The Case Against Solidarity Bargaining

Godfrey Moase || Now, let’s turn to some of the critical arguments running against solidarity bargaining in general, and the specific version of it that I have outlined in this work. The main objections, that I can conceive, are as follows; it places far too much reliance on the technocratic minimum wage setting processes (in the case of Australia, this is the annual wage review), if the movement is fighting for every worker why would any worker join a union, even if it does work we cannot assume the capitalist system is capable of providing every worker (even in one relatively small and privileged country) with a living wage, it only deals with wages, it places too much trust and/or skilled work on rank-and-file unionists for it to stand any chance, and finally the strategy itself could be disrupted by political and economic elites.

Reinforcing the authority of the state and its minimum wage setting processes

The first objection is perhaps the most apparent – that the solidarity bargaining strategy could reinforce authority of the state by aggrandizing minimum wage setting processes. In the Australian case this would be a small handful of Fair Work Commissioners who are appointed by, and largely themselves, members of the political and economic elite.

What this means is that a solidarity bargaining strategy that aims to bring activated people power to minimum wage setting processes could itself be subject to a critical loss of confidence and momentum from decisions that significantly hold back or reduce real wages. The underlying concern to this objection comes down to a fear of failure, and it is a reasonable concern to hold.

After all, for this strategy to work it must be strong enough to survive years of reactionary decisions and continue to attract more workers to its cycle of action. The fact, however, that the decision itself is made by members of the elite is not materially different from unionists engaged in public or private sector bargaining. The differentiating factor here comes down not to the quasi-legal process of the wage review compared with direct negotiations with the elite (or more commonly their agents) but the sheer amount of workers impacted, directly or indirectly, by the review.

From this springs a fear of not being able to impact a deep change, like a living wage, at such a scale. This objection, however, structurally misunderstands the way in which solidarity bargaining will start to impact wages. Further, it places far too much emphasis on the consequences of failure generally as opposed to its specific characteristics.

The structural misunderstanding

First to the structural misunderstanding. Solidarity bargaining is not merely a cycle of engagement in relation to minimum wage setting processes such as the annual wage review. Rather it is the substitution of the principles of collective bargaining into the union movement’s engagement with the review itself, and additionally the substitution of annual wage review engagement into ongoing union collective bargaining.

In this regard, the objective measurement of the impact of the strategy is not the outcome of minimum wage processes such as the annual wage review alone but a more generalised measurement of worker income. The Wage Price Index being one indicator. This is because the elite decision-makers being targeted here are not exclusively those determining the minimum wage at the level of the state but also the various employer decision-makers who are bargaining at the same time.

To prevent this strategy from gaining momentum a divided and factionalised elite must do more than impose their will on a minimum wage process annual wage review – they must prevent workers anywhere following solidarity bargaining principles from getting an outcome the same or better compared with bargaining on their own. In other words, the only true failure is the elite winning everywhere all at once for long enough to outlast the first onrushes of elation as solidarity starts to bloom in across workplaces again. A few bargains getting better wage outcomes here or there will be enough in the early days – each of these successes will be like embers on a heap of firewood – one of them can be sufficient to propel the whole strategy forward.

Second, the dynamic exchange between the two cycles of action also means that Award workers can use this process to commence their own bargaining campaigns that remain ultimately connected to the broader class. This makes the prospect that other members of the elite start to reconsider their own positions and submissions with respect to the review. Some employers are presently emboldened to make highly reactionary submissions in the present moment to the wage review. They know they are unlikely to receive much, if any, blowback from their own employees. As the annual wage review becomes a site of active worker struggle this changes. When workers become active they move from objects of the decision to agents themselves shaping the outcome. Each cycle, both alone and in dialogue with the other cycle, works to change the calculus of failure.

Solidarity bargaining does not start out as an all or nothing confrontation with capital and the state through the annual wage review but becomes itself a testing of a broad cross section of capital – looking for weak spots in order to build the worker power necessary to win a living wage for all. This is a spreading of the proactive worker action, in a comparatively low risk manner for each worker compared with an indefinite dispute only at their workplace. It harnesses the power of the ultimate scientific statement – “I don’t know”.

The “I don’t know” becomes an aide to workers, helping to fuel progress in an ongoing struggle for justice and dignity. In this sense, each individual defeat or setback is no longer total but becomes an experiment in a collective dialogue of workers learning to exercise their collective power. The true marker of progress , therefore, is not a win/loss binary on wage outcomes but any sort of objective indicator of worker impact, from overall wage rates to days lost to industrial action, on the present reality of atomisation and stagnating to declining living standards. The opportunity inherent in the current context comes from the fact that small embers of hope radiate more brightly in the dark.

Furthering free riders

Given solidarity bargaining involves organising to lift every workers’ wage to a living wage in a given social community – union and non-union alike – would workers even join or stay in the union? To answer this question one must consider why workers do or do not join a union.

Generally, there are three main reasons why a worker does not join a union – the first is because they have not been asked to join a union, the second arises from fear of retaliation (either real or perceived), and the third goes to the perceived effectiveness of the union.

At existing union sites, solidarity bargaining lowers the pressure of localised class conflict through generalising it. If workers feel this in some way scales back the pressure from their immediate managers, it will lower fear itself as a barrier to joining at these worksites. Meanwhile, at new union sites, workers have the ability to start organising in a way that has nothing to do with factors their local management or employer has an immediate or reasonable control over. Starting with a matter of perceived state control that nonetheless remains specific to workers’ lives is an indirect approach to what could develop into localised class conflict under conditions more favourable to workers.

This is not to avoid the need for localised and immediate struggle but it is to ensure workers have the space to assess when they are ready to take such matters on, separate from their decision to become union together.

As far as not being asked to join a union, solidarity bargaining is also an additional basis for union workers to have more organising conversations and interactions with co-workers on an issue that is usually widely and deeply felt. As an organising strategy, it provides the basis for more union members, delegates and staff to ask more workers to participate in an action of some sort, including joining the union. More generally applicable surveys, actions and conversational tools provide a basis for greater volunteer participation and the application of big organising principles like large-scale in-person and virtual mass member meetings and workshops that lead to member organising actions.

It is not enough that solidarity bargaining can mitigate some barriers to workers joining unions, it needs to also address the positive motivation for workers to associate together in the first place. A union must be seen as an effective intervention in the material experience of workers.

Workers tend join a union together when they sense it will make a material difference to their lives. This is why one worker confidently asking another worker to join their union can be so powerful – it is itself evidence of a union’s capacity to effect further change in the workplace. Given solidarity bargaining is an industrial strategy dependent only on the collective power of workers, to both expand their power and secure a better standard of living, then the fact of its success benefiting non-members won’t prevent the overall growth of union membership.

After all, it has historically been the case that an upsurge in worker organising benefits unorganised workers. What is, however, particular to this iteration of solidarity bargaining is that it seeks to flip the current neoliberal labour regime that individualises association but forces unions to act for all in a workplace from a strategic negative into a positive.

Solidarity bargaining becomes a union stance that says if every workplace is an open shop then we seek to change every workplace.

Workers are smart. They know effective strategy when they see it. It is, as such, the experienced and perceived effectiveness of the solidarity bargaining strategy in changing lives that will play a far greater role in overall union membership than whether or not groups of non-union workers will also experience some material gains.

Can capitalism even support a living wage?

There is also the question of whether, or for how long, capitalist systems could support a marked increase in real wages, let alone support a potential end-goal of a living wage for all workers. Theoretically, if real wages kept increasing through this strategy in a given social community (an actual reality workers are most definitely not experiencing), at some point such rates will become too high for capital to extract a profit from economic activity.

Given, however, the ballooning inequality of the neoliberal-era, including the relative accumulation of wealth in the hands of the top 1% and 0.1%, it is likely that the system could nonetheless some level of increase to real wages before a crisis of capital accumulation emerges (separate from capital engineering economic instability as a political response – I will address this later in the post).

The real answer thus, from a strategic point of view, is at what amount would higher wages disrupt the process of accumulation at a systemic level. This is of course an elastic marker given that capitalism is a system in motion across time and space. There is some evidence to sustain the contention that at least initially increased wages, starting at the lower end of the labour market, will drive an increase in economic activity.

A good life for people, however, should not be justified by its overall impact on the capitalist system. The system itself must be changed to support the universal reach of a good life rather than excluding some or degrading the concept for all in service to vampire capital.

Surviving capital’s reaction

Capitalism is not a force of nature but a system in motion with privileged political and economic actors. If these actors sense that labour’s assertiveness is on trend to disrupt their privilege, then they are likely to bring the system into crises at a time and place of their choosing to neutralise the threat. Thus, regardless of the theoretical limits of a system under constant mutation, strategic consideration must be given to the likelihood that any sort of class-wide momentum, or even early signs thereof, would be countered with a politically motivated crisis from such vampires.

The violent reaction, etched in the blood of Chilean workers, that constitutes the birth of neoliberalism itself is testament to this eventuality even in the face of a temporary social democratic settlement. The urgent question, therefore, is to what degree can solidarity bargaining better prepare workers for an organic or politically-motivated crisis of capitalism and what gaps must be accounted for?

It is in the nature of things that each crisis of capital and its resulting social settlement is itself an event horizon where the future is unknowable until it becomes a present contingency, and as it slips away into the past takes on the characteristic of inevitability. Solidarity bargaining, as part of the broader solidarity wedge strategy, is not predictive of the outcome of struggle but rather a way of enduring and shaping crises until it is possible to emerge into a better future. In this regard it is worth noting that solidarity is itself a survival mechanism, and using available legal tools to nurture solidarity sets workers up to better endure the inevitable ecological and biological crises of capitalism that are a baked in feature of 21st century life.

In this way, solidarity bargaining is a means to build worker confidence to face such crises. It does this through re-normalising and training workers to take strike action at scale. This should better prepare them to resolve a crisis on their terms. Moreover, solidarity bargaining works best as part of a broader strategy that goes beyond the wage labour relation – one that should heighten resilience through crisis as well as building a redundant system beyond capitalism, a system which workers actually build themselves. What matters most is growing the collective problem-solving and response mechanisms of the working-class. And solidarity bargaining, by structurally enhancing the role, capacity and connections between shop floor delegates is useful in this regard.

Moreover, even though solidarity bargaining is a strategy to return the prospect of the general strike to public life, this attribute itself will not be sufficient for a crisis of capitalism to be digested in a manner favourable to workers. The experience of European workers, from Greece to Belgium, fighting austerity in the twenty-first century demonstrates this.

The general strike, however, is a necessary part of any system-level change (other than social collapse) even if on its own it is insufficient. This is why a radical political practice alongside the establishment of a prefigurative solidarity economy must also be part of the strategy. Workers exercising power at work can crack and rupture the system but action at the other two points of the wedge widens the rupture for long enough to weave a new social fabric. Solidarity bargaining works as one part of a wider strategy.

What remains to be explored, however, is how to counter organised disruption by the capitalist class, whether through crises brought by a capital strike or some other means. Solidarity bargaining, once it has created the basis for mass strikes, provides a layer of protection for the working class but what about the beginning phase of the strategy, and how else might capital seek to interrupt the re-emergence of working class organisation?

What all this turns on is whether the industrial strategy provides enough critical hope to restart the engine of collective worker struggle. If it does, this matters far more than keeping faith with my particular iteration of a strategy to propagate solidarity. For then workers will engage in renewed struggle based on the emergent facts of capital’s reaction. If solidarity bargaining, or a specific struggle that feeds into the broader play, has not succeeded in jolting the engine of struggle by the time there is a reaction then no clever words or tactics will save the workplace strategy from critical failure.

At this point, however, it is worth noting that in fragmenting and atomising the working-class, capital is ironically producing its own fragmentation. The brutal fact is that any one fraction of capital is likely more threatened by the jostling of other factions than the risk of workers organising. This tendency, in the absence of worker struggle, does not improve the situation for anyone. Take, for example, the election of Trump and the UK’s Brexit vote in 2016. In both elections, one segment of capital lost its preferred outcome to another segment of capital that gave voice to some form of inchoate popular revolt. A politically united capitalist class would not likely have let the Trump or Brexit outcomes to manifest in the first place. The same tendency is at play in Australia where in response to trade union decline, and the rise of Labor as the default partner of capital, the conservative side of politics has fragmented. In the absence of genuine fear of an organised working class nothing remains to hold the capitalists together – not even the prospect of social or ecological collapse.

It is for this reason that I do not think Australian capital will be in a position to attempt to intentionally disrupt solidarity bargaining until the strategy itself has built sufficient momentum that it is contributing to the reorganisation of workers. Reaction, after all, must react to something. This has to be more than the noise of the right-wing press reacting to the fears of rich middle-aged and elderly men. Once there is momentum on the part of workers then specific strategies will change based on the particulars of the struggle, and this work will become (hopefully) somewhat dated, although the solidarity wedge could retain its relevance.

Furthermore, a good organising strategy, if it is a matter of democratic consideration and execution, should not be kept secret. It should be on the lips of every worker and the means through which some individual employers or fragments of capital may react should also be a matter of frank discussion with workers. They will be on the frontlines of reaction, and often they will have the best idea of how to counter their employer.

Moreover, there is no point in having a perfectly good idea in the abstract if the impacted workers themselves are not committed to it. It is for these reasons that disruption and reaction should neither be of itself a reason against a militant strategy nor a reason to keep it away from democratic deliberation on the part of workers. Instead, it should be factored into the roll out of a solidarity bargaining strategy, and discussed not as a thing to fear but to face. Such reaction is a necessary stage that emerges as a product of workers successfully cooperating. Insofar as this is a strategy to restart mass worker struggle, of course, it will encounter disruption and resistance if it works. If such struggle has commenced, then workers will be able to problem solve and react, and if it does not kick start the motor then such a reaction to struggle will not eventuate.