By
Ivonaldo Leite
The Social-Movement Unionism believes
that by the late 1990s the structure of world capitalism had become clear. As
Moody (1997) writes, capitalism was now global, but the world economy it
produced was fragmented and highly uneven. The old North-South divide had
widened in terms of the incomes of the majority. The South was locked into the
role of low-wage provider for corporations based in the North.
Corporate-dominated systems of production crossed this North-South boundary,
producing primarily for markets of the North. The North itself was now divided
into a Triad of major economic regions, which in turn crossed the North-South,
divided. Astride this divided world were the TCNCs operating in each Triad and
beyond.
At the same time, the multilateral agreements and institutions
that were said to regulate this process had been rigged to discipline
governments and encourage centrifugal market forces. Together, these structures
and forces sponsored a virtual race to the economic and social bottom for the
workers of the world.
As the twenty-first century approached, however, a rebellion against capitalist
globalization, its structures, and its effects had begun. As Moody observes,
the rebellion took shape on both sides of North-South economic divide and, in
varying degrees, within all three of the major Triad regions. It confronted the
most basic effects of the process of globalization at the workplace level, as
conditions became intolerable. It confronted the conservative neo-liberal
agenda at the national level and, no matters how indirectly, the plans of
capital’s rickety multilateral regime at the international level. Its explosive
force in some places surprised friends and foes alike. At the center of the
rebellion were the working class and its most basic organization, the trade
union.
This very class was in the midst of change: its composition was becoming
more diverse in most places, as women and immigrants composed a larger
proportion of the workforce, and its organizations were in flux – somewhere
still declining, somewhere growing, everywhere changing. The rebellion was
international in scope, but it was taking place mostly on national terrain.
The Social-Movement Unionism appeared
connecting claims on class, on race and on gender. Therefore, the vision
appropriate to era globalization is Social-Movement Unionism. About the Social-Movement Unionism in North, Moody
declares that within the industrial North it implied in many of the ideas put
forth by opposition groups within unions, national cross-union networks of
union activists, international solidarity networks and committees, official and
unofficial cross-border networks, and the only global grassroots industrially
based network, TIE. These forces are small, even marginal in some cases, but
they speak with a clear voice and offer ideas pertinent to the epoch of
capitalist globalization.
The Social-Movement Unionism is
not about jurisdiction or structure, as is craft or industrial unionism.
According to Gindin (1995), it means making the union into a vehicle through
which its members can not only address their bargaining demands but actively
lead the fight for everything that affects working people in their communities
and the country. Movement unionism includes the shape of bargaining demands,
the scope of union activities, the approach to issues of change, and above all,
that sense of commitment to a larger movement that might suffer defeats, but
can’t be destroyed.
This is not just a warmed-over version of “political unionism”, once
common in Latin America and Europe, in which unions supports one or another
party of the left. Nor is it the same as the liberal or social-democratic
“coalitionism” that sees unions and social movements as elements in an
electoral coalition. In both of these versions of organized labor’s role, the
unions and their members are essentially passive troops in an orderly parade to
the polls. In the case of Social-Movement
Unionism, happens the contrary. In Social-Movement Unionism neither the
unions nor their members are passive in any sense. Unions take an active lead
in the streets, as well as in politics. They ally with other social movements,
but provide a class vision and content that make for stronger glue than that
which usually holds electoral or temporary coalitions together. That contents
is not the demands of the movements, but the activation of the mass of union
members as the leaders of the charge – those who in most cases have the
greatest social and economic leverage in capitalist society. Social-Movement
Unionism implies an active strategic orientation that uses the strongest of
society’s oppressed and exploited, generally organized workers, to mobilize
those who are less able to sustain self-organization.
Bibliography
GINDIN, San (1995). The Canadian AutoWorkers: The Birth and
Transformation of a Union. Toronto: James Lorimer & Company.
MOODY, Kim (1997). Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy. London:
Verso.
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