Unions and vision.

[short thoughts]
Labor organizations must necessarily orient their overall trajectories and structures in relation to the economy in which they find themselves. How could it be otherwise in institutions meant to govern wage relations in the favor of workers? There have been fairly radical changes in the economy relative to the period of greatest American organized labor growth, the 30s-50s. As such, it is necessary to reconsider the structures and goals of organized labor, the ideals that animate its long-term projects and thereby inspire short-term projects.

What has changed? Communism is no longer a viable political ideology among American leftists. The Cold War is over, meaning there is no ideological imperative for international economic leaders to seek any level of just treatment for workers. Much of manufacturing has moved to low-wage regions of the global south. The US economy is dominated by low and high wage service sectors. Organized class consciousness barely exists. Economics and business training have been taken over by laissez-faire ideologies and politics has followed in suit. Environmental problems have taken center stage among American progressives and throughout much of society.

The nature of labor in America is currently very mixed. We have a very large immigrant population doing mostly low-wage service and construction work. Anyone involved in production now has the constant threat of outsourcing. The only perceived "safe" jobs, besides the highest levels of the professions, are directly applied skilled labor. Nursing, skilled construction, etc.

How can labor respond in this climate? The first step must be accepting something we rarely seem to consider, that any approach organized labor takes must be all-encompassing. That manufacturing employment has declined in America and that it is more tenuous does not mean that manufacturing should not be considered in terms of the trajectories and goals of organized labor. American labor must consider the aggregate of labor, the economy of the world as a whole, if it is to begin to mount successful campaigns against the directives of global industry.

That being said, the next step may be to recreate a vision for labor, a direction to guide its efforts, applicable to the economy as a whole and adequate to both the current organization of labor and the values and desires animating members of the working class, both in the US and abroad.

It is clear that these values are not systemic, the "working class" of the world is highly fragmented by culture, interest, and economic position. So any semi-coherent vision would have to allow that level of fundamental diversity.
[phenomenology of labor; immediacy of translating desire into work, autogestion, cooperative commonwealth]

Autonomous labor.

[incredibly loose notes towards a post-structural theory of labor, i.e. accounting for production by the structural dynamics between an embodied collection of participants]
We have two very broad schemas for thinking about labor and business, that equate to roughly the "capitalist" ideological position and the "communist" ideological position. The "capitalist" schema is dominant in business, American pop culture, and economics. This is the standard story of how goods and services are delivered in a market. An investor or pool of investors finance a business, hire management, and employees work for whatever wages the relevant labor market will bear. Management deals with labor through paying wages and salaries and benefits, and making decisions about the operation of the company day-to-day.

The "communist" counter-narrative is more intriguing. All real value in a good or service is created by the work itself (or the work plus nature, or work plus nature plus machines, etc). Capitalists (investors and/or financiers and/or upper management)steal the surplus value created by workers, and that is source of profit. This will lead said capitalists to exploit labor as much as they can to extract greater profits. A class struggle necessarily exists between the capitalists that steal surplus value and the workers from whom it is stolen. There are variations on this theme of course, and we could lump a great deal of left populism in this camp. Corporations exploit workers and the community through sweatshops and externalizing the residue of commerce, etc. The key theme here is the tension between owners who exploit labor and workers whose labor is exploited. This narrative is dominant in some form in many leftist organizations, in sections of academic theory, in much of the Third World, etc.

These are gross simplifications of both "positions". I think though that they serve the purpose of very briefly summarizing two tendencies we receive about how to think about economic life. These tendencies are very important. They structure what sort of actions we try to take in the economic world, and both enable and constrain our experience of economic agency. If we adopt the "capitalist" position we also adopt certain choices of action- trying to become a manager or leader in business, starting our own small business, considering the desires of employees as secondary and purely reactive, attacking unions, investing. If we adopt the "communist" position, we adopt other courses of appropriate action- working in unions for wage and benefits increases, fighting for labor laws and workplace regulations, joining adversarial and critical political groups, fighting bosses in one form or another, or participating in the "capitalist" position in occupational life while feeling moody and cynical about it (or, participating but promoting moderation of the "capitalist" position).

These approaches both have major problems. "Capitalism" as a position allows and rewards tremendous exploitation and inequality. "Communism" as a position tends to be self-limiting and destructive because its notion of agency is primarily reactive, secondary, oppositional. Unions tend to fight for conditions, wages, and salaries, but they don't tend to join their efforts to those for worker ownership or worker self-management, in any form. This isn't simply a question of "racialism." Unions in theory could promote self management or employee ownership through a variety of means, from full takeovers to buyouts to supporting small business or cooperative formation among members. With notable exceptions, this sort of effort just isn't embedded in the general schema of labor as exploited, struggling against owners for rights and privileges.

Libraries have been filled with books detailing and debating the strengths and weaknesses of these positions in all their forms and iterations. I'm not going to join that process of critique. I would like to offer instead a different "schema" for looking at workplace relationships, that is a little more thorough than either system yet allows for both to occur. What I'm proposing is a genuine change in perspective of analysis, which would allow for different sorts of "constructive analysis" in the form of facilitating the development of new economic projects.

I will label this position, provisionally, a "populist" perspective.

Taking a cue from the Italian autonomist theorists, we can begin by adopting some of the "communist" perspective, that the conditions of production are created by the efforts of the working class completely, and that investment and management are in a deep sense "secondary." But what can we mean by this, such that it doesn't just present an antagonistic model?

Consider an actual workplace, that generates a good or service. Consider what actual happens. A diverse array of people, occupying different positions regarding their values, desires, and abilities, unify around a particular process in order to develop and release a product. We tend to think of the design and organization of that process as primary, and this is essentially what I want us to reconsider. We can look at the process that way, focusing on the form of the thing, the abstract organization of a work process. Or we can look at the structure, the content, the "building blocks" of the process primarily, namely the particular people involved and how they relate and interact with one another and their "tools" of production. This doesn't mean that "management" of the process doesn't exist, far from it. But it means that this management is primarily a function of facilitating a coordination of desire around a particular product or set of products and services, binding together am array of people and things towards one semi-stable relationship.

Instead of only considering the direct aspect of a workplace, the part that gets planned out by bosses, we can consider the entire field of experience created by all the interactions of the participants. In this case, each "participant" can be considered as a field of desiring-experience, with multiple points of contact with the fields of desiring-experience of other "participants". The official "work-process" is the point of contact that is most stable, creating a single point of contact, a single event between all these "fields". There are multiple other points however, involving any number of the "fields." The privileged point though, the point that maintains across time and restricts the participants of the set, is the event of the work process. This is a sort of hegemonic event. The work event isn't the only point of contact, it is simply the dominant one, and "acts" at times to repress the other points and prevent them from becoming stable events in their own right.

In this characterization, the real tension to look for is the relative dominance of that stable event of the work process. If this event is configured to repress other events among participants so as to protect its dominance and integrity (for instance, preventing unionization at a sweatshop), then the incidence of contact between participants decreases outside the "work" point. A decrease in contact incidence, though, has the effect of reducing overall change in the set, stifling "innovation" or "experimentation" in the work process itself.

The optimal arrangement of power in this scenario is one that maintains the integrity of the work event while allowing easy connection and disconnection of points among fields.

{namely, an organization based on a cooperative model that doesn't create a strong barrier between independent connections and the event of the work process, so that those independent connections can feed into the work process fluidly and easily. both worker cooperation and consumer cooperation, see for instance discussion surrounding prosumers}