Union Movements

Labor or trade union movements are the quintessential example of the means by which workers under capitalism have collectively created their own independent organizations to represent their interests. Union movements are the aggregation within a nation-state of these individual labor or trade unions, so that we can speak of the union movement in, for example, Britain or the United States or union movements across the world. Unions, and thus union movements, are conscious social organizations united by several interconnected propositions and beliefs.

The obvious starting point for understanding unionism is the slogans that often publicly adorn trade union banners and placards, namely, “unity is strength” and “an injury to one is an injury to all.” The unity in thought and action is between workers and concerns the articulation, representation, and prosecution of their interests. This unity stands in relation to employers and management and their separate and differing interests, indicating that there is an assumption that workers together have common interests and that these are in contradistinction to those of employers and managers, collectively referred to as the bosses, the capitalists, or just capital. This notion of workers' unity of interest can be refined to suggest that workers are held to have interests that are at least compatible with, or similar to, each other's interests, providing the basis for common action. The key unifying factor for workers is that under capitalism, employers' profits result from the exploitation of the labor of workers, defining exploitation as the difference between the price paid for the workers' labor and the value of their work or output. In other words, workers do not gain the full fruits of their labor, and this is the primary, but not only, source of the antagonism between labor and capital.

The need for workers to construct a social organization embodying unity of thought and action among its members is also derived from a recognition that individual workers are in a fundamentally unequal relationship with the potential buyer of the worker's labor, namely, the individual capitalist. The worker has no means of subsistence other than the ability to sell his or her own labor, for a worker has no (substantial) fixed or liquid capital of her or his own, and neither does a worker own other workers whose labor could be sold for an income. Thus, although the individual worker is free to sell his or her labor to any particular capitalist, he or she is also free to enter into destitution and poverty by choosing not to sell his or her labor. In essence, the worker's economic security is dependent upon selling her or his labor to an individual capitalist. By contrast, the individual capitalist's economic security and viability is not dependent upon the hiring of an individual worker's labor, but rather the hiring of a multiplicity of workers' labor.

Running alongside this is the reality that the individual capitalist is richer in resources than the individual [Page 1409]worker. These resources, primarily in the aggregation of units of capital, mean that it is the capitalist who sets the terms of the employment relationship—who is to be hired, how many are to hired, what they are to do, how this is to be done, and who is to be fired or made redundant. These are the rights of private capital, embodied in the managerial prerogative—the right of managers, the agents of capitalists, to manage as they see fit. Only by workers aggregating their resources, namely themselves together, can workers hope to meet capitalists on anything like an equal basis.

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