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Labour thoughts
Aug. 9th, 2013 01:00 pmThis morning there was an interview on Metro Morning with Ken Lewenza, the outgoing head of the CAW, who is stepping down because he feels that someone with more energy and time to go before retirement should be the head of the new uion created by the merger of the CAW and the CEP. The discussion turned to the issues confronting the union movement and Lewenza made the usual points about the increasing wage and power equality issues in the workplace.
And I thought "you'll have to do better than that".
He made the right points, theoretically, but there was nothing there that I could see that would appeal to the people he needs to appeal to. Yes, lots of people are suffering from reduced incomes, flexibility, expectations, etc. ... but instead of looking at the trends and saying, "we need to get organized to respond to this" their reaction seems to be "Look at those overpaid people in union jobs; they need to be pulled down to our level". If you're going to appeal to the current labour force, it's going to require a new twist, and probably a lot more fire in the belly.
If you're going to be forming One Big Union, you might as well at least adopt the model of the people who were serious about it, the IWW, and bring it up to date.
Occupy tried, but for all of a general willingness of just about everyone to point at the 1%, it hasn't spread or become a self-sustaining growth movement with political pull (unlike its dark mirror-image, the Tea Party or equivalent, who are responding to many of the same forces -- senses of disempowerement and lack of options -- in their own way).
There's also the problem that most of the issues aren't just with the 1%, but structural problems which implicate a much larger swathe at the top, or towards the top, of the pyramid.
There's also the problem that (except maybe at the scale of the IWW) unions may not be in the best position to respond to the current challenges. For all of their strong points, they are very tightly tied to the current employment model (at best, they would want to replace capitalist owners with public ownership, and see how well that has worked out in North America recently for the public sector workers). But in light of the real possibility that the only way out of the tunnel may be to shift to a leisure society where basic needs are decoupled from the need to hold a job and the status (and general burden) of labour shift radically, an attachment to a 19th-20th century labour model may not be a strength.
It's worth noting that the preindustrial model, for all of its entwinement with a scarcity economy, may be somewhere to look for partial models for that shift. Many if not most preindustrial workers worked only for as long as needed to supply their needs / wants (food, shelter, drink) and then would cut out and relax for the rest of the week. A similar attitude might work better with a (relatively) surplus economy where only a comparatively small amount of labour (at the level of society as a whole) is required than one which emphasizes the dignity of labour and condemns taking time off as laziness. A great deal flows from the extension of middle-class idealization of labour -- "the devil still finds work for idle hands to do" -- to both the upper and lower classes during the 19th century: people used to aspire to being idle.
And I thought "you'll have to do better than that".
He made the right points, theoretically, but there was nothing there that I could see that would appeal to the people he needs to appeal to. Yes, lots of people are suffering from reduced incomes, flexibility, expectations, etc. ... but instead of looking at the trends and saying, "we need to get organized to respond to this" their reaction seems to be "Look at those overpaid people in union jobs; they need to be pulled down to our level". If you're going to appeal to the current labour force, it's going to require a new twist, and probably a lot more fire in the belly.
If you're going to be forming One Big Union, you might as well at least adopt the model of the people who were serious about it, the IWW, and bring it up to date.
Occupy tried, but for all of a general willingness of just about everyone to point at the 1%, it hasn't spread or become a self-sustaining growth movement with political pull (unlike its dark mirror-image, the Tea Party or equivalent, who are responding to many of the same forces -- senses of disempowerement and lack of options -- in their own way).
There's also the problem that most of the issues aren't just with the 1%, but structural problems which implicate a much larger swathe at the top, or towards the top, of the pyramid.
There's also the problem that (except maybe at the scale of the IWW) unions may not be in the best position to respond to the current challenges. For all of their strong points, they are very tightly tied to the current employment model (at best, they would want to replace capitalist owners with public ownership, and see how well that has worked out in North America recently for the public sector workers). But in light of the real possibility that the only way out of the tunnel may be to shift to a leisure society where basic needs are decoupled from the need to hold a job and the status (and general burden) of labour shift radically, an attachment to a 19th-20th century labour model may not be a strength.
It's worth noting that the preindustrial model, for all of its entwinement with a scarcity economy, may be somewhere to look for partial models for that shift. Many if not most preindustrial workers worked only for as long as needed to supply their needs / wants (food, shelter, drink) and then would cut out and relax for the rest of the week. A similar attitude might work better with a (relatively) surplus economy where only a comparatively small amount of labour (at the level of society as a whole) is required than one which emphasizes the dignity of labour and condemns taking time off as laziness. A great deal flows from the extension of middle-class idealization of labour -- "the devil still finds work for idle hands to do" -- to both the upper and lower classes during the 19th century: people used to aspire to being idle.
