Commentary No. 46, August 15, 2000
"Do Trade-Unions Have a Future?"
Since the early 1970's, there have been endless numbers of persons - scholars, journalists, and trade-unionists - who have noted, and in many cases, bemoaned the decline of trade-unions. This was based on the undoubted statistic that trade-unions in the wealthiest countries in the world - North America, western Europe, Japan - have been declining, often in absolute membership figures and certainly as percentages of the employed population. Over 25 years, the decline of trade-unions and therefore of trade-unionism became an accepted truism. But in the last five years, there has been a beginning of a revisionist view about trade-unions. What has been happening?
We should start with the actual history of trade-unionism in the world-system. The existence of workers' organizations which seek to obtain better wages and conditions for their members by organizing at the workplace begins in its modern form in the early nineteenth century mostly in western Europe and North America. The earliest such organizations were located in new industrial urban centers, where traditional artisans were being displaced by the introduction of machinery that permitted employers to hire less skilled and therefore lower-paid workers.
Trade-unionism had a difficult road to hoe throughout the nineteenth century. Employers, backed almost always by the state machineries, refused to recognize them and used force and intimidation to keep them from being implanted. With the rise of socialist and labor parties in the late nineteenth century, trade-unions tended to make common cause with such parties, and slowly to make some headway. The skilled artisan base of trade-unionism diminished and trade-unions came more and more to recruit all industrial workers, and therefore to be stronger in their ability successfully to struggle with employers and the states. Trade-unionism began to spread, but weakly, outside its loci of origin, and weak organizations began to be formed in other parts of the world.
It was not, however, until the end of the Second World War that trade-unions achieved a generalized social legitimacy and legal rights in the industrialized countries. Indeed, the generalized legitimacy became so great that even conservative parties accepted a possible role for trade-unions. And having trade-unions in a country became a sign of modernity. Almost every country, even if the regime was entirely authoritarian, allowed the establishment of trade-unions (often of course puppet trade-unions). To have a trade-union federation in a country was on a par with having a national flag, a national anthem, and a national airline.
And trade-unions did accomplish something for the workers they organized. In the wealthy countries, they achieved significant increases in wage levels and far better working conditions. Even in authoritarian countries, they became mechanisms of a controlled "welfare" program. As long as the world-economy was in its stage of overall expansion and high profits from productive activity, that is, roughly between 1945 and 1970, trade-unions seemed to flourish.
Then came the big Kondratieff downturn we have been living in since the 1970's. Profits from productive activity were way down, and many industries began to relocate to lower-wage areas, where trade-unions were far weaker. As the industries (such as steel or automobiles) relocated production, the trade-unions in the countries from which the relocations were occurring (North America, western Europe, Japan) found that they lost members. In part they lost members because their members lost jobs. And in part they lost members because they had to make concessions to keep the industries from still greater relocation, and the members did not feel that trade-unions were serving them that well.
There was another factor that contributed to the "decline" of trade-unionism, an ideological factor. Since the late nineteenth century, trade-unions and socialist parties had always insisted on the political primacy of the class struggle, and felt quite strongly that attention to "other" problems - the plights of minorities, or women - were diversions from the central issue. And that it served the interests of the employers to divide the working classes. But in the 19o60's, with the new aggressive stance of the women's movement, and the anti-racist movements, people in these movements began to feel that it was the trade-unions who stood with their oppressors, and were part of the problem, and not their allies.
These real phenomena were the source of the analyses of the decline of trade-unionism. The problem with such analyses were that they were short-term and too narrow in their geography. Let us start with geography. The relocation of industries to other parts of the world led within a decade to the rise of relatively strong trade-unions in these "newly-industrialized" areas - such as Korea, or South Africa, or Brazil. And such newly-strong trade-unions began to have a real impact on the economic and political structures in these countries. Looked at on a world scale, the lessened role of the trade-unions in the wealthy countries was compensated for by their increased role in these other countries.
Secondly, the decline of the trade-unions in the wealthy countries was directly linked to a conjunctural (and therefore passing phenomenon), the worldwide economic stagnation of productive profits. It has always been the case that towards the end of such a so-called B-period, there is a revival of labor militancy. And we have been seeing that in the United States, in France, and indeed throughout the wealthy world. This is the source of the recent "revisionism" about trade-unions.
Finally, there are two other elements to put into the picture.
The strongest opposition to trade-unionism has always been among "independent" workers, that is, those who worked for themselves. It was when the artisans lost this independence that they began to see a decline in income and therefore began to unionize in the early nineteenth century. Today it is the free professionals, who have always been relatively wealthy, who are losing their independence, and therefore seeing their income decline, and therefore beginning to think about unionization. Spectacularly, for example, in the last 2-3 years, there has been the beginning of unionization among medical doctors in the United States, who find that today they are working for the insurance companies rather than for themselves, and are therefore earning less, as well as losing control over their working conditions. This process will continue.
Finally, just as the trade-unions learned that they could not limit themselves to organizing skilled workers but had to unionize the semiskilled and the unskilled, so now they have learned that they cannot limit themselves to organizing male workers nor only those from the majority ethnic group of the country. They are finding that the work force is filled with women and with "minorities" or migrants, and they are beginning to organize them in a serious way. And this changes their politics and their alliances. Witness the events in Seattle in 1999.
This kind of reformed trade-unionism will probably play a much larger role in the next thirty years than it has played in the last thirty years.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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