Labor Unions:
Labor unions are supposed to be the same basic thing a government is, applied to a specific situation. That is, an agreement among workers to join together to protect their mutual interests against those who would threaten them—namely, their employers.
Labor unions create competition between workers and employers. And as we all know, Capitalism works so well as an economic system because competition drives innovation. Gee, so I wonder why so many Capitalists work so hard to prevent their workers from forming unions, and to break up unions that their workers form? Since every red-blooded Capitalist knows how much Capitalism benefits from competition, you’d think they would encourage their workers to unionize. Instead, they consistently act as the though their goal in the competition was to win the competition and eliminate their competitors. Gosh, that’s turning into such a recurring theme. I wonder why Capitalism doesn’t work as well as everyone thought it would…
Anyway, most labor unions are a joke. There are a number of reasons for that. For one, they have professional union organizers. For another, companies the unions work for have professional union liaisons.
The problem with that is that if the union organizer doesn’t have the same job as the workers, he obviously doesn’t have the same goals as the workers, and therefore, he can’t adequately represent them. A professional union organizer is paid from the workers’ union dues. That means that the most effective means a professional union organizer can perceive of preserving the survival of his DNA is to get the workers to keep paying their dues. The most effective means a worker can perceive of preserving the survival of his DNA is to work at his job and pay his dues in the hopes that his union will actually do something.
That might not seem like much of a discrepancy. It could be argued that a professional union organizer has more time to devote to organizing and that he keeps his job and keeps getting paid from the workers’ dues by actually accomplishing what the workers want him to accomplish.
However, as a lot of workers have discovered, professional union organizers end up occupying a different tier of the social hierarchy from the workers they’re supposed to be representing. Since they don’t work in the conditions of the workers, the workers’ problems are not personally meaningful to them. So professional union organizers have more time to organize, but union organizers who work alongside the rest of the workers fight a lot harder for the workers’ cause. So what do professional union organizers do with all that extra time they have to organize? Well as it turns out, basically, nothing. And people who make their livings on the sweat and blood of the workers and who don’t actually contribute anything useful to anyone else is exactly what the workers formed their union to protect themselves from in the first place!
That brings me to the problem of company-employed union liaisons. The goal of the company-employed union liaison is to facilitate relations between the company and the union. Well there’s just one problem with that. If you facilitate your relations with another group of people, you’re no longer competing against them.
So now you have professional union organizers for whom the struggles of the workers are not personally meaningful, working with a company-employed union representative to facilitate the relations between the company and the labor union. At this point, you’ve completely defeated the whole purpose for having a labor union in the first place!
The professional union organizer’s goal is to preserve the survival of his DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him. On one side he has a labor union. On the other side he has a company-employed union liaison. He gets paid from the workers’ union dues. So what do you think will be the most effective means he can perceive of preserving the survival of his DNA? He’s going to defend the workers just enough to make them feel like the union is doing something for them, so they will feel like continuing to pay their union dues. Then he’s going to get together with the company liaison to facilitate the relations between the company and the workers’ union. That means that the professional union organizer and the company-employed union liaison are going to get together and agree on a bunch of stuff. Those agreements are always going to benefit the company, because that’s the only thing a company employee would ever agree to. But people who come to agreements are not competing against each other. So now the professional union organizer has done enough to make the workers feel like there’s a point to belonging to the union and paying their union dues to support the professional union organizer, and the professional union organizer has come to an agreement with the company-employed union liaison. The end result of that is that the professional union organizer doesn’t have to struggle against anything, so he doesn’t have to organize any struggle, so he makes his own life as simple as possible, and keeps getting paid from the workers’ union dues.
This experiment has been conducted numerous times by numerous people.
Enter the Industrial Workers of the World.
The Industrial Workers of the World are Anarchists. They don’t pay professional union organizers, and they don’t work with union liaisons. They do what labor unions are supposed to do, which is to compete against their employers.
Their goal in the competition is very simple: Destroy Capitalism. Hey, all you Capitalists out there, this competitive economic system was your idea. So don’t sit around feeling sorry for yourselves now. Innovate motherf*cker, innovate.
Of course, innovating is what the Capitalists have been doing all along. And how have they been innovating? The same way they always innovate, of course. And is that by encouraging the competition that drives their economy? No, it’s by finding ever more efficient and productive ways to win the competition by eliminating their competitors. In this case, that means breaking up labor unions, preventing workers from forming labor unions, and commandeering the idea of the labor union, appearing to agree with it, stripping it of its content, and selling a hollow replica of it back to the workers to make them feel like they have a labor union on their side. So if Capitalists are working so hard to destroy labor unions, how else did you expect a labor union to compete against that but to try to destroy Capitalism?
The IWW’s mission statement begins with one very unambiguous sentence: Labor has nothing in common with Capital.
(Technically they’re mistaken, because Labor and Capital are both Homo sapiens, which is a lot for any two groups of people to have in common. Their perceptions of the world are different because of their differences in abilities, skills, resources, personal history, and cultural background. My dad alternated several times between working for someone else and going into business for himself, which meant he was alternating between being Labor and Capital, but he didn’t turn into a different person each time, and he certainly didn’t become a member of a different species. But if you take the statement to mean “Labor and Capital tend to have different characteristics that have nothing to do with each other”, as opposed to a literal division of everyone into one group or another, then the statement is true. And from a literary and artistic standpoint, it makes a very unambiguous opening line.)
Another of the IWW’s founding principles is: Labor is entitled to all it produces. Think about it. Why should people spend their lives creating things they aren’t allowed to use?
The argument against that is: Not allowed to use in what sense? There’s no law against people buying the things they produce.
There isn’t a formal law against people buying things they produce. But if the people aren’t paid enough to buy the things they produce, what else do you call that beside not being allowed to use something? Because their only alternative would be to steal it, and that is against the law. This commodification of people’s time is precisely where Capitalism began.
I think people have heard enough about what labor unions are supposed to do that I don’t need to spell it out any further. The Industrial Workers of the World have a website and a newspaper where you can find out more, if you’re interested. Since an industrialized technological level isn’t environmentally sustainable, the IWW isn’t a solution to all the world’s problems, but it is at least a step in the right direction. The chemical reaction of the global environment can’t possibly work in a way that can keep everyone alive as long as we don’t have a more equitable economic system, and a more equitable economic system is exactly what the IWW is struggling toward. Although that equitable economic system can’t be an industrialized economic system, doing something is better than doing nothing. People who have no control over their futures are slaves, and slavery is an oppressive and inequitable economic system by definition. Since all human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them, anyone who makes decisions that affect people who have no control over their futures can’t be trusted not to make their decisions for their own benefit, and at the other person’s expense. So the IWW is struggling to give workers more control over their futures. Basically, it’s the No Borders movement applied to all aspects of workers’ lives.
There are a couple other evolutionary factors the IWW has discovered and are putting to good use to make labor unions function the way they’re intended to function, which is what makes the IWW such a good example.
First of all, they’ve discovered the Hobbesian cycle of aggression. Economic and political power are meaningless unless you use them against the enemy. If you have them but don’t use them, the enemy will continue to act to advance his interests at the expense of yours, which negates your economic and political power. So to prevent that from happening, you have to use your economic and political power to push your enemy back and advance your interests, just to make sure he remembers that you can. You don’t necessarily have to harm his interests in the process of benefiting yours, but if his interests are mutually exclusive of yours, harming his interests is unavoidable.
They tell stories about these things on their website and in their newspaper all the time. A lot of their actions are pretty straightforward—striking and picketing and things like that. But they also use their worker solidarity in simpler ways, for more day-to-day purposes.
One story that sticks in my mind is of a Wiccan lady who worked at a Starbuck’s getting in trouble for wearing her Pentacle openly. Her manager told her to take it off for all the usual reasons employers tell their employees to take off their Pentacles—mainly because they offend a lot of customers. But then those same managers don’t say anything to employees who wear crosses openly, because if they did, they’d piss off about 70% of Americans or something like that. So people’s rights to observe their religions are being governed according the effects they’re having on Capitalists’ profits.
The Wiccan lady wouldn’t back down and refused to take off her Pentacle. So her manager sent her home a couple of times. Then the Wiccan brought up the problem at her next IWW meeting, and she and her Fellow Workers came up with a plan.
The next time the Wiccan’s manager told her to take off her Pentacle, she refused again. So the manager sent her home again. But this time the Wiccan took off her Pentacle and handed it to one of her Fellow Workers, and he put it on. So then the manager backed down, because she couldn’t afford to send him home too. That was the last time she told the Wiccan to take off her Pentacle.
With that simple of an act of workers cooperating to protect themselves against their Capitalist employers, the Capitalists were forced to yield, and the workers won. As we all know, Capitalism is a competitive economic system, and competition drives innovation. Innovation is not the goal of Capitalist competition; the goal of Capitalist competition is to defeat the opposition.
Innovation is just the byproduct, so it does nothing to change the fact that Capitalism is inherently oppressive. The easiest way to win at competitions is to compete against people you know you can beat. And that’s exactly what this manager was doing. But then the workers innovated and found a more effective and more productive way to compete against the Capitalists. And the workers won.
The other big evolutionary factor IWW members are putting to use doesn’t seem like much at first glance, but it has monumental effects on people’s perceptions of their situation. You know how people use titles like Doctor or Senator or Admiral to address people who have accomplished something important in life? Within the IWW, everyone addresses each other as Fellow Worker. In print, the title is always capitalized. Because really, everyone who works for a living, or even tries to work for a living, is accomplishing something important in life.
This is just the Australian mate tradition applied specifically to an economic system. It’s similar to the Communist tradition of addressing each other as Comrade, and the tradition a few American presidents have used of addressing voters as My Fellow Americans, but it’s different in two important ways.
Like the Australian mate tradition, the Fellow Worker title calls a social status truce. That means any time one IWW member addresses another, with the first two words out of their mouth they’ve called a social status truce—which means that IWW members can’t talk to each other without calling a social status truce. Where Australians use their social status truce tradition with anyone, IWW members use it for people who play a specific role in an economic system. If you don’t play that role, they don’t offer you the truce, because they already know that your goals are mutually exclusive to theirs.
After the words Fellow Worker leave your mouth, you will hold yourself responsible for living up to your own ideals with your own actions. If you address someone as Fellow Worker and then don’t treat him like an equal, it’s going to be obvious that you were lying when you addressed him as Fellow Worker. So if he doesn’t cooperate with you, you have no one to blame for it but yourself.
At the same time, if you address him as Fellow Worker and he doesn’t treat you like an equal, that will make it obvious that he’s not interested in a social status truce, so he’s absolved you of cooperating with him. You began the conversation by attempting to call a social status truce with him, and he chose not to accept it, which means that he chose to free you from any obligation you might’ve felt to act in his interests.
The Fellow Worker title is different from the Comrade or Fellow American titles because it doesn’t imply that the other person should feel any emotional attachment to you as a result of belonging to the same group as you. Consequently, you won’t evoke that feeling from the other person. It is true that an IWW member might try to use the words that way, but if they do it will be less effective, because the words themselves don’t imply that meaning.
Calling someone your Comrade implies that he already belongs to some group with you, and therefore he should cooperate with you for that reason alone. Calling someone Fellow American is a direct reference to the group the two of you belong to, and just as with the Comrade title it carries with it the implication that you should cooperate with each other just because you’re members of the same group.
The Fellow Workers title is a title of respect that refers to the fact that the other person is trying to make a living just like you are. It also refers to the fact that as two workers, the two of you have a lot of interests in common. But it does all of this in a way that leaves the two of you as independent entities, who can each choose to cooperate with the other or not to cooperate with each other as you see fit. It is fairly likely that you will choose to cooperate with each other, but if you do make that choice, you will make it as a result of the situation that affects you. And as a result, that cooperation doesn’t need to be enforced upon either of you artificially.
The other big difference between the Fellow Workers and the Fellow Americans and Comrade titles is that the Fellow Americans and Comrade titles were used by people who practiced coercive governments. If your president addresses you as “My Fellow Americans” or “Comrades”, he is trying to get you to attach emotional meaning to your membership in a group that he has the power to force you to cooperate with. That renders both of those terms basically meaningless, because everyone who hears them knows they’re lies. If the other person attempts to invoke your loyalty to a group when he addresses you, but you know, and he knows, and you know that he knows, that you have no choice but to belong to that group, and that he has the ability to punish you if you don’t cooperate with the group, then you know that he isn’t really addressing you that way because he needs to. The only reason he’s addressing you that way is to save himself the trouble of punishing you. So why should you think of him as anything other than a politician who’s trying to maintain a good public image and who doesn’t really give a f*ck about you?
Since the Industrial Workers of the World are Anarchists, nobody wields any power over anyone else. Or even if they do, as a result of a majority of workers electing certain people to be the representatives of their local chapter or whatever, it is still the goal of Anarchism that no one should wield any power over anyone else. So first of all, whatever power anyone wields over anyone else is minimized. Then, if you do wield power over someone else and choose to wield it for your benefit at their expense, you prove yourself not to be an Anarchist, and therefore not qualified for your position. Whatever amount of power you wield over anyone else is going to be less than the amount of power all the other group member working together will wield over you. And if you prove yourself not to be an Anarchist, you can be sure that the other group members will wield that power against you. So regardless of any superficial inequalities in decision-making power that exist within the group, the simple fact that all the members of the group have agreed to define the success of the group by the mutual benefit of all the members in the group, renders those discrepancies in decision-making power meaningless.
By contrast, here in America, we have a competitive economy and inevitably that competition has spilled over into what was originally intended to be a cooperative political system in which civilized men would resolve their disagreements without resorting to bloodshed. Now our political system has become a competitive political system where two sides battle each other every other year for who gets to make the economy work the way they want it to work. And that necessarily means which of two scientifically invalid economic ideologies our politicians are going to put into practice. If you participate willingly in the American political system as it stands now, you are no longer agreeing to participate in a cooperative political system. Now you’re agreeing to take your chances on winning the elections, along with everyone else. If you win, you win the right to force the losing side to cooperate with you at gunpoint. And you agree that if you lose, the other side has the right to force you to cooperate with them at gunpoint.
IWW members don’t recognize national boundaries as legitimate obstacles to control the movement of workers looking for work. I’ve talked about this already. Now when you add in the Fellow Worker title, it takes that idea to a whole new level. If an American IWW member talks about Mexican IWW members, he refers to them as Fellow Workers. If those Mexican IWW members then cross the U.S. border looking for work, he still refers to them as Fellow Workers, as opposed to illegal immigrants. Even if they take his job, the American IWW member still refers to them as Fellow Workers. That is, he actively recognizes them as workers trying to earn a living, just like he’s doing. The fact that they crossed the border illegally doesn’t make them illegal immigrants—meaning “bad people”—it just makes them workers who crossed the border illegally to look for work. Another person’s belief of who should be allowed to work where has no effect on the respect the IWW member holds for other workers. So in this way, the Fellow Worker title directly counteracts the illegal immigrant label.
The goal of the IWW, and Anarcho-Socialists in general, is for labor unions to take over the companies, so that the workers can control their working conditions directly, without having to go through their Capitalist employers. Hey, we all live in a Capitalist economy, where competition is rewarded. So what else do you call the IWW trying to take over all the companies in the world but competition? If you suddenly don’t like the idea of competition so much anymore, all I can say to that is, innovate motherf*cker, innovate.
Dr. McNally has quite a bit to say about the importance of labor unions to the anti-Capitalist revolution, all of which either applies to the IWW, or could be added to what they’re already doing easily. Of course, any other group of people could do these things too.
First of all, an additional problem that traditional American labor unions suffer from is that of being too conservative. In general, White men are well represented in traditional unions while women and minorities aren’t. Traditional unions try to use general business professionalism etiquette. In various other ways, labor union members try to mimic the culture of their employers in the hopes that their employers will relate well to them, sympathize with them, and be more willing to give them what they want. In other words, traditional labor unions have the completely counterproductive goal of trying to get ahead in the economic system of the people who are oppressing them. Here we can see another danger of basing your perception of the world on ancient religious beliefs. If you believe that people—of your own cultural background at least—are inherently good and are only tempted to commit evil, instead of believing people to be inherently self-interested, you’ll completely underestimate just how evil people of your own cultural background can be.
It is virtually inescapable that defeating Capitalism will depend on a lot of widespread, coordinated labor strikes in America and the rest of the industrialized world. After all, Capitalism is powered by people working at their jobs. As long as people keep working at their jobs, Capitalism survives, because the Capitalists keep making their profits.
One good place some people in Los Angeles found to recruit for labor unions was on city buses. City buses in L.A. are constantly being ridden by factory workers, housekeepers, landscapers, construction workers, and all kinds of other people with low-paying jobs who the economy depends upon. The Bus Riders’ Union is a broad-based labor union, which isn’t specific to any industry, and which brings together a lot of people who have the same basic interests. The organizers of the BRU started with the most obvious: the condition of the buses. At the time the BRU was founded, the L.A. public transportation commission was spending a hugely disproportional amount of its budget on the light rail system that ran through a few upper class neighborhoods—it was public transportation racism. So they got a lot of bus riders to help make a lot of noise about that, and the problem was solved. Another common interest of the Bus Riders Union was coming out in support of the bus drivers’ union when they went on strike for higher wages. From there, the founders of the BRU showed a lot of workers just how much they could do if they worked together, and got a lot of workers used to the idea of being able to make things happen.
Another way people in numerous cities have found to build broad-based worker’s political movements is to set up labor union centers in lower class neighborhoods, where people with some experience in organization can set up a basic structure of support for workers. Setting up labor unions in working-class neighborhoods, as opposed to at places of employment, gives workers the opportunity to come join a union without their employers knowing about it. But the real strength of this strategy is that by giving workers a place to come learn how labor unions work and what they can accomplish, these workers have the opportunity to meet up with each other. From that and from learning the basic background of how labor unions work and what they can accomplish, they can build upon that to figure out how to work together to solve problems they face on their own. And because these unions aren’t being founded by occupation but by neighborhood (where a lot of people in the same occupations live anyway), the workers aren’t limited to working together to solve problems they face at their jobs, but can work together to solve problems they face in any aspect of their lives. So it’s not so much a labor union as it is a labor movement.
As you may have noticed, these basic approaches to setting up broad-based workers’ movements doesn’t result in labor unions dominated by White men, but in labor movements everyone gets to be a part of. Then you really do pit Labor against Capital. Otherwise, all you end up with is Labor trying to imitate Capital.