A famous series of social experiments was carried out in the United States from 1938 to 1940, to learn about autocracy and democracy. The participants were boys organized into clubs, each with leaders adopting different leadership styles. The researchers soon decided to include a third “social climate”; alongside autocracy and democracy, they studied laissez-faire (which, they believed, arose from a misunderstanding of democracy).²

In short, the study revealed stark differences between the three modes. In autocracy, the centrepiece and focus of the work was the leader. In democracy, it was the group. In laissez-faire, there was none.

The autocratic leader made rules, dictated activities, and praised and criticized personally. The democratic leader discussed rules and encouraged group decision-making about goals, with technical help if required. The democratic leader was fact-oriented in praise and blame, and was a group member in spirit. There were no rules in laissez-faire; the leader supplied materials and gave information only if asked, did not participate in the group work, did not praise or blame, and did not attempt to regulate work.

The three structures resulted in very different behaviours. The autocracy group showed two major clusters of behaviour: submissive and aggressive. In the submissive groups, individual boys became dependent on the leader with virtually no capacity to initiate group action. In the aggressive groups, the boys felt frustration directed at the leader, and tended towards rebellion.

Aggression in autocracy and laissez-faire was directed toward other groups and individuals, as well as the leader. The group experienced inter-personal tension and scapegoating. The boys were dependent on the leader for task-oriented matters and social status. As a result, competition developed between them.

In the laissez-faire and democracy models, the boys sought more attention and approval from each other. However, only the democratic groups showed evidence of a stable co-operative structure.

Morale—in the sense of cohesion (using we not I), working together for group goals and being friendly rather than hostile—was highest in the democratic groups. It was lowest in the autocratic groups. In the latter, submissive groups suffered the lowest morale. In both autocracy and laissez-faire, the boys experienced a great deal of frustration related to their needs for autonomy and sociability.

Frustrations in laissez-faire groups were also high. The boys wanted to accomplish things, but lacking a structure for cooperation, they were all talk and no action.

The amount of productive work varied significantly between the autocratic, democratic, and laissez-faire conditions. When the leaders arrived late in the authoritarian groups, for instance, the boys made no initiative to start new work or continue work already under way. In the democratic condition, the groups were already productive. In laissez-faire the groups were active but not productive.

When the leader left the room in the groups showing a submissive reaction, the percentage of time spent in serious work dropped from 74% to 29%. In the groups showing an aggressive reaction, the drop was from 52% to 16%. The motivation to work was leader-induced, not intrinsic to the boys. In contrast, the democratic group remained stable, with a negligible drop from 50% to 46%.

The democratic groups had by far the highest quality of work and made far more suggestions about how work could be done. They had internalized the group goals. Pride in work also differed significantly. The democratic groups presented their work or took it home, whereas in one authoritarian group, the boys actually tried to destroy what they had made.

Overall, the democratic form showed its superiority on every measure.

This result has been replicated many times over in just about every form of human endeavour. But how far can this study be related to the workplace? The connection comes through a major discovery made by Australian Professor Fred Emery, who worked with the Norwegian Industrial Democracy Programme from 1962 to 1967.

By 1960 Norway had still not fully recovered from the devastation of World War II and needed revitalization. The Norwegian government decided to engage in a national experiment and asked Emery and Einar Thorsrud to redesign four nationally-significant industrial sites into “sociotechnical,” or participative democratic, systems. The experiments were successful, with increased productivity, lowered costs and higher quality work for the workers across all sites.

During this work, Emery discovered that there were only two Design Principles (known as DP1 and DP2) underlying all forms of organization. These corresponded to autocracy and democracy, respectively. The language was updated, as what were previously known as climates were shown to be structures. Furthermore, laissez-faire was shown to be the absence of a design principle because there are no structural relationships between the people.

According to Emery, every organization, whether it is a family, a government, voluntary group or a workplace, is governed by one of these design principles. In workplaces that legally employ people, the relationships between employees (whether they are board members, management or workers) is either autocratic (DP1) or democratic (DP2). Normally, the design principle is encoded in a collective bargaining agreement, an individual contract, a duty statement, or in job criteria.

Emery called these two design principles “genotypical”, because:

“…like DNA, they determine the most fundamental aspects of organizational shape and characteristics.”

The basic modules of structure that flow from each of these principles is shown below:

DP1 is called ‘redundancy of parts’ because there are more parts (ie people) than are required to perform a task at any given time. In DP1, responsibility for coordination and control is located at least one level above where the work is being done. That is, those above have the right and responsibility to tell those below what to do and how to do it. DP1 yields a supervisory or dominant hierarchy. Individuals have fragmented tasks and goals: one person–one job.

DP2 is called ‘redundancy of functions’ because more skills and functions are built into every person than that person can use at any one given point in time. In DP2, responsibility for coordination and control is located with the group of people performing the whole task. Each self managing group works to a unique set of negotiated and agreed, measurable goals, comprehensively covering every aspect of the work, social and environmental as well as production.

DP1 structures are hierarchies of personal dominance. DP2 structures are non-dominant hierarchies of function, where change is negotiated between peers.

Laissez-faire is defined as the absence of a design principle and, therefore, the absence of structure. It is every person for themself. Laissez-faire today commonly takes the form of an organization where the structure on paper is DP1, but the controls have been loosened to the point that there is widespread confusion about where responsibility for control and coordination are located.

DP1 structures induce competition, whereas DP2 structures induce cooperation.

Over time, DP1 actively deskills and demotivates people, whereas DP2 skills and motivates them.

Problems such as interpersonal conflict or lack of initiative are usually blamed on individuals, but Emery’s work shows that they are systemic — the effect of design principles on behaviour.

Importantly, the Norwegian project showed that successful demonstration or pilot sites are not necessarily copied in the surrounding areas. Success does not breed success. This finding has been replicated many times since.

Emery then went on to develop a new, quick and simple method for shifting organizations to the democratic, DP2 structure. This involved “Participative Design Workshops”, through which those who work in an organization set about redesigning it.

In the next part of this paper we’ll look at what’s involved, and how it has fared.

1. Merrelyn Emery is currently Adjunct Professor at the Department of Applied Human Sciences, Concordia University, Australia. She has a PhD in Marketing and has written and co-written extensively (particularly with Fred Emery) many books and journal articles in areas such as participative democracy, change processes, open systems theory, sustainable futures, organizational culture and education.
2. Discovering “laissez faire”.
   (This explanation is based on Merrelyn Emery’s own words.) . Included here as highly relevant to a critique of production relations under neoliberalism):

   During the experiment an inexperienced leader, Ralph White, became baffled by the anarchy created by two boys who were “real hell raisers.” He let all the boys “do their own thing,” which resulted in some very negative effects. His understanding then was that democracy could mean total individual freedom. His approach with this group allowed the distinction between democracy and laissez-faire to be made. Many people practice laissez-faire thinking that they are being democratic, just because they are not controlling autocratically. Unfortunately, this confusion of democracy and laissez-faire is still with us.

   They became dissatisfied with the chaos, confusion, and uncertainty. Even the boys who tried hardest to use their freedom to get work done found it impossible, as they experienced constant interference from other boys… The democratic leaders stimulated eight times as much independence as the authoritarian leaders and twice as much as the laissez-faire leaders (Lippitt & White, 1947). Democracy, not laissez-faire, resulted in the greatest individual differences. Although fewer expressions of individuality in autocracy should surprise no one, many will be surprised by the fact that there was less individuality in laissez-faire (Lippitt & White, 1947). Contrary to what many believe, freedom to do whatever one pleases actually results in a reduced opportunity to express individuality. Autonomy without a balancing degree of belongingness with peers restricts and inhibits personal growth (M. Emery, 1999).

The ILO is not alone in having found a clear link between the way we work and the rise of depression, fatigue, anxiety, cardiovascular disease, burnout and hypertension. If it’s not quite a consensus, that’s mainly because the fallout from admitting it openly could be so enormous. With this would come questions of duty and responsibility, and then of liability.

The new and emerging stressors are called “psychosocial hazards.”¹ To address them, progressive unions are starting to look hard at workplace culture. As many are finding, this is rapidly becoming the key challenge for 21st century union reps.There is plenty of data to back up the ILO’s decision to acknowledge psychosocial hazards.

• According to the U.S. National Institute of Health, 60-80% of workplace accidents are stress-related.
• Studies in Europe and other developed countries have shown that stress is a factor in between 50% and 60% of all lost working days.
• One in six working men and women suffers from burnout or depression, while one in three has hypertension or coronary artery disease. Some studies estimate that job strain alone accounts for at least 70% of burnout and 30% of hypertension among working people.
• In a 2007 U.S. survey, about three-quarters (74%) of workers at all occupational levels reported feeling stress from work.
• A 2002 study from Australia looked at how work factors contributed to suicides. The main factors identified were:
•    work stress (21%)
•    unspecified work problems (19%)
•    an argument or disagreement with a work colleague or boss (13%)
•    fear of retrenchment (12%)
•    A number of other factors were identified, including performance pressure (9%), job dissatisfaction (7%), long hours (6%), being investigated over a work matter (6%), and retrenchment (5%).²

Let’s take a moment to enjoy a bit of callous insensitivity. I mean, hell, isn’t a bit of depression better than losing your arm in a lathe? Well, that might be so if it were an either/or sort of thing. But it’s not. The rise of psychosocial hazards is an extra.

According to the World Health Organisation, there are about 120 million occupational injuries each year. There are also about 200,000 occupational fatalities. And there are between 68-157 million cases of occupational disease.

Unionists who want to understand the way health and safety is changing, and to be part of the solution, would be well advised to get their hands on a book called Unhealthy Work: Causes, Consequences and Cures. It came out last year, and won our readers’ poll for best labour book of the year.³ The 18 contributors to the book are all experts in their separate fields, and collectively they have brought together evidence from hundreds of studies around the world to show how work has changed, and how the new conditions are affecting the health and well-being of workers. As one of them puts it, with admirable compression: “…working conditions determine the conditions of workers.”

Whether you work behind a desk, down a mineshaft or in front of an espresso machine, this book will help you reflect on what can be done to identify, understand and reduce the new risks.

Of course there are those who are very actively organising against any recognition of the new hazards. The potential expenses and liabilities are only just beginning to dawn on government and employer bodies. But as unionists and OSH practitioners alike have been trying to tell them, the cost of doing something must be weighed against the cost of doing nothing. After all, the World Health Organisation has calculated that occupational deaths, diseases, and illnesses cost about 4% of Gross Domestic Product worldwide.

Again, Unhealthy Work: Causes, Consequences and Cures is full of useful information here.

• The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in the USA estimates the costs from stress and mental health issues at more than $200 billion annually. This is based on 1999 figures. If one only took into account absenteeism, tardiness and employee turnover, this figure would be closer to $407.5 billion today.
• A 1998 study of 46,000 workers, health care costs were nearly 50% greater for employees reporting high levels of stress in comparison with those who were ‘stress-free’.
• It has been estimated that up to 40% of staff turnover can be attributed to stressors at work. Turnover costs average 120-200% of the salary of the position affected.

As a unionist and a worker, how you might identify and track these new workplace hazards? How would you describe your workplace culture at present? How would you like it to be?

The New Unionism Network is developing a workplace culture diagnostic tool. It assesses your job against ILO criteria of ‘decent work’ and then helps assemble you and your colleagues’ collective view of life in your workplace.

1. Psychosocial issues include:

   * Work-related stress, whose causal factors include excessive working time and overwork
   * Violence from outside the organisation
   * Bullying, which may include emotional, verbal, and sexual harassment
   * Mobbing
   * Burnout
   * Exposure to unhealthy elements during meetings with business associates, e.g. tobacco, uncontrolled alcohol

2. These facts and figures, and others below, have been compiled from a variety of respected sources. Contact ten.msinoinuwennull@hso for details, and for further such data.
3. The good folk at Baywood Publishing have even offered us a 40% discount. Contact ten.msinoinuwennull@hso for details of this offer.

New Unionism: The union movement is the largest democratic force in the world today, by far. However, too many union members complain about bureaucratic behaviour at leadership level. Do you accept this is a problem, and, if so, what do you think are the root causes?

Dan Gallin: First, let’s get the problem in perspective. The level of bureaucracy in unions is constantly overstated. We have much less difficulty in this area than corporations do, for instance. Of course corporations are, by their very nature, top-down power structures – what could be less democratic than your average workplace? – and I cannot imagine anything as wasteful as some management bureaucracies. Similarly, think about bureaucracy in government, or in tri-partite bodies, or in non-governmental organisations. The difference is that unions, by their very structure and purpose, are consciously committed to internal democracy, and so failures are clearly seen as such. The basic structures of unionism are democratic and the internal struggle to assert and reassert democracy is always there. Trade unions have to deliver; there is a very short time span between demand and the delivery. Think of collective bargaining, for instance. Unions are constantly being held to account by their members.

NU: Are you trying to tell us there’s no real problem, then?

DG: No. I am not trying to minimize the problem. What I am saying is that bureaucracy is a pervasive feature of all institutional and organizational life. What, after all, is a bureaucracy? It is an administration, and all organizations need an administration. The problem arises when this administration develops a collective interest of its own, separate and eventually even opposed to the interests of the people it is supposed to serve.

This is serious enough in government, where the civil service constitutes a bureaucracy that can easily overreach its authority. In a democracy, the civil service is supposed to be the servant of the people. When it starts to act as its master, democracy is in danger.

In the trade union movement, the problem is even more serious because its administration, its own civil service if you wish, must represent people who have no other source of power than their organization. If this organization ceases to be responsive to their needs, they lose everything. An administration that builds its own power at the expense of the membership is betraying its trust – that is treason.

NU: If, as you say, trade unionism is inherently democratic, why is it that we hear these complaints about unions being run as dictatorships and/or oligarchies?

DG: Actually, there are not so many cases of this, in proportion. What happens is that we have some spectacular examples of organizations which degenerate and then become notorious. They are falsely represented as typical of the movement, most often in anti-union propaganda. But there is never any guarantee against an organization, even with the best democratic traditions, being hijacked by anti-democratic cliques or personalities.

The hijacking of the Russian revolution by the Communist bureaucracy led by Stalin is a classical example. After four or five short years, a vibrant, radically democratic, revolutionary mass movement started giving way to the rule of a bureaucracy which first asserted, then consolidated power by means of terror, police and military terror against its own people, on a scale not seen before in modern times. A whole new society with a bureaucratic ruling class!

How do these things happen? In order to work, democracy needs the active support of large masses of people at all times. In a union, this means the active participation of most of the membership. Democracy is not a state of being, it is an activity, it is in fact hard work, and it is a constant work in progress. You might say the same thing about freedom.

Most people are not able to maintain a high level of commitment over time. They are not organization professionals, they need to get on with their lives, as they should, so “democracy fatigue” might set in; especially after periods of great social stress. They might not pay attention to what happens in the organization for a time, routine sets in and the professionals take over. If the leaders are not trained in the right kind of politics, if they are not persons of the highest individual integrity, and if they are not supervised and controlled, they may start treating the organization as if it were their own property.

This is why it is the responsibility of every progressive and democratic trade union leadership to maintain constitutional and practical conditions in which membership participation and control is ensured and welcomed, without making conditions of participation too onerous for ordinary members.

NU: Just by way of clarification, can you explain what you mean by “trained in the right kind of politics”?

DG: Socialist politics, of course. And by that I mean the kind of politics based on the values that were at the origins of the labour movement and that made it great: solidarity, selflessness, respect for people, a sense of honour, and the modesty that comes with the awareness of being a soldier in the service of a great cause, a contempt for self-promotion, or “le refus de parvenir” as Monatte¹ called it.

NU: Do you think the Cold War contributed to bureaucratizing the movement?

DG: It certainly did. In a situation of extreme political polarization by outside forces, it is easy to lose sight of the original purpose of the exercise.

First, let us be clear what we are talking about. The Cold War was a conflict between States, between two blocs of States, led by the two superpowers of the time: the United States and the USSR, more or less from 1949 to 1989.

However, this conflict had nothing to do with a much older conflict within the labour movement. This earlier conflict arose after the October Revolution, when the Russian Communist Party created an International of its own and declared war on all other movements of the Left unless they accepted total subordination to its dictates.² That conflict became unbridgeable once the Communist leadership had moved to imprison and execute activists of other Left tendencies in the territory under its control, including its own opponents and dissidents. Under Stalin, this became a systematic campaign of extermination, with hit men spreading out all over the world to assassinate opponents.

It is small wonder that a majority of the Left, of all tendencies, became “anti-Communist”, meaning that they organized to defend themselves as best as they could against Communist claims of hegemony and terror.

When Nazi Germany attacked the USSR in 1941, breaking the treaty it had signed two years previously, the USSR found itself part of the anti-fascist war-time alliance. Despite past history and experience, much of the Western trade-union movement, which was predominantly social-democratic, was ready for organizational unity with Soviet bloc labour organizations. The result was the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), which was founded in 1945. However, it lasted only four years as an inclusive organization of the world’s labour movement (though it continued, and still exists, as a Communist rump).

The unity on which the WFTU had been founded was the temporary unity of governments, not a unity of labour – none of the contentious issues between the Communists and everyone else on the Left had been resolved. When the unity of governments gave way to the rivalry between the US and the USSR for world power, the artificial top-down unity of the WFTU also broke apart.

What happened then was a race between the two blocs to secure the support – in fact, the control – of civil society organizations (labour, youth, students, women, etc.), with trade unions as prime targets.

And now comes the complicated part, which must be clearly understood. The Western governments and the non-Communist Left suddenly had the same enemy. The conflict between governments – the “Cold War” – and that earlier conflict within the labour movement, became superimposed. For some, they became indistinguishable.

This is how the war-time relationships which some socialists – and others – had formed with the political services of the US or UK governments (among others) to fight the Nazis continued seamlessly into the fight for a “free world”, against the new totalitarian menace.

In reality, we were of course still dealing with two different conflicts and two distinct interests. One was fighting Stalinism to defend working class interests, the other was fighting the USSR as a rival imperialism to that of the US. These are hardly compatible positions, but the most difficult thing to comprehend in politics, especially if you have the knife at your throat, is that the enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend!

Despite the apparent symmetry of the situation of the trade union movement within the two blocs, the reality was quite different. In the Soviet bloc, the trade union apparatus was part of the government structures of a police state, and a fairly subordinate structure at that. Dissidence was treated as a criminal offence or as a mental disorder. So in that context, the bureaucracy issue does not even arise in connection with the Cold War — the whole system had been thoroughly bureaucratized long before. In its first decades, that system was impossible to crack from within.

The situation in the West was much different: here a three-way battle was being fought between the advocates of an alignment on pro-American policies, the advocates and apologists for Soviet policies, and those who kept saying that neither option represented working class interests and that the labour movement should refuse to be aligned with either side.

Those of us who held the latter position believed that the lines of cleavage that mattered most in the world were not the vertical ones separating the two blocs, but the horizontal ones between the working class and the rulers of both systems, a fundamental division cutting across both blocs.

This was not an easy position to hold. The pressures to align and to conform were very strong. Having been put in charge of the AFL-CIO’s International Department by George Meany,³ Jay Lovestone⁴) — the Dr. Strangelove⁵ of the labour movement — with his acolyte Irving Brown⁶ and the various AFL-CIO Institutes, were running around the world buying unions with US government money, in close cooperation with the CIA , and trying to destroy any organization or individuals that did not accept their line, whether Communist or not. They were not looking for allies, they were recruiting agents.

The Soviet bloc operators were doing the same for the other side, also backed by considerable diplomatic and financial resources. The result of this competition is not difficult to guess: it spread a culture of corruption, especially in Africa where the movement was weakest and most vulnerable, but also in parts of Asia, Latin America, Europe and the United States itself, where some labour leaders were co-opted into Cold War politics, although most had no idea what the International Department was up to, and did not much care until all these operations were exposed in the mid-1960s.

In that sense the Cold War was a very powerful factor of bureaucratization in the West: it created and strengthened corrupt leaderships who no longer had to take their memberships into account, it enforced political conformity, stifled discussion, suppressed dissent and isolated all radical opposition through ‘red baiting’.

NU: Some labour writers contend that the acceptance of Cold War politics, and anti-Communist purges by the leadership of the American labour movement, contributed to its paralysis during the conservative onslaught of recent years.

DG: Yes and no. It’s not that simple. True enough, after the anti-Communist purges in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the merger with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1955, the conservative elements of the AFL prevailed in the merged AFL-CIO. These people would later prove totally at a loss in the face of globalization and the conservative onslaught launched by Reagan, and continued by his successors, both Republican and Democrat.

But the problem with this story is that it exonerates the American Communist Party of any responsibility in these developments. The CP and its trade union activists are cast in the role of innocent victims. This overlooks the war the CP waged against all of the Left from its earliest days: first against the IWW and the socialists, then against the Trotskyists and against every other kind of radical group it didn’t control, and of course against most union leaderships, progressive or not. The CP did what it could to destroy the American Left and, like in Niemöller’s poem,⁷ when they came to get it there was nobody left to defend it.

This said, most conservative labour leaders didn’t need the Cold War in order to be ferociously anti-radical, super-patriotic and, eventually, helpless before the anti-labour campaigns of the Right. You have to remember that we’re dealing here with very stupid people. They may have been street-wise and cunning, but they knew nothing about the world and couldn’t think strategically. The roots of conservatism in the American union movement are very perceptively described by authors such as Daniel Fusfeld and Patricia Cayo Sexton.⁸) What the Cold War situation did, was to give people like Lovestone the opportunity to organize the right-wing of the American trade union bureaucracy as a base for a major international operation, and to isolate leaders of the labour Left, like Walter Reuther,⁹ Ralph Helstein¹⁰ and Pat Gorman,¹¹ as well as some good unions with a Communist history, like the ILWU and the UE.

NU: Did the Communists not at least denounce the clandestine right-wing operations the American unions were involved in?

DG: Not at all. Of course they would denounce operations like the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala, or of Goulart in Brazil, as examples of American imperialism in action, but there was never any exposure of the union involvement. The CIA and British government operations in the labour movement were blown open by Trotskyists and independent radicals in the mid-1960s. Then the New York Times picked up the story and it became a major scandal. But the CP had nothing to do with it at any stage. Afterwards, of course, everyone started writing about it.

NU: While all of this was happening in the US, bureaucratization must surely have been a growing problem in the European trade union movement as well?

DG: In Europe and elsewhere, for instance in Japan, the polarized politics of the Cold War also enforced political conformity and stifled dissent, but Europe is a complicated place with many political and trade union cultures, so generalizations are not very useful. In some countries Cold War politics played a major role in the labour movement, in others hardly at all.

Far more pervasive and general were the consequences of the war. Today it is hard to imagine the extent to which the historical labour movement had been destroyed, first by the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, then by the war itself, with the occupation of most of Europe by the Nazi armies and police. In most of Europe, the structures of the labour movement were wiped out, parties and unions of course, but also the entire institutional network that rooted the movement in society: welfare institutions, credit unions, co-ops, cultural and leisure time activities – everything.

Most of the leadership of the movement, right down to local level, had to go into exile, or into concentration camps, or died in the war. Many of the best people were lost. One of the important parties of the Socialist International, the Jewish Labour Bund,¹² was destroyed entirely, together with the population that supported it. No one had imagined anything like this could happen, and those who had hoped that the end of WWII would usher in another period of social revolution, a re-play of 1918, had lost touch with reality.

Superficially, the unions emerged in a strong position – after all we were on the side of the victors, whereas big business had collaborated with fascism throughout Europe and had much to be forgiven for. In fact, labour was far weaker than it appeared, and far more dependent on the State than before the war. That too did not seem to be a problem at first, since most post-war governments were pro-labour in one way or another, but it did eventually lead to the loss of the political and material independence of the movement and, yes, it did promote bureaucratization.

Whereas the pre-war movement conceived of itself as a counter-culture and an alternative society, at least in principle, the post-war movement made its peace with the “social market economy” and demanded no more than a better life within the system (full employment, welfare, social protection, good wages and working conditions).

In that situation, the leadership of the movement became increasingly unwilling to maintain a whole network of flanking institutions. If you don’t want to change society then you don’t need to build an alternative counter-culture or an alternative economy. Think of all the money you can save. So the unions concentrated on their presumed “core business” – collective bargaining with “social partners” – the parties concentrated on elections, and the movement lost its roots in society, lost many of its think tanks and educational institutions, and lost its periphery, a sphere of influence and protection.

At the same time, you had the surge of prosperity in post-war Western Europe through the Marshall Plan. An exhausted working class, after the deprivation and the sufferings of the war, started to get its life back and became gradually more comfortable over the next thirty years. And why not? But as it played out, as a major political factor, it created a problem the movement couldn’t cope with, because it also coincided with the rise of media empires, with television, financed largely by advertising. Our movement was not ready to compete at that level. This is where we lost the communications war. We lost our press and any independent expressions of working class culture, with the long-term effect of losing the culture wars in the 1990s.

Many of the issues of the vanished civil society of labour eventually got taken over by others (feminists, environmentalists, human rights activists, etc.), but that’s another story.

Then, in countries like France, Italy and Greece, where the CP was dominant in the labour movement, the working class became hostage to Cold War politics and political positions, as well as labour alignments. They were frozen for about thirty or forty years. In some other countries, notably Germany, Cold War polarization also contributed to deadening the political debate and distorting trade union priorities.

Finally, European unions have become accustomed to State subsidies, in general for specific activities, such as education or participation in a host of official and quasi-official institutions and meetings. Today, in many countries, unions would be unable to function without the government subsidies they have become accustomed to.

So what do you get? A heavily bureaucratized and passive movement, initially led by survivors, then rapidly replaced by complacent and arrogant careerists who are happy to depend on the State. They administer the gains of past struggles but are unwilling to conduct any new ones, opposing any ideas they have not thought of themselves and believing that nothing must ever happen for the first time. That kind of leadership educates union members to be passive consumers of union services, not participants in struggle.

NU: You said before that, as far as Europe was concerned, generalizations were not very useful. Should we take that to include what you just said?

DG: You got me there. I think what I have tried to do is draw a common denominator, a composite picture which applies in general but not exactly in any one country. For example, in the Nordic countries, except for a short-lived split in Finland, the Cold War had hardly any impact at all. In Spain, where the labour movement emerged from a fascist regime only in the 1970s, rank-and-file democracy is a strongly-felt aspiration. All of Eastern Europe is a different situation again, and a very complicated situation, with many cross-currents. And of course there are always exceptions. There have been outstanding labour leaders like Otto Brenner,¹³ Wilhelm Gefeller¹⁴ in Germany, Jack Jones¹⁵ in Britain, André Renard¹⁶ in Belgium. So, one has to fine-tune every national situation. But some will recognize my descriptions and, as the saying goes, if the shoe fits, wear it.

Neither do I want to idealize the pre-war labour movement in Europe. There were too many entirely avoidable and disastrous defeats. The leading labour parties of Germany and Austria had armed militias ready to fight which were awaiting orders that never came. The French Popular Front government refused to support the Spanish Republicans in the civil war, who, had they won, would have changed the course of history. Not to speak of the catastrophic Communist policies, in Germany, in Spain, all over. One needs to reflect on these defeats and learn from them. But even so, the level of ambition in those days was higher.

NU: You were general secretary of the IUF for many years, and active in the international union movement. How does the international movement cope with the problem of bureaucratism?

DG: With difficulty. You have to realize that the international movement is yet another level removed from the rank-and-file: the actual members of international trade union organizations, in a statutory sense, are national unions, not individual workers, so the international organization will reflect to a very large extent the culture and practices of its affiliated unions, particularly the large affiliates.

So, structurally, it is almost inevitably bureaucratic. The politics of the leadership, basically the secretariat and the governing bodies, makes a big difference. You can have an organization with a deeply rooted culture of militancy and a democratic culture, which will do two things: first, ensure that democratic practices are respected and encouraged in the way it operates, within its own governing bodies, and, second, encourage democratic participation within its affiliates wherever it can, for example through its educational programs, in its publications, etc.

NU: And then you have the others…

DG: Indeed. Again, it is a question of politics, of how you interpret the situation and, consequently, how you evaluate the union response required. If you believe that “social partnership” is an accurate description of labour/management relations, and that social change occurs through conversations between political leaders and experts – “social dialogue” – then you will invest your resources and energies in a lobbying operation. The privileged counterparts in these conversations will be the bureaucrats of government organizations and of employers’ organizations. In meeting after meeting, you will be bargaining about words, and you will believe you have won a significant victory when you have changed a sentence in a statement. This can go on forever, and no one will ever know the difference. The workers who are members of such organizations don’t even know they exist.

NU: How can workers, at rank-and-file level, learn to tell the difference between useful and useless organizations? Where does usefulness become apparent?

DG: Very simple: workers certainly can tell the difference when they become involved in a conflict. When it comes to conflict, the differences are very quickly apparent. And whether our international sell-out artists like it or not, unions are about conflict. Either the international organization pulls out all stops and the saying “one for all, all for one”, (especially the second part) becomes a concrete reality, for as long as it takes, or else the international organization starts mediating instead of fighting, tries to minimize and kill the conflict, even sides with the employer just to be rid of the problem.

NU: How does this relate back to the issue of bureaucratism? Are you suggesting that bureaucracy and politics are related?

DG: They are, very much so. However, the relationship is not a mechanical one. For instance it would be simplistic and wrong to say that left-wing politics protects us against bureaucracy. If we are talking about the Communist tradition, the opposite is true, almost always, and this includes Maoism, which is actually an extreme form of Stalinism. People who come out of that school are often dangerous authoritarians. Even when they change their politics, they don’t necessarily change their methods.

And of course social-democracy has its own awesome bureaucratic traditions; even anarchist and syndicalist organizations, contrary to legend, can be run in extremely authoritarian and bureaucratic ways.

No, the only form of politics which is an effective antidote to bureaucratism is the kind of socialist politics that contains a strong element of radical democracy. This goes back to Marx himself, but despite appearances, this current was never dominant in the socialist movement. It surfaces from time to time, a person like Rosa Luxemburg would be fairly typical, there were others within the political families of the Left. Eugene Debs in the United States would be another example.

NU: That’s not a very broad political base. If that’s all we have, is the struggle against bureaucratism lost in advance?

DG: No, because in fact we have very much more. The politics of radical democracy respond to a very deep and fundamental need felt by workers. They keep coming back to this on their own, and they very often spontaneously develop democratic forms of organizing, of conducting struggles, of running their organizations. Rosa Luxemburg understood this. This aspiration is very strong. That is the basic reason why the labour movement has such a democratic culture, despite all the pressures to the contrary from the society that surrounds it… the “old shit”, as Marx called it.¹⁷

NU: Do you see workers’ desire for deeper forms of democracy extending from union HQ all the way down into the workplace?

DG: Yes, except I would put it the other way around, from the workplace – the “point of production”, as the IWW used to say – to union HQ. It has to start at the point of production. As I said, this is a very fundamental need of workers, and actually very often of people in general. Think of women’s movements or peasant’s movements – in all progressive mass movements there is this demand for transparency and accountability in the leadership.

The point is to nurture and strengthen the politics of radical democracy, the particular strand of socialist politics which I believe is the authentic Marxism, which insists that power, where it matters, always has to remain in the hands of the workers. Today this means almost all of society, since nearly everybody is part of the working class, whether they know it or not. To get there, you have to start from the bottom, the point of production, and then build democratic institutions, like democratic unions, impose democratic procedures at every level, democratize the decision-making mechanism in public administration. We don’t want to abolish bureaucracy if bureaucracy means administration, we all need administration and we want it to be honest, transparent and efficient, in our own organizations to start with, then in society at large. We want an administration built on our key values: justice and freedom. These will be the values of the society of the future – if we make it that far.

1. Pierre Monatte (1881-1960) A proofreader by profession, he was a leader of the French CGT when it was a revolutionary syndicalist organization and, in 1909, founded its journal, La vie Ouvrière. He was an anti-war internationalist during World War I., joined the French Communist Party in 1923 and was expelled in 1924 for opposing its bureaucratization. He then returned to revolutionary syndicalism, and in 1925 he founded La Révolution Prolétarienne, which is still being published. “Le refus de parvenir” means: “the refusal of social climbing”.
2. The Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920 agreed on ‘Twenty One Conditions‘, which formalised the beginning of ‘the great split’: a split which was to divide the labour movement for the rest of the century. Note in particular: ‘In the columns of the press, at public meetings, in the trades unions, in the co-operatives – wherever the members of the Communist International can gain admittance – it is necessary to brand not only the bourgeoisie but also its helpers, the reformists of every shade, systematically and pitilessly.’
3. George Meany (1894-1980), president of the American Federation of Labor from 1952 to 1955, then, following its merger with the Congress of Industrial Organizations, president of the united AFL-CIO from 1955 to 1979.
4. Jay Lovestone (1906-1989), a founder of the American Communist Party, later leader of the Right-Wing opposition group (the pro-Bukharin faction) which dissolved in 1941. In 1943 Lovestone became international affairs director of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union and, in 1963, director of the international affairs department of the AFL-CIO. He held that position until 1974 and as the main architect of the collaboration of the AFL-CIO with the CIA. For more on Lovestone, see: A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster by Ted Morgan (New York: Random House, 1999
5. Dr. Strangelove: the 1964 black comedy film by Stanley Kubrick, featuring a paranoiac American general launching a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, hoping to thwart a Communist conspiracy to “sap and impurify” the “precious bodily fluids” of the American people with fluoridated water. The US president in the film is advised by a “mad scientist” type: Dr. Strangelove.
6. Irving Brown (1911-1989) , chief lieutenant and hatchet man for Lovestone since the 1930s, set ujp”anti-Communist” operations in the trade union movement, mostly in Europe, including the notorious Mediterranean Committee, organized with the help of gangsters in French, Italian and Greek ports.
7. Friedrich Niemöller (1892-1984), prominent German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor. He is best known as the author of the following lines (and variations thereof):
   “First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist; Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist;
   Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
   Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
   Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.”
   
8. Daniel Fusfeld: The Rise and Repression of Radical Labor 1877-1918, Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, Chicago, 1980 (ISBN 088286050X) and Patricia Cayo Sexton: The War on Labor and the Left – Understanding America’s Unique Conservatism, Westview Press, Boulder/San Francisco/Oxford, 1991 (ISBN 0813310636
9. Walter Reuther (1907-1970), leading organizer and after 1946 president of the United Auto Workers’ union, a Socialist Party member until 1939, president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1952, negotiated the merger with the American Federation of Labor in 1955, eventually clashed with Meany over the conservative policies of the AFL-CIO and formed a short-lived alternative center, the Alliance for Labor Action (1958–1972) with the Teamsters and a few smaller unions. On May 9, 1970, Reuther and his wife May were killed when their chartered plane crashed while on final approach to the airstrip near the union’s recreational and educational facility at Black Lake, Michigan. In October 1968, a year and a half before the fatal crash, Reuther and his brother Victor were almost killed in a small private plane as it approached Dulles airport. Both incidents are amazingly similar; the altimeter in the fatal crash was believed to have malfunctioned. When Victor Reuther was interviewed many years after the fatal crash he said, “I and other family members are convinced that both the fatal crash and the near fatal one in 1968 were not accidental.”
10. Ralph Helstein (1908-1985), president of the United Pckinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) from 1946 to 1968. Under his leadership, the union, a CIO affiliate, became one of the most militant and democratic unions in the US. It organized the meat packing industry in the US and Canada and played a leading role in fighting for minority and women’s rights. When the UPWA merged with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters union in 1968, Helstein became vice president and special counsel. He worked with the union until 1972 and died in Chicago in 1985.
11. Patrick Emmet Gorman (1882-1980), a life-long socialist, International Secretary-Treasurer of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen (AFL) from 1942 to 1976 (the Meat Cutters were an old socialist union which had a European constitution, where the secretary-treasurer, not the president, was the chief executive officer). Gorman opposed Meany on the Vietnam war and on many other political issues.
12. The General Jewish Labour Union of Lithuania, Poland and Russia, in Yiddish the Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Lite, Poyln un Rusland, generally called the Bund (from German: Bund, meaning federation or union) or the Jewish Labour Bund, was a Jewish political party and trade union in several European countries operating predominantly between the 1890s and the 1930s with remnants of the party still active in the United States, Canada, Australia, France and the United Kingdom. The Bund opposed Zionism and fought for the recognition of Jews as an autonomous cultural community within European countries. In this and in other respects, it was strongly influenced by the Austro-Marxist school of socialism, and was a left-socialist party in the context of the Labour and Socialist International. In WWII it was active in the resistance movement against the Nazi occupation in Poland and in Lithuania, one of its leaders, Marek Edelman, was a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, and later of the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) in 1976 and of the Solidarity movement. Two leaders of the Bund, Victor Alter and Henryk Erlich, who had sought refuge in the USSR after the German invasion, were executed in December 1941 in Moscow on Stalin’s orders.
13. Otto Brenner (1907-1972), president of the German metal workers’ union IG Metall from 1956 to 1972. In 1931 Brenner left the Social-Democratic Party (SPD) which he had joined as a youth to join the Socialist Workers’ Party, founded by Left Socialists and dissident Communists, too late to prevent the seizure of power by Hitler. Brenner became active in the anti-Nazi resistance, was arrested in 1933, sentenced to two years’ prison and kept under police supervision until the end of the war. In 1945 Brenner re-joined the SPD and became active in the reconstruction of the trade union movement. At the head of the IG Metall he played a leading tole in the defense of democratic rights and against rearmament. In 1961, he was elected president of the International Metalworkers’ Federation.
14. Wilhelm Gefeller (1906-1983), president of the German chemical workers’ union IG Chemie from 1949 to 1969, one of the founders of the post-war German trade union movement, active in the SPD. Strong advocate of co-determination in German industry and at international level, and of democratic rights. President of the International Chemical and General Workers’ Unions (ICF) in the late 1960s.
15. James Larkin (Jack) Jones (1913-2009), general secretary of the Transport & General Workers’ Union (UK) from 1968 to 1978. Throughout his career he strove to increase the power and influence of shop stewards. In 1937 he joined the International Brigades in the Spanish civil war and was wounded in 1938. Jones was also Vice-President of the International Transport Workers Federation and, after his retirement, was a campaigner for pensioners’ rights. His autobiography, Union Man, was published in 1986.
16. André Renard (1911-1962), Belgian trade unionist, active in the resistance under Nazi occupation,created an illegal united trade union movement independent of political parties and advocated its extension to the entire country at liberation, but could not overcome the split between socialist and Catholic unions. Deputy General-Secretary of the socialist trade union center FGTB, leader of the six-week general strike in 1960-1961 against the austerity policies of the conservative government. A strong advocate for the autonomy of Wallonia (the French-speaking part of Belgium).
17. “…revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the old shit and become fitted to found society anew.” Karl Marx: The German Ideology, Part I: Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook 1845.

It would be fair to say that he knows the ILO inside out. Now Professor of Economic Security at the University of Bath in the UK, he is well placed to reflect on the organisation’s potential and failings. By temperament, Standing is a reformer; by any objective measure, the ILO is in sore need of reform. Be warned, what follows is not masked in the “bureaucode” which generally obscures this kind of discussion.

New Unionism: Let’s be frank, most people know nothing about the International Labour Organisation, or ILO. It sounds like something out of a conspiracy theory. Can you tell us a little about it?

Guy Standing: The ILO was set up after World War One to raise labour standards. It has always been “tripartite”, meaning it brings together representatives of Government, Workers’ and Employers’ bodies. They used to represent many more than they do now.

Over the years, they have debated and passed a series of Conventions and Recommendations; there are now nearly 200 of each. Conventions are supposed to be legally binding, if the country ratifies them. Then, if unions believe their government is not adhering to a particular Convention that has been ratified, they can bring a complaint, which should be investigated. The trouble is that the ILO can do no more than criticise and urge action.

The organisation was set up largely to counter the advance of socialism in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution and other uprisings in Europe, as well as regulating against some of the excesses in the labour market. Without ever saying so, it stood for a model of capitalism where traditional employees are treated decently in return for accepting the employers’ prerogative to manage and to extract profit.

The roots of the ILO’s current problems began in the 1970s, with the rise of economic philosophies that tended to view any kind of regulation as a ‘market distortion’. It was not long before the ILO was seen as a symbol of an antiquated way of thinking. The USA actually pulled out from 1977 to 1980. This precipitated a crisis and ever since then, particularly after the fall of communism, the ILO has been struggling to redefine itself.

The trouble was that the ILO itself did not wish to offend the Americans, the World Bank or other institutions and governments supporting neo-liberalism.

The ILO still sets labour standards, of course, but it made a historic mistake in putting its faith in a new Declaration in 1998 establishing core standards to which all its members had to subscribe. Not bad, you might think. The problem was that this tended to marginalise all the other Conventions and it was not legally binding. Meanwhile, the ILO has tried to take on a role of a development agency, providing technical assistance to governments, and it has tried to become a global provider of knowledge and expertise. It has lost its focus, and cannot stretch to all three roles successfully. The roles are all subject to internal pressures. This has resulted in a gradual shift towards vague terms and a reluctance to deal in objective measurement. There’s a tacit understanding that these things just lead to trouble.

NU: You’re painting a fairly grim picture here.

GS: Behind the scenes there are few now who regard the organisation with respect or enthusiasm. It has become hopelessly compromised by the pressures it has to reconcile. it refused to move with the times, and its leadership has lacked courage.

Towards the end of the Cold War it found itself in a difficult position with regards to agencies like the World Bank. The Bank was preaching a free market solution to the crumbling socialist economies, and had the ILO challenged these forcefully it would have jeopardized funds for technical assistance projects. ILO researchers found evidence of the adverse effects of pro-market policies; at first, the evidence was dismissed, then it was kept quiet.

In 1999, the ILO adopted the vague notion of “social dialogue”, a term it borrowed from the OECD. Taking shelter behind vagueness was becoming a general strategy. Another example was the Declaration in 1998, which enshrined “core” labour standards. These are all worthy standards: banning forced labour, gender discrimination, the worst forms of child labour, and calling for an end to restrictions on the freedom of association. However they are matters of common and civil law, rather than part a global strategy or progressive agenda. Most nations could sign on to these without the slightest thought, particularly as they are not enforced, and then continue down whichever path of self-regulation they choose. Rather than transform global labour standards, we have witnessed the rise of voluntary employer initiatives such as codes of conduct and corporate social responsibility.

Again, it is all part of a drift towards imprecision and soft labour law, as opposed to binding regulation. Over recent decades the ILO has stopped addressing inequality and replaced this with calls for employment equity. This was a shift the Employers had wanted. Under a voluntarist framework governments could ratify Conventions they felt comfortable with, ignore those they do not, and even “deratify” those they had changed their minds about. One of the great ironies of the time was that while regulation was being so denounced, at national level there were more new labour market laws being introduced than at any comparable time in history (mostly restricting workers’ rights). All the ILO did was express general unease about the direction these were taking.

NU: …while the World Bank and the IMF were using their financial leverage to affect labour policies wherever they could?

GS: Relations between the international financial institutions and the ILO have been peculiar, to say the least. By the mid ’80s senior levels in the ILO had lost confidence. They regarded the technical capacity of the Bank, the IMF and the OECD as higher than that of their own staff. The result was a loss of voice in international debates. This has been a disaster for working people, as well as the ILO itself. For instance the dismantling of social protection in the former soviet states, before alternatives could be put in place, resulted in mass poverty and several million deaths. As for the crisis of labour standards in development and trade, the ILO has handled this by glossing over it. And the Governing Body has become tentative and conservative.

NU: By this you mean the Government, Worker and Employer reps?

GS: That is right. Each June over 3,000 of them from 180 member countries come together for an international conference in Geneva. This tripartite structure is what gives the ILO its legitimacy on the global stage. It does not take much imagination to guess what would happen if these three groups started taking control of the key positions. Rather than a genuine discussion over fact-based policy, presented by competent authorities, we would soon have capture or deadlock. Sadly, this is what happened. Some of the key management positions have been filled by Employer or Worker reps, and this has ushered in a regime of horse-trading. The ILO is at an impasse. Just a time when the world needs effective global rules, the organisation has allowed itself to become marginalised. It needs to be rescued, or something else created to fill a void.

NU: What do you think of the huge campaign going on at the moment around the general concept of Decent Work?

GS: That’s exactly what it is: a general concept. It is a platitude. It is an expression that nobody could really object to. What is demoralising for staff is that it is deliberately not measured. It is a bit like the notion of the “informal sector” which has preoccupied the ILO for so long. Generally speaking, when definitions are kept vague, policy will be confused.

NU: Those market philosophies that oppose regulation on principle took a huge hit recently, with the financial crisis and the interventions and bailouts. Now even the most conservative voices are calling for a new era of regulation. Do you think this might help restore the role of the ILO?

GS: It is an opportunity. However, I think the failure to move from old-style labourism means that the ILO is not in any position to play a major role. Endless empty statements about decent jobs are no substitute for a really progressive strategy. Whisper it… but globalisation is dead. Now is the time for real friends of workers across the world to work for a new strategy for equality and freedom. I think the New Unionism movement must embrace that strategy, for it is as important now as at any time in history that we have strong associations to represent all of us in our work and in our dealings with the state.

I am afraid the ILO looks like a tired old outfit, and barely able or willing to help.

The first began in the mid-1880s, as craft-based structures gave way to industrial unions. The new leaders argued that unions must become more open, visionary and inclusive.

In 1988 women at the Bryant & May match factory in London began what might well be the most significant strike in history¹: and their success ushered in a new era of expansion in union membership, social ambition and influence. A year later came the London dockers’ strike, and within twelve months membership of the UK’s Trade Union Congress had increased from 670,000 to 1,593,000.

Although created later, this poster from the U.S. IWW (aka “the Wobblies”) captures the spirit and goals of that first movement wonderfully.

It was a period in which unions went beyond reacting to imposed agendas and started developing their own social goals. Labor historian R.A. Leeson described the shift thus:

Two conflicting views of the trade-union movement strove for ascendancy in the nineteenth century: one the defensive-restrictive gild-craft tradition passed down through journeymen’s clubs and friendly societies,… the other the aggressive-expansionist drive to unite all ‘labouring men and women’ for a ‘different order of things’…

Speaking in 1892, W.G. Spence, made the following comments on “The Ethics of New Unionism”:

In the old days labor looked askance at the employer and felt a hatred for him. New Unionism is today looking beyond the employer and fixing its hatred upon the system, which is bad not alone for the worker, but for the employer — which forces the employer to act unjustly even if (they do) not wish to do so.

He continued:

…there was spreading amongst unionists this idea… that they could not affect the improvement they desired by dealing only with the mere question of hours and wages. And so comes what has been termed the “new unionism” — a unionism wide and broad in its aim, and one which will certainly be far-reaching in its effects… We are aiming now at securing an improvement by social and political reforms — and by that means alone a revolution will undoubtedly be effected in time. When I use the word revolution do not misunderstand me — I mean a quiet one. It will be a change from one condition to another.

Revolution? So where does this fit in with early communism, and Marx and Lenin and so forth?

Because of its deeper social agenda, New Unionism was described at the time as “labor socialism”, or “evolutionary socialism”. Karl Marx was a champion of the New Unionists:

The old Unions preserve the traditions of the time when they were founded, and look upon the wages system as a once-for-all established, final fact, which they at best can modify in the interest of their members. The new Unions were founded at a time when the faith in the eternity of the wages system was severely shaken… And thus we see now these new Unions taking the lead of the working-class movement generally, and more and more taking in tow the rich and proud, old Unions. …glad and proud I am to have lived to see it.

However, World War One interrupted New Unionism’s evolution. When it was over, leaving many of the traditional power relations shattered, three contending ideologies (soviet, anti-communist and Christian social-democrat) began vying to control the movement.

The Great Split

In 1920 there was a huge split in the labour movement. At the Second Congress of the Comintern, V.I. Lenin proposed “Twenty One Conditions” which must be met in order for communists and socialists to work together (more). In effect, the communists demanded allegiance to the Soviet order. Those who agreed pledged themselves to struggle against any force which was working to reform capitalism.

The same year saw a secondary split as well, with the formation of the “International Federation of Christian Trade Unions” — designed to provide an alternative to the anti-religious trade unions in Europe at the time.

World War Two papered over these divisions for a while, but as soon as it was over the primary dispute — often described in terms of “reform vs revolution” — resurfaced. Within a few years the Cold War had set the split in concrete, and Russian and US-dominated forces were battling in every imaginable way to control the direction of unionism. It was a fracas in which the workers’ voice was generally drowned out.

The effects of 1920 lasted beyond the end of the century. In fact, it might be argued that vestiges of the era’s top-down ideologically-based controls are still evident in some unions today.

However the splits are becoming increasingly irrelevant as the Cold War recedes. In 2006 the original Christian federation (changed and renamed) joined together with the originally anti-communist federation to establish a new international body called the ITUC. The remaining international group, the WFTU (which had pushed the soviet line) has lost more than half of its membership, and is struggling to find a new way forward.

With the effects of these three ideologies subsiding, the drive for social change is again emerging from below. New Unionism is again finding its expression within organised labour, which faces a whole new set of problems: environmental catastrophe, institutionalised conflicts, globalised economics and an increasingly borderless labor market.

We have set up this network to show that the second wave of New Unionism, like its 19th century predecessor, is democratic, rather than bureaucratic, and takes lessons from creative practice (including mistakes!) rather than from ideology. The people involved are those closest to the issues: trade unionists, workers and those labor academics who are engaged in practical research.

So where to now? The movement is still defining itself, and it will be for some years to come. But this time it is happening from the bottom up, rather than the top down. There never was any other way. As the leader of Mexico’s Zapatistas put it: “It is not necessary to conquer the world. It is sufficient to make it new”.

1. Claire Peytavi, “Annie Besant and the 1888 London Matchgirls Strike,” L’Unité de Formation et de Recherche (U.F.R.) d’Etudes Anglo-Américaines de l’Université Paris X Nanterre, 11 October 2003.

If heteroscedasticity is present and affects the coefficient estimates, the quantile regression estimation suggests that the rate of change of the unobservables is different at different quantiles for males but it is not the case for females.

Rightyho, then.

Strangely, international data on the union premium has never, to our knowledge, been assembled in an easily-accessible form. The most that we found was a list of 19 countries. No doubt there are good reasons for this, probably involving heteroscedasticity. Anyway, let’s start with a sample of five countries and then consider some of the issues.

(Note: these figures are not necessarily comparable, as different methodologies and definitions may have been used).

Before we go any further, let’s stop and ask if a high union premium necessarily a good thing for workers? At first this seems like an odd question to ask, but as the Canadian Labour Congress has pointed out:

The union wage premium has been found to be lowest in countries where union density is high, and highest where union density is low. Thus it is much higher in the US than in Sweden. This is surprising on the surface, but it reflects the fact that non-union employers will be more likely to be forced to match union wages where unions are very strong… The goal is to improve the working conditions of all workers rather than raising the wages of a union elite. A very high union wage premium and low union density is likely to promote strong employer resistance to unions, as in the US. On the other hand, widespread unionization, as in Sweden, is likely to promote much less strong employer opposition, at least once high density has been established. That is because, in highly unionized environments, wages are effectively ‘taken out of competition’… Employers must then compete with each other on the basis of non-wage costs, productivity and quality.¹ [italics added]

Employers would do well to reflect on this. Does it really make sense to pay workers extra so that they won’t unionize, on the basis that the company can then compete on wage costs?? Reducing the union premium in this way is common practice in many developed countries. But whatever savings are made are seldom compared against the costs of employee alienation, angry organising campaigns, anti-union consultants, ongoing legal costs, and the commercial risk of a public relations melt down.

That said, the majority of countries do allow businesses to compete on wages. Such competition leads to an endless pressure on wages, and of course workers have no choice but to resist. And by and large this resistance pays off well.

“Unions in other countries, such as Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Cyprus, Denmark, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal and Spain, are also able to raise wages by significant amounts.”²

(In Germany) “…works councils are associated with higher earnings. The wage premium is around 11 percent (and is higher under collective bargaining).”³

(In South Africa) “…We estimate union premia on the order of 20 percent for African workers and 10 percent for white workers.”⁴

(In the U.S.) “The standard estimate of the average union premium (union vs. non-union wage gap) of 15% might be incorrect due to two forms of measurement that create an error bias in the data… These procedural errors lead to a downward bias, indicating that the average union premium could be as high as 24%”.⁵

An interesting result of this battle is that a unionised workforce also tends to reshape the economic landscape as they struggle over wages.

“An almost universal finding is that union/non-union wage differentials are larger for lower-skilled than for higher-skilled workers.” arrows

(In the U.S.) “When one compares workers whose experience, education, region, industry, occupation and marital status are comparable, those covered by a union agreement (are also):
– 28.2% more likely to have employer-provided health insurance
– 53.9% more likely to have pension coverage
– 14.3% more paid time off.
The union wage premium varies by race, ethnicity and gender, but is large for every group:
– Whites – 13.1%
– Blacks – 20.3%
– Hispanics – 21.9%
– Asians – 16.7%
…Unions also lessen inequality because they are more successful at raising the wages of those in the bottom 60% of the wage pool.⁶

By now you’ll be getting the picture… this is bloody complicated stuff. Unions are good for working people, as a whole, but the financial benefits do not simply bounce back to those who pay the fees.

Various studies have shown that unions tend to make pay fairer (i.e., across society), rather than just higher (i.e., for members only). But do fee-paying members at least get their money back? Unfortunately contemporary data for this just isn’t available. In fact the move towards private employment contracts and fluid working arrangements means that we may never again see comparative international figures. The best we can do for you is to break our own rule, and to delve back into the 1990s.

“The Effect of Trade Unions on Wages” by Alex Bryson, Reflets et Perspectives de la Vie Economique, 2007.

When looking at the figures for Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden, don’t assume that unions aren’t doing their jobs. As Bryson points out: “this is primarily due to the fact that unions are also able to control wage outcomes in the non-union sector”. The same holds true, to a lesser extent, for France and Germany.

Although our figures are dated, it looks pretty clear that being a union member pays off. In fact when one compares union fees against wage/salary gains, there would be very few investments in the world which pay such handsome dividends. And yet this financial incentive is clearly insufficient. Why are there so few members in the US, where the rewards are so high? And why would a worker in Italy, the Netherlands or Sweden join a union? They’ll almost certainly gain the benefits anyway, even if they don’t belong. And in Italy, in particular, there is an extremely low level of social resentment against such “free-riders”.

There seems to be no simple link between union density and the union wage premium. None at all.

Yes, union membership pays a high dividend to members. But it also generates benefits for others, some of whom are not members. It seems that the cost-benefit ratio of unionism cannot be calculated in any normal way. Investing in values. Solidarity. Social justice. This is the kind of maths that modern economists simply can’t figure. It’s a pity, because there seems to be an awful lot of it going around.

1. “Economic and Social Impacts of Trade Unions,” Canadian Labour Congress.
2. Changes over time in union relative wage effects in the UK and the US Revisited, December 2002, by David Blanchflower and Alex Bryson.
3. “Work Councils and the Anatomy of Wages,” Discussion Paper 06-086, ZEW.
4. World Bank Group.
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