Co-op or drop
Is the labour union still the best friend of the worker?
What do H&M and McDonald’s employees have in common with app developers and graphic designers? They are all part of the new social class- the precariat that is exposed to job insecurities and for whom zero-hour contracts, part-time work and ‘portfolio’ careers are becoming the norm. Both the state and the business repeat the mantra for more flexibility, which translates to less security for the workers. More than 15% of the workforce is self-employed in Britain alone with a tendency of outnumbering the employees in the public sector by 2018. So how can so many people escape this dreary shift in the nature of work? The answer is the old but not forgotten radical idea of unionized collective action.
But why is then union membership going down and in the USA it has reached a deplorable level of only 4.4%? For one reason, the current model was designed to encourage unionization in large scale industrial workplaces such as the automobile companies of the early 20th century. Bad management of the unions have made them non-existent in parts of the economy such as the digital sector. The labour laws in many countries do not empower the retail workers to bargain collective agreements and create unnecessary regulatory barriers. Still, more than 30% of the nonunion workers in the retail and financial sectors want to be part of a union.
Going against a big company is a daunting task for every employee and the case with Walmart is one example. The largest employer in the States is also a leader in the fight against unionization by resorting to tactics such as a hotline for managers to report union activity and pre-emptive closure of whole stores or departments that chose to unionize. However, one union-like association- Organization United for Respect at Walmart achieved somewhat success in 2015 when it managed to move workers to real life collective action through online organizing and more direct horizontal relations.
Previously, the Justice for Janitors movement organized under the Service Employees International Union managed to secure 27 master contracts with the cleaning contractors in the States and secure health benefits and full-employment for the janitors. Its success was due to a clear strategy of targeting the building owners and the financial moguls at the top who have power over the janitors’ livelihood.
What about the self-employed?
The self-employed are difficult to organize due to their dispersion. The Freelancers Union, unlike what its name suggests, is merely an association that while providing health insurance schemes to its members, lacks a real bargaining power to negotiate contracts. It did strike success though when it pushed New York City Council to pass a bill protecting freelancers from client nonpayment. In recent years the unions have reinvented themselves and have now transformed from pure strike organizers to service providers as well. Most of them have chosen to support cooperatives that are closer to the people. In the UK 50 music teachers formed a cooperative to market themselves to schools with the help of the Music Union. In Belgium a cooperative supports its 60 000 members by invoicing and collecting debts for them. In India the Self-Employed Women’s Association not only provides its 1.7 million members with insurance but also plays an important role in advocating for women’s rights.
Everything points that representation works. In the UK today union members make 21% than nonmembers in the public sector and 8% in the private sector. It is now even more vital to oppose reactionary employers trying to bring back 19th century practices and to bring back the job precarity by calling it flexibility of the work force. When new-age employers like Uber breached its obligations of pay, health safety and holidays, it was the British GMB union that carried the argument on behalf of the drivers in court and won. In 2013 in the bankrupt city of Detroit again a union organized the people to go on strike against McDonald’s- one of the few employers in the city, who exploited the dire situation of the people.
But the 21st century calls for more and the unions must adapt and amplify what they do best. Instead of defensive, they should take offensive positions and using modern tools to organize creative large scale campaigns and ensure a more transparent horizontal structure. The unions of today, together with cooperatives and other mutual organizations, can play a bigger role and provide not only representation, but also education and services that are otherwise not there for the self-employed and thus reinvent the democratic self-help. The future of work looks somber with workers taking less and less of the proceeds of growth and salaries shrinking thus creating a volatile situation. The solution is, as one Justice for Janitors campaigner put it, “Union or Death”.
