Union Inefficiencies / Bureaucrats

[Futility Personified]

https://www.iww.org.uk/node/903

I was thinking of joining the wobblies and was having a gander on their website when I found the above.

This is nearly a year old now, but it got me thinking about how union management has become so... poor. GMB one of the unions at a big employers in this part of the country, who managed to get a deal that put the workers at a disadvantage, seems to have tainted the idea of unions for many I know.

When I was in the SPEW one thing I heard at branch meetings was trying to get more socialists into union organisations and that they had faced hostility, another thing I heard was a number of SPEW members being kicked out of their union for just that.

So what's the deal? I doubt any generalisation formed here could be completely extrapolated for all the big unions, but why are they so shit? It sounds paranoid, but I could imagine in their heyday MI5 would've figured it worthwhile infiltrating them, yet there must be more to it than that.

Thoughts?

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

The top-down structure of unions is a massive block on them having any semblance of being participatory organs of workers' power.

We can't tell our unions to call a strike. Union meetings are often organised, staffed, led, and minuted by full-timers, which puts them (the bureaucrats) at a massive advantage in terms of getting their own ideas through, against the ideas of ordinary members (if ideas are conflicting).

We don't really have any voice over what our union says when 'representing' us, nor the actions they do or do not take. An example is the refusal of the NUS to organise a strike this autumn, so NCAFC has had to step in here in the UK to organise one instead.

A view I have held for quite a while is that, whilst unions are essential 'defensive' organs for workers - to ensure at least basic pay, conditions, pensions etc., they are in their nature unable to advance any sort of radical arguments that threaten capital, because they depend on capital to survive. It's paradoxical - the very union that positions itself against capital therefore has no reason to exist without capital's dominance, and so it ironically must always act in the long-term interests of capital to some extent if it is to ensure its own long-term survival as an organisation.