Rob Lambert teaches at the University of Western Australia where he chairs the International Studies Program. He is also the International Officer for the West Australian Trades and Labour Council (ACTU), and the Coordinator of The Southern Initiative on Globalisation and Trade Union Rights (SIGTUR), established in 1990.
There is evidence that we are now entering an early phase of transition in the structure, form and mode of operation of trade unionism in terms as certain unions begin to experiment in broadening the horizon of their organizing work from an national industrial focus to a new civil society and global orientation that is distinctive from traditional labour internationalism. These are small signs that a global social movement unionism (GSMU) is a possible option.
This is occurring because there is a growing recognition that before all else, the movement’s future hinges on its capacity to block the public and private restructuring agendas of global corporations, case by case, company by company, until there is sufficient power in movements of civil society to redefine the nature and role of corporations, politics and the character of a just, participatory, democratic society. Failure to challenge restructuring and present an alternative vision will doom organized labour to a peripheral existence as workers abandon unionism, recognizing that these organizations cannot defend their most vital interests. In arguing that unions were ‘paralyzed’ by restructuring, Moody (1997) identified GSMU as a means to challenge this corporate agenda. However, his book is vague on two fronts: firstly, the precise form of GSMU is never clearly specified; secondly, the organizing strategies essential to such a bold new venture are not fully developed, nor are the obstacles to realizing this new form analysed. This chapter will attempt to grapple with these issues.
Given GSMU’s embryonic nature, the analysis is in part an exercise in sociological imagination that moves beyond C Wright Mills (1970) connecting personal problems and social issues. In the GSMU project we imagine what does not yet fully exist in the hope of provoking debate and stimulating new organizational initiatives. This is not purely speculative as there are already responses to restructuring that carry the seeds of something new. However, some of these initiatives end in failure more often than success and at best they are incomplete and partial. Most importantly, they are often constrained by existing patterns of unionism that produces a certain institutional inertia and aversion to experimentation, where rhetoric substitutes for change and where congress resolutions become a mere memory before inaction. This endeavor to imagine GSMU as a step in the process of creating the will to organize in a new way draws on instances where the engagement is real and radical rather than rhetorical and in the final instance, organizationally conservative. The argument unfolds thus. Firstly, since global corporations drive restructuring, the starting point of the analysis is developing a sense of context through scrutinizing the discourse on the nature of corporations, restructuring and its psychological and social impacts. Secondly, the limits of traditional union responses to restructuring are considered. Finally, GSMU as a possible alternative is outlined. Throughout the analysis, the need for a critical discourse that could stimulate this new unionism is spelt out.
The Corporation: Reconstructing a Critical Discourse
Occasionally words must serve to veil facts. But this must happen in such a way that no one becomes aware of it. (Machiavelli’s Instructions to Raffaello Girolami)
Having gained control of vital segments of the media, global corporations have crafted an image of social and environmental responsibility. These generators of economic wealth care about values other than profit – they are good for society. Apart from manufacturing commodities to enrich human existence, corporations invest in technology and production to create work for citizens, thereby contributing to the wellbeing of nations. This dominant discourse veils the impact of corporate restructuring on society. Since discourse is ‘a form of power’ and ‘a mode of formation of ideas and beliefs’ (Harvey, 1996, 83), the first step towards GSMU is the reconstruction of a critical discourse on the nature and role of global corporations that unveils the facts of their impact.
The argument is for a reconstruction because from the late Nineteenth Century, a critical discourse did exist. As corporations grew in size and power they faced a legitimacy crisis for they were widely viewed ‘as soulless leviathans – uncaring, impersonal, and amoral’ (Bakan, 2004, 17). They appeared vulnerable to popular discontent and unions demanded that government restrict and control their action, with some even calling for their dismantling. This critical discourse on corporations fired up a movement for change and gave direction to resistance. In the context of this earlier discourse, the advent of neo-liberal globalization in the 1980s highlights an intriguing contradiction. Under globalization, the power of corporations has increased to an unprecedented degree and intense restructuring has reflected ‘a reckless disregard for consequences’ (22), yet with a few notable exceptions, a critical response to global corporations has been muted. In general, unions have failed to target corporations with the critical insight and vigor of the earlier movement. A partial explanation of this weak response might reside both in the embrace of Post-Fordist paradigms involving a partnership with corporations by a number of key unions and the declining power of unionism.
Rebuilding unionism as a vital component of a wider social justice movement will require the reconstruction of a critical discourse on corporations. In the absence of such a discourse, a social movement response to restructuring will never be triggered because to the extent that unions are captivated by the dominant discourse they view their role as an agent of restructuring, cooperating with the corporate change agenda in the forlorn hope that these organizations will make an enduring local commitment because of the efficiency gains. Even the most militant of unions find that they are forced to justify their role within this discourse. For example, the Maritime Union of Australia set out to prove that it could indeed play a positive role in waterfront restructuring and deliver significant productivity gains when its existence was threatened in 1998. These forms of engagement have created a fog of confusion as workers become uncertain as to what unions really stand for. Bakan’s 2004 analysis of the nature of the corporation could be one starting point for reconstructing a critical discourse thereby providing a foundation for the movement project.
The book highlights the crucial role of the state’s legal interventions in shaping the character and role of the modern corporation. There are four empowering moments in this legal constitution of corporations. Firstly, the concept of limited liability was enshrined in corporate law in England in 1856 and in the United States over the latter half of the nineteenth century. This accelerated the growth of corporations through the stock market for individuals could now trade in these ventures with risk of loss minimized and the opportunity for gain unlimited. Secondly, laws constraining mergers and acquisitions were changed in the United States in the early 1890s resulting in a dramatic transformation of the corporate landscape. Indeed Marx had observed that the essential dynamism of capitalist development is the ceaseless competitive war between private companies, which is the ‘driving fire’ of the rationalization of production (Marx, Vol.3, 254). The consequent concentration and centralization of production is the intrinsic logic of the system as ‘one capitalist always strikes down many others’ (Marx, Vol.1, 929). Initially the legal system limited this process, this logic of capital accumulation, but when the states of Jersey and Delaware sought to attract corporations to their jurisdictions by jettisoning restrictions from their corporate laws restructuring accelerated. The change exerted a competitive pressure on other states to similarly attract investment. With the dismantling of most legal constraints on acquisitions and mergers, a large number of small and medium sized corporations were quickly absorbed into a small number of very large ones – 1 800 corporations were consolidated into 157 between 1898 and 1904. In less than a decade the US economy had been transformed from one in which individually owned enterprises competed freely among themselves into one dominated by a relatively few large corporations (Bakan, 2004, 14).
Thirdly, Bakan (16) observes that, ‘By the end of the nineteenth century, through a bizarre legal alchemy, courts had fully transformed the corporation into a ‘person’, with its own identity, separate from the flesh and blood people who were its owners and managers and empowered, like a real person, to conduct business in its own name, acquire assets, employ workers, pay taxes, and go to court to assert rights and defend its actions’. The corporate ‘person’ had taken the place, at least in law, of the real people who owned corporations. The significance of this legal identity is that the courts in the United States then assumed that as a ‘person’, corporations were entitled to freedom and independence, thus the Supreme Court decided in 1886 that corporations should be protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. As a consequence, this ‘person’ status legitimized the deregulation thrust of liberal economics, asserting that corporations should be freed of all burdensome restrictions. Fourthly, in the Dodge verses Ford case in the early Twentieth Century, a legal principle was established that managers have a legal duty to place shareholder interests before all others and that they have no legal authority to serve other interests. This has become known as ‘the best interests of the corporation’ principle in which management is viewed as the stewards of shareholder investment (36). These legal interventions enhanced the power of large corporations and defined their orientation.
This evolution of corporate law has enhanced the scale and power of corporations and legitimated self interest above all other considerations. The profit drive defined in this way excludes moral concern, consequently the impacts of restructuring are off the business agenda. Milton Friedman argued that the corporation’s sole objective ‘is to make as much money as possible for their shareholders. This is a moral imperative’ (33). In Bakan’s view, these four defining legal interventions have legitimated the singular focus Friedman extols. In shaping the corporation thus, corporate law has created a ‘flawed institutional character’, enabling corporations to act without moral concern for the impact of their decisions. Consequently, corporate culture is characterized by moral turpitude where ‘the language of business is not the language of the soul or the language of humanity, it’s the language of indifference’ (56). There is an indifference to the psychological destruction of persons and communities caused by closures and the extreme exploitation of workers in their factories in China or Mexico does not register. Since the corporation is defined as a ‘person’, Bakan applies a psychological checklist to these actions and concludes that such indifference is the hallmark of the psychopath (57). This is because the corporate leadership that creates such a deeply flawed organization cope with the consequences of their actions by compartmentalizing their lives and refusing to acknowledge the impact of restructuring. Anita Roddick of Body Shop fame concluded that this tension ‘was fashioning a schizophrenia amongst us’ (36).
In this process the state appears as the guardian of free market globalization and is therefore less ambiguously captured by corporate interests and the promotion of unimpeded capital accumulation (reflected in accelerating mergers, acquisitions and consequent restructuring), whilst at the same time restricting the power of independent forces in civil society from disrupting these changes. Hence the whole trajectory of labour law and industrial relations systems need to be viewed in the context of this dynamic.
The further evolution of market ideology in the era of globalization functions to ease the strain of the psychotic state Roddick reflects upon by rationalizing restructuring in terms of the logic of competition, in which the corporation appears to have no option but to intensify work, downsize, casualise, relocate and exploit cheap labour because their competitors are forcing their hand. This is presented as if the corporation constituted as a human personality makes these decisions in the light of market competition, whilst the actual human agents become mere mechanical functionaries.[1] This is a fiction that the critical discourse of movements needs to expose. The Board – human persons who lead the corporation are the decision makers who choose which factories to close and which workers to downsize, without reference to psychological and social impacts. Psychotic behavior is a coping mechanism minimizing the potential stress of these contortions.
Neo-liberal deregulation is a force driving these changes at a merciless rate as corporations are ‘vaulted to unprecedented power and influence’ (21). Now unaccountable, without any allegiance to place, the corporation acts ‘with reckless disregard for the consequences’ of its decisions (22). The corporation attempts to veil this recklessness through words that construct a benign, caring image so at odds with the reality of their decisions. Corporations care about the environment and communities; they are not just about the soulless pursuit of profit; they are part of the solution to the problem, not its cause; there is a new corporate order of conscience (33).
This is the situation that unions now confront – a radically enhanced corporate power; unilateral restructuring imposed to secure ever higher profit margins characterized by moral indifference. The first step in any fight back is cutting through the veil, exposing the corporate essence, thereby enhancing a sense of class injustice and a desire to act. Rather than speculating in the abstract, the actions of a particular global corporation and the union response to restructuring will be scrutinized. Electrolux, a Swedish trans-national corporation (TNC) and the second largest global corporation in an industry sector producing white goods (principally stoves, fridges, dishwashers and dryers) is selected to illustrate these processes.[2]
Schizoid Corporate Logic
The evolution of the white goods industry illustrates the singular logic outlined above.
An historical survey of the industry from its inception in the early Twentieth Century reveals a spatial competitive dynamic played out through acquisitions, mergers and closures that both create and destroy productive forces. The geographical dimension of these transformations is a cardinal feature of the restructuring. The most successful corporations were those that were most aggressive in this drive, first within their home territory, then regionally, and finally globally. The resultant concentration of corporate power laid the foundation to increase the corporation’s scale and geographic reach and hence its capacity to exploit geographic difference. This command of space and the emergence of a new geography of production consolidated a vast power imbalance that underlies union paralysis. Global restructuring has produced in a highly concentrated industry where the five largest corporations control 30 per cent of the market with a combined turnover of 45 billion US dollars in domestic appliance revenues in 2002. The top two white goods giants alone controlled 15 per cent of global volume sales while the ten largest corporations account for 44 per cent of the global market. Electrolux is the second largest global corporation in this sector.
The strategy of these corporations demonstrates that the accumulation of capital is indeed a ‘profoundly geographic affair’ where spatial reorganization and the exploitation of uneven geographic development stand at the very center of the way competition is played out (Harvey, 2000, 57). Within this dynamic a clear geographic pattern emerges marked by factory closures and relocations. In North America, white goods factories move southward to Mexico and across the Pacific to China; in Europe, there is an eastwards drive into Central Europe; in Asia, a movement from Korea and Japan to China; and in Australia, a movement to China and Thailand. In each restructure, the magnet is the absence of effective independent unionism and the uneven geographical evaluation of workers. All the major players are pursuing precisely the same form of competition to the point where they are all leveraging advantage from uneven geography.
Global restructuring in this industry confirms Bakan’s critique – each decision to close production in unionized zones of the global economy and relocate to the non-unionised, cheap labour zones is made with scant regard of impacts for these are viewed as market decisions, which if ignored would imperil the very viability of the corporation. In this alternative analysis, the choice is not to disconnect the decisions of the corporate power brokers from their impact. In endeavoring to construct such an understanding, Polanyi (1957) provides insight into the consequences of the schizoid market/society ideological construct. The self regulating market could not exist for any length of time without physically destroying man and transforming his surroundings into a wilderness (Polanyi, 1957, 3; Munck, 2002, 2). This is captured in the destructiveness of restructuring, where labour is just a ‘factor of production’ in the economic calculus and classical microeconomic cost curve analysis. Polanyi (1957, 72, 73) highlights the contradiction this commodity status when he argues, ‘Labor is only another name for human activity which goes with life itself, which in its turn is not produced for sale but for entirely different reasons, nor can that activity be detached from the rest of life…to allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings…would result in the demolition of society…For the alleged commodity ‘labor power’ cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of a man’s labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity ‘man’ attached to that tag’. Unions are principle defenders of this wider humanity as they unite workers in continuous struggle against this imposition of commodity status.
In the following section the human impacts and union response to three decisions of the Electrolux Board are scrutinized: the closure of the Chef cooker plant in Melbourne Australia; the demise of the fridge factory in Orange, New South Wales, Australia; and the planned closure of a fridge factory in Greenville, Michigan. The negated and neglected psychological and social dimension of market ideology is highlighted through ethnographic research in the two Australian companies.[3] The study based on participant observation and qualitative interviews is longitudinal so that the full impact over time can be assessed.[4] Capturing the words, feelings and social consciousness of victims of is crucial to the GSMU project. Can the anger be channeled into a new movement building project, or will victims simply slide into depression, passivity and fatalism? Will these closures, these geographic relocations be fought, or are they viewed as inevitable? Polanyi contends that the move to market ideology creates a counter movement against its destructive power. In my view, the process is more complex: the possibilities for a counter movement do exist, but so do the prospects of a deadening passivity before global corporate power. The following section therefore captures a critical contradiction: corporate restructuring creates both a basis for the counter movement as well as emphasizing significant obstacles to its realization. This is revealed in the responses in these three factories. The cases show just how poorly equipped traditional unionism is when confronted by global restructuring.
Chef – World’s End
Electrolux is run by the rich….all they do is think about their money
This inner city Melbourne factory had deep Australian roots for it had been established early in the last century by local entrepreneurs (Lambert 2004). Economically, the company was a paragon of success, capturing 39 per cent of the Australian cooker market by the early 1980s when Chef became the leading Australian brand. By the 1990s profits averaged around 28 million Australian Dollars per annum, which was high by Australian standards. The irony is that success in sharemarket driven capitalism results in vulnerability to take over bids. In the early 1990s Southcorp, a leading Australian wine producer, acquired the iconic company, utilizing the profits to further advance its wine interests. Late in the decade, the cooker producer’s major Australian competitor, Email, acquired this valuable asset. Two years later, Email succumbed to a bid by Electrolux where part of the deal was the closure of Chef.
The ethnographic research captures the human impact of the decision.
Mick.
I came here as a young kid. It’s as if someone’s taken your home away from you – it hurts. I was brought up here. I learnt everything here. For someone to come in here and just close the place down – what a pack of fucking hypocrites these people are. They spit in your face. They treat you like shit. They have never set foot in this place. Do they know what they have done to us?
We were called into the boardroom and we all sat there waiting for the decision to be made by the board of directors in Sydney. Deep in my heart, deep in my heart, I never ever, ever thought they would close us down. I said, no they can’t close us down. We’re making profits, were making money, we’ve got good product, we’ve got the market – they can’t close us down. It’s impossible, it’s impossible. It would take a brave man to try to close us down because it just does not make any sense – why would they want to close down such a great company?
Then we heard the announcement that they were going to close us down. I was sitting in the boardroom with my legs crossed. It must have been the nerves in my legs – I just kicked the bloody table. I got hot and flustered. I really wanted to reach over and grab this person by the throat. I wanted to climb over the table and punch his lights out.
I was very, very bitter and I said, NO I’m going to fight this. I rang up and joined the union and organized rallies at Brunswick town hall.
Politicians haven’t got the guts to try and save manufacturing in Australia. We’re just heading towards becoming just another third world country.
Ross.
It was the end of the world for me. I came here thirty five years ago. This was my first job. All of a sudden, someone makes a decision and it’s all over. I cried. I had to go home and break the news to my wife and my family.
Ron.
It’s just unbelievable to think that something like this could happen here – Just gone. What have we done wrong for it to come to this? Who would have believed that this could happen? Everyone is just in a state of shock. No one spoke – it’s too painful to mention – it’s like a death in the family. What do you say, what do you feel when faced with a death?
Assembly line woman worker, who had migrated from Greece.
Where we go now? Even young people can’t find jobs. My mind still fast. My hands still fast, but they close the factory. You can’t forget. They take it from you.
A male assembly line worker.
Electrolux is run by the rich. Personally, I don’t like the rich people. All they do is think about their money. They don’t give a shit, all they think about is their pocket and the ways that they can spend their money. That’s the biggest issue, right?
There are people starving, and these Electrolux people, they’ve got so much money, they don’t know what to do with it, right? Like the boss from Electrolux, whoever he is that makes this shit decision.
This is why the world is turning out to be such a terrible place to live in, because it’s only good for the rich, so the days of Robin Hood when you pinch from the rich, them were the good days – them days – perfect!
Workers were hostile towards politicians.
Politicians are scum. They forget about working people. When they want our vote, they come to us. After the vote, they change their story. Look at how many factories have just closed in Victoria – Dunlop, Arnotts, Ansett.
A middle aged male press shop worker.
Politicians are big bludgers. They get money for do nothing. I work hard and get paid peanuts. Politicians try to sell us policies like they sell cigarettes, like they selling soap. When are they going to create something different? When are they going to get down to the people and understand our situation? Politicians don’t listen to us. They need to represent us. They just represent themselves and forget why they are there’.
Shock, pain, depression, a sense of class injustice and anger against the corporate leadership of Electrolux and Australian politicians – how is this experience ‘measured’ against profit; will these feelings trigger a counter movement? Whatever opportunity may have existed within this emotional turmoil was missed. Australian Workers Union (AWU) branch that was present in the factory was a weak company orientated, bureaucratic union that did little to capture and direct these emotions when the closure was announced, remembering there was a full year between the announcement and the silencing of the machines, time when a resistance strategy could have been forged. A local town hall protest meeting was all that was organized and thus ended the union involvement as the politically ambitious new National Secretary of the AWU gained press mileage before swiftly losing interest in the Chef workers.
Subsequent interviews and observations of the unemployed Chef workers reveal that they experience a sense of abandonment. Who is concerned about their plight? Not the union, not the politician, not the church leader, not the media. These are the forgotten remnant; alone with their personal pain, their waves of depression, their family breakdowns, their isolation – persons on the scrapheap, at best mere survivors with memories of a life that was; a sense of existence that is a premature daily dying; time without spirit, will, hope, a mechanical functioning through another seemingly endless day. They view themselves as the neglected, the forgotten victims of corporate restructuring. But then as a mere ‘factor of production’ emotion holds no currency; feelings must be hidden in the tough world of market efficiency.
Clock numbers in Orange
‘It is not overstating the case to say that despite our long and illustrious history in Orange, our future here in recent times looked uncertain’[5]
‘I mean those people (Koreans at LG), when I say work, they work. They’re doing exercise in the morning not to feel good, it’s so they can work flat out for 8-10 hours a day for six days a week. How do I create an environment that lets us work at the same rate and tempo that they do?’[6]
‘We are now just a clock number, we’re just a tally to get out. That is what Electrolux is about. That is how we feel.’[7]
An essence of our humanity is the capacity to make choices, to dream and aspire to a better life. Ever since World War Two, droves of Australian workers sought to escape the driving pace of the big cities by moving to the country town of Orange, nestled in the valleys just inland from the Blue Mountains, surrounded by apple farms thriving on the rich volcanic soil. Secure, reasonably paid employment in the large fridge plant, converted from a munitions factory after the war, was the magnet. Many eventually bought small holdings in the rural surrounds as they constructed a life style markedly different to the pace of the city. This lifestyle would prove to be short lived when Electrolux acquired the factory in 2001. Orange workers were soon to discover that there is no rural escape from globalization and the culture this engagement heralds.
When Electrolux bought this economic mainstay of the town, 1 600 workers were employed. Soon after acquiring this facility, Electrolux began to expand its fridge production capacity in China, investing US$50 million upgrading its Changsha factory in the inland Hunan province to a ‘global production platform’. Fridge production will expand from 650 000 per annum to 1.3 million by 2006. This has implications for Orange and the workforce is now wracked by insecurity with management warning that changes had to be accepted or else closure was a certainty. Work is being constantly reorganized via downsizing (a 50 per cut in the workforce), increased intensity (increasing the speed of the line by 66 per cent through benchmarking with Korean factories), changed working hours and casualisation thereby eroding the material foundation of the Orange lifestyle.
To secure a smooth transition to the culture of the market, Electrolux skillfully undermined the union power base by applying provisions of the 1996 Workplace Relations Act, banning union organizers from entering the factory and shop floor delegates have been targeted in the redundancies. Delegates are not allowed to speak to workers in the factory, indeed, any worker caught talking is harassed because ‘having a lark’ undermines productivity. Historically, the union had been a force in the factory, having organized lengthy strikes to bargain conditions. Now, in the short space of three years, the union is a shadow of its former self with the remaining delegates contending that workers ‘no longer gave a shit’, believing that the factory would close anyway.
In May 2005 time was spent in Orange interviewing workers who were still in the factory and those that had already been forced out. These human encounters revealed a startling fact: all were disabled to some degree by repetitive stress injuries (RSI) which were a direct consequence of the speed up. Many had taped wrists and forearms; others had shoulder or back injuries. Without prompting, all expressed the view that Electrolux had treated them like an object, and cared little about their injuries. All believed that closure was inevitable and none had any conviction that such an event could be fought. At plant level, the two previously militant unions appeared bereft of ideas other than seeing their role as redundancy negotiators. Like the union at Chef, they had organized a mass meeting at the town hall when the first major wave of downsizing was announced. The union leadership at the meeting expressed anger against Electrolux and the exploitative attitude of multi-national corporations, but they advanced no resistance strategy. Not surprisingly, fatalism pervades the town.
Greenville Dreams
Corporations aren’t about heart, they’re about profits.
The similarities between the factories in Orange and Greenville, a country town in Michigan, are striking. Both are converted munitions factories; the viability of both towns is tied to the plant; both have been bought out by Electrolux and then threatened with closure. Greenville is a large factory employing 2 700 workers who produce 1.3 million fridges a year. October 21, 2003 was the fateful day when company executives met with the local leadership of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and announced that the factory would close and relocate to Mexico where they would save US$81 million a year through lower wage and environmental costs. The executives outlined that a wages and benefits package cost the company $22.99 an hour in the United States ($15 base wage), whereas they could hire labour for $3.60 an hour in Mexico ($1.57 base wage). Furthermore, the company will escape environmental regulation. In the US it is required to switch to environmentally friendly foam for the fridges that would raise costs by US$8 per unit, whereas Mexico does not impose these obligations. They claimed that these wages and environmental costs meant that they had ‘no choice’ but to relocate. The Greenville plant would continue operating through 2005 and possibly into 2006, whilst Electrolux set up production in Mexico.
For the shareholders, the decision signals Electrolux’s commitment to maximizing profit, whilst for the workers, the decision had, in an instant, changed the lives that they had built. Their feelings were the same as the displaced workers of Chef and Orange: they were ‘stunned, devastated’, they experienced ‘shock’, feelings of ‘agony’ that would not go away. Family impacts were the focus. Teenage children spoke at public meetings sharing their fears of the loss of home and possessions. As was the case at Chef and Orange, employment is based on extended family networks with husbands, wives and relatives working at the factory, thereby magnifying the proposed closure’s impact. Once the factory closed, the only option is accepting low wages and an anti-union environment at Wal-Mart. Most feared losing their medical insurance.
The assessment is that ‘the community is going to fall apart’ because of the impact of the closure on the life and the viability of families.[8] Furthermore, the event will drain Greenville of US$ 437 000 in tax revenue each year.[9] Electrolux is indifferent: when they devastate the community, when they exploit Mexican workers, these not ethical decisions; they are rational, economic choices, they are simply an application of ‘the best interests of the corporation’ principle.
Over the past fifteen months, the UAW local 137 has responded to the closure. A critical discourse came to the fore. ‘Corporations aren’t about heart, they’re about profits’; this was ‘a cold blooded corporate decision; and the company had ‘chalked up another win for corporate greed’.[10]
The union linked with the local council and government and tried concession bargaining. Ready to sacrifice wages and conditions, the union offered contract concessions of more than $32 million a year, whilst local government formulated a raft of tax breaks. These included $83 million in tax credits over the next 20 years ($4.5 million a year); $31 million over 15 years ($2.06 a year) for a tax free renaissance zone credit; a community development grant of $2 million for public works at the site; $3.9 million over 15 years ($260 000) a year education tax credits; and finally, a $65 883 cut in local property taxes for the next 12 years. Electrolux’s stance was uncompromising and they rejected the offer out of hand pointing out it was well short of the $81 million that they would save by relocating to Mexico.
Whilst concession bargaining was the primary focus of UAW strategy, the union also mobilized the community, organizing an American jobs rally that linked workers from across the United States. Workers spoke out against ‘accountant like economic restructuring’ that failed to take account of people and their families. They were ‘waking up from the American dream’ for when they lose their jobs they also lose their health insurance. Despite the anger a sense of fatalism seems to pervade workers, who spoke of ‘constant feelings of powerlessness and paralysis’.[11] A fatalistic acceptance of closure is captured in the statement by one of the local union leaders, ‘I have my resume out. I have one daughter in college and two more kids who will be going in the next couple of years. I don’t know where I’m going to be able to find a good paying job, especially one with health care insurance and a real pension. But I’m out there looking’. He fears facing no option but a Wal-Mart type job that forces down conditions from $15 an hour with health care, dental insurance and a defined pension plan to jobs that pay $8 an hour with virtually no benefits.[12]
Agency and Choice
Those living the lie confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system. (Vaclav Havel)
Where, then, is the courage of our minds to come from? (Harvey, 2000, 237).
Can workers resist, can they challenge the logic of closure? Can the inevitable dark pessimism and consequent passivity give way to optimism, sense of purpose and the will to collective action? If traditional protest meetings are ineffectual, where are there genuine pressure points? What kind of movement is needed to generate these shifts? There are no easy answers. However, in facing Goliath, is there a David like approach to the problem, a discovery of some essential weakness, a point of vulnerability in the corporation? These questions are explored in this final section and they provide an opportunity to outline both the magnitude of the problem and the first tentative union experiments.
The opportunity to experiment resides in the fact that there is a one to two year stay of execution for the two remaining factories as Electrolux develops its Mexican and Chinese operations. At present, the company is free to restructure at will, without any serious disruptions from the union movement that needs to globalize its power base if it is to block these corporate plans. The three cases provide an insight into the challenge this predicament presents. In each we discover a predictable union response that has characterized the movement during the era of nation based unionism. Protest rallies were organiseed where participation was strong and where the meetings provided an opportunity for fragments of a critical discourse on corporations to emerge. However, the union leaderships are painfully aware that corporate power brokers are hardly ruffled by one off rallies where participants vent their anger and return home without an effective action plan.
In this concluding section, the realm of sociological imagination as defined in the introduction is engaged as a pathway to addressing this impasse, this quagmire that is burying unionism. However, what follows is not pure speculation. A new response is emerging through specific struggles to create a new power base forged out of a global response to global corporations.[13] This reflects a novel dimension in sociological interventionism that has the potential to dissolve the intellectual/activist divide and open the way for the creation of genuinely organic intellectuals who will play a role in creating the new discourse on corporations and who will contribute to shifting the organizing endeavor. Hence the approach in spelling out GSMU is not a restatement of current academic discourse, but rather an uncovering a concrete process of struggle to create something new that demands a full commitment of intellectuals and union officials, shop floor activists and other civil society activists. This is a common endeavor to conceptualise and then operationalise GSMU, a praxis in which there is a continuous and dynamic interplay between the process of theorizing and concrete organizational engagement.[14] Commitment to such a project has the potential to transform both the participants and the relations between them.
The basic premise of David Harvey’s (2000) book, Spaces of Hope, and the work of labour geographers such as Andrew Herod (2001) is a significant starting point for this project. Let me clarify this in relation to my work in Orange. At present, the overwhelming ethos of workers in the factory and those who have been dismissed is a paralysing pessimism: nothing can stand in the way of global corporations who can restructure at will. The following comments typify this fatalistic streak that was expressed by all who were interviewed. Speaking to workers at the factory gates during the afternoon change of shift, the viewpoint was repeated, ‘What happens, happens, there’s nothing I can do’. In an interview, a union activist commented, ‘No one gives a fuck anymore; they just experience Electrolux as a big company that has just taken over their lives. Everyone knows that they are just a number now. That’s why they don’t give a shit about anything’. Then there is Sarah, a union shop steward, who was a real fighter. A year ago when I visited Orange to speak at the union rally, she was articulate; a fiery person, unafraid to speak her mind. At a local council meeting the night before the rally, she stood up and attacked councilors who were real estate agents, and who had argued that there should not be a fuss in the town over the threatened closure, as this might affect their businesses. She warned, ‘Just remember, the community elected you and the community will chase your tail at the next elections’. When I met Helen almost a year later in May 2005, she was unrecognizable. She had shifted from fighter to fatalist. She told me, ‘There is nothing that you can do. You just have to move on. I’ve now got a low paid job as a cleaner in a hospital. I just want to move on – you can’t do anything about a big company like Electrolux’. In a real sense there was nothing that she could do, because the unions had done nothing other than their normal routine activity, caught as they are in an institutional groove that was effective in the age of national unionism and national bargaining rights. There are also gender issues here as Sarah’s partner is against her becoming involved in any campaign against such an ‘important company’ in the town. Others interviewed, echoed Sarah. Dennis said, ‘Life has just got to go on. You have got to make it go on’. He is a victim of the ‘downsizing exercise’. Stressed and anxious, he reflected, ‘I have got nothing in my bank account. Centre link won’t pay me now – they say I will get my first payment at the end of May. I will try and live on my
$1 500 balance on my credit card’.[15] With no prospect of collective resistance to Electrolux’s strategy in view, workers have shrunk into their private world of personal struggle, a daily grind just to survive.
If this then is the reality of what is happening on the ground, surely the prospects of a GSMU response becoming anything more than a mere intellectual notion are dim indeed. The pervasiveness of such pessimism must surely mean that Electrolux has a free hand in Australia, or indeed in the United States, or anywhere else that it chooses to locate. Unions cannot stand like King Canute before the incoming tide.
This is the critical issue that the new labour geography addresses. Harvey (2000, 237) poses the right question when he asks, ‘Where, then, is the courage of our minds to come from?’ The new labour geography may well provide an answer to this question, for this field of intellectual endeavor is underpinned by an optimism in agency. Herod (2001, 1) challenges the view that the global capital is all powerful and that civil society is powerless. Herod contends that ‘there is always opposition to power and domination, a fact that is seen everyday in countless workplaces, fields, offices…’ A key to unlocking this possibility is the development of an understanding of how space and spatial relations may serve as sources of power and objects of struggle. Hence to capture this opposition the issue of spatial praxis needs to be re-theorized in a manner that uncovers the ways in which workers are capable of fashioning the geography of capitalism and how they have the capacity to become ‘proactive, sentient, geographic actors’ rather than existing as ‘passive bearers of the geographical transformations wrought by capital’ (Herod, 2001, 5).
Harvey (2000, 117) argues that the attempt by corporations to commodification of labour will never erase the ‘transformative and creative capacities’ of persons. When treated as a commodity, persons still have the capacity to ‘contemplate alternative possibilities’ (2000, 199) even in the darkest of times when there is an absence of any obvious blueprint for social change or any social movement with plans for social change. Following Marx, Harvey (2000, 201) captures this in his adoption of the figure of the architect as a metaphor for human agency. Like architects, persons are capable of ‘thought experiments’, of imagining and struggling with passion and commitment for an alternative social order
Having experienced the bleak pessimism of workers at Orange I recognize the significance of this argument, for without a belief at least in the possibility of challenging global corporations there can never be a GSMU response. Hence the starting point of the project is reigniting a belief in this prospect of agency. The concept of networking is crucial to the flowing of this optimism. Such possibilities do exist, even in Orange where the bodies and minds of workers are so bruised and damaged by restructuring any proposed initiative may seem like a fantasy. However, the history of worker struggle demonstrates that movements do not arise spontaneously; they are painstakingly built by committed persons who decide to stand up and fight. What interesting in Orange is that some workers refuse to lie down and accept the beating. Take for instance the tattooed bikkie, nicknamed ‘Hungry’, who is a shop steward. He refuses to kowtow to management and supervisors (team leaders) and their anti-union campaign, proudly wearing his shirt with a bold union logo. He is an archetypical Aussie worker, humorous, upfront, honest. ‘I’m not afraid of them; they don’t scare me; I’m with the boys’. Then there’s John, who has steadfastly remained a union member for the past 20 years. ‘The union saved my job on two occasions. I will never leave the union’. Brad has had enough of Electrolux’s ways. He has suffered from serious RSI for the past three after the speed of the assembly line accelerated dramatically. ‘We are just a number now, just a clock card. There’s no human side now – just push, shove, hustle, go, go, go! They have jacked up the speed by about two thirds and workers are finding it difficult. The injury rate has gone up’.
In the light of the current situation the following plan involving the constitution of three groups is presently being formulated. Firstly, a global worker network of Electrolux workers will be established. To achieve this, committed shop floor leaders will form the Orange Workers’ Global Action Group. Initially, they will be trained in internet skills including web site design. The group will make direct contact with workers at Greenville, creating space for a sharing of experiences and a consideration of options. The network will then be widened from Greenville. Secondly, a research group will be created to monitor and research Electrolux’s global strategies and their local impacts. Thirdly, the World Company Council concept will be modified and a much leaner steering group of key union leaders will be constituted to develop a resistance strategy in dialogue with the global action network and the research group.
Action groups at every place where Electrolux produces
A GSMU arises out of and is constituted by this dynamic of networked interactions between the grass roots action groups in each geographic place where Electrolux has invested, the global research group and the modified World Company Council. Let us return to the case of the Orange workers to imagine this dynamic and the way in which a GSMU could emerge from such an initiative. Firstly, by proposing and implementing such a plan, the union is signaling to their committed leadership in the factory that a fight back is in the making – there is organizing work to be done. This will preempt the further dissolution of leadership by undermining the belief that nothing can be done. Sarah’s disillusionment might never have happened if an action strategy had been formulated. Weekly meetings to gain computer skills, design a web site and interact with the Greenville workers has the potential to create a sense of community and common purpose in contrast to the prevailing isolation where workers deal with their personal problems in isolation. The level of interaction with the Greenville workers can be highly personalized, given the user friendly technologies that are now available. This will provide a concrete experience that these local problems of assembly line speed and RSI, downsizing, casualisation and closure are global problems requiring a global response. The Orange Action Group would also seek to widen its social base by forming relationships with local apple farmers who are experiencing threats to their livelihoods because of free trade policies. Small shopkeepers in Orange are fearful of the impact closure might have on their businesses.
Secondly, the research group would constantly feed the action groups and the WCC Steering Group with research on Electrolux’s evolving strategy so that a counter discourse and counter strategy could be formulated and grounded in the local action groups. The Rio Tinto campaign organized by ICEM has already demonstrated the points of vulnerability of global corporations. Shareholder meetings can be targeted and other pressure points explored. Given the trade dependency of these corporations and their synchronizing just in time production systems, they are now far from invincible.
As these interactions develop and evolve, a GSMU will emerge, one that reflects a process of revitalization at local level and new forms of global resistance to force these corporations into global framework agreements. Such agreements should be the first stage in forcing back the frontier of control, ensuring that the bargaining process extends beyond wages and conditions to the right to negotiate investment decisions. Corporations should be forced to commit to an even spread of investment across the globe and not as a stick to beat workers who are fearful of closure into submission. In short, GSMU would widen the agenda so as to socially regulate corporations.
Conclusion
The choice is stark indeed. Either unions reinvent themselves as a GSMU, or they are likely to wither and die. Either pessimism and passivity maintain their grip on workplace culture, or activism born of a vision will inject a new found optimism in the workforce. This drama is being played out in this Australian country town. The choices this union makes and its capacity to reengage its local leadership are the small signs that we are indeed entering a transition phase in unionism. The success or the failure of this venture will determine whether or not a GSMU is indeed emerging.
End Notes
[1] This is the fetishism Marx (1976, 165) identified where, ‘the products of the human brain (in this instance corporations) appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own’. This personification of the corporation and its transformation into a subject with untrammeled power to decide on the life and the fate of persons and whole communities results in labour assuming a thing-like (dinglick) existence where working persons are nothing more than an object, a commodity, a market factor in the restructuring process. The essence of humanity is negated (Fromm, 1966, 84).
[2] This analysis derives from an Australian Research Council project analyzing the globalization of whitegoods production and the trade union response to this restructuring.
[3] We are planning to develop a similar project in Greenville.
[4] Research at the Chef factory was conducted between 1995 and its closure in 2001. Since then, contact has been maintained with management and workers to assess the impact of the event on their lives. A similar method has been adopted in Orange since 2003. Here I have had to meet workers outside of the factory as the Electrolux management has stated that I am ‘not a friend of Electrolux’. Doubtlessly, they have read my article 2004 article on Chef.
[5] Trevor Carroll, General Manager, Electrolux Australia.
[6] Leon Andrewartha, Electrolux, Director of Australian Manufacturing.
[7] Shop floor worker, Orange
[8] UAW Local 137, online, January/February, 2004.
[9] Online Holland Sentinal, 12 August 2004.
[10] Comments of UAW Local 137 posted on the UAW web site, Solidarity. See January/February and March/April 2004.
[11] UAW Local 137, web site posting, 3 August 2004.
[12] Senate Policy Committee Hearing: ‘Shipping American Jobs Overseas: A Hearing on the Bush Administration’s Claim that Outsourcing is Good for the US Economy’, record of the presentation by David Doolittle, Greenville, Michigan, March 5, 2004.
[13] In this stuggle I straddle the divides. I am a University academic, the International Officer for the West Australian branch of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), and a founder and the Coordinator of The Southern Initiative on Globalisation and Trade Union Rights (SIGTUR), which was established in 1990, brings together democratic unions from Korea, Southeast Asia, Australia, South Asia, Southern Africa and Brazil. SIGTUR is an attempt to create a new labour internationalism in the south that is social movement orientated. My life is therefore bounded by activism, teaching and research, which is not without its challenges and contradictions. I grew into this more organic role through my involvement with the birth of the new democratic unionism in South Africa in the 1970s. I was fortunate to have as my friends and mentors intellectuals who, in varying degrees and forms see their own role in terms of these connections. I refer here to Rick Turner, Eddie Webster, Philip Bonner and Ari Sitas in particular.
[14] Obviously, the recent focus on GSMU is part of an earlier debate on the nature and the possibilities of a social movement unionism (SMU) reinvigorating trade unionism. Peter Waterman, Eddie Webster and myself, have engaged this issue over the past two decades. Recently, Waterman’s ‘SMU adventures’ situate the question of alternatives in ‘the new global justice and solidarity movement’ and the need for ‘a new labour internationalism’ (Waterman 2003a; 2003b; 2003c; 2002a; 2002b; 2002c; 2002d; 2001a; 2001b; 2001c; 2001d). SMU has become the focus of debate over the future of the labour movement in the United States (Hathaway, 2000; Johnston 2001; Moody, 1999; Turner, Katz, Hurd, 2001; Voss and Sherman, 2000), whilst Von Holt (2003) has rekindled interest in South Africa. More recently, Clawson (2003) has argued that we are on the brink of ‘a new upsurge’ in which a social movement orientated unionism would be central. In my view, SMU played a key role in the democratic struggles in Brazil, Korea and South Africa. These historical experiences provide the basis for an optimism that a fightback against corporate restructuring is possible and that hope can be reclaimed.
[15] Centre – Link is the Australian government agency responsible for managing the social welfare system. Unemployment benefits are currently under review, with plans to tighten them. Eligibility for unemployment benefits should be tightened to ensure that the out of work look for work. Dennis has searched for the past eight months to no avail.