ABSTRACT

Workers’ control has been a slogan and an aspiration of many unions and their activists and leaders. If the older craft societies were founded with collective bargaining as the raison d’être of their trade unionism, unionization of the unskilled constituted a challenge to this by straddling the “political” and “economic”, conventionally posed as the division between party and union within the social democratic tradition. But workers’ control was submerged in the integration of organized labour within commodity relations through collective bargaining with grievances converted into cash payments. Yet from its earliest expression, industrial action has also been linked with alternative organization for subsistence and meeting social needs, broadening and deepening the horizons of what labour unionism could be conceived for and, ultimately, raising the prospect of workers’ control defined as a system such as socialism.

Keywords: Workers’ power; managerial prerogative; challenges for unions

INTRODUCTION

Workers’ control has been a slogan and an aspiration of many unions. If the older craft societies had been founded with collective bargaining as their raison d’être, the unionization of the unskilled rallied a challenge to the very system of capitalism. Rather than negotiation and compromise with employers, the “new unionism” posed direct action as a means of overthrowing capitalism. Not only the strike, the withdrawal of labour, but tactics like sabotage and occupation entered workers’ repertoire. The skilled could see workers’ control as a defence of their autonomy over the labour process, a defence of their job control. The unskilled could see the building of their union, or their workplace organization, as mobilizing for the “general strike” and prefigurative of the administration of a socialist society. Workers’ control was the aspiration for revolutionary syndicalism and of other revolutionary and democratic socialists. In a more moderate formulation, workers’ control has been associated with the establishment of cooperatives and other self-managed enterprises in a more gradual transformation of capitalism from within (Ranis 2016). Further, workers’ control has been presented as the shifting frontier of struggle between labour and capital: “Militant trade unions … able to wrest some, or most, of the prerogatives of management from the unilateral disposition of managers” (Coates & Topham 1972: 61).