LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Spring 2007

by Hilmar Schneider

Sir,

The organisation of production in western economies has faced fundamental change for the last 40 years, with fundamental consequences for labour relations. This process is sweeping away the trades unions’ traditional source of power – the mass strike. The present decline in union membership is the result of changing circumstances rather than some supposed new credo of intellectual elites. So it makes no sense for John Monks to call for a new “evangelism” to restore the glorious age of unions.

After the industrial revolution, the evolution of mass production created huge companies. Based on the ideas of Frederick Winslow Taylor, production processes became increasingly fragmented, with working practices controlled by strict procedures and rigid hierarchies. This was the era of greatest antagonism between labour and capital.

The immense productivity gains of mass production were a source of great wealth, and it was an historic achievement of the union movement to ensure that workers got a share of the rewards. Mass strikes became a powerful tool for pursuing the homogeneous interests of the labour force.

This world no longer exists, however – and if it ever returned, few people would be happy with it. The success of mass production seemed to bear the seeds of its own destruction, as mankind may like the idea of equality but rejects uniformity. Greater personal wealth led to increased individualism and consumer preferences, setting a “natural” limit on mass markets. This point must have been reached somewhere in the 1960s and its effects have over the past 40 years spread into almost every workplace in the West.

Today, tailor-made solutions for individual clients are replacing “Taylorism” and homogenised mass production. Strict controls over an entire workforce turned out to be sub-optimal compared to the formation of flexible, self-organised teams which could work towards agreed targets. So companies have turned themselves into a collection of profit centres. Workers in companies where profits are shared behave more like entrepreneurs, and where corporate hierarchies have become blurred as more employees share responsibilities that were formerly the preserve of supervisors. Traditional antagonisms between labour and capital are about to vanish; some people call it an organisational revolution.

Under such circumstances, the traditional role of unions is doomed. How can they organise a strike if that means calling upon workers to hurt their own self-interest? Without the ability to strike, unions will lose their bargaining power.

Does this mean that unions will disappear and workers will again become paupers? Empirical evidence would suggest not. There has been exponential growth in the variety of skills that modern production methods require, generating bargaining power for specialised workers. So, rather than looking to merge to survive, unions might in future be better off representing small, occupation-related interest groups. This certainly seems to be the lesson of recent developments in Germany, where more and more occupational groups are separating from the world’s largest trade union, ver.di, as the giant service sector Vereinte Dienstleistungsgewerkschaft is called.

So perhaps the future for unions lies in the organisation of training rather than the organisation of strikes. As long as unions are able to prove their worth to workers, they will survive. And if they are no longer useful − well, who will care if they cease to exist?