Quick note: I originally wrote this piece around 2023, but have since edited it several times for conciseness and clarity.

Organize NOW

As a preface, I support unions. If I ever have the chance to organize one with future coworkers, I’ll do it. And I will always vote in favour of unionization, as well as actions beyond that, like strike action. We don't have enough unions nor strikes in Canada. Unions help workers fight back against employers, especially those who steal wages (inadequate raises, made-up nonsense wage penalties, etc.), implement wage/salary tiers, and fire workers unfairly. Unionized workers enjoy better pay and benefits in contrast to non-unionized workers.

Unions aren't perfect because they operate within the rules of capitalism. This underlying economic system demands competition, which by nature produces few winners and many losers. Companies and corporations are in comeptition with each other all the time, and in a capitalist economy. When companies outcompete others, who are absorbed or go bankrupt, it only worsens the inequality and power disparity between the remaining workers and their much more powerful employers.

Personally, I don't think the purpose of unions is to overhaul the system they're forced to work within. Their job is to fight for better wages and benefits for their workers in their current situation. However, we can certainly achieve broader political and economic goals by increasing union density. More unionized workplaces not only gives power back to working people - it also encourages non-union employers to raise their standards to match those of unionized workplaces.

Employers may threaten that a business will fail or go bankrupt if workers in a workplace form a union. Never forget who makes decisions in a business and how it operates, including how pay is distributed. If the business was struggling so much that its workers unionizing would cause it to fold, there wasn't much of a business to begin with anyway. Businesses like this are always unsustainable pet projects running on the labour of severely exploited workers. Such places are fated to fail regardless of their workers unionizing.

Another point is that old unions, especially those during the Reagan to Clinton era from the 80s-90s, were (and some still are) big bureaucracies that often made concessions to employers. In their infancy, they were even outright racist.

Employers may use this as a union-busting strategy. They would claim that union dues go toward feeding a big bureaucracy. The irony is that the bigger, and more parasitic bureaucracy already exists in the workplace. Out of every, say, $100 you earn for the company by doing your work, how much of it are you getting paid? How much is your boss getting from that? How much is their boss getting, if they exist? How about the shareholders? Out of the profits directed toward everyone but the workers, how much of that is being used to improve the workplace, give you better benefits, or simply distributed as raises?

Not to digress too much, but you should absolutely share wage and salary information with your coworkers. But more importantly, there should be wage transparency at the very top - everyone should know how much their boss makes.

A union must be accountable to you and your coworkers. If a union really has grown too big and inefficient to be useful to its members, then the workers should form a new one! Unions must be worker-led organizations. If they stop being that, they're no longer serving their purpose.

Indeed, some older, larger unions have created "labour aristocracies". Unionized workers who win good contracts inevitably have high wages and benefits. That's great! The problem happens when these same workers fail to extend their winnings to lower paid or newer workers. Eventually, members of the same union could end up with large pay disparities, reflecting tiered-wage systems unions have to fight against in modern struggles.

One way to prevent a labour aristocracy, especially in older unions, is militancy. Militancy means going on strike. If a union doesn't strike, it's a guild. Worse, it's a social club. A union that's unable or unwilling to strike reduces it to a vanity project, which is the same reason identity politics fails to achieve anything meaningful for the people it's purpotedly helping. Again, the purpose of a union is to secure immediate benefits for its members. Members refers to all union members, not just workers with seniority.

Beyond that, there are "worker centers", which operate independently from unions. An example in No Shortcuts by Jane Macalevey was the North Carolina Smithfield fight, where worker centers played an important role in teaching workers English so they could engage their employer's lawyers (read: cronies) more effectively. They aren't rivals with unions, but the existence of alternative organizations shows how those not interested in unions for whatever reason can and do help the working class in other ways that unions can't.

Of course, it's easy to write "I support unions". I've (unknowingly) attempted to organize a union once, but once was enough to learn that unions are one of the best and most accessible ways to improve the lives of workers in your workplace and beyond. We have to start at unions, because this is where most of us are. We give the best hours of the best days of the best years of our lives to employers, as economist Richard Wolff has said.

Mass unionization can help us win permanent universal benefits, like making paid breaks into law. Long ago, unions won us the 9-5; the 8-hour workday. For generations, it was an unspoken rule that you would get a lunch break while on the clock. Then, employers slowly stole another half hour of the day from us, because they insisted on the letter of the law. (Incidentally, much of labour law seems like it was written to protect employers and the wealthy, sometimes at the expense of worker protecctions.) A former employer I worked for took away the tacit paid breaks from my former coworkers and me. 8-hour workdays became 8.5-hour workdays for those of us who dared to eat - to survive. That single act of utter tyranny, callousness, and inhumanity taught me everything I needed to know about whose side I want to be on in what is and always has been a class war.

Get started here: https://workerorganizing.org/resources/organizing-guide/?amp#download