I’ve just finished Women Workers and the Trade Union Movement, by Sara Boston. It covers women in the trade unions (I know, what a surprise) in Britain in the late 19th century, and most of the 20th.
I really enjoyed reading it – it is so amazing to discover what people had been able to achieve by working together – these huge strikes and victories.
But my main feeling while reading the book was anger – over and over again women workers were being sold out by their male comrades. Men would complain that having women workers on a lower rate undercut their wages, and instead of getting pay equity and a rate for the job they’d try and keep women out. Sexism and misogyny was so deeply ingrained that male workers and trade unionists would act against their own best interests as workers in order to maintain their power over women.
Don’t get me wrong there were some really great examples of solidarity, and strength across gender lines, but not enough.
On the left, one of the most annoying arguments you hear is that if women (or anyone else) organize separately then it’ll ‘divide the working class’. If people paid any attention to history they’d realize it wasn’t the women organizing against sexism that were dividing the working class – it was the sexism and misogyny of men.
*She had the audacity to suggest equal pay at a National Union of Women Teachers conference.
Note for Comments: This is a pro-union thread. Please do not post right-wing criticisms of unions in this thread.
Pingback: Catallarchy
Pingback: feminist blogs
If this is too right-wing, delete it; I won’t complain.
The dynamics of race/class and unions in the South was similar; one primary goal of white workers in many cases was to keep black workers out of particular professions. (The reason I bring in class is that in many cases, there were also attempts to keep poorer, rural whites out of the trade unions, and to reserve trade jobs for union members; that gets less press, but helps explain why the South remains so strongly anti-union on the ground.)
I’m fairly pro-union–but it’s well worth remembering that unions have not always been very helpful to equality.
It seems like there needs to be a book or two done on ways the various movements have betrayed certain constituencies. The point would be to learn from those mistakes and stop making them. Feminism seems to be constantly re-inventing itself in that respect.
Unions work under the same principles of organizational dynamics as any other group. The leadership of the group has its own agenda, which may or may not be aligned with the avowed mission of the group; a casual look at the union-busting history of some unions (such as the SEIU, which has shot down a number of attempts by its own staff and service workers to unionize) is informative in this regard. Unfortunately, lightly, this makes it difficult to “stop making [mistakes]”; it isn’t a mistake being made, it’s someone deliberately acting on their own agenda. That agenda can even be a “good” agenda – the SEIU bigwigs don’t hate office workers, they just don’t want to pay them more money, because that would take away from their ability to fund organizing drives.
It’s probably a good idea to remember that a union is an organization, not a philosophy or a movement – even if everyone in the union is an adherent of the philosophy or movement, it will still function in organizational ways, rather than idealistic ways. That’s one reason (among many) that I personally favor co-ops over unions; the organizational dynamics of co-ops tend to hew much closer to their values, since there is no formal hierarchy and no ability to compel membership or obedience. Co-ops don’t fit well for many situations, however, particularly in places/industries where there is no realistic way for members to secede and start their own group or company.
SamChevre – it was the same in New Zealand with union anti-immigrant feeling (I’m not sure if unions ever organised to keep Maori out of work, I haven’t heard of it, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen).
Unions can use workers power to do anything they want (I used to joke with members that we could go into negotiations to get them ). But it’s both depressing and coutner-productive when that’s fucking other people over
they just don’t want to pay them more money
Unionizing is not really about higher wages.
Robert;
At least here in the US, one reason unions behave in the way you describe is that very few have fair, contested elections for top and local union officials. If not a perfect fix, fair elections are at least a step in the right direction of more powerful unions with members interests in mind.
Anyone who works in the field can tell several stories of unions which oppose the unionization of their own workers. Such a fight is going on right now here in California inside a big union of government workers. An old labor lawyer professor of mine told me that the only time he’d seen a union really broken in the middle of a strike was a situation where another union was the employer.
I am personally disappointed by this trend because I really believe that the unionization of workers is an essential step towards economic justice.
So much for idealism I suppose.
If this is true, its hard to believe your friend really has much experience in the labor movement. Anybody with any familiarity with the US labor movement could name dozens of disasterous union-ending strikes–famously, the 1981 PATCO strike. But there are probably thousands of examples of what your describing.
curiousgirl, my professor made that remark some time ago, long before 1981. Recent years have not been favorable for the union movement, sadly.
Maia,
Thanks for this post. It’s an important topic that all too often gets ignored or whitewashed in labor history.
In America, at least, there are two really distinct periods of history to consider — the labor movement up to the establishment of government-sponsored unionism by the Wagner Act in 1935, and then the labor movement after the establishment of government sponsorship. Before 1935 there were many different strands of the labor movement, who were often vigorously competing with one another over the vision of organized labor — conservative unions, especially those affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, either actively excluded workers on the basis of sex, race, nationality, and class, or else tolerated and supported their union brothers [sic] who did so. Their strategy was, generally, to shore up the bargaining power of male, white, American-born, skilled tradesmen within the system of Gilded Age state capitalism, by shoving women, blacks, Asians, immigrants, and industrial workers out of the labor market. But other unions, especially radical unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World, explicitly aimed at inclusion of all workers and worked actively to organize across lines of sex, race, nationality, class, etc. They aimed not to shore up the position of unionized workers within the state capitalist system, but rather to organize against the state capitalist system as such and replace it with worker ownership of the means of production. The conservative unions thus effectively became the junior partners of the bosses in trying to protect capitalist labor relations from the organizing of the radical unionists; meanwhile the radical unionists gained strength by organizing precisely those workers who were excluded by the conservative unions.
What happened in 1935 is that the Wagner Act created an extensive system of government privileges for unions that met the conditions for government recognition. Not surprisingly, the system was designed to favor the conservative unions’ organizing models and to focus union energies as much as possible on collective bargaining over wages and conditions with the sitting boss. Thus the explosive growth of the American Separation of Labor and its younger cousin, the CIO, through the new government-sponsored privileges, which “subversive organizations” like the IWW had no access to. The big union bosses flourished as they were inducted into the establishment alongside Big Government and Big Business. The bosses screamed bloody murder but then happily settled down to business with compliant, easy-to-coopt unions. The politicians celebrated their success in incorporating a new organized “base” into the system of political patronage and vote-buying. The radical unions dwindled in membership, or else were bought off by the other new big player in town — the Communist Party and its financial backers in Stalinist Russia. And the privileged, educated professionals who fancied themselves “Progressives” shouted “Hallelujah” and passed off the evisceration of domestic labor radicalism as the great triumph of labor history.
What’s happening now is that, with neither Soviet Communism nor autonomous domestic labor radicalism being considered a serious threat to the stability of the state capitalist system, Big Business and Big Government no longer have as much need for keeping Big Labor at the table. With less of a perceived threat, there is less of a perceived need for co-opting a buffer against that threat. It has served its purpose and now can be scaled back like any other obsolete resource. Thus, the current situation and the decaying prospects of the establishment unions. And since the establishment unions have spent the last half century selling out workers at large in order to protect the short-term interests of their own membership and especially their own union bosses, they have nobody but themselves to blame for that situation.
Unions are made up of blue collar guys. (Not a criticism, just a statement of fact.)
Blue collar guys have not yet bought into the feminist movement. That’s for college educated men only.
What’s happening now is that, with neither Soviet Communism nor autonomous domestic labor radicalism being considered a serious threat to the stability of the state capitalist system, Big Business and Big Government no longer have as much need for keeping Big Labor at the table.
True, but the vastly increased level of societal wealth plays a role as well. There are a lot of people who will fight and die (metaphorically or literally) because their children are starving while oligarchs feast. There are far fewer people who will do that because their children have only one iPod, while Bill Gates’ kids hire orchestras. In the former circumstance, any establishment has to take strong steps – even desperation measures like permitting labor unions to exist – to prevent revolution. In the latter circumstance, you just have to make sure that the much smaller number of real hotheads are kept on ice.
Robert,
O.K., but I don’t think that that very well explains the decline in union membership and union influence over the past 30 years. Average real wages are substantially lower now than they were in the 1960s and early 1970s, and despite several years of modest increases during the late 1990s, the steady trend since 1973 has been the erosion of workers’ wealth, not an increase in the baseline.