An industrial strategy to take on the far right

Godfrey Moase || As I have previously written, solidarity bargaining can unite millions of workers in acting on their common interests. It is also an extra-parliamentary response for union workers who have experienced decades of wage stagnation and decline. Moreover, it is a potential industrial strategy to fight back against the radical right.

Solidarity bargaining can beat back the far right as it is a means through which workers can respond to their declining living standards, and increase worker power. It circumvents the control of association, restrictions on strike action and an employer’s control over union recognition as barriers to building worker power. It does this through bringing two related cycles of struggle together into a universally-relevant or class-wide wage struggle. It can bring people out into the streets, and re-normalise mass protest again while minimising the risk any one worker faces from anti-protest laws.

As a cycle of activity, it provides at a workplace by workplace level, a way through which workers can re-learn the practice of class-wide collective action regardless of whether a worker is public or private sector or whether they have an existing union contract or not.

The broader social factors running in solidarity bargaining’s favour as a strategy are only one part of the picture, consideration of the practical opportunities and impediments must also be given to implementing this bargaining strategy. At a granular level, that is in the specific relations between workers, delegates, union officials and employer representatives, solidarity bargaining can stand up as a strategy. It is important to tease this out, for this strategy is nothing if it cannot work in the messy, relational and contradictory world that is the daily work of the union movement.

How union leadership can strengthen the far right.

One of the dilemmas that requires confronting is the ever present tension within unions of how to fairly and effectively balance its limited resources between existing union workplaces, identified growth industries or those industries vital for social reproduction, and potential new members. This is especially the case in generalist unions such as my own that cover workers across a broad range of industries.

Given the present predicament of the movement, the allocation of member-owned resources requires due consideration. One critique of solidarity bargaining is that it attempts to resolve this tension by ignoring it and pretending the union can be everywhere at once. This is not the case.

Solidarity bargaining merely opens up new possibilities through which the tension can be handled as opposed to finally resolved. The current dominant mode of union strategising in resource allocation pretends to be otherwise but it amounts to no more than a zero-sum game cloaked in an idiosyncratic salad of reheated management speak and out of context diluted Leftist language. It is an example of what I call the neoliberal left where the logic of capital infects and distorts workers’ own organisations.

Such a strategy suits the material interests of some union officials who act as junior partners within political networks of privilege (or what Grace Blakeley has labeled as cartel parties). It maintains the existing relationships of patronage for as long as there is a sufficient membership base to pay the bills. The proposition to workers is that the union needs to (often put in such a way that conflates the union office or union leadership with the union) focus on this or that industry so that union power can be rebuilt or saved. What follows from this is that the deprioritised workplace will have less union staff or no union staff allocated to it. In practice, actual rank-and-file members would have had little to no say in this strategic call. The decision is presented as final. The decision for the impacted members is that workers will have to either look after themselves as a union, go to another union or drift towards becoming non-union. This alienates rank-and-file members from the union movement and opens up the field to the far right.

Moreover, the deprioritised workers themselves have little to no agency in the ultimate success or otherwise of the proposed campaigns. The solidarity asked of these workers ends up being too removed in three senses. First, the potential gain of the proposed campaign for the deprioritised workers is dependent not only on the campaign being partially successful but being so successful that it changes the entire balance of class power at some often unspecified point in the future. Second, it becomes a campaign that they have no ownership over or a meaningful stake in. Three, the strategy internalises the neoliberal paradigm insofar as it treats actually existing union members as a burden to progress rather than what they are – the living and breathing foundation that bring meaning to the very union relation, and therefore, always a union’s greatest strength.1

Worker leaders, however, have a strong sense about these sorts of things and generally they pick up on their own marginalisation within the life and activity of their own union. Moreover, it only takes a minority of workers who find their alienation addressed by the far right’s organisational ecosystem for it to cause an existential threat to democratic practices.

Taking on the threat of the far right

Solidarity bargaining is an immediate and active proposition. It is a generative proposition based on the active cooperation of a mass of rank-and-file workers. It builds solidarity across real differences in groups of workers from the start.

While existing resources still need to be judiciously allocated, no group of workers are being categorically deprioritised within this strategy. All occupations and workplaces amongst the membership are equally important in practice and limited staff resources can instead be allocated more on a skills and capacity basis than on an a priori categorisation of workers based on industry, demographic, political convenience or vibe. It ensures that every member counts within their own union.

Under existing conditions, however, the radical right can place the labour movement in an impossible dilemma – defending an imperfect and broken set of governing institutions. If unions choose a narrow and perceived moderate strategy of defending a set of governing institutions, it plays into the radical right’s move of characterising union leaders as well as unionised public servants, educators, health practitioners and other professionals as members of the elite defending a broken status quo that does not work for the broader working class. On the other hand, if unions choose not to defend the institutions of liberal democracy, the radical right has a free hand to build a new post-democratic and authoritarian social settlement. Either option could lead to a new authoritarian consensus with the union movement indefinitely alienated from the wider working-class.

It is the historic contraction of trade union density in the Anglophone world from the 1980s onwards that opens up this opportunity for the far right. This is because union membership has become predominately concentrated into the public sector and professional sections of the working-class.

For the radical right, it is these public sector and professional workers themselves who are members of a global liberal elite, and supposedly the interests of this particular group of workers runs counter to the interests of the broader, (allegedly) more traditional and/or authentic working class. Solidarity bargaining responds to this narrative not just with words but the actions of workers themselves on very real and shared material interests. It, therefore, provides a material and economic basis to roll back the putative hegemony of radical right through and between public elections.

This post is the first post of chapter four which is the second chapter in part two of the overall project. Part Two is Solidarity within Wage Labour and examines building transformational solidarity within the constraints of the wage labour relation. Use the about page to locate where you are in this broader project.