Radical Trade Unions Research Articles

The War on the North American Left-Wing Labor Movement From World War I Through the Post-World War II Period

Repression of the North American trade union movement dates to the late nineteenth century. Much of this repression has occurred in response to union militancy during strikes, some of which were directed against political radicals of various orientations. Peaks of repression against radical trade unionism occurred during World War I and in the immediate postwar years as well as in the early Cold War period, after World War II’s conclusion into the early 1950s. Through the analysis of three recently published volumes, I argue that the repression of North American left-wing unions was intentionally severe because of the strength of these labor organizations and the threat they were perceived to pose to employers and the government. Given that these left-wing unions were much more militant than the American Federation of Labor unions, this governmental repression (as well as that of other forces) can be viewed as a conscious set of tactics invoked that were meant to break, or at a minimum tame, these radical unions in the service of capital. Such behavior also acted as a warning to nonradical unions that repression could be directed against them as well.

Solidarity happens: Corriente Sindical de Izquierdas, radical trade unionism in democratic Asturias

ABSTRACT In the aftermath of the Franco dictatorship, a pole of workers’ militancy was forged in the city of Gijón around a critical current of Comisiones Obreras, the main Spanish trade union, called the Corriente de Izquierdas (Left Current). This group of workers was the driving force behind some of the most important conflicts of the new democracy, including a strike of strict solidarity that lasted almost three months. Expelled from their union in 1982, the Corriente Sindical de Izquierdas became the main reference point for radical trade unionism in Asturias. Despite its small size and limited presence, for forty years it has been at the forefront of many of the most notorious and agonising conflicts against the deindustrialisation of the city and the region, with trade union methods characterised by their radicalism, but above all, by their strong commitment to solidarity. Such has been its trade union history that the organisation has earned a notable place in Asturian and even Spanish popular culture. Here we will review its evolution as a trade union and what have been the signs of identity that have made it possible for an admittedly small organisation to accumulate such remarkable social prominence and symbolic capital.

Industrial Labor Social Movement against the Issue of Neoliberalism (Case Study on the Movement and View of Trade Unions in Indonesia on the Global Issue of Neoliberalism)

In December 1999, there was a large demonstration in Seattle, United States which triggered large demonstrations elsewhere to oppose neo-liberalism. An ideology of the capitalists in uniting a world economy free of national boundaries. Neoliberalism policies also occur in Indonesia, such as through privatization, the application of a flexible labor market or outsourcing The problem discussed in this paper is how the trade union movement and response to the policy of neoliberalism theoretical studies in this study use Marx's Conflict Theory, Smelserian social movements and Gramsci's Hegemony. This research uses descriptive, qualitative type The results showed that there were two types of trade unions that emerged after the reform, namely moderate trade unions and radical trade unions. The responses of these two types of trade unions differ in their response to the policy of neoliberalism. The first union prefers compromise while the radical trade union prefers confrontational methods. The emergence of labor awareness about the dangers of neoliberalism is a step forward when compared to the image of the previous labor movement. which only moves at the level of normative issues

Union organising and Full‐time Officers: acquiescence and resistance

AbstractIn the mid‐1990s, the TUC relaunched itself with a strategy for renewal labelled ‘new unionism’. The strategy had two strands: partnership with employers and the promotion among affiliate unions of grassroots union organising. The latter, heavily influenced by US and Australian experience, saw possibilities for a more radical trade unionism in the UK. This article draws on a case study of Unison to analyse the organising strand of new unionism. It identifies how top‐down approaches to organising are distorted by union bureaucracy for the priority of recruitment, not only limiting the possibility of emerging union radicalisation but also restricting the ability of trade unions to represent their members. The article also identifies that the position of union Full‐time Officers is complex and not necessarily within a uniform union bureaucracy juxtaposed to and restraining a more radical union rank and file.

Institutionalising critical pedagogy: Lessons from against and beyond the neo-liberal university

This article approaches the question of how far critical pedagogy can be institutionalised through a series of historical and contemporary examples. Current debates concerned with the co-operative university are examined, as well as histories of independent working-class education and the free university movement. Throughout this history, critical pedagogy has occupied a difficult space in relation to higher education institutions, operating simultaneously against and beyond the academy. The Deweyian concept of ‘democratisation’ allows the institutionalisation of critical pedagogy to be considered as a process, which has never been and may never be achieved, but is nevertheless an ‘end-in-view’. The article concludes by offering the Lucas Plan as a model of radical trade unionism that could be applied to the democratisation of existing universities and the institutionalisation of critical pedagogy.

Blurring the borders between old and new social movements: the M15 movement and the radical unions in Spain

This article analyses the relationships between the M15 movement and radical labour organizations in Spain. Based on semi-structured interviews and document analysis, it concludes that to the extent that the economic crisis has evolved, the relations between the M15 and the trade unions have moved from mistrust to convergence. This is especially evident in the case of radical trade unionism with which the M15 shares several features. Although the M15 has been studied as an example of a ‘new social movement’, recent changes suggest certain shifts in relation to the type of activated subject and to the motivating factors for collective action. One of the consequences of this is the closeness to the institutions of the workers’ movement, which blurs the borders between old and new social movements.

The Role of Social Networks in Trade Union Recruitment: The Case Study of a Radical Union in Spain

<p>In a general context of union decline, radical trade unions are experiencing a moderate growth in contemporary Spain. This article examines the channels through which workers join radical unions. It applies social network analysis to the study of recruitment in 2012 by the local branch of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) in El Puerto de Santa María, Spain. It concludes that pre-existing social networks (co-workers, family and friends) are essential in trade union recruitment. Due to the rapid growth of the local branch and to the characteristics of this union, the findings of this case study can shed light on the general debate on union membership.</p>

When “us” doesn’t have to be versus “them”

Purpose – This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies. Design/methodology/approach – This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context. Findings – In the UK, in the 1970s and 1980s, labor relations were at the apex of political discourse like no other time in the country’s modern history. A slow economy and Labor Government in the late 1970s had seen the “sick man of Europe” suffer massive strike action and low productivity. The 1980s saw a huge response by the following Tory government, with radical trade union legislation taking the fight to employee bodies with debilitating effect. The war seemed to have been won, even if some battles ensued in the following decades. Originality/value – The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

Capital and the Shifting Grounds of Emancipatory Politics: The Limits of Radical Unionism in Durban Harbor, 1974–85

This article considers the transformation of work for stevedores (longshoremen) in Durban between 1974 and 1985 and its consequences for radical trade union politics. I detail the demise of “racial capitalism” in the port, with containerization requiring fewer, and differently skilled, dockworkers. I then show how radical unionist aspirations of emancipation from both capitalism and apartheid encountered limits that have become increasingly apparent in contemporary South African workplaces. Unlike approaches explaining union difficulties as matters of strategies (industrial or general unionism), tactics, or ideology (“workerism” versus “charterism”), I argue that this period in the harbor offers a lens onto the changing relationship between capitalism and apartheid, revealing the instability of the working class and implying a rethinking of the terms of an emancipatory project. While challenging Marxist sociologies and workplace historiographies in South Africa, I suggest that a different reading of Marx’s analysis of capital could inform such a project.

Public Sociology and the Rights of Citizenship in Brazil: Critical Assessment and Historical Perspectives

Public sociology is at the origin of the formation of the modern Brazilian sociological field. Between 1960 and 1970, at least two important institutions of sociological research (the Center for Labor and Industrial Sociology at the University of São Paulo, CESIT, and the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning, CEBRAP) developed the praxis characteristic of public sociology building up links with extra-academic audiences, in particular, radical trade unions and progressive social movements. The purpose of this presentation will be to reconstruct the theoretical and political links between theseexperiences in public sociology and the current engagement of the Center for the Study of Citizenship Rights (Cenedic), public sociology institute founded at the University of São Paulo in the 1990s by sociologist Francisco de Oliveira. Thus, we intend to debate some tensions between the academic research and social movements fighting for the rights of citizenship which resurfaced with unprecedented strength in Brazil in June 2013.

Meerut and a Hanging

The Meerut Conspiracy Case was directed largely at the emerging radical trade union and workers’ and peasants’ movements in India, while aiming its blow more specifically at an internationalist communism or socialism. The public impact of Meerut, however, was not unidirectional or confined to leftists, and it came to epitomize the arbitrariness of imperial authority. It was part of a larger process that created divisions and solidarities at the same time. Roy and Zachariah’s essay traces the new divides and solidarities that the case facilitated and its impact on a wider popular political imagination as seen, in particular, through the lens of the Indian youth movement. In many ways, the authors contend, Indian communists’ responses to Meerut, backed in part by their British communist comrades, showed that a top-down directive from Moscow did not in fact have the impact that it was supposed to. Meerut was thus the pivotal point that went a long way toward defining the politics of the 1930s, both within and outside India.

THE CONTENTIOUS FIELD OF PRECARIOUS WORK IN ITALY: POLITICAL ACTORS, STRATEGIES AND COALITIONS

This article aims to present an empirically grounded analysis of the field of actors mobilized against precarious work in Italy. Based on extensive fieldwork including interviews and document analysis, we discuss and compare four types of social and political actors and their organizing patterns: traditional trade unions, radical trade unions, groups of self-organized precarious workers, and grassroots activist groups. The underlying questions focus on patterns of organization and coalition building. By analyzing how precarious workers organize, which goals they have, which kinds of collective actions they engage in, and how they connect to other actors, we found that distinctive strategies lead to diverse degrees of agency and subjectivity that precarious workers develop, ranging from almost nonexistent to high degrees of subjectivity. Recent transformations in the Italian labor market toward more flexible forms of employment lead to a broader diffusion of precarious work, especially among younger generations, women, and migrants. Despite the existence of many studies about labor market flexibility and precarity in Italy, there is only a small amount of publications dealing with the organization of precarious workers struggling to improve their working and living conditions. 2 Among these publications, empirically grounded analyses that compare different actors organizing precarious workers are seldom. Drawing on different strands of literature, such as social movement studies and labor and industrial relation studies, we adopt a comparative perspective on the contentious field related to precarious work. The results we present in this article are based on extensive fieldwork revolving around three sets of data sources: forty-one semistructured interviews 3 ; official documents like public declarations and collective agreements; documents produced during protest events and campaigns like call for actions and leaflets. We analyzed and compared the data constructed during the fieldwork according to a qualitative analysis strategy focusing on four dimensions linked to collective action that we introduce below. This article develops as follows. The first subsection presents a critical literature review about the concept of precarious work and precarity that also serves to introduce a working definition for our understanding of precarious

David Dubinsky, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and the Limits of Social Democratic Trade Unionism

Unlike Parmet’s (2005) well-written and thoroughly researched biography and many other generally admiring books and articles on David Dubinsky, the former International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) president from 1932 to 1966, this essay contends that even though Dubinsky initiated important developments within the ILGWU and fought heroically against Nazism and Fascism, his right-wing social democratic worldview was ultimately divisive to the achievement of national and international working class unity. Dubinsky’s political positions become evident through his vigorous anti-Communism which he engaged in with regards to his dealings with Communists in the ILGWU, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and the American Labor Party. Moreover, the exporting of his anti-Communism abroad via the American Federation of Labor’s Free Trade Union Committee and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions damaged international working class unity through the sabotaging of radical trade unionism not only in Western Europe but in nations around the globe. Understanding Dubinsky’s anti-Communism is the key for ultimately comprehending the garment union leader’s politics.

Mixed Repertoire of an Indian Labor Movement, 1990–2006*

AbstractThis article analyzes the protest repertoire of an Indian labor movement between 1990 and 2006. Chhattisgarh Liberation Front led a seventeen year struggle against the industrialists and state in central India for the recognition of contract workers' entitlements. During this long contentious history, the movement deployed disruptive repertoire, ranging from relatively legitimate “wild‐cat strikes” (illegal stoppage of work) to extreme physical attacks, against the industrialists, and non‐disruptive repertoire, ranging from disciplined participation in court‐cases to mass martyr day celebrations, against the state. The mixed repertoire points at the two distinct capacities in which the movement was acting, as a radical trade union against the industrialists and a social movement in relation to the state. The finding suggests that the CMM participants perceived the state as holding genuine power, and their relation to it as citizens, and perceived the industrialists, despite their being indigenous capitalists, as adversaries.

The Latin American Labor Studies Boom

The contemporary North Atlantic world has been marked by a waning enthusiasm for and salience of the study of workers. Yet the current ebb “in the traditional capitalist ‘core’ countries” (not to mention eastern Europe), Marcel van der Linden recently suggested, is far from being a “crisis” in the field of labor history as such. Rather, it is best understood as “only a regional phenomenon” since in much of “the so-called Third World, especially in the countries of the industrializing semi-periphery, interest in the history of labor and proletarian protest is growing steadily”. Citing encouraging recent developments in labor history in Asia, he noted how the field has grown in parallel with “the stormy conquest of economic sectors by the world market [which] has led to a rapid expansion of the number of waged workers, and the emergence of new radical trade unions”. Van der Linden's description fits well the study of labor in Latin America and the Caribbean, where the field first gained visibility in the early to mid-1980s and has now won recognition as an established specialization among scholars of many disciplines. After surveying the Latin American boom and its political context, this article offers a Brazilian/North Atlantic example in order to illustrate the intellectual gains, for students of both areas, that come with the transcendence of geographical parochialism.

Belgian labour in World War II: Strategies of survival, organisations and labour relations

A system of collective bargaining at sector level emerged in Belgium after the First World War. The commissions paritaires, in which unions and employers were equally represented, became the centres of power of the pillarised Belgian trade union movement. This system of industrial relations was challenged during the general strike of 1936. Some employers tried to compete with the unions by creating factory councils, yellow unions and 'mutual societies' at company level. The strategic aim was to remove the centre of labour relations from sector to factory level. This tendency was reinforced during the Second World War. Pre-war trade unions were abolished, employers tried to take over the role of the unions by creating all kinds of social provisions at company level. The factory became a basic element of the survival strategy of the workers. Moreover, from 1941 a clandestine and more radical trade union movement, which opposed the pre-war pillarised trade unionism, emerged. These clandestine unions were organised at factory level. In their view, the factory and not the sector had to become the locus of industrial relations after the war. The organisational framework that was established between 1944 and 1952 was a synthesis of the pre-war model of industrial relations and newly established councils at company level.

William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism

In this trenchant work, James Barrett traces the political journey of a leading worker radical whose life and experiences encapsulate radicalism's rise and fall in the United States. A self-educated wage earner raised in the slums of a large industrial city, Z. Foster became a brilliant union organizer who helped build the American Federation of Labor and, later, radical Trade Union Educational League. Embracing socialism, syndicalism, and communism in turn, Foster rose through the ranks of the American Communist Party to stand at the forefront of labor politics throughout the 1920s. Yet by the time he died in 1961, in a Moscow hospital far from the meat-packing plants and steel mills where he had built his reputation, Foster's political marginalism stood as a symbol for the isolation of American labor radicalism in the postwar era. Integrating both the indigenous and the international factors that determined the fate of American communism, William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism provides a new understanding of the basis for radicalism among twentieth-century American workers.

The Collapse of the Communist-Anticommunist Condominium: The Repercussions for South Africa

The demise of communism and Soviet Union has extraordinary repercussions for transformation of South Africa. South Africans are having to adjust to simultaneous collapse of a principal paradigm for rationalizing apartheid and a principal paradigm for opposing it. The attempts to dismantle apartheid have been substantially complicated by depth of unexpected, simultaneous discrediting of communism and anti-communism. Although only a minority among anti-apartheid forces are card-carrying communists, fall of Soviet communism has weakened appeal of revolutionary Marxism and even to some extent of socialism, ideologies which have inspired resistance to apartheid for more than four decades. Indeed, socialism and revolution became so wedded to idea of anti-apartheid struggle that South Africa emerged as a cause celebre of left, a central exhibit in broader arguments and campaigns for socialism. The populist insurrections of 1976-77 and of 1984-86 and upsurge of radical trade unionism since late 1970s seemed to turn South Africa into a uniquely promising scenario for revolutionary triumph. Thus, as recently as 1986, Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff could project a vision of South Africa as the only country with a well-developed, modern capitalist structure which is not only 'objectively' ripe for revolution but has actually entered a stage of overt and seemingly irreversible revolutionary struggle.' From such a vantage point, current negotiations in South Africa are both a success and a failure. The revolutionary impetus did prove irreversible in so far as it rendered country unmanageable, fulfilling