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

Unions

I support unions. If I have the chance to organize one with a future coworker, I’ll do it. And I will always vote in favour of unionization and even strike action. We don't have enough of them anywhere in Canada or beyond! They protect employees more than they don't. Unions are meant to help workers fight back against employers, especially those who steal wages, implement wage/salary tiers, and fire workers unfairly. Union workers enjoy better pay and benefits in contrast to non-unionized workers.

As much as I like unions, they aren't perfect. Unions operate within the rules of capitalism. They will not change this underlying economic system which requires competition, meaning winners and losers. For example, auto companies are in comeptition with each other all the time, and in a capitalistic economy, the natural result of this is defeating and potentially absorbing one's rivals, which only worsens the inequality and power disparity between the remaining workers and employers. That said, I'm not sure the purpose of unions is to overhaul this system. They're already busy fighting for better wages and benefits for their workers. My point is to argue that we shouldn't look at unions as the end goal. They are an incredibly important step in actually changing social, political, and economic structures, but they are not a panacea.

Disclaimer: 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 unionized workers would cause it to fold, there wasn't much of a business to begin with anyway. These businesses were always unsustainable pet projects running on the backs of their grossly exploited workers, and such places are fated to fail regardless of a union.

Another point is that old unions, especially those during the Reagan to Clinton era from the 80s-90s, were (and some still are) large, bureaucratic, and often agreed to big concessions with employers and business owners. In their infancy, they were even outright racist. Thankfully, unions have come a long way since. And that's coming from someone who typically dislikes race-based rhetoric, because it's been used by society's elite and powerful for generations to divide people based on skin colour and more. We are all equal as humans and deserving of good lives. But a point must be made about how unions can become too large and unfocused, much like university administrations taking up something like half of an institution's entire payroll.

Another disclaimer: surprise, this is also often used as a union-busting strategy. Employers may claim that union dues go toward feeding a big bureaucracy. I would counter this by pointing to the bureaucracy that exists in the workplace. Out of every, say, $100 you earn for the company from your work, how much of it are you getting paid? How much is your boss collecting from this amount? How much is their boss collecting? The shareholders? This is why it's important to be transparent about your wages (with your coworkers), but also to keep a union accountable. If a union really has grown too large to be useful to its workers, then the workers should form a new one! Always remember that a union is a worker led and run organization. If it stops being that, it's no longer serving its purpose.

The old unions contributed to the creation of a "labour aristocracy". A labour aristocracy forms in an industry where unionized workers are extremely successful, but stop expanding their union efforts to lower paid workers. It's a situation where although a workplace is unionized, some union members earn significantly more than others. It reflects the tiered-wage system unions have to fight against in modern struggles.

One thing that's missing from modern unions, especially some of the older ones, is militancy. Militancy means going on strike. If a union does not strike, it is a guild, or worse, a social club. Either way, a union that is unable or unwilling to strike reduces it to vanity or aesthetics. I don't remember exactly where or when I heard this, but I do remember hearing it from Paul Prescod on a podcast. (Prescod is a labour activist who I respect greatly.) Prescod mentioned that workers should not fetishize a strike. It took me a few months to reflect on this idea, and I think I understand the point better now. If unions focus too much or occupy themselves with strikes, they will fail to achieve the point of the strike: to negotiate better wages and benefits for their workers.

All this said, unions are fundamentally not designed to reform the broader system and I'm not sure that's a bad thing. Unions should focus on securing immediate benefits for their workers, and many do that already without striking. Beyond that, there are "worker centers", which operate independently from unions. An example I read about 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 are not 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.

Fortunately, that only makes me want to join or organize a union even more.