Trade unions have no autonomous voice. They can only be the transmission belt of globalisation to the working people rather than filling their earlier role of being the transmission belt of Party agendas to the workers. Under communism their function was very similar - that of disciplining workers and ensuring flexibility in the use of labour and low money wages, as the Party agenda required. The only difference is that under communism there was over-full employment (not by design but as a by-product of excess demand for under-priced goods). Under capitalism any refusal to transmit globalisation to the workforce results in additional unemployment - which is an alternative mechanism for disciplining workers.
Globalisation, or free trade as we used to call it, raises productivity much of which is enjoyed by us all through lower prices. But we cannot have high wages, high employment and low prices resulting from globalisation.
Protectionism offers higher employment levels at higher wages with higher prices and lower productivity. If the trade unions under capitalism favour protecting members' employment and high wages then they must press for protectionism. And a ban on immigration and on capital outflows.
What an agenda. What is the point of trade unions?
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To fight bullying, lying and exploitation. I was not in a union in my first year of teaching and learned the hard way.
I cannot respond to your work experiences other than to accept that your union was preventing the nastinesses you list, S.
Nevertheless, either organisations that protect from such behaviour are recast and abandon other, and principle, roles, or even these aims will be beyond them.
Watching the behaviour of Italian trade unions towards the attempts to retain car-making in Italy at all makes me feel quite cross at their worn out 20th century ideologies, the risks of lower living standards and de-industrialisation with which they threaten us all in the name of their members 'rights'.
Yes, I'd agree that unions can't buck the modern market, or at least not without damaging cost to their members in the long term, and insofar as they pretend they can, they are operating a scam on their membership. Though the market was once skewed in quite the other direction, too, which is why we should respect people like Joseph Arch.
'principal' even.
But apart from that, there is a need to move on in political understanding and aims that is being stymied by reverence for past achievements and by hopes for past aims that were ended for ever under the regimes of realised socialism.
I fear we are going to have to clear the attitudes and beliefs embodied in current trade unionism away before we can begin to restore a democratic and just set of social ends to work for, and the organisations that we need to achieve them.
Unions do offer protection for individuals. Far better to attend a tribunal with an experienced union representative than without. The union makes the management think twice about cuts, changes or working practices, dismissals, safety.
But they have long thought they were more than that. That's the problem. They often go far too far to 'justify' their existence. More than necessary safety rules, holidays -better benefits - sick days as a right and so on.
As you say they eventually force up the costs of their services to the point where they are uneconomic.
The CWU led the longest strikes when they took UK post workers out on strike in 2007 and 2009 without achieving very much either time.
All they managed was to anger the public, encourage competitors, lose money and demonstrate their relative impotence.
Now, 2010/11 when they are to be privatised they will struggle to get the membership, let alone the public, on side for a strike.
The point of trade unions then is to protect individual workers, indeed groups of workers, from rapacious employers. And rapaciousness in employers is very common.
What I cannot accept is that they should be a corporatist, sectional interest, political movement attempting to assert a trade union right to interfere with national economic policy which, necessarily in a democracy, should be shaped to the good of all, not just trade union members.
And a political party that is founded as just that hasn't a leg to stand on. All Labour is achieving is the consistent disruption of any development of a serious, nation-wide, principled political movement that seeks to hold the ring in the various conflicting interests played out in a functioning democracy.
Just LOOK at the damage Labour has done to us all, repeatedly, pretending that capitalism is 'unfair' and inefficient. Capitalism may have lots of bad things about it, but, like democracy, it's the best we can do.
Granted all that, have you let your dislike of the Ancien Regime blind you to the faults of the new incumbents?
The meeja generally have taken the attitude that the new government has the right to have "bought golden opinions from all sorts of people, which would be worn now in their newest gloss, not cast aside so soon," but I no longer wish to give any government a honeymoon period.
The Fourth Estate is sometimes partial, sometimes suborned, sometimes subdued. How VERY odd that tonight's Channel 4 Dispatches programme has had to be pulled, I don't think.
I fear we have the Heir-to-Blair, another bloody shallow, self-seeking deceiver. Don't tell me I'm wrong now, Bill Q, just wait a year or two.
"Fit to govern!
No, not to live! O nation miserable..."
Across Europe, the New Hapsburgs are rising.
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