‘Union Organising’ — Past, Present and Future

By the beginning of 2009, the working populaces of the developed capitalist nation states were beginning to experience (again) a severe economic downturn, affecting their jobs, incomes, pensions and housing. Only in retrospect will it be possible to assess the true depth and extent of this downturn. But, regardless of this, the downturn presents a further, and huge, challenge to the projects of ‘union organising’ taking place in many of these countries. This challenge arises not just because of the weakening of any extant labour market power that workers may wield and the diversion of union attention and resources towards dealing with redundancies and closures and away from ‘union organising’ per se. It also arises because the destruction of capital — through firm closure and downsizing — and the then consequent emergence of new units of capital (as slump provides the conditions for the next boom) will represent the destruction of unionised enterprises and the emergence of non-unionised enterprises. Enterprises do not as a rule emerge as unionised; this has to be struggled for to be achieved. In other words, the ways in which capitalism and units of capital respond and act will force ‘union organising’1 back several, if not many, steps. And, of course, there is an obvious sense in which workers need the protection of labour unionism2 even more at such a time of downturn and yet, paradoxically, this is often the time this protection can least be proffered because of the weakening of the power of organised labour.