Labor Movements: Is There Hope?

By Fernando E. Gapasin and Michael D. Yates

For the past thirty years, the class struggle has been a pretty one-sided affair, with capital delivering a severe beating to labour around the globe.

When economic stagnation struck most of the world's advanced capitalist economies, beginning in the mid-1970s, capital went on the offensive, quickly understanding that the best way to maintain and increase profit margins in a period of slow and sporadic economic growth was to cut labor costs. Governments and global lending agencies such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund began to implement policies that made workers increasingly insecure.

The authors argue that:

As workers regroup and re-strategize, we believe that several things must be kept in mind. First, workers inhabit many localities: workplaces, communities, extended families, civic and religious organizations, etc. Each of these can be sites of organizing, and none should be overlooked.

It is important to remember that the future of labour movements may lie in the ability of local unions and federations to transform themselves to become the locus of labor movement power. It is, after all, at the local union level that everyday workers and communities interact with the labour movement. This is not to say that strong national and international organizations are not necessary; they obviously are. However, when power emanates from the top, bureaucratic dictatorship is the result.

One way to develop the local power base of the labour movement is to develop multiple access points for organizing, like workers' centres.

Second, in any kind of organizing, those with the highest level of class consciousness must be central to the organizing.

Third, ways must be found to connect the stable and the unstable sectors of the working class, that is, those with relatively secure employment and the burgeoning segment of insecure and informally employed.

Fourth and of most importance, we must ask what is the purpose of a labour movement. For what are workers to be organized?

(Monthly Review; June 2005)