Well we all know that the old trade union movement is on its death bed, the only question is what will replace it. It seems to me clear that the day is rapidly coming when no single group of workers can expect to win a major confrontation without the full power of the class behind them. For many workers, such as manufacturing workers employed by large companies, that day is already here. Nestle is a mighty international concern able to transfer production offshore, to purchase influence with the government and ultimately it is backed up by the armed capitalist state. It is asking a lot of four or five hundred workers to defeat all that.
Workers tend to have less interest in making labour history and more interest in victory.
In our time working for victory, and here I just mean wages and conditions, means working to build the infrastructure to support an indefinite general strike. You don't need to be an anarcho-syndicalist to see this, just to have a little common sense. But this infrastructure is itself nothing other than the syndicalist union. The syndicalist union exists for the sole purpose of confronting capitalism and the state, which is why it can go on to make a revolution and advance the anarchist project, if it is powerful enough and if its members so will. The reformist trade unions were never designed for this purpose.