we will use to navigate our way towards a society founded upon equality, solidarity, sustainability and true freedom? I want to sketch out the structure of such an organisation – a 21st century union of workers.

First, a disclaimer. The rest of this may read like an autopsy of a dead body because in a way it is. Unions are like sharks. When they stop moving they die. That’s because members acting together around issues is the lifeblood of the union movement. Existing rules and regulations are just designed to limit that so it doesn’t critically interfere with the employer community’s want to structure the workplace in such a manner that it produces a healthy profit. What I will be dealing with here is the organisational structure that members acting together around issues will be able to use.

Before I go into the details of the new structure a bit of context is necessary. We can divide each and every union in the 20th century into one of two types of structure: representative and insurrectional. A representative union is one where the officials of that union act as the advisers and representatives of the rank-and-file membership, through contract negotiations and other legal proceedings. This model has brought real benefits to generations of working people but it’s fundamentally limited in what it can achieve. Although we shouldn’t knock higher wages, a greater say in the workplace and progressive social policy. But this model of union is forever vulnerable and any gains it achieves are conditional and reversible. An insurrectional union is one that seeks to use the economic and physical power of the working class to transform the dominant mode of production. It’s horizons may be more vast but given the existential threat it poses to the dominant order it is subject to direct and violent repression. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) is probably the most famous example of an insurrectional union (at least in Australia and the United States).

The history of the Union movement’s interaction with the State can be summed up by a carrot and stick two step in response to growing worker power. Insurrectional unions have been repressed, its leaders killed or jailed. Representative unions have been given conditional legal recognition that at least partially legitimises their role within wider economy. This conditional recognition has allowed representative unions to build up a significant pool of resources; financial resources, offices and staff (although still absolutely nothing compared to corporations). Representative unions require these resources in order to go about their daily functions, which despite conspiracies to the contrary involves officials with good values trying their hardest to improve things for their members. But these resources are also the Achilles’ Heel of the representative union – take it away and it ceases to function. It’s not really the laws that regulate industrial action themselves that are used to discipline representative unions – it’s the existential threat of having those resources taken away as a result of transgressing the State sanctioned limits of industrial action.

Representative unions, nonetheless, still proved to be so successful that the price of labour itself caused a systemic economic crisis in the 1970s/80s. It was then that the structural vulnerabilities and inherent limitations of representative unionism were exploited to full effect in order to restore profitability under the guise of neoliberal economic policy. It has had a devastating impact on representative unions in the developed world. This has in turn been overplayed into a crisis of unionism in general, which is pure crap. The idea of workers standing together is an idea. You cannot kill it. It doesn’t bleed. And this does not match with growing union power across the globe.

The cleansing fire of extreme neoliberal policy nonetheless is giving rise to a synthesis of the two competing models of unionism. I know this because the first tentative steps are starting to happen around this global movement. For want of a better term I’d call it direct unionism. It combines the transformative vision of an insurrectional union with the everyday foundations of a representative union. But unlike either it cannot be disciplined through the threat of its resources being appropriated or its leaders being killed and jailed. It can only be shut down through turning off the very flows which sustain capitalism itself – the flow of information and capital.

[Die Neue Zeit]

http://tradeunion.wordpress.com/2012/04/01/an-indestructible-union-part-2/



At the heart of the direct union, and in fact at the core of any union, is the conversation. In the same manner that the exchange of commodities is the foundation for a market economy, the conversation with and between workers is the foundation for any union. However, the grounding conversation in a representative union, whether it be between workers, union delegates or officials is simply this: “what can the Union do for us, and how can it do it better?” While, many representative unions have initiated great campaigns, or participated in large-scale struggles for new rights, the crux of the matter though, is that representative unions having been given legal recognition become (semi)privileged actors in the economic system that can deliver some limited outcomes for its members. This engenders an attitude amongst workers that the Union is an outside body that delivers for them, it’s an excellent recipe for passivity. Furthermore, the repetition of this conversation over time prepared the groundwork for the neo-liberal counter-reformation. With Unions being framed as an outside/external body (and often acting like one), the general crisis of the rising cost of labour could be repackaged as the Other (unions) threatening the prosperity of society in general. Therefore, if this outside body was disciplined, weakened and brought into line then everyone (including the workers who were being represented by these Unions) would be better off. It worked electorally. Even industrially, smart management in highly organised sectors could set about a 5-10 year plan of de-Unionisation by going direct to their workforce, buying off or otherwise sidelining local workplace representatives and offering better wage outcomes. With the organisation of their workforce smashed, over time they could bring down the wages and conditions to a more affordable level once again. The sad story of the deunionisation of the Pilbara region, in the north west of Australia, in the 1990s bears out this strategy.

The insurrectional union, on the other hand, has a very different sort of foundational conversation. The conversations between workers, shop-floor leaders, and organisers takes the form of “we are Union, and what are we going to do about it together?” There are a number of different names/frameworks for what are essentially the same action conversation whether it be Saul Alinsky’s “Anger, Hope, Action” framework or the old anarchist catch-cry, “Agitate! Educate! Organise!” (and that’s just for starters). The first phase of the conversation is to agitate/anger the worker about a particular issue they are experiencing. The second phase then moves to educating the worker about the power they can exercise collectively (whether it be in their specific workplace, their company, industry or class) – the idea being that the worker now has a realistic hope that they can actually win on their issue – enough of a hope to care again. The conversation then moves to the action/organise phase. The idea being that the worker will come away from the conversation committed to carrying out some sort of action – historically this has ranged from simply joining a union, asking a couple of workmates to come to a meeting through to participating in a general strike. The whole aim of the conversation though is to get working people actively grabbing hold of their own destiny and struggle.

Interestingly, since the neo-liberal counter-reformation the action conversation is gradually gaining ground in larger-scale representative unions. The fire of the neo-liberal industrial relations strategy is forging a new model of unionism, and the incorporeal part of the union structure, the conversation is the first part of the representative structure to change. It, therefore, should come as no surprise that the first systemic use of action conversations within a representative union structure came at the Ground Zero of neo-liberalism; 1980s California. The 1980s Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles was all about getting workers active because the traditional representative mechanisms had so broken down for cleaners/janitors that the only rational option, over and above a distopia of forever falling wages and living standards, was action across an entire industry against those who really exercised power and shifted risk down to workers.

The action conversation, in the contemporary period in Australia at least, first started to filter through in the early 1990s as the crisis in representative unionism started to be felt institutionally with drops in membership numbers translating into a real operating and budgetary crisis for unions. It was here when the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) radically shifted its training priorities. The first Organising Works class started in 1994. New organisers would be trained in the action conversation (and other key elements of organising). Obviously the training up of a professional class of organisers will only ever have limited value as a measure on its own to build up worker power. One could even retort that it hasn’t made much of a difference over the last 18 years. I would argue, though, that it’s probably only recently and over the next 4-5 years that we will objectively see what sorts of ramifications this will have for the entire movement. Given the relatively small change of personnel and low-levels of turnover it’s really only been recently that those who directly participated in this revised training curriculum or were open to be influenced themselves have begun to obtain leadership positions within the wider union movement.

The action conversation has probably reached ideological supremacy within the Australian union movement, although its hegemony is by no means uncontested. And there is a real self-interest for unions as organisations as to why this has happened; when neo-liberalism cuts away at the foundation of representative functions it’s the strongest alternative the movement can turn to. Where we are today though, is by and large representative unions having more action conversations. The key will be turning to how these conversations can take place within a direct Union.

Usually, but not always, getting a worker to become a member is one of the first aims of the action conversation. In the next part I will deal with how membership in a direct union should structured.

[Die Neue Zeit]

http://tradeunion.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/an-indestructibe-union-part-3/



The membership is the Union, and the Union is the membership. This is why membership is usually one of the goals of initial conversations between workers, delegates and organisers looking to create a new Union in a workplace or industry – membership is the existential question that sets up the realistic structures necessary to fight for a group of workers’ key issues. It is the vehicle which creates the power necessary to win the change they want to see. The union is simply the collective pronoun for a group of workers united in their economic, political, social and environmental interests.

It is the first objective indicator that a group of workers are acting together over and above merely reacting to an employer changing workplace practices or upping the intensity/duration of work. Union membership is the first sign that a group of workers are united in common cause to defend their interests against the insatiable corporate drive to take more and more profit. It also provides the structural drive for effective unions to fight for equality (at least amongst their membership), as each and every member is of equal importantce in terms of the contribution they make towards the effective whole of the Union. Hence the old union adage, “without you there is no union”. As an aside, this leads to an interesting historical thesis that I wonder if anyone has ever tested before. That is unions will display either racist/sexist tendencies or fight for equality based on the identities of (a) their existing membership, and (b) the workers working with their existing membership.

While there are other factors at play in measuring worker power, there is a strong enough correlation between overall union membership numbers and density within the Australian economy and the strength of labour in economy for it to be a topic of statistical interest to both the Australian State and the mainstream press. This is also the source of the paradoxial criticism of union power amongst paid advocates for capital. Over a generation of union decline, these advocates have generally used two lines of criticism. The first being that the Union movement is more and more out touch with mainstream working Australia because there are less and less members. The second line is that unions overall exercise too much power within the Australian economy. The logic gap between the two lines only makes sense from one perspective; the logic of continual profit accumulation. The first line is really a celebration of successful efforts to decrease worker power and the second is the expression of capital’s insatiable hunger for more and more. The vampire can celebrate his kills but still lust for more.

If we go back to membership at the apex of representative unionism aside from its quantitative difference it was also qualititatively differrent. At the apex of representative unionism membership contributions were relatively low compared with today. This reflects the way the system works today compared with the late 70s/early 80s. Membership was relatively widespread but the amount of time and effort put in to make an objective difference in the lives of each worker was a lot lower. Unions could survive and prosper with a strong network of workplace delegates and a few officials who would make the necessary adjustments to the centralised wage and condition structures to bring in new members/enterprises.

Overall union membership declined at its fastest rates not in the Accords of the 1980s (although there is a strong argument to make that this may have contributed to overall rank and file disillusionment and disempowerment) but with the shift to decentralised bargaining in the 1990s. Why? Because this necessitated a qualititative shift in the way unions had to operate in order for unions to successfully ‘deliver’ for members. It was no longer a matter of changing a few documents here and there centrally, with some unofficial action delivering some extra gains for a few hot shops. The game had changed. Under an enterprise based bargaining system instead of a single document governing an entire industry, we now had a system where some large operators in a single industry had 10 to 20 different enterprise agreements for the same or similar functions spread across different worksites. A greater and greater amount of time, effort and resources had to go into delivering for fewer workers. This is at the heart of why this period of what has been officially called ‘labour market deregulation’ has coincided with an exponential expansion in the length of the various industrial relations acts and accompanying regulations. It was a structural/regulatory bipartisan policy shift that has greatly increased the operating costs for unions. It makes no fundamental long-term sense for any social democratic party as it just greatly errodes its financial support base. This leaves Labor activists with two options, (1) finalise the corporatisation of the party by turning it into Australian out-post of the US Democrats (i.e. wholly dependent on corporate funding but with a system of ‘open primaries’ to substitute for an effective industrial/political membership base), or (2) admit error and take on the structural issues again.

The main method the Australian union movement has overcome this funding gap over the last generation has been to increase membership contributions to between 1% – 1.5% of their members’ average incomes. Overall, this increase in membership contributions has been justified and largely tolerated by the remaining core of the union movement on two grounds. First, as the wage system has decentralised the gap in wages and conditions between organised and non-organised worksites has gone up to around a 20% differential, secondly while the very same shift has seen more resources required to achieve this. Take it from my experience, negotiating an agreement for 5 people can be nearly as challenging as negotiating an agreement for 5,000 people. This has led us to a membership structure today though where there is a clear binary between union and non-union, membership and non-membership. Membership becomes a large commitment for a worker but a commitment that makes a huge difference to their lives in the right circumstances. This binary, I will argue, will need to be shifted to a membership continuum within a direct Union.

The next post, however, will deal with the other structural shift to Union membership; the qualititative change in the employment relationship that has occurred over the last 30 years. In essence, as corporations have had more power in the labour market they have had greater power to treat workers like simple commodities.

[Die Neue Zeit]

http://tradeunion.wordpress.com/2012/04/29/an-indestructible-union-part-4/



There has been a qualitative shift in the employment relationship over the last 30 years that has placed severe pressure on the representative Union structure. Colloquially, this is known as the disappearance of the job for life. Like most instances of remembering historical relationships the notion of the job for life, is based on a combination of mythologising the past and the real life collective experience of the Australian working class.

First to the mythology. In reality, there was never such thing as the job for life. Exploitation and labour market turnover (voluntary and forced) was a part of life in the post-War Golden Age. Overall statistics for both the Australian and British labour markets suggest that there has only been a slight decrease in average lengths of tenure since the 1980s. However, like most global statistics this slight decrease tends to hide rather than reveal that which is actually going on. First, there has been a marked increase in job tenure for women over this period as more have entered the workforce and some have obtained relatively privileged positions within the labour market. Second, there has been a divergence in the labour market between those already occupying permanent positions of privilege and those just starting out (or restarting) going through a series of temporary/casual positions.

Some academics such as Guy Standing have argued (see The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class 2011) that this divergence is so great that it is forming a new class in the making, the precariat. While I agree with the overall phenomenon in terms of labour market insecurity and its real/potential political impact, I’m far more scepitcal about labelling the precariat as a separate class. It tends to ignore Marx’s analysis, in Capital (Vol. 1), of capital’s tendency to create a reserve army of labour that could be brought in and out at a moment’s notice to not only fulfill seasonal/contractual obligations but discipline the existing workforce and lower the overall price of labour.

This labour market divergence, however, is particular marked in Australia. Overall, 40% of the Australian workforce are in temporary or insecure forms of work arrangements from labour hire, fixed term contracts, through to direct casual (to name but a few). This constitutes one of the highest rates of temporary work in the OECD, period. Unsurprisingly, as this graph from the most recent Australian at Work report demonstrates, Australia has a significantly lower length of job tenure than EU countries:

[GRAPH IN LINK ABOVE]

The financial incentive to get rid of the so called job for life for employers is greatest in those sorts of roles that are both physical and deskilled, sectors such as manufacturing and general warehousing. It allows you greatly increase the rate of exploitation on the job to maximise your profits, and then easily toss the broken workers back onto society to bear most of those other inconvenient costs. It all leads to the attitude expressed by one worker and participant in the Australia at Work study:

…Like you don’t have a job for life. Or a right to a job for life, y’know, if they feel that you’re not needed…Oh I think that’s the way of the modern world. …. Got to accept it and move on (Male, 54 years).

If you want to get a really damning assessment of how our country has changed for working people, get a group of 40 blue collar workers who have all started work at different times in the last 40 years and ask them three things. How were they employed in their first post-school job? How are they engaged today? How has their work changed since they started? I’ve tried it, and would call the exercise “why Marx is right”.

This qualitative change in the labour market over the last 30 years has been particularly devastating to representative Union. Why? Because, being part of a representative Union is predominantly about getting together with the people you work with, at your employer, and have a union act for you in contract negotiations. This results in a two-fold difficulty for representative Unions. First, increased labour turnover lessens the appeal for workers to stand together at their existing place of work. This is because both the potential pay-off is decreased (I might be leaving soon anyway if I can get something better?), and the barriers are raised (a lot of my workmates might not care because they’re looking for something else/I’m a casual the boss might just tell the labour hire company to stop giving me shifts). Second, because the very structure of the Union (in both form and function) is tied to the employer when you leave it you leave your job. For example, you’re probably in the union because it makes your existing job/workplace better, and you have your Union contributions deducted out of your wage. So when you leave both you end up leaving the Union anyway, as well as leaving behind the primary reason you joined in the first place. This makes it very more difficult for representative Unions to recruit and retain members. Thus, members of a representative Union tend to be those occupying the more privileged positions within already unionised industries (the skilled tradies in a factory, the forklift drivers in a warehouse or the nurses in a hospital). As a general rule, union members on average have job tenures of 10 years as opposed to 5 years for non-members.

So unsurprisingly, the main reason in Australia today a worker will leave their Union (but by no means the only reason) is labour market mobility, which is either a change of employer, work location or industry (or a combination of any three of those factors). As such membership in a representative Union structure faces a dual challenge from the increased resources required to represent workers a particular workplace through ‘decentralised bargaining’, and greater labour market turnover. Some on the left today may subscribe to the view that the relatively weak state of the Union movement today is due to continued and concious consiprarcy by a parasitic class of collaborationist union officials. Maybe this was true once, but I’m afraid the contemporary truth is far more banal. The union movement today is largely populated by organisers and officials with good values who have no great love for either the Labor Party or the employers they deal with, but are largely too overworked by the bargaining and recruitment treadmills in the representative Union structure to have that much energy left to strategically change approach.

In the next post, I will go through how membership should be structured within a direct Union, turning current labour market tendencies into an organisational strength rather than a weakness for working people.

[Die Neue Zeit]

http://tradeunion.wordpress.com/2012/05/13/an-indestructible-union-part-5/



If you’re like me the stinking mess wafting up from the HSU East Branch makes you want to vomit. What pains me most is the gap between the reality of that Branch and what it could be. Their membership base is a range of allied health professionals and blue collar workers in the wider sector, i.e. a membership base intrinsically working around a key anchor institution in our society that cannot be either outsourced or shut down; hospitals. This should be a fighting union that wages huge campaigns and inspires other workers around Australia. But then again the strategic nature of the membership in building genuine people power in this country combined with what immediate difficulties that might cause for State (read Labor) governments probably provides a potent push for an (un)representative swill to take over to keep things ticking along (so to speak). The whole putrid affair shows up the mortality and limitations of the representative Union. The tale of the credit card and the prostitutes provides the media fodder but the wider story really is what appears to be the systemic fraud and large salaries of a few key operators combined with the lack of meaningful results/power that the membership exercised.

In this post I had intended to deal with some more technical aspects of how membership should work in a direct Union but the real world interrupted, so suck it. It’s forced me to cut to the chase more immediately and then tidy up the details later. The ever challenging Piping Shrike has written an insightful post in the last few days picking up on a ‘democratising’ debate going on within the Labor Party – a meme Kathy Jackson has picked up on. It’s one of those things that sounds nice but is really about providing an alternative basis on which a small elite can maintain control in a period of crisis – changing the way in which the legitimacy for representation is gained.

The direct Union, on the other hand, is about the membership as a collective having direct control over their own Union. A union is about workers coming together to exercise direct power in their workplace, industries and communities. It should be readily apparent that this is in no way possible without workers also being able to have direct control over the vehicle which is supposed to win them these victories. But this statement is a piece of glib obviousness compared with the hard work implementing this in reality - and it cannot be founded on a romanticised or idealised view of workers as the ideal other which will come to the rescue of a flawed society. It must be based on a recognition that there is no such as an inherent human nature – and that the actions and attitudes we see of people is at least partly a product of the structures we put in place.

Generally, in Australia today, unions have a representative structure. The membership is represented by a layer of elected officials (a mixture of full-time officials and those who remain on the job). It is these officials who are by and large left to determine and implement the administrative, industrial and political strategies of the union – if either the members are deeply unsatisfied with the results of these elected representatives, or the representatives themselves become divided, or they anger well-resourced outsiders (or usually a combination of all three factors), then there might be a challenge.

A direct Union would probably still require a layer of dedicated officials to assist in both researching, proposing and implementing the administrative, industrial and political strategies of the union. However, it would be the membership that would also have the power to propose and determine these strategies and policies. This would have to come through a mixture of face-to-face meetings/general assemblies, online participation and (sometimes) votes of the entire membership. Probably the most important piece of infrastructure for the direct Union is a full on web 3.0 site, a space that would allow geographically disparate but industrially connected members to deliberate together – there’s also a whole host of other functions that such a website would need to fulfill and given its importance this topic will be given its own space later. On such a website though, in a members only section of course, all of the Union’s administrative policies (including salary levels, membership contributions and credit card policies among other important topics) would be posted for free comment and suggested editing.

This could be supplemented by an annual general assembly for the union that is open to every single financial member – a hybrid physical and online meeting – occurring with booked meeting/conference facilities in each major metropolitan region as well as allowing members who may be unable to attend a chance to voice their opinions online. These meetings would vote on the Union’s budget for the coming year, decide the Union’s political strategy for that given year, and endorse/review the progress of significant campaigns. Such a general assembly to be a meaningful event though, would have to be a culmination of a series of informal meetings/committees and online forums open to all members to put in the significant amount of work for members to then make an informed decision. Think of it as a synthesis of structure and the democratic energy of the occupy movement.

There would still be leaders in such a structure but the basis for their power would be different – it would come less from ‘having the numbers’ and therefore controlling key offices – but rather being allied with and harnessing creative thinkers to drive progressive change, being persuasive enough to shift people, and doing the hard work of organising members. Having a structure to reward these character traits would not only be good for the movement but also good for the country. As an aside, I think we’re seeing a trend where personal authority and personal influence are becoming more and more mutually incompatible. I’m not sure whether it’s because (at least on a global scale) we’re going through a period of crisis, or whether there are other underlying technological or developing cultural reasons at play. So I can’t be sure how long or for how far this trend will shift, my instinct tells it’s certainly reversible and contingent.

This of course, all sets up an interesting paradox. What if the membership collectively and directly decides against any of the other structural changes I would propose as part of building a powerful direct Union? Well, shit happens.

[Die Neue Zeit]

http://tradeunion.wordpress.com/2012/05/27/an-indestructible-union-part-6/



Membership in a representative Union structure is really a dichotomy. Either you are a Union member or you are not a Union member. If it’s a recognised Union site then chances are you are probably a member, if it’s not a recognised Union site then you are probably not a member. And to be a member you must be paying your Union contributions. In contrast, direct Unionism abolishes the member/non-member dichotomy and replaces it with a continuum, and it does this by breaking the nexus between membership and paying contributions.

The separation of membership and contributions is really the structural means by which capital’s two key strategies for reducing worker power (over and above a direct assault on Unions) are transformed into trends which build levels of worker organisation. As I’ve outlined in earlier posts in this series, two developments in the industrial sphere have translated into a general hacking away at the membership of representative Unions; first is the decentralisation of bargaining away from an industry level to individual work sites, and second, is the growing rate of turnover with the rise of insecure work (especially for new entrants to the workforce). This has led to a situation where by and large (in the private sector), union membership is restricted to islands of key sites within some companies in the economy, and that within these islands membership is further (and sometimes deliberately) restricted to a core of permanent longer serving workers. The periphery of insecure workers are then largely ignored.

The membership continuum, however, can turn this into a trend that works for building worker power. First a disclaimer, as I’ve written repeatedly, all of these structural changes are dependent on active union campaigns. Otherwise, it’s akin to describing a powerful human body without a heart. It might look good but it’s not going to go anywhere. Supplementary to these membership changes though is an environment where unions are actively campaigning for insecure workers in a way that brings the core workforce together. Unlike Guy Standing who sees very little prospect for solidarity between secure and insecure workers, I think capital’s insatiable desire for more and more profit as quickly as possible will see it forcing more and more workers in the core to the periphery of the workforce. This leaves those remaining in the core working under the ever present threat of being made redundant or outsourced. This may work for employers in terms of day to day control of their workforce, but it’s also fertile organising territory. Australian unions have made a respectable start at starting campaigns that create this necessary context (see here and here). So, issues of context aside, a membership continuum turns the islands of unionism into pockets of dandelions in a field. As workers come through these sites and inevitably leave them they can float onto new fields as union members. It achieves this through a number of intersecting means.

First, direct Union membership is not continuously mediated by an employer through payroll deductions. Instead, when a member joins a direct Union they do so directly – membership contributions are paid directly to the Union either via electronic fund transfers or credit cards. Whatever the means any individual’s union membership is not dependent on ongoing employer cooperation. If this membership method were applied across the Australian union movement today, it would open up at least the structural possibility that hundreds of thousands of unionists each year could retain their memberships in non-union or anti-union workplaces. A structural possibility is, however, a long way from a structural imperative to retain union membership.

Second, workers leaving a workplace face a very real prospect of unemployment or underemployment. While many insecure workers within the islands of unionised workplaces face the real and ongoing prospect of underemployment. Removing the nexus between membership and contributions allows for the periodic suspension of contributions while retaining one’s underlying union membership. For example, it might be the case that a worker will not be getting a shift during the annual office shutdown – once this would have been enough to cancel a union membership.

At this point, you might be thinking that all I’ve done is collected a bunch of things that are already happening within many unions and turned them into a recipe for draining the union movement of key financial resources. If this was all there was you’d be right as I haven’t outlined any significant points on the spectrum as yet but briefly outlined the technical means by which a worker could move between through the spectrum and retain membership. And there is a very real tension that needs to be teased out here between underlying union values of equality and democracy combined with increasing involvement on the spectrum leading to more involvement and more rights. On this point, I don’t have all the answers but I know I don’t have all the answers.

A table of the direct Unionism continuum:

[TABLE IN LINK ABOVE]