Back to index of Nerve 13 - Winter 2008

Got a boss? You need a Union!

By Danny McGowan

For trying to uphold some measure of democracy in our working lives, globally trade unionists suffer victimisations and harassment, even imprisonment and assassinations. From Karen Reissmann (a mental health nurse sacked for union activities) to our Colombian brothers and sisters struggling against Coca-Cola and the state, respect and solidarity is owed to all those who take a stand and defend the right to organise.
In this country, trade union laws have been introduced to stifle workplace self activity. Despite this over seven million people remain members, with enormous collective potential. Although membership is ageing, like the general population, and is concentrated in the public sector, no-one should accept the myths that unions are powerless or a thing of the past. Just this summer, 650 tanker drivers contracted out by Shell took industrial action and won a 14.5% pay increase over two years.
With the prospect of workers being made to pay the cost of the next economic recession, and increasingly that of climate change, unions are as necessary as ever.

Constraints and contradictions

Unions developed in tandem with industrial development. This has undoubtedly shaped our official structures, which are in many respects part of the system they seek to restrain and negotiate with.
Set up to give the union leaders a political voice, the Labour Party has brought them into the institutions of the British state over the last century. While the achievements of the welfare state are undeniable, New Labour's neo-liberal assault on it means that most unions are now questioning this relationship on some level.
There are other constraints. Unions traditionally represent their own members first, and there can be petty bureaucratic rivalries and narrow sectional interests, as against what represents the needs of all workers and oppressed people. However the union movement has been a leading anti-racist force for decades, opposes the British National Party and supports the rights of refugees and migrant workers.
Unions work by mobilising a united workforce, and this can mean moving at a slow pace. It also means that 'revolutionary unions' with an ideological appeal to a handful of activists have little relevance for now. There is, however, a rank and file union tradition that stresses the active participation of workers in struggle, in ways that can relate to the politics of today's 'direct action' activists.

Get involved!

Workplace struggles are an ongoing fact of life in capitalism; the challenge for us is to build solidarity for independent working class politics though our networks. Ultimately workers run every corporation, giving them the potential to shut them down, and run society in a better way instead.
Activists who dismiss the unions as a whole, or who don't understand or connect with the pre-occupations of working class people, run the risk of being dismissed in turn, to the detriment of us all. The alternative is to bring new, radical politics to a movement that clashes with capitalism, to make another sort of resistance possible. Unity is strength, after all.

For more ideas, discussion and debate on this feel free to contact us at education.officer@unitemchs.co.uk

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