Unions, strikes and class consciousness today (original) (raw)
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Rethinking unions, registering socialism
Socialist Register, 2012
A fter three decades of the waning of trade unions as a social force, their generally anaemic response to the Great Financial Crisis cannot but be registered. With the failure to build on the golden opportunity offered up by Occupy's demonstration that audacious action can touch a populist nerve-punctuated by the eventual defeat of Wisconsin labour's recall electoral strategy over a year after its exemplary occupation of the state assembly (which predated Occupy Wall Street by six months)-the left today confronts a more discomfiting question: does the rejuvenation of unions still really remain possible, or are unions now exhausted as an effective historical form through which working people organize themselves? To be clear, the issue is not whether unions and union-led struggles are about to disappear. Unions will stagger on, sometimes very heroically. They will carry on organizing, bargaining and filing grievances. And they will continue to strike, march, demonstrate and on occasion remind us of working-class potentials. But trade unions as they now exist no longer appear capable of adequately responding to the scale of the problems working classes face-whether the arena of struggle is the workplace, the bargaining table, the community, electoral politics or ideological debate. 1 Although a recent symposium on unions in developed capitalist countries concluded that 'the declining trend is visible everywhere', this essay will focus on the impasse in US labour. 2 The last time the US working class faced a comparable economic and internal crisis, during the 1930s, industrial unionism came to the fore. What new form of working-class organization might explode onto the agenda this time? Then, communists and socialists were vital to the formation and orientation of unions, at a time when radical organizers were inspired by the notion that workers could become the historical agents of a new society and unions might become schools for socialism. Is it still credible, in light of recent history, to believe that working people might one day be at the centre of radical social transformations? 3
The Marxist View of the Labor Unions: Complex and Critical
WorkingUSA, 2013
Since the world economic crisis of 2008 and governments' increasing demands for austerity in countries around the globe, labor unions have failed to provide leadership to the working class. This has led to a debate about the value of unions and their role in social change. Longstanding socialist organizations and emerging nonstate socialist and anarchist groups have begun an important discussion of the nature of the labor unions, the character of their leaderships, and their relationship to employers and the state. Marx and Engels are often referred to or cited as authorities in these debates, though seldom do we have an overview of how they arrived at their complex understanding of labor union structures, leaderships, politics, and behaviors. This essay is meant to contribute to this important discussion by examining Marx's and Engel's involvement in the workers' movement, including with the labor unions, as well as their writings about labor unions, placing them in the broader context of their revolutionary socialist strategy and vision. We trace the development of these ideas from their first involvement with the workers movement in the mid-1840s until the death of both by the 1890s. Finally, we conclude by making a summary of their considered opinion. Marxist socialists have a complicated and critical attitude toward labor unions. 1 The general reasons for this are no doubt obvious to anyone who has thought about them. Labor union leaders generally fight for higher wages, while Marxist socialists struggle to end the wage system. Trade union leaders often see strikes as unfortunate if sometimes necessary struggles that temporarily disrupt the labor union's usual and ongoing partnership with capital. Socialists on the other hand see strikes as essential to maintaining workers' fighting spirit and preparing workers to engage in class war and eventually to carry out a social revolution to overthrow capitalism. Trade union leaders tend to see their unions as the only legitimate vehicle and voice of the working class, while socialists tend to see trade unions as too limited in their scope-excluding as they often do much of the working class, especially ethnic and racial minorities, women, immigrants, domestic and farm workers, the unemployed, and the indigent. Socialists, on the other hand, organize workers not only into unions but also into educational groups, workers parties, social movements, and revolutionary socialist organizations. Unions foresee no alternative workers' organization, while socialists envision the organization of workers into community or industrial councils that would include virtually all workers, broad organizations that would bs_bs_banner
Since a couple of time the events around the year and cipher "1968" are examined in historical research as a global and transnational phenomenon. The focus is particularly laid on the student-and youth protests in the western and eastern world and on the so called anticolonial liberation movements in the global south. Beside this scholars have also begun to address strike movements and conflicts on the work place, which had reached in industrial countries of Europe and both Americas too a significant high level in the 1960s and 1970s.
Introduction. Strikebreaking and industrial vigilantism as a historical problem
Corporate Policing, Yellow Unionism, and Strikebreaking, 1890–1930, 2021
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Europe, the United States and large areas of the globe experienced labour unrest and multiple strike waves at an unprecedented pace and intensity, some of which developed a quasi-revolutionary momentum. From the bitter conflicts of the pre-war period, through the epochal tremors of war and revolution, to the violent spasms of the 1920s and 1930s, a sense of impending cataclysm, symbiotically associated with fears of revolutionary upheaval and forebodings of social anarchy, ceaselessly haunted those who had assumed the role of guardians of the established order. While much work has been devoted to socialist parties and revolutionary organisations, the multifaceted experiences of anti-labour mobilisation and privately organised coercion have not received the same degree of scholarly attention.
2016
Ever since the onset of the international economic crisis in 2008 and the consequent collapse of the Celtic Tiger and the Irish banking system we have seen the abject failure of the Irish trade union movement to mobilise serious resistance to the attempts by successive governments to make working people and the underprivileged pay for the crisis of the system. There has, it is true, been some opposition: in January 2009 the unions organised a huge public sector workers demonstration of at least 120,000 and on November 24, 2009 held a public sector workers strike involving 300,000. Then in November 2010 the Irish Congress of Trade Unions held another big march of up to 100,000. But on each of these occasions the union leaders failed to follow through. After the November 24 strike the proposed strike for 3 December was withdrawn and massive pay cuts accepted. After the 2010 march they simply did nothing. In other words they led their troops up the hill and promptly led them down again...