Working for the GFTU, the UK’s federation for small, specialist unions and professional associations, it is always of interest when there is a development which helps (re)inform our labour movement understanding of the way in which small groups of workers comprising their own bargaining unit are of critical relevance to organising strategy.
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| Grunwick: An insight upon state fear of worker mobilisation |
Classic
workers’ struggles represented throughout the UK’s labour history from
Tolpuddle to Grunwick illustrates the power of small groups of workers to
challenge employer and state power. Indeed, direct state aggression/violence in
both of these cases represents a critically valuable insight on the potentially
far-reaching implications of worker resistance and of what the state feared.
So the current response of employers and their acolytes across right wing politics in the US around the mis-named micro unions is a contemporary perspective on an historic tradition of labour movement expansion of new forms and models of collective representation of workers.
In a
fascinating piece which was published recently by In These Times there is an important investigation of the way in
which the employer-right-wing-lobby nexus is attempting to curtail the capacity
of independent small groups of workers to gain formal recognition for collective
bargaining purposes.
The nexus is
attempting to re-classify, re-brand and toxify an age-old tradition of workers
voluntarily and organically seeking to gain recognition as a means of either
creating a new, standalone union or gaining additional power through merger
with a larger, long-standing union or federation. Thus the term ‘micro union’
has been crafted to suggest that officials from the US National Labor Relations
Board (NLRB) have been actively encouraging groups of workers to organise and thereby
offering them easier access to recognition.
As Bruce
Vail outlines in the In These Times piece
A
micro-union, in short, is a relatively new description for a time-worn labor
organizing technique that focuses on smaller, sharply defined groups of workers
for the purpose of creating collective workplace action. That tactic, although
nothing new, rubs against the grain of the popular imagination of labor
organizing as a mass movement against large, highly visible corporations.
In short, what is happening in the US is an
attempt to circumvent by statute the most natural form of expression on the
part of workers: the right to collectivise their interests and mobilise these
in the form of a union.
Although there is some suggestion that the
latest attempt to curb this tradition will fail the article is well-worth a
read regardless, if nothing else for a sense in the US of the right-wing
backlash in the face of a nascent upturn in the appeal of unions as a voice for workers: http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/15183/what_are_micro-unions_and_why_is_big_business_so_upset_about_them/
In Solidarity
Ian
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