from Vol. 22 | Issue 4 | August-September 2003
ARE UNIONS OBSOLETE?
By Don Wells
Around the world, unions are in decline. For the first time since
the 1960s, the proportion of Canadians who belong to unions has fallen
below 30 per cent. Private sector union workers, once the bastion
of organized labour, are down to 14 per cent. Those employees whose
numbers are growing the fastest in Canada — the young, immigrants,
the private service-sector workers — are the least unionized.
Many argue that these trends reflect the irrelevance of unions in
the new global economy. Thanks to new technologies and management
systems, they say, workers in "post hierarchical" organizations
are now "empowered" on the job. Old antagonisms are said
to be dissolving in a new spirit of cooperation. We're all bosses
now. Academics talk about liberated, fulfilling work not as a radical
goal, but as capitalism's own project. From a pragmatic perspective,
some argue, this new "cooperation" reflects the realism
of our times. In today's hyper-competitive economy, labour-management
conflicts are luxuries we can't afford. So who needs unions?
About union decline there is no doubt. What is in doubt are these
explanations. Despite all the talk about "post hierarchical" work,
in workplaces where this kind of "liberating work" is supposed
to be found, management control is often stronger than ever before.
With few exceptions, the old divide between those who design work
and those who do it, between those who order and those who obey,
has not changed much at all.
Perhaps this is why the language of workplace empowerment is heard
less often these days. In its place, the more pragmatic language
of "competitiveness" and "survival" has emerged
as the dominant argument for union decline in the new global economy. "Free
markets," a set of abstract forces out there, have their own
in-built imperatives, we are warned. Non-unionism is at the top of
the list.
Yet, contrary to popular perceptions, unionized workplaces are often
more innovative and more productive than non-union workplaces. Unions
also tend to produce other good effects as major forces for greater
social equality. Workers are paid better, and it's almost impossible
to have decent health care, public pensions, public education, and
a host of other beneficial social policies without a strong labour
movement.
If union decline can't be explained on the grounds that work has
been liberated or that unionized workplaces aren't competitive, neither
can it be explained on the grounds that people don't want to join
unions. Survey after survey has shown that many workers want to join
unions. So why don't more people join unions? Employer and government
anti-unionism is a big part of the answer.
Noting a significant increase in anti-union discrimination around
the world, the UN-affiliated International Labour Organization (ILO)
cites Canada for denying workers the right to strike by abusing its
use of compulsory binding arbitration. The ILO also cites Canada
for denying collective bargaining rights to many public sector workers.
In addition, on the grounds that they provide "essential services,"provincial
governments now deny 10 to 15 per cent of their employees the right
to strike. Provincial governments have also weakened "unfair
labour practice" laws and eliminated provisions that certify
unions when enough workers have signed union cards. And provinces
have scrapped anti-scab laws and given employers more freedom to
hire and fire as they see fit. In the last decade, the proportion
of government jobs in the economy has fallen by almost a third. Most
of these have been union jobs.
Many private sector employers have been even more aggressive. In
addition to using court injunctions and "replacement" (scab)
labour, employers are using sophisticated union-busting teams. It
is common practice to use rigorous hiring procedures to eliminate
applicants with union sympathies. When employers commit unfair labour
practices, they frequently pay no penalties, and when they do pay
penalties, the fines can be less than those for jaywalking.
Governments have facilitated private sector anti-unionism by abandoning
the priorities they once gave to low unemployment policies, public
health care and other social programs that gave workers a measure
of protection. Enhancing economic insecurity, Ottawa has made huge
cuts in social welfare and in unemployment insurance coverage and
payments. Whereas nine of 10 unemployed workers were once eligible
for unemployment insurance, today fewer than four in 10 qualify.
In most provinces, the minimum wage has fallen below poverty levels.
These and other policies are promoting a flood of precarious, part-time,
short-term "bad jobs" with little job security, low wages
and no or few fringe benefits. For an increasing number of people
in Canada, stable jobs and careers have been replaced by a sequence
of employment "episodes," making it rarer to maintain a
fixed relation to any employer, or to co-workers and to one's community.
In this context, union organizing is much more difficult.
New management strategies are another reason for union decline. In
Canada, the U.S., and other industrial economies, modern industrial
unionism was born in large factories. Today, big factory capitalism
is declining. Employers are decentralizing, outsourcing and subcontracting
work. In part this reflects the fact that workplaces in growing sectors
of the economy, such as restaurants, retail stores, and financial
services, tend to be small. The trend to smaller workplaces also
reflects management's use of new information technologies to coordinate
production and distribution around the world. These smaller workplaces
are easier for management to control. They are also harder and more
costly for unions to organize and administer.
Similarly, new information technologies, together with declining
transportation costs and the decline of tariffs and other trade barriers,
make it easier for firms to locate in low-wage, high-repression,
largely non-union jurisdictions. In the U.S., for example, firms
have been moving to the U.S. South, where state "right to work" laws
make it illegal to require workers to join unions.
In such labour intensive industries as clothing, toys, electronics,
and footwear, transnational firms have been moving to China, Vietnam
and other countries where manufacturing wages are 20 or 30 cents
an hour. Typically, these corporations are part of complex global
production chains in which subcontractors subcontract to other subcontractors,
and where a host of small firms and home workshops diffuse and disguise
responsibility for labour rights. Many of these transnational corporations
now "regime shop" for even lower labour standards, pressuring
governments and workers to compete for investment and jobs by reducing
wages, accepting worse working conditions and restricting labour
rights, including the right to join unions.
More fundamental to explaining the decline of unions is the rapid
growth of the informal economy in almost every corner of the world.
Varying from country to country, and region to region, the informal
economy is highly diverse. It includes workers in survival activities
such as street vendors, shoe shiners, garbage scavengers, scrap and
rag pickers, paid domestic workers employed by households, home workers
and workers in sweatshops, and self-employed people operating on
their own or with family members. International economic organizations
such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund promote
this informalization of employment through "structural adjustment
programs" that pressure governments to privatize public sectors
and expand exports through anti-labour policies.
Indeed, it is in the informal economy that most jobs are being created.
In Africa, over 90 per cent of new jobs in the past decade have been
created in the informal economy. In Latin America, the informal economy
accounts for 60 per cent of urban employment, according to ILO data.
In Asia, informal employment ranges from 45-85 per cent of non-agricultural
employment. Informal employment is also growing in industrialized
economies. In the European Union, it is now estimated that "undeclared
work" amounts to 10-28 million jobs. Around the globe, an estimated
211 million children, between 5-14 years old, wash cars, shine shoes,
hawk, deliver goods, weave, make fireworks, matches, clothing, furniture,
and bricks, and do hard physical work such as scavenging, construction,
and commercial agriculture. Many of these children perform the most
dangerous and degrading forms of work, including prostitution and
drug trafficking, to survive.
These kinds of workers are least likely to have the right to join
unions. Most have been left completely outside the labour laws, with
little or no protection against arbitrary dismissal, workplace health
and safety hazards, excessive overtime and other violations of basic
labour rights and standards. All these "decent-work deficits," as
the ILO calls them, could be corrected if workers were able to form
strong, independent unions. However, even when workers do have an
official right to join unions, employers rarely allow it. According
to the ILO, those "in informal work represent the largest concentration
of needs without voice, the silent majority of the world economy."
Not only is the new global economy contributing to a "representation
deficit" when it comes to union rights, but, at the same time,
it is contributing to a "democratic deficit" when it comes
to citizen rights. Labour rights and democratic rights are inseparable.
Increasingly in the new, global economy, labour is becoming an unregulated
commodity. Where markets (that is, the bosses and banks) are sovereign,
the labour of citizens and of society is narrowed down to a mere
economic exchange instead of the heart of democratic politics. While
property rights have been constitutionalized in international economic
agreements, labour and other human rights have been left outside,
in the realm of the voluntary and private. Union rights are core
democratic rights. Democratic trade unions are more representative
of society than the memberships of all but a few political parties,
and far more representative than the plutocratic command structures
of private corporations. If the main point of government becomes
aligning so-ciety with these private "market forces," where
lies democracy?
As part of this new contest for democracy, there are signs that labour
movements are taking new forms. In Canada, these include "flying
squads" of workers, retirees, students and other activists who
support striking and locked out workers in other workplaces. These
also include solidarity actions between unions and the homeless,
and links between unions and a host of other social movements, including
the environmental, anti-racist, feminist, student, and peace movements.
Particularly prominent is the growing participation of unionists
in solidarity with workers in the global South, in the global justice
movement, and in the anti-war movement. There are also signs of a
re-emergence of grassroots participation in some unions, and of the
development of alliances with non-union workers.
Another indicator of revitalization is the shift toward new organizing.
In Canada, several unions are making dramatic increases in the resources
devoted to organizing growing numbers of private sector workers,
including hotel workers, restaurant workers, retail workers, and
security guards, many in part-time and temporary jobs. Many medical,
teaching and other professionals are also joining unions as part
of their resistance to public sector budget cuts. Often, professional
unionization is also in response to administrators' challenges to
professional autonomy, as in the U.S., where doctors are increasingly
at loggerheads with powerful "managed care" companies.
Many university teachers are unionizing because they face similar
challenges. The dire spectre haunting post-secondary education is
one of electronic teaching delivered by low-paid academic nomads
on short-term contracts, doing excessive teaching with little or
no time for their research.
"Community unionism" centred on alliances between unions and community
groups in pursuit of common goals is another indication of this revitalization.
In the communities in which they live, union members are working with minority
rights groups, religious groups, women's groups, training organizations and other
organizations. These union-community partnerships help with organizing drives,
promote improved community services, fight against cuts in social programs, campaign
against racial and gender discrimination, improve schools, build social housing,
and pursue a host of other community goals. In the U.S., for ex-ample, community
union-ism has been effective in helping to organize immigrant home workers, home
care providers, sweatshop workers and other marginalized, often invisible workers,
including undocumented immigrant work-ers. Recently, a broad coalition of labour,
religious and community groups worked with Latino and Chinese American workers
to pass an Unpaid Wages Prohibition Act. As a result, the state of New York now
has the strongest wage-enforcement law in the U.S..
In other parts of the world, unions are active in promoting democratic
worker cooperatives to organize workers. In Singapore, the labour
movement helped create a workers' co-op among self-employed taxi
and minibus drivers. In Benin, unions helped build a producer co-op
spanning 33 villages. In the Philippines, the labour movement organized
a cooperative for poor families by providing loans, training, and
a social security program, and by helping members to market their
products.
All these are signs not of the demise of unions, but of the labour
movement's growing adaptation to the new global econ-omy. The history
of un-ions is a history of workers organizing themselves on the basis
of solidarity with each other and with their allies. The need for
workers to organize themselves has not changed.
Printer friendly page | Email this article | Subscribe to Our Times | Top of page
