Labor needs to fundamentally rethink the very concept of what a union is and how it operates.[1]
Justice and democracy are sacrificed on the altar of a mythical market presented, like the gods of an ancient religion, as a force outside of society instead of a creation of it. They are a political choice dressed up as a market necessity.[2]
The trade union movement is less and less ethically identified… there is no prospect of a more just, amicable society.[3]
Within the rich, diverse history of trade unionism, the identity, role and purpose of workplace organization has often been contested. This question is shaped to a considerable degree by the social vision of trade union leadership, which has the potential to advance the structure, strategy and goals of the organization rather than simply reproducing historical forms. Emphasizing agency highlights that strategic choices are indeed available to trade unions, hence the notion of market necessity, a central tenet of liberal economics, can be challenged through recognizing that markets are social and ideological constructs. They do not derive from natural laws, which are perilous to ignore.[4] Hence every facet of market driven restructuring may be viewed as a political choice that is open to resistance and the construction of alternatives. Free trade, privatization and the corporate dynamism of acquisitions, mergers and closures, which are accompanied by work intensification, flexible working hours and casualization are choices open to contestation. No aspect of the organization of the economy and production is inevitable and irreversible. However, accommodating restructuring and accepting a market vision constricts choice to business unionism, to being an agent of competition, efficiency and productivity change, thereby marginalizing the union role as an instrument of justice.
This article contends that challenging market necessity requires a new union form. An argument for global social movement unionism (GSMU) as an alternative strategic choice is developed. The analysis unfolds as follows. Firstly, drawing on historical transformations in Australia the ways in which market driven politics has transformed union role and identity is briefly considered. The Australian experience vividly illustrates the paper’s central argument, given the historical rupture from its status as a ‘model social democracy’, to that of becoming one of the world’s most radical market societies in the short space of two decades.[5] Secondly, the historical emergence of social movement unionism (SMU) is explored. Thirdly, the possibility of globalizing SMU is considered. Since the recent history of trade unionism demonstrates the limitation of the historical form, exploration of possible alternatives is a critical issue that needs to be engaged if unions are to regain their power and their legitimacy.
UNIONS AS RESTRUCTURING AGENTS
A ‘triple tension’ lies at the heart of union identity.[6] Trade unions are drawn in three directions as they engage market, class and society. In European trade union history this gave rise to a ‘triple polarization of trade union identities’.[7] As associations of workers, unions attempt to regulate the wage-labour relationship and thus cannot ignore the market. As organizations representing the interests of workers, confronting employers’ interests, they are class agencies. Unions are also part of society, coexisting with other institutions and other constellations of interests. Hyman presents market, class and society as a ‘geometry of trade unionism’, connected in an unstable balance in the three points of a triangle. Thus business unionism (market focus); integrative unionism (social focus) and radical unionism (class), never exist in a pure form. Hyman concludes that in practice, ‘actually existing unions have tended to incline towards a contradictory admixture of two of the three ideal types’.[8]
Historically in Europe, as in Australia, the unstable resolution of this ‘triple tension’ was profoundly shaped by social democratic politics. At the turn of the last Century the Australian state ceded significant power to unions resulting in their profound impact on markets, class relations and society. A struggle for egalitarianism was advanced through a method of judicial determination in centralised wage fixing and the conscious protection of industry and jobs.[9] This social reformism was a response to the great wave of strikes of the 1890s. Recognition of the role and the rights of trade unionism and protection of their power to bargain collectively was a central feature of the reforms and the interventions came to reflect the social identity of the new federal state formed in 1901. This was a state that defined itself in terms of a particular relationship to the working class. In 1890, Alfred Deakin, a founding father of the new state, commented,
Instead of the state being regarded any longer as an object of hostility to the labourer, it should now become identified with an interest in his works, and in all workers, extending to them its sympathy and protection, and watching over their welfare and prosperity.[10]
Recognition of worker rights was to usher in ‘the age of the common man’, and ‘the beginning of a new phase of civilization’.[11] The industrial relations system that was to play a central role in making Australia ‘the social lighthouse of the world’ was founded on the Conciliation and Arbitration Act of 1904. The Act required employers to recognize unions registered under this law and empowered these unions to represent the interests of all workers within an industry. Under the Act, unions could force employers into an industrial court even if they were unwilling to negotiate. Courts were empowered to make an award, that is, a legally binding ruling on wages and conditions. Employers eventually came to support the arbitration and award system because the government promised tariff protection, provided they could prove that they had met their responsibility to pay fair and reasonable wages.
Some 70 years after the introduction of the first moderate levels of tariff protection in 1902, the highest tariff levels of any industrialized nation, baring New Zealand, shielded Australian manufacturing.[12] This interventionism was seen to assert the positive social value of egalitarianism. Wage justice through Arbitration became the means, which marked this ‘new phase of civilisation’. A regulated minimum wage structure grounded in the principle of human need and welfare, not profit and productivity was enshrined through the famous Harvester judgment. In this, the state set minimum wages by judicial decree rather than abandoning workers to the turbulent waters of market forces. The notion of the cost of living became the basis for wage movements. The then President of the Arbitration Commission, Justice Higgins was ruthless in his enforcement of these principles. In a 1909 case involving one of the large mining companies, BHP, he argued that if the company could not pay the minimum rate it was preferable that it shut down. He commented, ‘If it is a calamity that this historic mine should close down, it would still be a greater calamity that men should be underfed or degraded’.[13] Hence the industrial relations system came to be viewed as ‘the greatest institutional monument to Australian egalitarianism’.[14] Trade unions were a recognised, integral component of this system and came to play a key role in securing a steady, uninterrupted improvement in wages and conditions. Between 1939 and 1974, workers’ real wages rose by an annual average of 2% and the 40 hour working week was common by the late 1930s.[15]
These material gains, which were the product of trade union recognition, arbitrated wages and industry protection, represented a century long, stable, durable class compromise that was the foundation of Australian social democracy. The compromise has had some degree of cultural impact on class relations in Australia. In certain literature, notions of egalitarianism were presented as a defining feature of Australian society. So for example, Ward in his book, The Australian Legend, advanced the mythical notion of ‘the typical Australian’.
The typical Australian is a practical man, rough and ready in his manners…He believes that Jack is not only as good as his master but at least in principle probably a great deal better. He is a fiercely independent person who hates officiousness and authority…yet he is very hospitable and, above all, will stick by his mates through thick and thin.[16]
The notion that ordinary Australians resent class distinctions was also advanced.[17] Historian Sir Keith Hancock noted that deference was not a feature of communication between classes in Australia and visible signs of class distinction in language, dress and perhaps education were not visible to the extent that they were in the United Kingdom.[18] The power conceded to trade unions doubtlessly contributed to this lack of deference. The legal protections of the arbitration system contributed to a culture of democratic and social rights that gave a degree of independence to workers and in some measure, undermined elitism.
Ironically, this institutional commitment to a social democratic vision of society in which unions played a cardinal role was eroded when Labor came to power in 1983. Under Prime Minister Bob Hawke, ex-president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), the new government negotiated a radical transformation of the union role from an advocate of the social to an agent of restructuring. In terms of Hyman’s conception, unions shifted from a broad sense of identity that embraced a market, class and society role, to a narrow, instrumental, market role in which identity resided primarily in the union’s constructive contribution to corporate restructuring.
As the government deregulated the economy and the financial markets, the ACTU leadership contended that this shift required a new form of unionism (strategic/best practice unionism), which was essential to the success economic liberalization. The Australian unions adopted this new role in 1987 when the leadership accepted the proposals of Australia Reconstructed that grew out of a study mission to Europe.[19] In a pointedly brief discussion of the document at the 1987 ACTU Congress, Laurie Carmichael, General Secretary of the Australian Metal Workers Union (AMWU), spoke passionately on the need for change. ‘Unions are the only force capable of providing for improved production’. The ideas contained in Australia Reconstructed should be ‘taken up on the job’.[20] Carmichael, a leading Communist, was part of the delegation that visited Europe, where they enthused over the Swedish model.
This rupture from the politics of social democracy to market driven politics
has in the short space of two and a half decades led to ‘a remarkably rapid erosion of democratically-determined collective values and institutions’, as state sovereignty has been increasingly surrendered to large global corporations.[21] In this shift, market ideology (competition and individualism) has penetrated every facet of society. Trade unions have assumed an expanded role: unions are now the advocates of market driven politics. They are instruments of ‘best practice’; they are a driver of competition and efficiency. The concept of class interests dissolved before the politics of partnership as did the historical compromise of welfare state, social democratic politics and integrative unionism.
Over the past two decades, the role and purpose of Australian unionism defined itself in these market terms: they became agents of corporate restructuring. The ACTU articulated a positive conception of restructuring – the process created efficient, competitive corporations that were integrated into global economy, seizing the opportunities of global market access. This strategic shift signaled ‘an historic watershed’ heralding a new era of partnership, of ‘cooperative industrial relations’ that would dissolve ‘ingrained distrust’ between employers and unions, improve productivity and ‘minimize traditional conflict’, thereby energizing market driven politics.[22] Unions as agents of class interests dissolved before this new orientation. Change is however, always contradictory and as the promise of the new orientation faded during the 1990s, key unions attempted to reassert their class role. In particular, the mining union fought bitter battles against workplace restructuring in the Hunter Valley and in Queensland.[23]
This embrace of restructuring did not usher in a new era of union significance. Rather, the rapid demise of Australian unionism is a feature of the 1990s, as the Hawke/Keating government opened the door to non-union employment relations for if flexibility is the essence of market efficiency, the labor market needs to be reformed accordingly. Hence the government changed industrial laws to facilitate restructuring. In a speech to the Institute of Company Directors in 1993, Keating stated: ‘It is important now that we accelerate the reform (of industrial relations) so that all the other elements of flexibility in the economy can work in harmony’. Industrial relations change through the 1980s and 1990s is comprehensible when located within the dynamic of workplace restructuring determined by waves of corporate mergers and acquisitions. The evolution of the structural efficiency principle and enterprise bargaining provided the opportunity to maximize flexibility and link wage change to the acceptance of lean production, increasing work intensity and casualization. Legislative change in the 1990s also sought to marginalize the union role in bargaining. Keating’s amendments to the 1988 Industrial Relations Act gave formal recognition to direct bargaining, allowing companies to reach agreement with workers without union involvement. The Labor government’s reforms were further advanced through the Liberal/National government’s 1996 Workplace Relations Act, which introduced individual bargaining and a variety of measures that consolidated managerial prerogative, giving corporations virtually unlimited scope in driving restructuring. The Coalition’s 2004 election victory signals a further evolution of this non-union pathway.
During the period of these changes, union membership in Australia declined steeply. The Australian unions seem to be in free fall with membership down to a mere 23.1 per cent of the workforce in August 2002. This slide needs to be viewed against the backdrop of their relative historical strength, which had remained above 50% for all but 13 years (11 of those years following the Great Depression: 1931-1941) between 1920 and 1980.[24] According to Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) figures, based on union census data, union membership density in the post-war period hit a high of 63% in 1953, and then slowly declined to 49% in 1969-1970 before recovering to average 54% for the remainder of that decade.
Radical deregulation from the mid 1980s ushered in a downward spiral as density declined from 49.5 per cent in 1982 to 46 per cent in 1986 and then to 40.5 per cent in 1990. Membership numbers fell rapidly during this period. The stripping of tariff protection to negligible levels in the 1990s was marked by an accelerating decline with union densities waning from 31.1% in 1996 to 25.7% in August 1999. Total membership fell from 2 194 300 to 1 878 200 over the same period. ABS figures now place membership density at less than a quarter of the national workforce: falling from 24.7 per cent in August 2000 to 23.1 per cent in August 2002.[25] This decline obviously impacts on the capacity of Australian unions to represent workers. Chris Walton, Co-director of the ACTU’s Organising Centre has estimated that falling union membership over recent years had lost unions $156 million in income (ACCIRT 2002).[26] Such financial pressures are likely to impinge upon union staff and resource levels, thereby placing increasing pressure on unions’ organizing capability and service provision.
This crisis of decline has led to the ACTU promoting the AFL/CIO inspired organizing model. Whilst there is obvious potential in this orientation, the failure to focus on restructuring as a fundamental cause of decline is remarkable, perhaps indicating how deeply embedded the ACTU is within ALP market politics, which is indistinguishable from the essentials of Coalition economic policy. This article contends that the choice to oppose restructuring and the market model is critical to the prospects of union revitalization. To be effective, such opposition will need to assume a social movement form that is global in its scope. Moody makes a similar point with regard to unionism in the United States when he notes that ‘the decline of unionism was rooted in a shift from a collectivist, egalitarian ethic to an individualistic one.[27] His book analyses United States labor history, demonstrating how ‘both the practical promise of egalitarianism and the ideological potential of social unionism were cut down in their youth’ in the post World War Two period.[28] To date, labor analysts in Australia have been absorbed in an institutional analysis that is largely confined to a consideration of the legislative changes central to this transition. Whilst such monitoring of change is essential and whilst there is a focus on union decline and the need for renewal, the latter is limited to the American organizing model, with no exploration of SMU alternatives to business unionism. Interestingly, this contrasts markedly with the United States, where labor scholars are articulating a social movement alternative as a pathway to empowerment. The following discussion of SMU considers this literature but is not limited to northern debates. Indeed, history shows how unions embraced a SMU alternative in the south, most notably in South Africa, Brazil and more recently in Korea. Furthermore, a globalized SMU is now evolving in this zone of the global economy.[29]
CHALLENGING RESTRUCTURING: SOCIAL MOVEMENT UNIONISM
Discourses are manifestations of power.[30]
When working class consciousness goes, the workers’ movement loses its overall meaning and the broader issues become blurred and unclear.[31]
Discourse is power and the transformation of union discourse identified with regard to the historical transition of Australian labor reflects the power of neo-liberalism over organized labor, epitomized in the way unions became imprisoned within liberal economic values. Discourse is a moment of communication and persuasion regarding lines of action and belief. The discursive moment is a ‘form of power, it is a mode of formation of ideas and beliefs.[32] The failure of Australian unions to develop an alternative discourse on restructuring is an indication of the success of the neo-liberal political project in this regard. Deeply held, historically grounded beliefs and values of organized labor are mocked as reflecting those of a bygone era – they are barriers to progress, undermining the economy.
In absorbing market beliefs and values and in becoming market agents, this business unionism orientation signaled a profound political transformation that undermines class consciousness.[33] Such an orientation has reinforced the notion of market necessity and in so doing has asserted that the foundational values of trade unionism are now market values: individualism, competition, efficiency, profit, shareholder enrichment. The model’s social vision is of a society of individual opportunity and upward mobility. This is a politics that stimulates individual aspirations, assuaging the desire to climb the social ladder. Such a value shift is radical, corroding the essential driving power of unionism – the culture of solidarity. Market discourse has penetrated the thinking of union leaders so deeply that now, as their very existence is threatened by new highly repressive labor laws, they fail to articulate the crisis in a language of solidarity and justice. Instead, concepts of the market that appeal to individualism are presented as a survival pathway. State Secretary of the powerful construction union, Kevin Reynolds argued, ‘In order for unions to survive, unions will have to expand their services to offer products such as travel insurance and ambulance and funeral cover’. Another leader contended that the move to allow employers to only offer individual contracts to their workers, thereby excluding unions, would diminish collective bargaining in Australia, ‘which was the unions core business. The unions must now look at setting up businesses to negotiate individual contracts for members in a bid to remain relevant’. [34]
Touraine has highlighted the implications of this value shift with regard to the historical transformation of European unions from their social movement roots to a marked decline in this orientation.[35] He noted, ‘Beliefs and convictions have been lost, with the result that militant workers lack certainty and sometimes even feel that they no longer know what their action means….it is impossible not to notice how much weaker ideas of a desirable future have become’. A worker explained, ‘We are at the end of our tether because there is no prospect of a more just, amicable society’.[36] Others observed that ‘the trade union movement is less and less ethically identified…trade unionism must rediscover these values in order to give meaning to its activities’.[37]
In the context of this decline, Harvey asked, ‘…in a time when the class struggle has receded…, is this not also a time when the painting of fantastic pictures of a future society has some role to play?’[38] Such a shift in discourse lies at the heart of the union transformation question. The issue of what kind of society unions are fighting for captures the fact that imaginative strategy embraces both the vision (what is being fought for) and the present predicament (what is being fought against). Both dimensions are shaped by ethics, by ‘foundational beliefs’ that could make ‘political action meaningful, creative, and possible’.[39] Justice is the core, foundational value that inspires a social movement alternative to business unionism. Market necessity is undermined through highlighting how market driven politics functions as a mechanism of injustice. Pessimism and inaction that derives from the notion of the iron clad nature of markets is transformed into anger at the injustice and inequity of market restructuring. Shifting the discourse from efficiency and competitiveness to exploitation and justice, reignites the need for solidarity, the vision of a desirable future and the optimism of social agency. Such a change contradicts the market’s assertion that the only desirable agency is being a consumer. Here all that is left to workers is keeping the great wheel of the economy turning through increasing their personal indebtedness, their appetite for the latest commodity and their insurance for a good burial. Indebted credit card workers are politically cautious, passive before market politics.
Business unionism and its embrace of market ideology represents but one union orientation. Turning to the experience of Brazil and South Africa a historically grounded alternative – SMU that is driven by a different set of core values is analysed. The power of an historical approach to the question of SMU is that it can be demonstrated that such an alternative actually existed for the most oft repeated counter-argument claims that SMU is simply an imagined reality and that unions by their very nature are limited to collective bargaining. A justice discourse inspired the fight against racial oppression in South Africa and military dictatorship and extreme inequality in Brazil, giving rise to SMU as a key facet of the resistance. In both nations the strategic orientation was articulated by union leadership: these were not struggles for limited, sectional gains in wages and conditions, important though these might be. This was a much wider resistance for human emancipation, recognition, and dignity. To secure such a vision, the injustice of these regimes had to be fought against. The social movement pathway generated by this strategic value choice provides a model for unions world-wide, now consumed by restructuring. If global restructuring is to be resisted, a global social movement for emancipation, equality, meaning, security and against the insecurity, inequity and restructuring’s destruction of meaning will need to be imagined and constructed through the power of movement. The first signs of such a movement are evident in the rise of the World Social Forum process and the global social justice movement although much depends on whether or not this promising initiative can transform from a discussion forum to a global resistance movement against corporate power. Furthermore, it is still far from certain that unions will fully commit to this process.[40]
Before proceeding with the analysis of the emergence of SMU, the term social movement needs to be defined. The theoretical understanding informing this paper derives from Castells.[41] Social movements arise out of a commitment to mobilize mass action around specific issues. In terms of this commitment, social movements have the following characteristics: they are issue based; whilst they comprise a working class majority, they are cross class movements that mobilize a wider spectrum of society into a new alliance; they are upsurges of people that challenge specific issues and the roles imposed on them by social institutions. Movements are by their very nature participatory and democratic in character.
As a contribution to furthering the debate on possible social movement responses to restructuring that challenge instead of accommodating to the market logic of the imposed change, analysis of SMU is grounded in the labor history of South Africa and in Brazil during the 1970s and 1980s. This endeavor is part of the renaissance of scholarly interest in SMU in recent years. Peter Waterman has continued to address the issue. His ‘SMU adventures’ situates the question of alternatives in ‘the new global justice and solidarity movement’ and the need for ‘a new labor internationalism’.[42] SMU has become the focus of debate over the future of the labor movement in the United States,[43] whilst von Holt has rekindled interest in South Africa.[44] Most recently, Clawson’s thesis has further stimulated interest and debate.[45] Silver’s argument about how the relocation of capital and the commodification of labor have provoked counter-movements is also relevant to this phase of labor studies renewal.[46]
This resurgent scholarly debate is a response to the crisis of business unionism. South African and Brazilian experience provides fertile ground for reflection on the alternative needed to fight restructuring because the state regimes in both countries, backed by corporate interests, appeared all powerful. The possibility of challenging the state seemed absurd just as today the notion that corporate restructuring can be halted appears as a fantasy like desire. From the outset it was clear that collective bargaining in and of itself could never challenge political oppression. A sense of powerlessness prevailed – there appeared to be no alternative and it seemed as if little could be done to alter the denial of rights and the predicament of workers. Black workers were unorganized in South Africa where the only unions were racially defined, bureaucratic organizations, whilst ‘unions’ in Brazil were controlled by the military.
Powerlessness was the focus of the trade union debate in South Africa in the early 1970s. Analysis of the fifty year history of non-racial unions revealed phases of expansion followed by decline.[47] Labour historians concluded that there were two fundamental flaws: mass mobilization was not consolidated into workplace organization; structures of leadership accountability were weak, resulting in instances of corruption that divided the new unions at the very moment that they had grown in membership numbers and in potential industrial power. Hence there were cycles of growth followed by decline. This led to the advancement of a concept of internal democracy centered on worker control that was consciously anti-bureaucratic in its thrust.[48] Workers would form a majority on all structures and elected, paid officials would have no vote. An open organizational culture of accountability and mandates was stressed. This created a high level of participation which gave workers a sense of empowerment that stimulated the rapid growth of strong workplace based unionism through the 1970s and 1980s.[49] Above all, this radical internal democracy generated a depth of leadership forged in the cut and thrust of building solidarity and engaging in collective action. There was a similar trajectory in Brazil were the clandestine work of activists developed a workplace militancy that undermined the military controls established in the 1960s. A 1978 metal sector strike wave overcame ‘a sense of powerlessness’ that had prevailed.[50]
A social movement orientation distinguished the emergence of the new democratic unionism. Seidman in considering the extension of factory based demands into the political arena concludes, ‘That question – what led unions and communities to interpret their interests in parallel terms and to participate in joint campaigns against both employers and the state – is perhaps the key to understanding the meaning of social-movement unionism’.[51] Referring to Castells, City and the Grass Roots, she notes that this workplace/community interface ‘is hardly a straightforward process’.[52] Labor movements generally avoid direct involvement in community campaigns focusing instead on the workplace, whilst urban social movements tend to avoid a class based rhetoric that might alienate the middle class.
Seidman stresses the significance of agency in resolving this divide.[53] She argues that SMU emerged in South Africa and Brazil during this period of democratic union growth because of the activist leadership that prevailed. Activists formulated ideologies that introduced ‘concepts and rhetoric that linked struggles in different arenas’ in a way that ‘reflected individual’s lived experiences’. In both countries, state policies impoverished workers and communities through adopting an industrialization strategy that combined low wages with urban spoliation. ‘Class struggles in the ‘sphere of production’ spilled over into the ‘sphere of reproduction’ as workers sought to raise the historically defined level of the cost of reproduction of labour’[54].
Brazil of the 1970s and 1980s was characterized by intense community mobilization around domestic needs. These included campaigns to fight cost of living increases, improve public transport, regularize title deeds and provide health clinics and day-care facilities for working mothers. Catholic activists from the Christian base communities sought to strengthen the links between the emerging urban social movements mobilizing on these issues and the labor movement. These Christian communities encouraged their members to participate in the new unions, arguing that these were one of the few forces available to empower community struggles. The new unionists encouraged their members to participate in community campaigns because they considered that these issues impacted on the erosion of real wages and the declining conditions of working class communities. Such a relationship was mutually reinforcing. The growth of the new unions after 1978 stimulated community activism, whilst in turn the new urban social movements strengthened the labor movement through supporting striking workers.
Social movements became arenas for participation and the development of a new discourse. The participatory style generated discussion and debate, creating a new social and political awareness. In Brazil, social movements generated a consciousness of ‘savage’ capitalism by exposing visible processes of peripheralisation.[55] Activists from unions and the community developed a class analysis of this process through focusing on the dynamics of spatial segregation that forced workers from the urban centers to the periphery where housing and urban services were inadequate. This reflected a ‘logic of disorder’ where public investment was directed to wealthy areas whilst segregated poor areas were starved.[56] This exclusion meant that the links between exploitation in the workplace and eroded living conditions at home became apparent. Group discussions inside the movement challenged the class structure through redefining citizenship as inclusive of economic, civic, political and social rights in a way that challenged the confinement of politics to the privileged few.
A similar process was at work in South Africa during the 1980s with the emergence of community organizations in the black townships mobilizing on issues such as bus fares, rents, and municipal governance. Civic associations, student groups and street committees organized rent and consumer boycotts and protest marches. Between 1984 and 1987 the new unions became increasingly prominent in the anti-apartheid struggle, organizing stay away protest strikes and engaging with community movements in a range of campaigns. Township based Shop Steward Councils became a forum for debate and the forging of linkages between workplace and community.[57]
Whilst SMU emerged strongly in the south during this period, unlike Australia, tendencies towards the revival of a social movement approach are present in the United States. Here the most extensive research has been on the reawakening of the American labor movement under new leadership and new strategic directions.[58] Some unions, such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Hotel and Restaurant Employees (HERE) and the United, Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), have begun to organize new members, using a variety of confrontational tactics, including street demonstrations, direct action, worker mobilization and sophisticated corporate campaigns. At the heart of this revitalisation strategy is an attempt to shift labor away from historical business unionism model to a SMU approach. In the growing literature it is argued that two generations of activists are driving these changes: veterans of the social movements of the 1960s, now in leadership positions at the American Federation of Labour – Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO) and in many member unions, a new generation of campus and workplace activists’.[59] At the core of Turner and Hurd’s argument on union revitalisation in the United States, then, is the presence of leaders with activist experience outside of the labor movement. As Voss and Sherman argue in their fascinating case studies of union renewal in Southern California, ‘Activists with experience outside the labour movement brought broad visions, knowledge of alternative organisational models, and practices in disruptive tactics to the locals that became fully revitalised.’[60] A valuable insight into into the forces shaping social movements is the concept of a ‘political generation’, which is used very effectively in these studies.[61] However, SMU is defined rather vaguely and narrowly as a type of unionism that mobilises the rank and file for specific actions and gains’.[62] Importantly, the authors distinguish between ‘a social movement’ and ‘social movement unionism’, arguing that ‘labor activists in the United States promote social movement unionism in the absence of a broader social movement’.[63]
Paul Johnston raises the important issue of citizenship when he argues, ‘the resurgence of SMU ‘in the United States as an attempt to ‘seek to defend, exercise, and extend the boundaries of citizenship’.[64] But Johnston qualifies his assessment by suggesting that ‘the labor movement achieves its potential only when it aligns itself and even merges with other democratic social movements or when it enables its participants to express themselves and act not only as workers but as members of a community with multiple interests and identities’.[65] This ‘citizenship frame’, he suggests, ‘resonates with the social movement unionism of countries such as Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, and the Philippines, where the most dynamic and powerful labour movements today take on issues of democracy, human rights and social justice not only in the context of labor relations but also in the larger society’.[66] This revitalization debate in the United States needs to link more explicitly with the issues of global restructuring by posing the question revitalizing union power for what – a narrow collective bargaining, wages and conditions focus, or a challenge to the whole direction of global restructuring? Clawson’ book embraces this issue more directly when he argues that we may well be on the brink of ‘a new upsurge’ of SMU that will challenge restructuring.[67] The book has created widespread interest because it appears to fulfill a deep felt need – he presents a clear case for a new form of unionism. In an age of profound pessimism regarding the possibility of challenging restructuring, Clawson’s unabashed optimism is enticing. Movements are built and driven by optimism. Pessimism erodes the will to challenge and to fight against the injustice of restructuring. Even though corporate forces are ‘winning at almost every level’ and labour movements are ‘struggling to survive’, ‘society can reverse directions as fast as the stock market’.[68] ‘In many places workers are using innovative strategies and new alliances to win victories that could serve as models for future action’.[69] There is a possibility that ‘a new round of social movements’ will ‘explode on the scene and transform political realities…such a political-social-economic reversal is at least possible – and I believe likely’. ‘A new upsurge, I argue, will fuse the unions of today with the issues and the styles of the social movements of the 1960s, producing new forms and taking up new issues’.[70]
Clawson’s book reinforces the key point of the brief expose of SMU in the south, namely, the new orientation is stimulated by and grounded in a radical participatory democracy within the unions and a linkage to movements outside the workplace. The book provides fine examples of the styles of unionism that empower in this way and those that leave workers feeling demoralized. A simple but crucial point is made,
‘the union is not the organizers or staff…the union is you…the union is going to be whatever we make it when we organize it’.[71] This democratic, participatory and action orientated unionism, contrasts with business unionism, whose goal ‘is to increase the number of dues-paying members, not to empower workers….the organizing staff is ‘the union’ in their own minds and in the minds of workers.[72] This is a far cry from the proposal of the Australian union leader Kevin Reynolds who sees the future of unions under attack as developing the right ‘product to sell’. Clawson warns ‘Unless there is a new period of mass social movements, labor is likely to continue to lose ground’.[73] He concludes, ‘But if unions are able to combine the new style and tactics with the mass mobilization characteristic of unions at their best, this would create an awesome political force whose potential is only now being explored’.[74] He argues that current struggles are ‘the prehistory of the upsurge’ of mass civil disobedience against the injustice of neo-liberal restructuring.[75]
There is a need for a SMU that sets restructuring at the top of the agenda. In this age of market politics and corporate dominance, the leadership choice to fight restructuring and to imagine an alternative mode of organizing the economy and society is at once an ethical choice for this is not a condition that only affects employed workers who might be union members. Restructuring affects youth in search of their first job, who discover the nature of the casualized job market; it affects the families of the retrenched and the families whose wellbeing is scorched by corporate cost cutting; it affects farmers and small businesses whose life work is shattered cheap imports. Despite their decline, unions remain the most significant of civil society actors. They therefore have the capacity to assume a new historical role, that of building a new social movement against corporate restructuring and of visioning, debating and formulating a democratic and humane alternative to restructuring. Unions are presented with this unique opportunity of articulating a new set of values, reasserting a set of fundamental beliefs, forging an ethical center to their endeavors, providing hope that there is indeed the prospect of a more just, amicable society that contrasts markedly from the cut throat nature of market society.
A key aspect of a radical democratic transformation of unionism is that the democratic culture and process of the organization has the potential to make unions the center of a new discourse, a new language of globalization, a language of place that identifies exploitation and injustice and exposes the reification of the language of market efficiency. Unions become a space, a forum for the new discourse, for value based vision of an alternative social, economic and political order. To secure this space unions have not only to create internal democracy, they have to become independent of social democratic parties that promote market politics, despite their union affiliation.
The capacity to sustain democratic organization, internal debate, a social movement orientation and independent political space to invent a new response to market politics requires a more permanent structural transformation in the nature of unionism. As I argued in my 1989 debate with Peter Waterman, the key problematic in the concept of SMU is the degree to which moments of broad based resistance can become constituted into a more durable organizational form, representing a new civil society movement grounded both in the workplace and in the community. I argued that such a development was critical to the empowerment of civil society against the state and against the destructive agendas of global corporations.[76]
STRUCTURAL TRANSFORMATION – RENDERING THE TEMPORARY PERMANENT
Seidman was aware of the possible ephemeral nature of SMU when she concluded her study by observing, ‘Over time, as states and employers recognize trade unions and engage in collective bargaining, such labor movements may become institutionalized, part of the regular pattern of labor relations in their countries; social-movement unionism may well be a transitory phase, as relatively privileged workers create channels through which to articulate interests’.[77] In the case of South Africa and Brazil SMU was indeed a transitory phase. Following political change in both countries, unions assumed the historical collective bargaining form revealing that these unions momentarily engaged social movements in civil society to strengthen the political struggle against the state without a durable change in the method of organizing and the structure of unionism.
This is a cardinal issue when considering union response to restructuring. Perhaps this is an opportunity to build on these fleeting historical moments of SMU, taking up the challenge of a more permanent change in the fundamental character of orientation of unionism. In this regard, there is an historical experience that can be drawn on. The 1950s were a tumultuous period in South African history. When the Afrikaner nationalist government came to power in 1948 and advanced its apartheid vision, the African National Congress (ANC) developed a program of mass action based on Gandhi’s concept of passive resistance. As these battle lines were drawn, the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) was formed in 1954. This was a non-racial federation with strong links with the ANC and the banned South African Communist Party (SACP). From its very inception the new federation conceived of its role as embracing three arenas: the workplace, the community and the political struggle against the state. Between 1954 and mass arrests of 1963, SACTU came to play a key role in the resistance, mobilizing workers in the factories, mines and in the township communities, working to heighten consciousness and build commitment to the campaigns against the state that took the form of national strikes (stay away) and defiance through burning the hated passbooks, which controlled the movement of labor.[78] In committing to these campaigns, SACTU broadened the horizon of trade unionism, engaging both at workplace and community levels in linking classic wages and conditions struggles (the Pound a day campaigns) to political strikes, protest marches and consumer boycotts. The leadership viewed this linkage as essential to the creation of a social movement dedicated to the anti-apartheid struggle.
One might conclude from SACTU’s brief history that this engagement is no different to the later emergence of a similar orientation in South Africa and in Brazil, that was triggered by the authoritarian state but failed to outlive the demise of these political conditions. This is where the SACTU project is pertinent for the core problematic of this paper. The oral histories and documentary evidence revealed that SACTU’s leadership were convinced that SMU (what they termed political unionism) empowered the political struggle against the state and in so doing transformed the very nature of trade unionism from an instrument limited to wages and conditions bargaining in the workplace, to a new space for workers to become the architects of a future society, where they could discuss, debate and formulate action at work, in the community, and with regard to the state itself. Through struggle, SMU was creating the institutions of a new society which questioned the conventional relationship between the economy (production) and politics. This was an era where the political spirit of the times transcended market logic; this was the age of the Freedom Charter, which asserted,
The national wealth of our country, the heritage of all South Africans, shall be restored to the people;
The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole;
All other industry and trade shall be controlled to assist the well-being of the people as a whole.[79]
In short, this was a moment in history where the vision of a just society was clear and strong, creating the beginnings of a profound cultural transformation. The oral histories revealed that individuals were prepared for torture and a lifetime in jail to build such a movement. Personal suffering could be endured in the knowledge that this just struggle might transform the lives of ordinary working men and women in the mines, factories and farms. This is the context in which the SACTU leadership conceptualized a SMU as a permanent new form of unionism, essential not only to the ANC’s anti-apartheid struggle, but also crucial to the longer term fight against market rule.
A particular conception of Factory Committees became the lynchpin of this new orientation. Billy Nair, a leading union organizer explained, ‘We had to politicize workers. A means to establish a link between political struggle and the struggle for higher wages had to be found’.[80] Factory Committees were the instrument to widen the horizon of workplace struggles so that workers would never view collective bargaining and the fight for improved wages and conditions as the sole end of unionism but rather as a key facet of a much wider struggle that confronted the state and politics as structures that sustained these conditions. These committees were quite distinct from historical conceptions that tended towards the extremes of either engaging exclusively with wages and conditions, or becoming merely the conduit or transmission belt of a political party in the workplace. Through its commitment to worker education, SACTU strove to develop a social consciousness in the workplace that understood the dynamics of the relationship between the economic and political spheres. According to Nair, the fundamental premise of this work was the promotion of a distinctive social consciousness, one that was aware that ‘the spheres of factory, township and state are inseparably linked. There can never be a time span between organizing, or the workers reaching a particular stage of consciousness, and thereafter taking up political issues. There must be a constant interaction between spheres’.[81]
This organizing work throughout the 1950s strengthened the resistance campaigns immeasurably and participation in a series of nation-wide political strikes, street demonstrations, acts of defiance and consumer boycotts generated a social movement that grew in power with every action. This was the crucible for the genesis of SMU in South Africa. Flowing out of this historical analysis, I have argued that a definition of roles whereby trade unions engage only in collective bargaining, allocating wider issues to a political party, inevitably results in unions being structured by state industrial relations systems.[82] Given the power of these systems, it is false to argue that SMU had emerged as a new union form when collective bargaining unionism engages with civil society momentarily on a specific issue, as was the case, for example, in the 1998 Maritime dispute in Australia. SMU can only emerge when there is ‘a fundamental change in trade union organization in terms of factory structures, ideological input, and the nature of collective action’. Lambert contended that ‘SMU could be said to exist when a trade union leadership consciously, by way of strategic choice, breaks the boundaries of collective bargaining unionism to establish structured relationships with social movements for the purpose of engaging in mass action’. Central to this conception is a model of SMU that extends the boundaries of engagement with civil society movements, without diluting or neglecting collective bargaining processes. The key issue is linkage of struggles, not the wholesale abandonment of hard fought gains in the workplace that can only serve to dilute the power of movement which derives from leverage gained within strategic economic sites, reinforced by civil society mobilizations.
Von Holdt makes a similar point when he argues that one of the weaknesses of SMU analysis is to assume that its distinctiveness ‘lay in its political and community alliances’ thereby neglecting ‘to investigate whether it might also demonstrate distinctive workplace practices’. In relation to South Africa, this analysis had ‘placed the building of alliances with other social movements and community organizations at the centre of the concept’ and had tended to regard this as ‘an external alliance between autonomous organizations and movements and therefore did not investigate the impact of alliance politics on the union movement itself’.[83] In his careful analysis of a single workplace, Highveld Steel in South Africa, von Holdt demonstrates the complexity of this interface – how movements interpenetrate through complex and dynamic networks.[84]
These networks are consolidated through the formation of new structures in the workplace, such as SACTU’s factory committees, that open space for a new discourse and successfully construct the linkages between workplace and civil society. In this new era of global restructuring, this conception of SMU as an enduring transformation of unionism needs to be extended beyond the national context.
GLOBAL SOCIAL MOVEMENT UNIONISM
With the exception of Moody and Hathaway, the absence of a global dimension to SMU is the most striking omission in the revitalisation problematic in the United States.[85] As Katz notes in his conclusion to the Rekindling the Movement study ‘Ultimately, the labor movement will have to find a way to extend revitalisation sphere linkages into the international arena. … The problem now confronting labour movements all over the globe is that they confront the need for cross-national unionism’.[86] The issue is not simply one of encouraging SMU in new national settings but rather one of confronting the serious problem that national unions face: restructuring wrought by global corporations cannot be effectively challenged at a national level. Unions need to create and network SMU across national boundaries as they respond to the geography of corporations in a new way. This networking of SMU within global corporations is what constitutes a GSMU.[87]
Recently, there has been much debate within certain Australian unions and within SIGTUR on the question of building a GSMU along these lines. In essence, the proposal is to promote a SMU at local level that will reflect an enduring transformation of collective bargaining unionism. As has been argued, restructuring impacts on the entire community, hence a wider civil society movement is essential to reconfiguring power relations with corporations. The local organizing effort to construct a SMU will move together with an equally determined effort to globalize this new form through networking within the corporation. The purpose of such a GSMU will be to raise consciousness on the corporation’s global strategy; build a sense of global solidarity; establish a modified world company council; plan global action that explores the corporation’s points of vulnerability.[88]
The volatility of financial and capital markets means that image is all important. Therefore, GSMU will form capital committees to target the shareholder meetings corporations and pressure large institutional investors that manage the pension funds of workers. Corporations and governments are also trade dependent in the new globalised economy. Manufacturers are locked into just in time production scheduling and depend on the swift and reliable movement of their commodities. GSMU will target these vulnerabilities. The International Transport Federation (ITF) could play a significant role in this new campaign oriented counter to global restructuring. Global resistance to restructuring is possible. What is required is the political will to generate a GSMU.
AGENCY & CHOICE
To conclude, this article has attempted to identify the choices union leadership face when confronted with global restructuring. The choice to become an agent of restructuring spells the death knoll of unionism – the culture of solidarity – eroding the fundamental beliefs and values that generate a collective response to the change. The alternative is to empower workers through the creation of democratic workplace organization that is social movement in orientation, mobilizing civil society at a local and global level. This is an ethical choice, a choice to fight with and for all citizens who have experienced the destructive force of restructuring in their lives and in their families.
[1] Clawson, The Next Upsurge, 48.
[2] Freeman, ‘Why not eat children?’, 14.
[3] Touraine, The Workers’ Movement, 115, 118.
[4] Huberman, Man’s Worldly Goods, 204.
[5] Pusey, Economic Rationalism in Canberra, 1.
[6] Hyman, Understanding European Trade Unionism, 3.
[7] Ibid. 4.
[8] Ibid. 4.
[9] Paul Kelly , The End of Certainty: The story of the 1980s (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1992), 2.
[10] Pusey, Economic Rationalism, 1.
[11] The first quote is from Russel Ward, The Australian Legend (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1958). The second is from a speech by Deakin when he introduced the Arbitration bill in 1903 as Prime Minister. Quoted in Kelly, The End of Uncertainty, 7.
[12] Ross Garnaut, Australian Protectionism, (Sydney:Allen and Unwin, 1987), 6.
[13] John Rickard , H B Higgins: A Rebel Judge (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1984),173-175.
[14] Kelly, The End of Certainty, 9.
[15] Gruen, F.H., “How Bad is Australia’s Economic Performance and Why?” Discussion Paper No.127. Center for Economic Policy Research. Australian National University, (1985), 4.
[16] Ward, The Australian Legend, p16
[17] See the work of influential war historian, Charles Bean, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918, Vol.1 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1937). Passage quoted in Janeen Baxter, Micheal Emmison, John Western, Class Analysis and Contemporary Australia (Melbourne: MacMillan, 1991), 15..
[18] Baxter et.al., Class Analysis, 15.
[19] Australia Reconstructed: A Report by the Mission Members to the ACTU and the TDC to Western Europe (Canberra, Government Publishing Service, 1987).
[20] Edward Davis, ibid., 123.
[21] Leys, Market Driven Politics, 4.
[22] Ogden, International Best Practice, 11.
[23] The second half of the 1990s was marked by a general retreat from strategic unionism by a number of key unions as they came to terms with the fact that the promise of a new era of partnership was not going to materialize. However, no union has fully broken with the market discourse on restructuring, perhaps reflecting the dominance of the Australian Labor Party, which still argues that the ‘reforms’ were Labor’s great contribution to securing Australia’s future in the global economy. This paper argues that SMU asserts a more independent political role for unions as social movements.
[24] Svensen, Trade Union Innovation. See also, Peetz, Unions in a Contrary World.
[25] The ACTU (2002) noted, “If the decline in union density continues at the same pace as the period 1997-2000, union membership will decline by just over 100,000 to 22.9%. A figure of greater than 22.9% would indicate a slowing of the rate of union decline”.
[26] ACTU web site.
[27] Moody, An Injury to All, xvi.
[28] Ibid., xvi.
[29] South is used here as a political descriptor and not in a geographic sense. This refers to a nation’s position and historical evolution in the global economy (international division of labor) and the various forms of authoritarian statism that emerged. A globalised SMU has emerged in the form of SIGTUR (The Southern Initiative on Globalization and Trade Union Rights). See Lambert, Webster, ‘Global Civil Society and the New Labor Internationalism: A View from the South’, in Taylor, Creating a Better World.
[30] Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, 78.
[31] Touraine, The Workers’ Movement, 112.
[32] Harvey, ibid., 83.
[33] Moody, An Injury to All, explores a similar transformation in the United States.
[34] The West Australian, June 4, 2005, p7.
[35] Touraine, The Workers’ Movement, 112.
[36] Ibid., 115.
[37] Ibid., 118.
[38] Harvey, Spaces of Hope, 49.
[39] Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, 2.
[40] Waterman, ‘The New International Social Unionism’; ‘An Emancipatory Pole’; ‘The Still Unconsummated Marriage’.
[41] Castells, The Urban Question; City Class and Power; Grass Roots and the City.
[42] Waterman, The Third World Social Forum; The New International Social Unionism; The Still Unconsumed Marriage; Globalisation, Social Movements & the New Internationalisms.
[43] Hathaway, ‘Allies Across the Border’; Johnson, ‘Organize for What?’; Moody, Workers in a Lean World; Turner, Katz, Hurd, Rekindling the Movement; Voss, Sherman, ‘Breaking the Iron Law of Oligarchy’.
[44] Von Holt, ‘Social Movement Unionism’; Transition from below.
[45] Clawson, The Next Upsurge.
[46] Silver, Forces of Labor.
[47] The South African Labour Bulletin was established by a group of Marxist intellectuals in 1974 to promote such reflection. A review of South African labor history was at the heart of this project. (bulletin refs)
[48] See booklets of the institute of industrial education
[49] Maree, The Independent Trade Unions; Friedman, Building Tomorrow Today; Baskin, Striking Back. The South African Labour Bulletin provides a rich texture of the development of the movement during this period.
[50] Seidman, Manufacturing Militancy, 154.
[51] Ibid., 199.
[52] Ibid., 199.
[53] This is also a significant conclusion of Voss and Sherman’s analysis of SMU in the United States. See ‘Breaking the Iron Law of Oligarchy’.
[54] Seidman, Manufacturing Consent, 203.
[55] Ibid., 215.
[56] Ibid., 217.
[57] Baskin, Striking Back, 87.
[58] Voss and Sherman, ‘Breaking the Iron Law..’; Turner, Katz, Hurd, Rekindling the Movement.
[59] Turner and Hurd, Rekindling the Movement, 10.
[60] Voss and Sherman, ‘Breaking the Iron Law…’ , 333.
[61] Turner, Hurd, Rekindling the Movement, 23. The concept of political generation defines an age cohort that is shaped by the experiences of its formative years (ages 20-30) and ready to rely on that learning when it becomes the `ruling generation’ (circa ages 40-65).
[62] Ibid.
[63] Ibid.
[64] Johnson, ‘Organise for what’, 35.
[65] Ibid., 36.
[66] Ibid., 37.
[67] Clawson, The Next Upsurge. For a symposium on the book, see Labor History, Vol. 45, No.3 p333.
[68] Ibid., ix.
[69] Ibid., x.
[70] Ibid., x.
[71] Ibid., 4.
[72] Ibid., 10.
[73] Ibid., 20.
[74] Ibid., 23.
[75] Ibid., 26.
[76] Lambert, ‘Social Movement Unionism: the Urgent Task of Definition’.
[77] Seidman, Manufacturing Consent, 274.
[78] Lambert, Political Unionism in South Africa, for a historical analysis of these developments. The Phd thesis is based on oral histories of the SACTU leadership and workers.
[79] The Freedom Charter, adopted at the Congress of the People at Kliptown, Johannesburg, on June 25 and 26, 1955.
[80] Interview with Billy Nair, 11 April 1984.
[81] Ibib
[82] Lambert, ‘Social Movement Unionism: the Urgent Task’
[83] Von Holt, ‘Social Movement Unionism’.
[84] Von Holt, Transition from Below.
[85] Moody, Workers in a Lean World; Hathaway, ‘Allies Across the Boarder’
[86] Katz, Rekindling the Labor Movement, 348.
[87] Moody, Workers in a Lean World, was the first to propose the concept of a GSMU. However, his analysis failed to spell out the exact form of such an initiative, or how it might arise in practice.
[88] Levinson, International Trade Unionism, 123, for a discussion on the initiative of World Company Councils. Even though these councils are part of the policy of the International Metal Workers Federation, most have never met because they are too large and too costly. The Australian Manufacturing Workers Union is proposing a small, lean council that is action oriented.
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