If you had the chance to change the rules of a 50,000 strong union, how would you do it?

key thing IMHO is autonomy of the workplace/company/industry unit re: industrial action - i.e. that any of those can trigger a ballot for industrial action among their own members easily (i.e. by member petition or meeting resolution), and that the content of that industrial action is defined solely by them, without reference to any higher level of the organisation such as executive. Same autonomy should go for electing officers, discussing things at meetings, etc.

I guess I don't know the industrial relations law set up in NZ, but with how it is in the UK, the main power of the union bureaucracy consists in the power of the executives to prevent or determine the form of legal industrial action (which always has to be approved by member ballot). This isn't a matter of law, it's something which the unions have chosen to do.

(I don't even know if the IWW has this structure incidentally?)

Also, elections for every national and regional post should be at no more than two year intervals - one year would be better. There should be a mechanism for triggering deselection ballots at every level.

All elections should be run by STV.

And elected officers right down to the lowest level (i.e. shop steward) should have a formal right to membership lists and contact information for the body of workers they represent.

Negotiations and meetings with management should be carried out only by elected representatives (plural) of the workers. A national official can be invited along by those representatives, but it is their prerogative.

Obv this isn't going to make it perfect la la la but it would make a real a difference.

Some excellent points here are marred by a factual error: s.226 - 232A, and s.234A of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 point out the requirement for TUs to hold a ballot prior to industrial action if the TU - and thus their striking membership - wish to obtain protected status under the law. My understanding of "protected status" is that it means that the TU can legally issue strike pay, the TU can publicly support the strikers without risk of having their funds sequestered and that the membership have a slight chance of being able to utilise the unfair dismissal legislation.

Or are you suggesting here that the TUs are manipulating the legislation, say by refusing to hold a ballot, to prevent their membership from taking industrial industrial action? Your statement doesn't seem to read like that and it's certainly not true in my personal experience, but I'll happily believe it's possible in certain of the reformist unions.

You're right in what you say, but I really just didn't communicate what I meant well by adding the parentheses after I'd written the last sentence in the bit you quote. What I meant was that the law requires that industrial action be held according to the union's statutes - that the union as a whole ratifies it. The fact that this power is given to union executives - as opposed to branches, industrial units or workplace units - is determined by union constitutions. You could quite easily have a clause in your constitution to delegate powers to order ballots, determine action etc. to those lower levels. That's how a senior TUC official explained it to me anyway.

Do you work in Britain? What's your union? I would say this is the absolute main plank of bureaucratic union practice. Not only refusing to hold a ballot, but calling off action once a ballot has been held on the grounds that 'a better deal is on the table' or 'the company has agreed to negotiate'. And not only that, but determining the form of the action - i.e. restricting it to one day, isolated from other workers, and then having to ballot again for another one day.

I agree with cantdo that this is worth doing, if only to set out a public idea of what workers' organisations should be like and show solidarity and commitment to everyone else in the organisation. However we should remember that the IWW and CNT mergers happened at periods of relatively high class struggle - so it's not simon's fault if his proposals don't have the same effect!

These are interesting debates, I'd tend to moderate those positions a bit.

First is that when a union is already bureaucratised at the level of the membership, not only at the level of offialdowm (i.e when the membership do not relate to the union as an organisation of struggle, but as mediation, and are pretty much content with that), then electing organisers is a deeply dangerous idea. What you will get is your industrial aristocracy, fat off their struggles of thirty years ago, electing people to organise people who are now at the cutting edge of industrial struggle. If you've got militant fast food workers electing someone to help other fast food workers be militant that's fine, but it's not fine for (I dunno) steel workers to elect someone to organise the fast food workers. That embodies the content you're looking for less than employment because it's more likely that you'll attract someone who's from the cultural millieu of fast food workers by advertising than by asking them to run in an election against some good ol' boy steelworker who all the steelworkers know. If you get my drift. So I think this problem can't be answered in the abstract.

On the second bit, that's a bit harsh because, for example, it might discourage union officers from trying to organise lower paid workers - who'd try to organise hotels if it meant taking a pound an hour pay cut? And I think there are certain bare minimum standards you should uphold, just to treat people humanely. It's hard to be publicly campaigning for standards you don't uphold yourself.

Though I think with quite flexible work, like fast food restaurants, it would be good to look at how far you can get people back into their jobs, even if at another restaurant, if they leave for a year and work for the union, then return to work... USDAW do that, and though they're obviously fucked for other reasons, I think it's a good principle.

nice one, cheers

Hi, thanks for the comments.

I'm surprised there isn't a website/article/paper somewhere that better explains the structures and ideas behind the structures of syndicalist unions. I know how they work of course, but most papers are theoretical and not many practical articles. Even a simple diagram of structures would be useful. I've found a paper on anarchosyndicalism.net about the structure of the CNT and the IWW rules are useful but there doesn't seem to be a document talking about basic syndicalist ideas and the different historical way those issues were dealt with. Well not in a single document anyway! Basically what I'm *trying* to do is write up a paper with different headings about different topics, give a typology of how different union's deal with it and their arguements, and then put forward a syndicalist idea.

An example:

Paid Officials

* The structures/ideas of the merging unions:
* NDU staff have a collective agreement, can have representatives on the union's decision making bodies, small number of election organisers but are in process of being removed, paid good wages, although less than some industries they work in
* SFWU staff have a collective agreement, staff are not to be photographed on pickets, no stories written about them in the paper
* Unite staff were unpaid for a long time, have no collective agreement, feel solidarity with union's management, activists more than organisers, paid around average wage

* Typology of unions
* General unions: Paid professionals give members confidence in the union head office to represent and service them well
* Syndicalist unions: ... etc

Recommendation: The current union's structure has encouraged reliance on the union professionals. the new union's structures should allow sections which so choose to determine what paid officials they use, i.e. wether they use national office organisers (and thereby give a certain percentage of their dues for that purpose, which may be set by the national body), elect their own officers, etc etc. Existing employees of the union role changes to focusing on building self-reliance. Limits on pay depending on the industry they represent. Staff employees must be more involved in new committees of the section/branch and be directed by them. blah blah

(One thing to keep in mind is that in some unions in the current situation of low membership involvement, organisers act as a counter power balance to elected and non-elected union management.)

This isn't my arguement, I just wrote it up for an example of each section in the paper.

E.g.

Looking forward to more discussion and debate, i've only got a very short amount of time to make my submission. I'm mainly doing this as a way of clarifying the position of syndicalists and propaganda, not because i necessarily think anythings going to change. And at the end of the day, it's not the structure alone that will build a grassroots rank and file movement within our unions!

Simon

I haven't seen this proposed yet in this thread and I'm a bit surprised.
One of the first changes we should propose to a trade union in such circumstances is to dis-affliate the union from electoral activism in Government. No funding for candidates , no union sponsored campaign volunteers. The unions time and money are better spent on organizing the unorganized. Speaking from experience, expressing this idea in main-stream unions will get one noticed, for good or ill. Personally I'd go so far as to say a union body has no real business paying any attention at all to electoral politics, but i can see where that policy might have practical limitations. Not in supporting a "lesser evil" but in maintaining the collective right to call a racist war mongering anti-worker creep exactly what they are in public.

On the staff issue, I'd say as few as possible, as many as necessary . A union with 50,000 members is going to find tasks that need to be performed full time while the majority of the members are at work. If members have time to do them as volunteers, great, that should be strongly encourged, but they need to be done and must otherwise be paid. A livable pay packet might also make the difference for members who are interesting in doing the work but confronted with economic realities. For instance, I find it a bare boned necessity of practical syndicalism for union locals to have a person or group available to relay messages between and addressed to the members at the workplace. Obviously multi-location unions and those with 24/7 shifts will need more. People available to come to the work place and assist member militants at need are a very useful extra. Unions attempting a targeted organizing campaign will in all probablity need people exploring contacts in non union work places full time. Other locals might need hiring hall dispatchers or publications/website editors. As long as A: the lines of accountablity and mutual responsiblities are clear between the staff and the body of workers and B: the body can reasonably afford to pay a living wage but no more, I've never been completely sold on the "no paid staff" position. For unions that is, a different standard will certainly apply for anarchist or communist political organizations, which must rely on the voluntary efforts of the working class in my view.

A war story about a bad example of union staffing and then I'll hit "post comment". A local building trades union decided on a picketing campaign against a union busting law firm. When they noticed that the picketing would need to be performed while they were all at work, they contracted activists from the homeless community in a park near the lawyers office. "Good idea!" thinks I, and goes down to see whats going on. I was not too shocked to find they were being paid far less than union scale with no benefits. In convrsation with union membership and office staff i took the position that they needed to pay at least apprentice scale with offers of unionized jobs after the campaign was concluded.I don't recall thinking of it at the time, but an understood and stated union responsiblity for any medical or legal bills directly related to the campaign would have been simple solidarity. I heard no complaints from the pickets about wages and they seemed to be having a blast, happy to get in the face of business owners and get paid anything at all for it, but I felt it was explotation.