Over the last few years, the trade union movement around the world has experienced huge developments. General strikes initiated by the unions have been key features of mass uprisings in countries from Myanmar to Belarus, Colombia and many more. There have been big strikes, even strike ‘waves’ in many countries involving millions of workers and the so-called ‘Great Resignation’. As well as important transformations at the tops and in the rank-and-file of many unions and efforts to create either new unions or organize new sectors and employers like Amazon and Starbucks. A poll in the last half of 2021 found that unions in the United States were at their highest rate of popularity — 68% — since 1965.
While many of these things were already developing before the pandemic, it’s clear that Covid had an intensifying effect. The period has had a stark effect of demonstrating that it is the working class that literally makes society run, especially those classified as ‘essential workers’ ranging from logistics to healthcare to food services. It has raised expectations among many workers about what they should expect from their job in terms of conditions, safety, pay and benefits.
Now as the cost of living crisis comes to bite and the capitalists seek to first blame the war in Ukraine and then the working class itself, it is only natural that workers will fight back, including through the industrial field. The trade unions and labor movement will be an explosive battlefield for class struggle over the next period. Strikes, including general strikes, the explosive growth of existing unions, new unions and struggles within the existing trade union structures will all be on the agenda.
Already in 2022, major strike waves and/or general strikes have taken place in many countries including Iran, Italy, Greece, India, Turkey and Kazakhstan, and unions are building up to significant new national strikes in many others including Belgium and Algeria. And at the time of writing, the US labor movement is going through the first steps of what could be an earthquake of revival and militancy.
As International Workers’ Day approaches, the organized working class is an increasing factor in the stormy events of the new age of disorder — for socialists, it is the decisive factor in charting a viable way out of the manifold crises of decadent world capitalism.
US and UK: Shifts at the top of big unions
Late last year, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, one of the biggest unions in the US at 1.4 million members, concluded an election whose results returned the first new President in over two decades. Though the incumbent President Jimmy Hoffa Jr., the son of notoriously corrupt former Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa Sr., was not running for reelection, his endorsed slate called ‘Teamster Power’ was. This slate represented a continuation of Hoffa’s entrenched bureaucratic business unionism that had led to years of rotten contracts and selling out portions of its own membership. It was defeated by former Boston chapter president Sean O’Brien, who was the leader of the Teamsters United opposition slate — an alliance chiefly engineered between O’Brien and long time rank-and-file Teamsters for a Democratic Union leader, Fred Zuckerman.
O’Brien himself had been close to Hoffa but broke with him in 2017 after being fired as lead negotiator for the 2018 national United Parcel Service (UPS) contract. UPS is the single biggest employer of Teamsters members representing over 260,000 workers. The situation around the 2018 Contract became an immense flashpoint of pushback against two-tier contracts, low wages and other issues by rank-and-file Teamsters who voted at over 90% for strike authorization. After O’Brien was dismissed, subsequent negotiators brought back a pitiful contract conceding on almost all major issues under contention. The result was that the Teamster membership voted in the majority — 54% — to reject the contract. The Hoffa administration responded by using bureaucratic procedures to undemocratically enforce the contract.
On the back of this and some other key sellouts by the Hoffa regime in the period after, the Teamsters United slate was elected by almost 2/3rds of the vote driven by anger at the Hoffa regime’s sellouts and procedure around the UPS contract. Another major aspect of this victory was a pledge by Sean O’Brien to launch a unionization drive at Amazon. All of this led to the TU slate being seen as the potential for a leadership that would take a more combative and fighting approach versus the accommodations and concessions of the previous regime. However, O’Brien’s past is far from radical and the extent he breaks from his bureaucratic past in relation to rank-and-file democracy is an open question.
Significant changes also took place in Unite the Union in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Unite is the 2nd largest union in the UK and Ireland with over 1.2 million members, though this number has been declining over the last 15 years. Against a background of fierce attacks from the bosses including the increasing prevalence of ‘fire and rehire’ schemes, where bosses fire entire workforces only to re-employ some or all of them on worse terms and conditions, an important battle emerged for General Secretary of that union in 2021. Right-winger Gerard Coyne, who had almost defeated former GS Len McCluskey in the previous election, seemed to be surging ahead based largely on support from the establishment and the Labour Party right-wing. With the traditional broad left fractured after essentially becoming a transmission belt of the left bureaucracy, led by McCluskey himself, a number of better left candidates emerged.
One of these, Sharon Graham, eventually was victorious against all the odds. Graham’s campaign, which was supported by some of the most active militants within the union including ISA members, focused on strengthening lay democracy, workplace organization and militant action to defend jobs, pay and conditions. In particular, her campaign very strongly put forward the need to move away from an approach of reliance on lobbying the Labour Party for pro-worker change. Like O’Brien she also placed importance on the need to organize the unorganized including a similar pledge to take on Amazon. Though rightfully deemphasizing a political lobbying approach including suspending Unite funding to Labour in wake of the Coventry, England bin workers strike her so far failure to articulate a program on the question of working class political representation and the fact that she is facing an entrenched bureaucracy within Unite are significant obstacles.
Also in the UK, 2021 saw the biggest union, Unison, elect a Left majority to its National Executive Committee for the first time in its history. This was based on a new broad initiative within the union in which ISA members play an important role, arguing for a root and branch transformation to democratize the union and lay out a militant new industrial strategy. Since its election the new NEC — which faces even greater internal obstacles than Sharon Graham, not least from a right-wing General Secretary — has struggled to drive its agenda forward.
While all of these figures and phenomena have limitations, the hammer blows of events could have profound impacts in the directions of the unions they head. They are in large part an expression of the broader phenomenon of the shifts in consciousness and mood among the working class that have developed over the last period. However, they also bear some of the hallmarks of the complications inherent in the situation, particularly within the labor movement. For instance, rather than being evolutions out of an effort or organization of a broader militant rank-and-file activist layer their successes were more based on tapping into a certain broad mood. This means they have less to fall back on and act as a counterbalance to the pressure of constant interaction with the capitalists, as well as the resistance of the bureaucracies within their own unions.
There are also signs that equivalent developments could occur in these and other countries. For example, recent elections in Argentina’s powerful Metal Workers’ Union (UOM) saw the defeat of several prominent incumbents including its long time Peronist leader Antonio Calo. In April, the national conference of Ireland’s ASTI teachers union defeated an attempt by the union leadership to award a breathtaking pay rise to its General Secretary at a time when its membership is facing insulting pay offers.
New challenges to the conservative bureaucracy which continues to hold most of the world labor movement back may begin as products of new betrayals or as rejections of long-hated policies, and can further progress into big challenges within the union structures and leaderships themselves.
The extent to which they express themselves in any election depends on a variety of circumstances, as does any particular struggle revolving around the balance of class forces. For socialists seeking to transform the labor movement, the most important developments cannot be seen above but below. The building of mass independent rank and file organization is the only sure road to lay the basis for new union leaderships which meet the needs of the moment.
Capitalism’s crisis of profitability means that the system in its current stage of history is less able to deliver significant reforms to the working class, significantly undermining the efficacy of non-struggle based approaches like the ‘service model’ or the preferred ‘a seat at the table’ model of business unionism in the recent era.
Organizing the unorganized
A key feature of the potential new labor revival has been the recent organizing drives in several previously non-unionized and particularly precarious sectors. In contrast to the years of promises and half-hearted attempts from union leaders, workers themselves have been the ones in the main driving this process forward. The two most prominent examples of this have been the recent developments in the hospitality sector in multiple countries and at Amazon sites in the US.
At time of writing, 225+ Starbucks stores in the United States have now filed for union recognition elections. Of the 37 that have held elections, 35 have returned in victories for the union. In Northern Ireland, Unite Hospitality, founded and in part led by ISA members, has had an impact in organizing a number of workplaces in the UK and has grown almost tenfold since its founding a few years ago. Both of these have been driven in the main by workers in their 20s and 30s motivated not just by workplace issues but also influenced by the general radicalization and social struggles.
The first unionization victory at the JFK8 Amazon site in Staten Island, New York has sent significant shockwaves through the workers movement. The narrow but incredible victory by a new independent union started by a worker fired for organizing — Amazon Labor Union — could have an electrifying effect throughout the world if followed by further victories at different Amazon sites. To the extent this will result in totally new, independent unions like ALU remains to be seen even in the US. But it would be significant not just in its potential for inspiration but involves a section of workers at one of the biggest companies in the entire world in a sector at the heart of the global economy in the world’s most dominant imperialist power. It would be an earth shattering change in the balance of forces towards organized workers versus capital worldwide.
A significant effect of both these phenomena could be the invigorating impact that new, particularly younger workers can have coming into the trade union movement en masse. This can in turn put pressure on the existing union tops and have a positive influence on longer standing unionized workers.
Unions playing a role in broader movements
In an epoch marked by so many simultaneous fronts of deep crises of capitalism, the labor movement cannot restrict itself just to workplace issues, but must again become a vehicle for struggle on all issues facing the broader working class and oppressed masses. As stated earlier, this has been shown in unions playing a role in mass movements of varying types and triggered by a range of factors, from Latin America to Asia, to Eastern Europe and beyond. Many of those, such as in Myanmar and Belarus, were launched in opposition to coups and crackdowns by extremely reactionary authoritarian regimes. In both of these countries, workers taking militant strike action which made tyrants tremble, showed the crucial leading role that must be played by the labor movement and most importantly its social power and methods of struggle, in the fight for democratic rights, which cannot be separated from the fight between labor and capital.
This is tied in with the crucial political role which the labor movement must play in ensuring the independence in struggle of the working class and its interests. This is the case both in the struggle against right-wing reactionary regimes, but also in the context of ‘Left’ or ‘progressive’ governments.
This can be seen clearly in Latin America. On the one hand, in Brazil, unions have mobilized against the Bolsonaro government, including in a colossal general strike in 2019, which almost brought the regime and its reactionary reforms to its knees. But on the other hand, the leadership of the main union federation, the CUT, has held the movement back from landing more decisive blows, linked to a strategy to defeat Bolsonaro which is based almost exclusively on hopes that Lula da Silva of the PT, the misnamed ‘Workers’ Party’ with which much of the union bureaucracy is affiliated, will win the upcoming Presidential elections.
ISA and its Brazilian section, Liberdade, Socialismo e Revolucao (LSR) insists on the primacy of the mobilization and organization of the working class in the struggle against Bolsonaro, and for the political independence of the labor movement from the PT, against which it will undoubtedly also need to mobilize, as on countless occasions in the past, if indeed it does return to power.
Peru recently elected a new left government on the back of a mass protest movement in the last couple of years. The electoral victory of Pedro Castillo, a rural teacher and trade unionist, was seen as a left-wing triumph of the movement over the conservative and traditional political and economic establishment. Despite being elected on a left program including political and agrarian reform and nationalization of key industries, he has quickly turned towards attempting to extract concessions from the Peruvian masses to pay for capitalism’s cost of living crisis.
The trade unions responded by a mass strike which resulted in a broad protest movement being reignited across the country. Versus the protest movement of 2020 that he rode to electoral victory on, this movement was initiated by the trade unions starting with a strike called by the National Guild of Carriers and Drivers and quickly spread. Of major consequence is the willingness for the unions to take independent action versus Castillo, not only elected as a left but a former trade unionist. It is an important harbinger of what may occur in other similar situations.
Looking to the future
It’s clear that the objective situation is driving a desire for more combativity from the unions. In addition to the features mentioned above, there have been a number of strike waves. Last year we had ‘Striketober’ in the US and this year we’re seeing even more. In Turkey, the first two months of the year saw 108 strikes which continue. A wave of strikes and strike ballots are rocking Northern Ireland. On April 6, the Greek working class mounted a 24 hour general strike. Tens of millions of Indian workers joined a two day general strike at the end of March. In Britain, the Trades Union Congress has scheduled its first national demonstration since 2018 for this summer.
With the prospect of looming stagflation, eroding living standards and attacks more action will be on the agenda. This will be reflected in many ways but pressure on the trade unions to act will undoubtedly be a feature of the situation. Where leaderships block struggle and workers do not find avenues to challenge them within the formal union structures, workers have shown a willingness to develop new avenues for putting forward the action necessary, often — in broader movements or formations or even new unions in some cases.
Class struggle is back on the agenda over the next period. The trade union movement will see important reflections of this. But just like with other movements and struggles, the question of what role the unions play and taking up a fighting program that challenges the economic and political status quo will be essential. Particularly as capitalism dips further into crisis, the need for class struggle methods to fight for fundamental change will become more acute. It will be the role of socialists and worker activists around the world to work to rebuild a fighting trade union movement that can play a leading role in struggles of the broader working class. As Marx explained, the working class must not be only ‘in itself’ but must become ‘for itself’ — organized in the industrial and political field to prepare for the period of struggles to come.
