Labor Unions Are a Dead End for the Left
By: Aidan Hess
Tags: Society, Capitalism, Unions, Communism, Politics

The labor union is perhaps the most sacred and revered icon among American leftists in our nation’s long history of class struggle. The labor union movement, to be sure, stands drenched in the blood, sweat, and tears of workers of all stripes who made tremendous sacrifices to establish the living conditions we enjoy today. Especially in the volatile uprisings of the early days — such as the Haymarket Riot (1887), the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, and the Battle of Blair Mountain (1921) — thousands of laborers lost their lives in pursuit of fair wages, safe working conditions, and the eight-hour work day.

So, with this being said, I do not mean to either downplay the very real costs of the historical struggles of labor or dismiss the victories that unions have achieved. We would be in far more miserable conditions without these sacrifices of past laborers.

Nevertheless, I want to spotlight the increasing failures of unions to make positive changes to our lives in more recent years. These are not failures of political will, I contend, but of structural obsolescence. That is to say, the very form of labor’s struggle against capital has eclipsed the union model of political action.

To use Marx’s famous pronouncement in the opening pages of Eighteenth Brumaire against the contemporary left, unions are the “tradition of a dead generation” which “weighs like a nightmare on the mind of the living.” It is time we cast off ourselves the tired, tattered costumes of past labor movements and invent new ways of doing politics.

Appeal to the history of union struggles for guidance on present political action stifles our ability to create a political model adequate to the struggles we face today.

The relations between labor, the means of production, and the productive forces are vastly different now than they had been for the workers of the early 20th-century. For one, contract work, which already comprise 1 in 5 American jobs, is the fastest growing sector in the national economy, and it will likely make up half of the American workforce within a decade. Moreover, even those laborers who are still employed via salary or wage are working less and less in physical proximity to one another.

These shifts in the American workforce are major impediments to unionization. Traditionally, labor unions emerged organically from the collective nature of industrialized work. Deep in the coal mines or out on the shop floor, laborers organized themselves on the basis of the shared conditions of exploitation which were to each and every laborer immediately recognizable. Workers easily and fluidly communicated the offenses of employers (wage theft, layoffs, and so on) across the entire labor force. And, given both their close proximity and the inadequate surveillance capacities available to bosses at the time, workers could meet relatively easily in secret to discuss organizing a union.

The independent contract workers of today, on the other hand, are significantly de-socialized. Uber drivers, for example, are not working cooperatively to produce a commodity but are in ceaseless competition with one another to get paid for a particular service.

This process of de-socialization has indeed long been a central characteristic of the so-called ‘gig economy.’ Comprised of businesses like Uber, DoorDash, and Instacart, the gig economy deliberately employs transient, precarious laborers who do not need cooperation with other workers to do their job and hence the routinized interactions necessary for the organic emergence of unions.

What’s more, those forms of employment which still do require some amount of significant cooperation, specifically tech work, are being increasingly broken down into small teams by upper management ‘productivity’ schemes. These teams or ‘pods’ have exceptionally minimal interaction with one another, with the only external company communication passing in and out of the ‘team leader.’

This is combined with a maximal degree of surveillance, both on- and off-campus: every action taken by employees on their smart devices, at least while on the company’s network, is tracked and potentially used not only to ‘evaluate performance’ but also to union-bust. Make no mistake: Google, Amazon, and Facebook have all shown themselves more than willing to use these surveillance technologies they impose on their employees for the latter.

So then, why do we keep returning to a defunct model for political mobilization which entire industries have long since adapted to pre-emptively hinder? Why do we not instead attempt to convene our politics from the present contours of class struggle?

The most common retort I have faced when I ask these questions is that unions are a proven historical method of appeasing the demands of labor. It is therefore better, so the argument goes, to go with the ‘tried and true’ model of unionization rather than risk too much sacrifice or loss with an untested way of organizing.

In response, I have two comments which will hopefully dispel this argument.

First, we must finally own up to the fact that the ‘victories’ of labor unions in the United States were always Pyrrhic when considered from a global perspective.

The heyday of union power, i.e. the middle of the 20th-century, arrived concomitant with the most intense period of imperialism in our nation’s history. Particularly after World War II and during the much-acclaimed ‘booming US postwar economy’, raw materials such as oil, copper, iron, and timber were expropriated for grotesquely cheap costs from the developing world.

The demands of labor unions in the US, and the ‘victories’ it for so long struggled for, were clearly informed by quality of life premised on mass consumption, suburbanization, and fossil fuels. These demands and victories are therefore inseparable from a long, bloody history of expropriation which has immiserated a majority of the world population.

I say this not to simply make American laborers feel guilty about the lifestyles they now enjoy but to insist that if our aim is international solidarity with all workers of the world, then we must throw out the very form of political organizing which made our vision of the ‘American way of life’ so myopic — that is, unions. Oriented as they are toward the mediation of labor on a national scale, unions will always fail to address the unequivocally global scale of capital accumulation.

Second, it is not in the last instance a question of whether labor unions have made historical progress in the struggle against capital but whether they are able to do so today.

This is the real thick of it: unions are simply ineffective political strategies if our aim is meaningful disruption of the flows of capital and the eventual revolutionary transformation of society. This is because we live in a world today where labor is quickly becoming as rapidly transient as capital itself.

It is not, then, just that unionization can easily be skirted through surveillance, outsourcing, contract work, and so on, but even more that it hinders the fluid capacities of labor, too. Unionization works against the current, that is to say, of a rapidly recombinant form of labor which can and will dissolve faster than union organizers are able to establish chapter meetings, union dues, and the like.

All I am saying is, quite simply, why go against the present, central features of labor, i.e. its mobility and flux? Why not try to utilize these capacities to our own advantage? Instead of appealing to rigidity, why not attempt to outpace capital, to sabotage it at its frontiers? Why not be, as the anarchists say, ‘like water’?