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VI. Assessing the Efficacy of "Union Organizing" Strategies in Union Revitalization Projects in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States
Discussion
Gregor Gall
University of Hertfordshire
It’s clear that the “union organizing” projects in the Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom have now been underway long enough to warrant being subject to rigorous examination as attempts at what is generally termed “union revitalization.” Although the three papers focus on different aspects and dimensions of union organizing, the results in the three countries have been poor, whether judged by absolute or relative measures or narrow or wide definitions of “union organizing.” This is a salutary lesson, for much energy and hope has been invested in union organizing. What I want to do as the discussant is to look at the bigger transnational picture to examine the issues of the grand narrative of union organizing and union revitalization (rather than engage in comparative analysis).
Let me begin by saying that if you were in the national leadership of a union or union movement in any of the three countries, then the rationale of union organizing seems evidently rational. Unions are experiencing prolonged, multifaceted crises, and as a general secretary or national executive member, you have been charged with the responsibility of defending and growing your union by deploying the resources you have at your disposal. Therefore, you deploy administrative and leadership solutions using technocratic and bureaucratic means (like best practice and good management). This means operating in a centralized, top-down way in order to exert control over the process you have initiated and secure the best use of and outcome from your scarce resources. Consequently, you employ people as full-time organizers and train others in core skills and favored perspectives—which has been characterized by some as “managed activism,” or the cultural reproduction of union activists. Union organizing has come to be a strategy and practice, and it is on this basis that I want to raise seven questions of a quantitative and qualitative nature.
Question 1: Would more of the same—that is, more union organizing—lead to the “breakthrough” that is much desired (however defined)? Answer: Clearly, the answer must be no based on the evidence we have before us, and it is unlikely that it is possible to get much more in the way of resources to allow even the attempt at a lot “more of the same.” As practiced and preached, union organizing is just not up to the quantitative and qualitative scale of the task of regenerating the union movements. Of course, I do not mean to say that any other alternatives are either. Indeed, there seems to be no other alternatives, and so union organizing remains something of a “one horse town.” Question 2: How much worse off would the union movements be without union organizing? Answer: We can use the counter- or alter-factual method to ask, Has union organizing gotten in the way of something bigger and better? This is a difficult question to answer because other than there being a vibrant grassroots union movement within centralized bargaining regimes—like what existed in part at around the high-water mark of postwar labor unionism (which was not the case in the last twenty years), in a period of labor quiescence and a downturn in the level of workers’ industrial struggle—it is hard to see what other progressive alternative might have emerged in its place. This at least means that in assessing union organizing we should reconsider the usually disdainful approach that we take to the relationship between full-time officers/union leaders and the “rank-and-file” in the present heavily contingent period where the role of the national union and its officers has arguably increased (indeed, had to increase) in importance. Question 3: Has union organizing tried to recreate unions as social movements, or has it missed the point entirely, namely, that unions are social movements and should be treated as such? Answer: If union organizing has tried to recreate organized labor as a social movement, it is fundamentally misconceived, for it would be facile, much less ahistorical and atheoretical for a centralized, top-down managerial initiative to try to do so (given that social movements are of a different nature and genesis). If union organizing has not tried to do so, how then does it relate to unions as social movements, and are we essentially left waiting for unions to renew themselves through an upswing in industrial struggle such as the Kondratieff cycle? Of course, many might respond that simply waiting for the return of the “good times” is defeatist, abstentionist, and just plain wrong (they may never return), but that cannot detract from a hard-headed analysis of the inherent and contextual weakness and limitations of union organizing. For example, just how much can union organizing achieve when the terms of the terrain—dominated by the ascendancy of neo-liberalism and employer power—are now so different and deleterious compared to thirty to forty years ago? Question 4: Has union organizing effected a separation between “representation” and “organizing” that necessarily leads to dislocation and poor results? Answer: There is strong evidence that union organizing has compartmentalized “organizing” so that one union hand does not know what the other union hand is doing and vice-versa, cumulatively leading to a lack of integration and thus also efficiency and effectiveness. This may be indicative of the idea of union organizing not having won over the lower levels of the union and sectional interests (“servicing” existing members) still predominating. Question 5: Has union organizing focused too heavily on the workplace, union recognition (certification), and micro-institutional rights to the exclusion of the wider process and forces outside of the workplace? Answer: Certainly, workplace unionism is a weak and fragile phenomenon in the current period if it does not become enmeshed with and supported by other means of union leverage external to the workplace, most obviously, political, ideological, and legal means. We need to remember that no workplace is an island. Question 6: Following from this, have unions, in effect, ignored the issues of membership mobilization in a variety of arenas because the focus has been on the “numbers game” of membership figures and worker support in recognition/certification elections? Answer: Examples of union practice in countries with extremely low membership (like France) or poor membership levels (Greece and Italy) suggest that much can still be achieved (albeit of a defensive rather than offensive nature) by mobilizing existing members through collective mass actions like general strikes and demonstrations, which momentarily cripple economic activity and in so doing give voice and some political leverage. Moreover, more productive results might be gained from concentrating on encouraging existing members to be active and developing more members as activists rather than chasing the eternal rainbow of new members and new activists from outside. If unions could be more effective with their existing members, maybe this would allow a demonstration effect to be built up (on union premiums, wage mark-up, and the like), which would, particularly in high profile cases, become its own talented and successful recruiting sergeant. Question 7: Can the practices of some successful individual unions practicing union organizing be disaggregated from their contingent environments and the core of what they are doing be generalized and transferred to other unions? Answer: The most obvious example of the SEIU and the TGWU (TGWU section of Unite) in Britain is still in its infancy, so it is too early to make a definitive judgement. The same is true of the SEIU and LHMWU in Australia. That said, we would be well-advised not to wait with bated breath.
So to conclude, I have heuristically raised and speculatively answered a number of probing questions concerning union organizing that are germane to all three countries. While being aware that we cannot treat unions or union movements as unitary, homogeneous bodies (meaning that it is facile to call upon ”unions” to do x or y), it is still correct to raise these questions in order to think through the salient issues. Thus, I would suggest that we are still far away from resolving the tensions of unions being “down but not out,” whereby the mighty are fallen but still have agency to do something about their predicament. In other words, for the unions the battle between structure and agency is still an ongoing one; we have not yet worked out the answers. Likewise, we are still far from resolving the tensions between unions as leaders and followers of their members with regard to union organizing. The saying goes, “Give me the troops and I’ll go to war.” But who is that being said to and by whom?
Again speculatively, I would venture that much may be learned by considering the writings of the long-dead Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who enjoined us to conceive of struggles against employers, governments, and capitalism in terms of “wars of position” through a long battle with the contesting cultural and ideological hegemony of the status quo fought by creating antihegemonic alliances. Gramsci’s writings speak to our epoch of “down but not out” for organized labor and the necessity of wider conceptions of worker collectivism that are not primarily characterized by economism. In so doing, perhaps we can better understand in retrospect what went wrong as well as in prospect how to make what we want to happen, happen.
Author’s address: Business School, Hatfield AL10 9AB
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