Conference on Organized labour
Responses to the Conference Paper
Professor Simon Clarke
Warwick University, UK
19 October 1998
Organized Labour in the 21
st
Century: Comments
I think that this is a very clearly structured and presented document that pinpoints a series of key issues confronting trade unions. My reservations are more about what is left out (or just downplayed) than what is included.
I think that the document is rather too exclusively IR-focused and organizationally oriented and in this sense is rather 'North-centric'. The emphasis is on the problems facing the trade unions in attempting to retain or build on their traditional role as agents of collective bargaining in the face of changes in the world economy and employer actions. But I think this rather begs the question of whether the trade unions themselves have some responsibility for the situation in which they find themselves and whether more fundamental rethinking might be needed which could lead to different foci of trade union activity and different forms of trade union organization. In this respect there may be more to learn from other trade union traditions and experiences than is comfortably allowed for here.
I think that three areas, in particular, merit more attention.
The first is the 'end of corporatism' issue, which is the central issue in the transition countries and in parts of the developing world, where the corporatist functions of the unions were their primary functions and where the issue is much deeper than merely that of the unions establishing their representative status. In response to globalization/neoliberalism the tendency of the unions is to try to hold onto those corporatist functions, even if they become more and more a charade, and the state may still provide them with a symbolic space in which to play out that role, while new unions or non-union social organizations emerge to represent the grassroots activists who are engaged in active struggles against restructuring. The trade unions face a very difficult dilemma because institutionally it is very attractive, and much more secure, to continue to play out the corporatist charade, to struggle for the restoration of corporatist structures, to seek to restore official recognition as the authentic voice of the working class, while resisting pressures for change which come from below.
This issue is crucial in the transition countries, and the basis of a real strategic division. On the one side are those who are primarily concerned with maintaining existing organizational structures in the face of a declining ageing male membership with the focus being on organization, education and recruitment. On the other side are those who favour a much more positive issue-based thrust: the decline in union membership is only symptomatic of the fact that the unions don't do anything, there is still a large membership and a mass of discontent to be harnessed, so the question is not so much one of organization per se, but of identifying the issues around which to mobilise.
The second is the whole issue of the social wage/health, education and social services/pension provision/unemployment insurance, all of which are under attack on a global scale, with the attack being orchestrated by the World Bank. This links up with the globalization of services, which in a sense is more of a threat to the working class as a whole than the globalization of production, since the bulk of those services have always been public services. Some of the trade unions and ITSs have been doing some good work in the area, but it seems to me that this is a fundamental issue which all trade unions should be addressing more actively, one which has considerable potential for campaigning and which provides scope for coalition building, for experiments with new forms of organization and for broadening the base of the trade union movement by involving workers as producers and as consumers. Here the transition and developing countries can learn a lot from the failure to stem the tide of privatisation of services in the industrialised countries. This is alluded to in the section on the hostile economic environment, but as a matter only of the scale of provision, not of its form.
The third issue relates to the question of the identity of the trade union member which is alluded to in the initial reference to the traditional core of union membership, but whose full significance is not really developed. The 'traditional' image of the union member was the male wage-earning head of household, and even in organizing women workers the trade union movement has typically been oriented to defending the position of the role and identity of its core members as breadwinners. The fragmentation of work, diversification of sources of household income, the growth of the informal sector and so on not only raise the question of how these discrete groups of workers can be organized, but also the prior question of the sense in which these people identify themselves as workers, so of the basis on which they can be organized. This has been picked up by the post-modernists in terms of individual versus class identity, consumer versus producer etc, and this perspective has informed some trade union organizational and recruiting strategies. I think that their critique is correct: that only a minority of the labour force are bread-winning household heads, but their conclusion is quite wrong. The issue is not individualism against collectivism, but recognising the household rather than the individual as the locus of the struggle for existence and building collective organization on the basis of the diversity of activities and interests combined in households. There has been some innovative work done here by trade unions in the industrialised countries, but here the experience of trade unions, and maybe even more the NGOs, in the developing countries can perhaps be extremely illuminating as they have had to grapple with the problems of organizing oppressed and exploited people whose social identity is by no means unambiguously defined by their location within a wage relation (and again the experience of the transition countries, with their very high female participation rates and B work-orientation among women, is useful). The failure of the trade unions to address this question has enabled the neo-liberals, led by the World Bank, to depict themselves as the true representatives of the general interest of the poor and underprivileged, and the trade unions as representatives of the sectional interests of a privileged minority. I think the issue has come out very starkly in the child labour campaign which has seen some of the NGOs campaigning against the ILO and ICFTU, in support of child labour.
In sum, it seems to me that the perspectives of the programme could be broadened beyond the present implicit identification of organized labour with labour organizations to look more closely at the problem of organization and representation of labour from the perspective of the labourers themselves.
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