Now, let’s turn to some of the critical arguments running against solidarity bargaining in general, and the specific version of it that I have outlined in this work. The main objections, that I can conceive, are as follows; it places far too much reliance on the technocratic minimum wage setting processes (in the case of Australia, this is the annual wage review), if the movement is fighting for every worker why would any worker join a union, even if it does work we cannot assume the capitalist system is capable of providing every worker (even in one relatively small and privileged country) with a living wage, it only deals with wages, it places too much trust and/or skilled work on rank-and-file unionists for it to stand any chance, and finally the strategy itself could be disrupted by political and economic elites.
Reinforcing the authority of the state and its minimum wage setting processes
The first objection is perhaps the most apparent – that the solidarity bargaining strategy could reinforce authority of the state by aggrandizing minimum wage setting processes. In the Australian case this would be a small handful of Fair Work Commissioners who are appointed by, and largely themselves, members of the political and economic elite.
What this means is that a solidarity bargaining strategy that aims to bring activated people power to minimum wage setting processes could itself be subject to a critical loss of confidence and momentum from decisions that significantly hold back or reduce real wages. The underlying concern to this objection comes down to a fear of failure, and it is a reasonable concern to hold.
After all, for this strategy to work it must be strong enough to survive years of reactionary decisions and continue to attract more workers to its cycle of action. The fact, however, that the decision itself is made by members of the elite is not materially different from unionists engaged in public or private sector bargaining. The differentiating factor here comes down not to the quasi-legal process of the wage review compared with direct negotiations with the elite (or more commonly their agents) but the sheer amount of workers impacted, directly or indirectly, by the review.
From this springs a fear of not being able to impact a deep change, like a living wage, at such a scale. This objection, however, structurally misunderstands the way in which solidarity bargaining will start to impact wages. Further, it places far too much emphasis on the consequences of failure generally as opposed to its specific characteristics.
The structural misunderstanding
First to the structural misunderstanding. Solidarity bargaining is not merely a cycle of engagement in relation to minimum wage setting processes such as the annual wage review. Rather it is the substitution of the principles of collective bargaining into the union movement’s engagement with the review itself, and additionally the substitution of annual wage review engagement into ongoing union collective bargaining.
In this regard, the objective measurement of the impact of the strategy is not the outcome of minimum wage processes such as the annual wage review alone but a more generalised measurement of worker income. The Wage Price Index being one indicator. This is because the elite decision-makers being targeted here are not exclusively those determining the minimum wage at the level of the state but also the various employer decision-makers who are bargaining at the same time.
To prevent this strategy from gaining momentum a divided and factionalised elite must do more than impose their will on a minimum wage process annual wage review – they must prevent workers anywhere following solidarity bargaining principles from getting an outcome the same or better compared with bargaining on their own. In other words, the only true failure is the elite winning everywhere all at once for long enough to outlast the first onrushes of elation as solidarity starts to bloom in across workplaces again. A few bargains getting better wage outcomes here or there will be enough in the early days – each of these successes will be like embers on a heap of firewood – one of them can be sufficient to propel the whole strategy forward.
Second, the dynamic exchange between the two cycles of action also means that Award workers can use this process to commence their own bargaining campaigns that remain ultimately connected to the broader class. This makes the prospect that other members of the elite start to reconsider their own positions and submissions with respect to the review. Some employers are presently emboldened to make highly reactionary submissions in the present moment to the wage review. They know they are unlikely to receive much, if any, blowback from their own employees. As the annual wage review becomes a site of active worker struggle this changes. When workers become active they move from objects of the decision to agents themselves shaping the outcome. Each cycle, both alone and in dialogue with the other cycle, works to change the calculus of failure.
Solidarity bargaining does not start out as an all or nothing confrontation with capital and the state through the annual wage review but becomes itself a testing of a broad cross section of capital – looking for weak spots in order to build the worker power necessary to win a living wage for all. This is a spreading of the proactive worker action, in a comparatively low risk manner for each worker compared with an indefinite dispute only at their workplace. It harnesses the power of the ultimate scientific statement – “I don’t know”.
The “I don’t know” becomes an aide to workers, helping to fuel progress in an ongoing struggle for justice and dignity. In this sense, each individual defeat or setback is no longer total but becomes an experiment in a collective dialogue of workers learning to exercise their collective power. The true marker of progress , therefore, is not a win/loss binary on wage outcomes but any sort of objective indicator of worker impact, from overall wage rates to days lost to industrial action, on the present reality of atomisation and stagnating to declining living standards. The opportunity inherent in the current context comes from the fact that small embers of hope radiate more brightly in the dark.
This post is the fifth post of chapter four which is the second chapter in part two of the overall project. Part Two is Solidarity within Wage Labour and examines building transformational solidarity within the constraints of the wage labour relation. Use the about page to locate where you are in this broader project.
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