Beyond the labour of sisyphus: Unions and the city

The dominant perspective of trade unionism in the United States has for decades been to lead an orderly retreat, giving ground on this and that issue, while defending the union as a ‘precious thing’, an end-in-itself. For much of the left, the hope is that spirited local defensive battles may be generalized to the class as a whole, thereby transforming economic into political struggles. But as a strategy for labour renewal this confronts a series of dilemmas, especially as rates of union representation have declined to 6.9 per cent of private sector employment in the US (12 per cent when public sector workers are included). There is a more important dilemma at issue. A great many of the social struggles we see today – and are sure to see more of in the future – do not arise from the workplace or from the wage relation narrowly conceived. They are sparked by the destruction of a park, a rise in transit fares, racist policing strategies, and the dismantling of public education. No one familiar with labour history could deny that the fate of the labour movement is linked to these struggles. Yet in too many instances we find union apparatuses on the other side, deeply implicated in the very neoliberal urban accumulation strategies and governing regimes that are at the root of the problems. It is not at all surprising, then, to find that many activists today have simply abandoned strategic engagement with labour, and with it any class-based project for social transformation. Even young staffers going into the unions expect that any revival of the US labour movement will arise only out of the rubble of the existing business-unionist institutions. But this only begs the question: if the existing institutions are inadequate, what organizational forms and strategies for labour would be adequate? The privilege of our time is to act in a moment of widening realization that both capitalism, and the labour unions that would ameliorate capitalism, have failed to meet the needs and expectations of the vast majority. To move on, it will be necessary, first, to show how dominant labour strategies are hopelessly entangled in class contradictions as a result of their being embedded in neoliberal capitalism; and second, to outline a strategy for labour that develops anew in workingclass struggles what Luxemburg called ‘the power of seeing the larger connections and of taking a survey of the whole position’