Time, money and struggle within capitalism.

Solidarity bargaining is a strategy to restart class-wide action but it is dependent on the single issue of wages. An argument against solidarity bargaining is that through intervening in minimum wage setting processes it unduly narrows down industrial class struggle to the issue of wages. Restricting struggle to wages leaves so many issues untouched about the experience of work not least managerial control.

Of course, there is more to a working life than money, and yet solidarity bargaining is a strategy to restart the engine of mass strikes, even a general strike, using the issue of wages. This strategy, however, is not about the limits of struggle but a way for the working-class to learn to strike again.

The leading edge of the wedge should not, therefore, be thought of as an end but a start. Once mass strikes are occurring then any union leader wanting to limit action to wages would find their authority melting away.

Strikes, and a strike wave, develop their own momentum and other critical issues from working hours to social issues from social security to climate policy would inevitably become sites of mass struggle. This would be doubly so if the end goal of union wage claims centred on a living wage – itself a broad concept that ties in so many other issues. Solidarity bargaining is a way of strengthening a strike muscle that has largely atrophied, and workers will end up using that muscle according to their own deliberations. This is no bad thing.

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Time and money within capitalism

Even outside the tendencies of mass strikes, a wider scope than just wages is baked into the solidarity bargaining strategy. This expanded horizon is formed through the workers themselves, the nature of wages and money in the capitalist system, and the broader scope baked into bargaining for union contracts.

First, to the workers themselves. One of the key aspects of solidarity bargaining is that no matter the legal manifestation of insecure work in the employment relationship at any given moment, it is capable of uniting workers together around a common set of wage claims. It builds a unity of purpose and action between direct workers, casuals, labour hire workers, outsourced and privatised workers beyond any legal processes in place to undermine or roll-back their protections – this can go so far as to include gig workers and dependent contractors too.

This unity across categories of employment and a common wages goal, especially with the concept of a living wage, structurally raises the issues of (and for capitalists the very utility of) insecure employment. For insecure workers, the capacity to start taking action on wages drags into the struggle of questions around the variability, reliability and security of their income. It also stitches together a working class subjectivity that has been cut to ribbons by neoliberal laws.

Second, to the nature of money in a capitalist system. The old adage goes: time is money. For workers this is even more so as they rent their mind and body out to employers for a fixed time period in return for a sum of money necessary to try and live their lives.

In the same way, Einstein’s theory of relativity speaks of the idea of spacetime – that is, folding the three-dimensions of space into time, we should see money (as the median of exchange, wages and capital) as folded into time on a social level. In a capitalist system, time and money are merged into moneytime. This is experienced by workers as a robbing of their limited time as the only means to secure a wage, and in another way it’s also felt in the perpetual present of capitalist pop culture.

When it comes to worker struggle, it means that any fight on time or money is necessarily about the other as well. Workers, when they are in a position of confidence, will therefore seek to reduce their working hours at no loss of pay – that is to reclaim the benefits of improved productivity by clawing back time to live their own lives while maintaining the same level of material security. If solidarity bargaining contributes to a situation of increasing worker confidence then worker focus will shift to the “living” part of the living wage proposition and demand more time with which to live their lives.

Third, even on the terms of the system as it currently exists, workers may bargain about any non-discriminatory matter related to the employment relationship provided association remains formally regulated at an individual level.1 This allows for broader issues to become a matter of contest through the enterprise bargaining side of the cycle – this is yet another reason why changed material circumstances are a result of worker solidarity across the two cycles. Workers who are bargaining for a union contract can claim on broader issues from job security matters to reduced working hours without it being a challenge to the definitional terms of the system.2

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Yeah, but can workers really lead their own collective bargains?

Solidarity bargaining’s reliance on delegate-led bargaining is a physical necessity for the strategy to operate at scale. If rank-and-file delegates are not capable of leading their own bargaining then this specific iteration of solidarity bargaining cannot fulfill its own aims. The full promise of solidarity bargaining involves tens of thousands of workplaces bargaining at the same time with interested workers reaching out to the union office on a regular occurrence to get advice on how to transition their own worksites into greater involvement with the solidarity bargaining cycle.

If rank-and-file delegates are not capable or prepared to directly face the managerial and consultative class then the strategy will fall down. I should note, however, that in the context of the wider strategy for renewal, thousands of workers running their own bargain is not even the biggest draw on the capacity and tenacity of workers. After all, another pole of the wedge is thousands of workers owning their own jobs, and running their own firms. If they cannot own their bargains then they cannot own their jobs.

The strongest reason for this not being feasible is that the current practice and expectation for union members is that generally a union official is present actively managing the bargain. There are two possibilities for why this is the case. Either workers are intrinsically incapable of leading their own collective bargains in a manner that provides for consistent implementation of a common strategy, or there is some external or contextual reason for the current arrangements.

No doubt there are many who believe it is due to intrinsic capacity, even some who would describe themselves as unionists or socialists of some variety. This view, however, is nothing other than class prejudice against workers more generally. It is an internalisation of the capitalist myth of meritocracy as it says not doing some sort of professional/quasi-legal work likely means you are incapable of doing such work. It’s a short distance from this to also being of the opinion that the privileges and inequalities present within the system are down to intrinsic human worth as opposed to structural injustice. Capitalism’s injustice lies not just in an unequal distribution of wealth but also its constriction of human capacity in the cause of profit (which itself drives inequality).

Systems of work inform developed human capacity rather than reflecting it. To think otherwise is to write off people as mere objects rather than subjects growing and interacting with the world around them.

There is, however, some distance between actual practice and capacity. Just because a group of workers may have the potential to between them effectively manage their own bargain does not mean that they see the urgency or need to develop this capacity. For a start, there is the pastoral conception of the union. This is the dominant idea of a union widely shared by members, delegates, union officials and many employees. This way of viewing the union conflates the union office and paid union staff with the actual union. This standpoint is visible in all sorts of ways.

When members speak of not having seen “the Union” since the last bargain, they mean the last time they saw a union official. When union organisers speak of “their members” or what they have to do to look after “their members” as if it is only one dedicated person standing between a group of workers and the oncoming flood of capital. When union leaders, often at some distance from the shop floor, proclaim what workers can or cannot do, or when they speak of their political work and lobbying as delivering for members. It is visible when an employer will blame their workers for being angry or aggrieved by an issue on the union office or a particular union official as if their own workers are not possessed of the human capacity to reason and feel. When a non-union worker says they do not need to join a union because they are capable of looking after themselves as if millions of other union members are somehow incapable of attending to their own needs without first checking in with the union office.

No substantial upswing in the fortunes of organised labour is possible without the defeat, permanent or temporary, of this perspective. A society properly run by the people is impossible without workers first being able to demonstrate that they can run their own affairs. Being union is a means through which to achieve this, not to avoid it. This is a hurdle that must be crossed for there to be a democratic revolution in our daily lives. The dominant paradigm of a union has a tendency towards worker demobilisation and passivity (even as there are competing tendencies that push in other directions). Their welfare becomes not a matter of cooperation with each other but dependent on the actions of a few at the union office. It thereby curtails the power that union workers could otherwise exercise.

This view also reinforces and entrenches the role of union officials as brokering the price of labour within a capitalist system without any prospect of a resolution. Solidarity bargaining as a strategy may or may not fall down at this hurdle but any transformational union strategy requires rank-and-file unionists stepping up to take much greater control over their own workplaces. A hurdle that is difficult but necessary to clear is not reason enough to turn back. It is not a question of whether or not to clear the hurdle but rather a practical one of how to clear the hurdle even if more attempts fail.

The workings of the strategy point towards how the hurdle might be cleared. As discussed, solidarity bargaining provides a rationale as to why taking ownership of the bargain is in the immediate interest of established union sites. They are not doing it as an act of charity for another group of workers or for the distant prospect that one or two discrete organising campaigns may radically shift the overall balance of workers power at some point in time in the future – they are doing it to make an immediate positive difference which can have a transformative character as time goes on.

Moreover, the gravitational nature of the change – that is working with willing leaders in the initial rounds of collective bargaining cycle allows for an intentional program of delegate and member education to be instituted and refined as more and more workers are positively attracted to the strategy. This reorients the union office relation with union members from technical agents to educators.

The cyclical nature of the strategy provides for an iterative implementation. This means programs, tools and tactics consistent with solidarity bargaining can be tested, and either incorporated into the ongoing work, modified in some way or scrapped. It develops through feedback. A trust in the underlying rationality of the new approach emerges through time from the experience of communication and cooperation between workplace delegates. What this hurdle represents is not so much a threat to solidarity bargaining’s workability but an opportunity for workers to start to take control and ownership over events. In this way workers will be able to restart the wheel of history, decades after we had all been told of history’s end.

The inherent difficulties of the solidarity bargaining approach should not be confused with its impossibility, and likewise the possibility of solidarity bargaining is not to be equated with its ease or inevitability. The task of workers organising to realise their true power, and in so doing realise the full promise of a democratic society, is as difficult and fraught as it is necessary. Set backs abound. The trick is to persist.

Solidarity bargaining is a way of repairing the bonds of solidarity across the working class, the promise of the strategy is nothing more or less than helping the class remember its collective subjectivity. It is a way of taking the next steps in the struggle and not to be confused with the entirety of the long journey of worker liberation.

This post is the seventh 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.