The lessons about union officialdom

The strike wave is reviving. Why did it sag in early 2023? One big lesson is about the role of union officialdom.

After almost 35 years of low strike levels, a strike wave started in June 2022, with workers striving to match wages to prices, especially of food and energy, rising much faster than at any time since the early 1990s.

Unemployment was and is low, with bosses hiring anew for post-lockdown expansion, so workers have also sought to reverse the decline since 2008 in real median weekly wages, especially in public services.

On the rail, on the Tube, and in Royal Mail, workers have also been battling to save conditions against restructurings attempted by the bosses after losses during lockdowns.

In the private sector, a number of strikes, such as the Liverpool dockers’ and some busworkers’, have won sizeable rises and rejuvenated workplace organisation. With public service workers, it’s been more difficult.

The public services have large, sprawling workforces in which organisation is often poor in many patches and difficult to renew. They face a stubborn government. Most public service workers lack the capacity to make their strikes bite directly into profits.

Those difficulties have bitten harder because, while the private-sector strikes have generally been indefinite, or with large schedules of action, the public-service strike campaigns have taken a form never seen before on this scale: what CWU (post union) Deputy General Secretary Postal Terry Pullinger called “a marathon, not a sprint”. And stop-start marathons at that.

Stop-start

A sally of one-day, two-day, or occasionally longer, strikes would be announced. After that sally, then a pause, sometimes explained as helping negotiations with the employers, but often just a pause. Then another small schedule. After six months, a re-ballot as mandated by anti-strike law. Then more small schedules, more pauses.

From early 2023, the pauses became longer, the sallies scantier and more subject to cancellation, the recommendations to accept poor offers more frequent. And those recommendations were often made by union leaders to members already demobilised while they waited on talks.

From a Marxist point of view, a central factor here is full-time paid union officialdom as a social layer.

Beyond a certain size, unions need some full-time paid officials to function. Over the decades, the layer of full-time paid officials (and usually of “career” full-time paid officials) has mutated into an independent social and political factor. The top officials are paid like, and live like, capitalist managers. They come to see trade-unionism as primarily as matter of their negotiating skills, and working-class action as a supplement to nudge the bosses when they’re slow about negotiating.

Bureaucrats

Pat Cullen of the RCN takes £190,000 in salary and benefits; Gary Smith of the GMB, £259,000; Mick Lynch of the RMT, £149,000 (though he got the union to cut his official payment by 20%); and most others comparable amounts.

There are three union leaders who pay back to the union some of their high salaries: the General Secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, Matt Wrack, who takes the wage of an experienced firefighter in London; the Assistant General Secretary of PCS, John Moloney, who takes the much lower average wage of the most numerous grade in the civil service; and BMA council deputy chair Emma Runswick, who takes a junior doctor wage to match what she would have received had she not been elected. But the rule in all the sizeable unions is: high salaries and benefits.

Even the highest-paid union leaders aren’t capitalist managers. They want to get a better deal for their members. They also want to avoid risk to their union machine (offices, salaries, etc) and to longer-term “collegial” negotiating relations with bosses.

The fear of risk bites especially in times when union workplace, branch, and committee organisation is weak, as it has been in recent decades; when union democracy is weak, in terms of rules, or in terms of active engagement, or both; and when energy and strength is lacking for networks of rank-and-file activists organised specifically to put pressure on the officials, to call them to account, to surveil them, and to replace where necessary (and where possible: many high-up union officials are appointed from higher-up, not elected from below).

Democracy

When they call for workers to vote for action, they often phrase it as calling on workers to “support the union”, as if a workers’ vote for action is back-up for skilled negotiators, rather than skilled negotiators being a back-up for workers’ action, and as if “the union” is the negotiators. The idea is often not really that strikes would force bosses to make an offer, but that strikes will “nudge” bosses into reasonable negotiations, where the officials’ skills will triumph.

The answer is to fight for union democracy, to organise rank-and-file networks, and to organise within those networks a nucleus of activists (Marxists) who have studied the theory and the history and learned about the logic of class struggle. As Leon Trotsky put it: to “strive not only to renew the top leadership of the trade unions, boldly and resolutely in critical moments advancing new militant leaders in place of routine functionaries and careerists, but also to create in all possible instances independent militant organisations corresponding more closely to the tasks of mass struggle against bourgeois society”.

• More, including links to classic texts on the issue here