Every place has its different environment, whether it be the level of organisation, reputation of socialism, dominant values of society, history and experiences, conflicts and crises. Because of these dynamics, I’d expect to see stark differences in what the movement looks like around the world. An obvious example familiar to most here is seeing the widespread and militant union mobilisations in France’s retirement age protests.
Which countries do you have experience in, and how are their labour movements different?
The title is intentionally vague by saying ‘labour movement’, so you’re welcome to talk about workplace attitudes, unions, socialist organisations, legislation and more.
I can provide some context from Greece.
First of all, the unemployment rate is high. The official figure is currently at 12.5% but has been steadily decreasing from its peak of 27.7% in 2013. The real numbers are probably higher since people that haven’t been employed within the last few years are not accounted.
As a result, labour rights are non-existent, overtime is rarely paid, wages have been stagnant since 2008, it is really common to work in unsafe conditions, and worker abuse occurs so often noone bats an eye.
While we do have unions more often than not they are powerless. For example, last year we had a major train accident (57 people died), the goverment blamed the train workers, their response was pretty much “our strikes for the safety issues that lead to the accident were deemed illegal, while our attempts to raise the issues were dismissed by the ministry of transportation”.
We have had major nationwide protests with more than a million of people taking to the streets, but noone feels like that ever lead to anywhere.
IMO one of the greatest problems is the lack of information. Mainstream media are corrupt, and independent media are sabotaged or persecuted by the government. People do not know their rights, we have been trying to survive for so long that we cannot imagine a better future, and that allows employers to freely profit from laborers.
One interesting development is that lately more collectives are popping here and there, from coffee shops to softwafe development houses, more and more people are fed up and try to take matters on their own hands (even if in absolute numbers they are still very few).
I’m a union organizer in tech. I’m Italian, but I live in Germany and I do interact a lot with American organizers.
In Germany, most organizing is effectively cleansed of political identity and needs to be conducted in a very sanitized environment to be appealing to workers. It’s also very very focused on the legal aspects.
Americans are way more technical about the whole of it: more methodologies, more processes, more tools, it’s a game of numbers.
Italians…, well, let’s say the unions there deserve the hate. Not because they are particularly corrupted or conservative (which they are), but because they have no fucking clue what they are doing. They are much slower than their foreign counterparts, they have no resources, they have very little coordination and no interest in getting better. Like many things in Italy, they are slowly sinking in the quicksand. The organizers on the ground they are often under prepared and they have no concept of methodology: they know their legal stuff, but they believe that building momentum in the workplace is just a matter of identifying the right arguments and deliver the right speech at the worker assemblies. Basically they rely on luck, workers motivation and 50 years old processes. They also have no operational coordination on a regional or national level. People from the same union working on the same category don’t know or talk to each other unless they work in the same physical office.
I’m an American software engineer who has badly wanted my field to unionize. Do you think it will ever happen? I’m not hopeful because there are too many people who are just in the field for the lucrative salaries and have no real interest or passion. They’ll put up with anything if it means a six figure+ salary:
Scrummicromanagement, open office spaces, incredibly unrealistic deadlines that were set without engineer input, vacation time hardly ever getting approved, etc.What do you mean? The USA has a lot of momentum and a lot of tech companies are unionizing, many more than anywhere else. It’s on mainstream newspapers every other day
I don’t mean tech companies, or the broad designation of “tech workers”, I’m specifically talking about software developers (and maybe QA). For example, a salesperson is not going to understand why engineers hate open office spaces and how it makes it extremely difficult for us to focus on our work.
Union organizing should be done across departments. Anyway software developers are doing a lot of organizing and unionizing, exactly because they have more secure positions. AWU, Kickstarter, NYT, Grindr, and many others are almost entirely office workers, many of which are software developers. Software developers are tech workers: drawing lines doesn’t help anybody and historically has always been to the detriment of the workers movement. Software developers start organizing when they stop being software developers and become tech workers.
Also FYI: I’ve been a software developer for a decade and I mostly organize software developers that, if anything, are overrepresented in “tech workers” spaces, to the point where we have to put rules like “don’t talk about git, it scares the workers” to prevent the spaces to become cliquey.
Thanks for the perspective. I’m US born and raised, educated in public schools, so the only education I got about unions was the bad stuff. The only unions I know of in my area are electricians and plumbers, so I assumed it was a vocation-specific thing. Also lol @ your last sentence, I can totally imagine
Join Tech Workers Coalition then. https://techworkerscoalition.org/
‘More equal then the rest’ eh?
Good luck with that, truly an american attitude
Not even remotely what I said. I was referring to how different positions deal with different issues and it seemed strange to me to lump them together just because they fall under the broad designation of “tech worker”. But, someone already corrected my ignorance in a way that was much more constructive and helpful than “FUCKIN AMERICANS AMIRITE GUIS???”
The difference between my experiences in the UK and Australia were… interesting. Being upfront, my time in the UK was extremely radicalisng.
In the UK there was a general distain from the media and most people I met for the labour movement. While at the time there was some real bright spots like seeing crowds singing The Internationale, it was mostly an extremely depressing environment. I think the number of people who are a part of their union is similar to Australia but there seems to be a more aggressive negative sentiment from non-members. But my experience was that there was some really strong displays of solidarity despite the outside attacks. But the level of wealth inequality was sickening and probably not helped by a cultural obsession with the monarchy.
Back in Australia you’d think there would be strong culture of working class solidarity, with the Australian Labor Party (ALP) being the first Labor party to have ever formed government in the world in 1904, but its [solidarity has] been in steep decline here since the 80s with union membership down from nearly half of all workers to close to 10%. Despite that decline, the unions here still hold a lot of influence, being a key driver behind the general strike in 2005 where 1/2 million people marched against exploitative employment laws. The unions also control the majority of ‘superannuation’ funds which all employers make compulsory payments into on behalf of their workers, and the unions own some successful energy cooperatives, insurers and credit unions. However the movement is going through a particularly rough patch this last month with corruption allegations, and parliamentary interventions, some sketchy leadership issues and some sharp divisions appearing along gender lines, all while the ALP adopts increasingly neo-liberal policies.
What do you think was the source of the general disdain in the UK?
My parent’s generation in the UK experienced things like the three day week ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week ), major disruptions to normal life due to strikes. In the end, the Conservatives in some ways ‘won’ and so this has gone down in the cultural memory as unions having ‘too much power’. Add to this that, largely due to unrelated geopolitical and macroeconomic reasons, the 70s (when unions had more power) were hard times, and in the 80s (when Thatcher and Reagan were doing their thing) things felt like they were getting better for lots of people (even though with hindsight inequality was starting to grow and the seeds of many of today’s problems were being planted).
Maybe someone else would be a better judge on what the source is. I know the UK had a period of more entrenched socialist policies prior to Thatcher that may affect the general population’s perceptions of the movement. The poisonous Murdoch newspaper/media ecosystem can’t help either.
What are they accusing the construction union of? I saw an article about the union going to administration but it didn’t really say why.
The allegations are that outlaw bikie gang members were acting as delegates and were involved in government-funded projects. It comes off the back of the Victorian branch’s leader John Setka being expelled from the ALP due to some ugly allegations of domestic abuse.
