Unions(?)

I want to clarify this first: I support unions. 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 and fire workers unfairly. Unions are, or should be entirely made up of workers, who protect themselves and each other through unity and solidarity. Union workers enjoy better pay and benefits than non-unionized workers, and people know this, as poll after poll suggests broad support for unions and their efforts. The only reason this doesn't happen more often is almost entirely due to employer interference in union efforts - anything to avoid paying their workers, who generate the entirety of the employer's profits, a fair share for their work.

As much as I like unions, they aren't perfect. I wrote about this briefly in my writing about nonprofits several years ago, but I didn't really recognize the inherent weaknesses of unions at the time. More importantly, I never discussed alternatives to unions. The short version is that unions are a part of the system (we live in a society, ha-ha) which immiserates people in the first place. They depend on the business their workers work for and within. Conseqeuently, workers also depend on the business's position in the economic system, in that if the business folds or goes bankrupt, the union can't do anything about it.

It's important to mention here that this is a common union-busting threat used by employers to intimidate workers. This is, of course, a bluff. A business never "goes out of business" as a result of their employees unionizing. To put it simply, if a business was struggling, there wouldn't have even been enough employees for a union to exist in the first place. My point is about the broader impacts of a business on a union, rather than the other way around.

Old unions, especially those during the Reagan to Clinton era from the 80s-90s, are large, bureaucratic, and often agree 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 typially dislikes using race-based rhetoric, because it's been used by society's elite and powerful to divide and polarize working people based on skin colour and more. We are all equal as humans and deserving of good lives. More recently, "labour aristocracy" has become a sore spot for unions. A labour aristocracy forms when a union's workers become alienated from their union. Meanwhile, union bosses and management (the aristocracy) hoard union dues, or worse, spending it on themselves as shown by the Hoffa era. from when in reality it should have always been democratically supported. A union must comprise workers, not union bureaucrats.

What's missing from modern unions, especially some of the older ones, is militancy. Militancy means going on strike. This is the entire reason unions exist. If a union does not strike, it is a guild. Guilds are just aesthetics, which is admittedly an oversimplification, but benefits and wages are not the main purposes of a guild. It was only a century ago that Winnipeg went on its eponymous general strike, bringing businesses to its proverbial knees, and winning big reforms for the labour movement across the country. When's the last time we had one of these? We got close, sure, with the education workers' strike in Ontario, but the law was so restrictive that the union representing those workers were arguably forced to concede without winning what they deserved (read: much higher pay and better benefits). Nobody won that fight except the feckless Ford government. I guess the silver lining in all this is that unions can afford to strike (that's what union member dues are paying for, right union presidents?) and should strike. Jacobin recently published an article showing how the Labor Movement is loaded with funds, but doesn't use this money to expand and organize. Gone are the days when a union organizes the workers and the communities they live in to fight for fairer wages and better working conditions. Instead, we have union bureaucrats collecting multiples' worth of their constituency's wages.

The function of unions is not to reform the broader system and I don't think that needs to change. Unions must keep securing immediate benefits for their workers. If they are unable to do so due to employer resistance, they need to strike. But unions can't do everything! I recently learned of something called "worker centers" during a Labor Notes presentation. Worker centers operate outside the purview of unions and fulfill workers' needs in ways that unions can't. 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 unions have failed to address the concerns of their workers, let alone all workers.