Jon Las Heras (@jonlhc) & Lluís Rodríguez (@lluisraeco), political economists and members of the Institute of Economics and Self-Management.
Is capitalism built through class oppression? Of course. Although it
seems that as we keep talking about how things are so bad, even, about
how worse they are getting with the rise of proto-fascist governments
across the world – despite all these (new?) phenomena – it is obvious
that nothing is really changing, or at least in our favor. To such
pessimist answer, we should dare to make a provocative extension and
state the following: yes, capitalism is disgustingly built by putting us
against each other but WITH OUR INVOLVEMENT, with us being necessary
accomplices of its hegemony and of its ugly transformation.
To our mind, we need to start changing our object of attention and acknowledge that capitalism is ALSO the expression of labor’s incapacity to organize and strike back effectively. We should be more self-critical, which does not mean self-destructive and start trying new things. Don’t you feel we have had enough of compassion and that it is already the time for a recalcitrant dose of strategic realism? But when we talk about new “things”, new “methods”, we are not talking about “original” or “utterly new” forms of class struggle – as some may prefer to believe they do exist outside history –, but instead we conceive them as basic forms of class organization and solidarity that perhaps, in the right context and dose, can unfold a set of new events that surface underlying contradictions. To our mind, as it stands now, right-wing class movements are making “goals” while the radical-left remains in a sort of state of confusion, an impasse, in which the time is running against us.
In such apparently gloomy landscape, and after seeing how European
workers and class organizations have not managed to build effective
transnational solidarity structures and discourses to counter-fight
austerity and neoliberal regulation since 2008, a little country –
Euskal Herria – in the Spanish state has provided us with renewed hopes.
But these are not hopes of the kind in which the world is going to
change to the much better very soon, but more realistically, that from
the standpoint of an average Basque worker, there are some few things
that one can do in order to make a step forward, no matter how small,
but still, a step forward. A sort of successful incursion in a context
of guerrilla-warfare perhaps?
More concretely, Euskal Langileen Alkartasuna (ELA), the largest and most representative
trade union in the Basque Country, is a class organisation that, and
from a position of ‘counter-power’, has sought to build organisational
strength vis-à-vis the employers, the government and conservative
unions, through the empowerment of its rank-and-file, predominantly, in
collective bargaining and industrial conflict processes. Since the
mid-1990s it opted to leave aside the historical turn that the rest of
social-democratic unions were taking across the western world: to change
from a position that seeks greater working conditions to that of
conformism and micro-corporatism. A corporatist logic makes us think
that the worse is to come and yet that it is better not to trigger the
conflict, so we buy-into the enemy’s discourse and believe that by
lowering the standards may be the explosion will put off. Ironically,
such very strategy undermines all the conditions that once were gained
and, at the same time, makes such actors to the eyes of the rest as
accomplices of the course of history.
ELA has bet on gaining both political and financial autonomy
(around 93% of its expenditures are self-covered) in order to be
capable of setting some ‘red-lines’ that the rest of big unions are
currently incapable of setting: not signing dual-wage-scales, not
signing working-time and workload increases, not fostering calendar
flexibility, not signing vacuous sector agreements that are not likely
to be implemented at the workplace, and establishing new alliances with
more confrontational unions and social organisations among other things.
Or put it differently, this union has gained political and
organizational autonomy and strength by rejecting social dialogue with
the government and other conservative unions in order to establish a
‘counter-power’ strategy that seeks to protect and organize the whole
Basque working class in and through their organization.
ELA has 100.000 members but it organizes just less than 10% of all
the strikes taking place within the Spanish state (60 out of 600-800 per
year approx.), and in the last years it has managed to organize,
overall, more strikes than the second largest social-democratic trade
union in Spain (Union General de Trabajadores, UGT) which has 10 times
more affiliates than ELA. Moreover, the scope of action of the Basque
union is smaller, i.e. the Basque Country only represents less than a 5%
of the Spanish workforce, and this union only represents one-third of
all Basque unionized workers. In other words, this union is the main
force behind the fact that the Basque Country hosted 36% of all the
strikes taking place in Spain between 2000-2017. This concretizes also
in the statistical fact that a worker engaging in a strike organised by
ELA loses at least 7 days more for every day lost by a strike organized
by UGT. Therefore, and taking into consideration that Spain is already
supposed to be one of the most conflictive countries in Europe, this
Basque union is playing very tough.
After a decade of economic crisis and fiscal austerity, the trade union has maintained the pulse and not given up. In 2018 the number of strikes organized by ELA has augmented 81%.
However, these have not sought to protect and empower ‘core-workers’
but rather more ‘precarious’ or ‘subaltern’ ones, expanding the horizons
of class solidarity. For example, the longest and most visible strikes
have occurred in feminized and racialized sectors such as in
elder-caring-residences, hotel cleaning-services, publicly subcontracted
cleaning-services, publicly-subcontracted school-restaurants or
publicly subcontracted museum services. That is, in almost all those
economic activities that should be incorporated within the
responsibilities of what once was labeled as a social-democratic
capitalist state. ELA is denouncing the neoliberal patriarchal state and
is striking back to transform its regressive roots.
But how can we explain this? And leaving aside that the second largest union in the Basque Country, Langile Abertzaleen Batzordeak (LAB), has also various decades of grass-roots mobilization and social movement history? Well, we conceive that the strike-fund has a lot to do with this. Three examples, which are becoming the norm rather than a rarity, might be interesting to consider succinctly:
1. In 2016, after 41 days of complete indefinite strike, workers at the museum of fine arts of Bilbao
managed to: raise their gross-wages more than 100%, by increasing their
base-salary from 10.400€ to 20.500€ and recognising their seniority
(trienios); introduce a subrogation clause in the collective agreement
so that the modification of the license between the government and the
subcontractor would not suppose any lay-off; and to block the company
from reducing salaries or working conditions in case of financial stress
that the 2012 labour reform permits. According to one syndicalist: “We
are a very small collective who was confronted a large multinational
company like ManPower Group Solutions and to the three largest public
institutions in the territory […] Despite the numerous problems, we have
also discovered ourselves, and that is the most important: that we have
discovered the power of unity”.
2. This year, after another 41-day strike that started the 1st of February and finished the 12th of March, 38 workers of a manufacturing company in Navarra
managed to secure a collective agreement that would: increase salaries
more than 10% by recognizing night-shifts, seniority, inflation and so
on; reduce 24 working hours during the first year and would prohibit to
work on Sundays; reduce calendar flexibility so that workers can plan
and organize their holidays and reproductive-life better; and block the
implementation of the 2012 labour reform that bestows companies
sufficient power to modify working conditions discretionally.
3. Last year, after 40-days striking and protesting in the city
center of Bilbao, starting the 2nd of November and finished the 12th of
December, the room-service and cleaners of two multinational hotels
managed to improve their salaries and working conditions substantially:
an increase of 54% of their basic salary in less than two years (from
13.000€ to 20.000€), thus, equalising their salaries and other working
conditions (reduction of working time and flexibility) to what actually
establishes the regional agreement on the hotel industry; the
reincorporation of those strikers who had been laid-off or whose
contract had expired during the strike.
According to the latest data published for its militancy (Landeia, February 2019),
ELA starts using the strike-fund in strikes of a duration of more than
three days, and it comfortably exceeds the Minimum Wage for the
commitment that the fund should cover at least 105% of the legal
minimum. The amounts for the year 2019 are the following: (1) the
“regular fund” of €1,102.50 per month (£951.25); (2) a “reinforced fund”
of +15%, that is €1267'87 per month (£1,093.93), for those companies
in which at least 35% of the staff is affiliated to ELA; and (3) the
“strategic fund” for those strikes and sectors considered to be
strategic, and in which the support can reach up to €2,205.00 per month
(£1,902.5). In any case, the cash compensation may never exceed the
monthly net salary, including extraordinary payments.
Having a strike-fund of this type is only possible thanks to a high
union fee (€21'77 per month, £18.78 per month; the highest within the
Spanish state), and because the union allocates 25% of their union fees
to the strike-fund, that is around £5 per month. This high quota
supports the financial autonomy of the union (it self-finances more than
94.44% of its activity), and allows ELA not to depend on external
revenues such as state subsidies. This financial autonomy provides, and
unlike other unions tied to the financing of social dialogue, the
necessary political autonomy to confront both government and employers.
The combative orientation of trade union policy, political autonomy and
collective bargaining, and financial autonomy together with the use of
the strike-fund, define the union model of ELA that has no comparative
references at European level.
After doing sociological and historical research on industrial
conflict and the restructuring of collective bargaining in the Basque
Country, Catalonia and the rest of Spain, the two authors of this text
have come to the conclusion that the use of a strike-fund is a
(relatively simple) organizational mechanism that can empower workers in
two forms. On the one hand, it empowers workers “democratically” or
“from below”, as the use of strike-funds can only become operationalized
through the active intervention, organization and mobilization of the
rank-and-file at various spatial scales, predominantly the workplace,
but not only. On the other hand, we have also realised that the
strike-fund does also empower the working class “strategically” or
“collectively”, as it simultaneously amplifies the room for maneuver of a
class organization (the union), and crystalizes the effectiveness of
its (democratic?) leadership through the transformation of history and
by gaining social support.
Taking into consideration all the discussed above, the appropriate
strategic question is the following one: if a strike-fund appears to be
an organizational instrument that can help workers to improve
considerably their working conditions at the workplace and enhance their
class power collectively, why are not other trade unions making use of
it too? Why are not trade unions that consider themselves to be
revolutionary not using it systematically, in order to enhance the
collective solidarity of its membership? Or is it that revolutionary
unions are achieving similar victories with the use of other tools and
forms of class struggle? We dare to advance two responses: (1) or we
are not giving to collective bargaining and to the conditions that are
established through daily-life class struggle the centrality they
deserve, because collective bargaining is not interesting at all for its
reformist horizon, and then why to make out our disposal any instrument
for it; or (2) in a cost-benefit analysis a union realizes that it has
unsolvable difficulties in its management.
No matter how superficial this may look to revolutionary praxis, we
believe that refusing to assimilate effective organizational instruments
in the triggering of (no matter how partial and limited) class
struggles is to condemn revolutionary syndicalism to the irrelevance,
both within trade unionism and class politics. We consider far more
dangerous to wait for the emergence and spread of revolutionary
class-organizations out from any historical praxis, resorting to ‘purer’
proclaim than to try to understand the actual contradictions of our own
historically grounded collective power and forms of class
consciousness. The fact that we have still no clue on how to make the
revolution and on how a socialist or communist society may look like
should not impede us from committing more accurate mistakes. From such
reading, and in a context of pervading structural disempowerment, we
argue that wielding the dilemmas of a strike- in order to both
strengthen solidarity ties between already-union-members and expand them
beyond, to those workers who may start seeing syndicalism a
possibility. It is here where revolutionary-syndicalist (e.g. IWW) and
democratic-socialist projects (ala e.g. ELA) may converge, from a
heuristic process that confronts theory with praxis – a process which
understands ideology and collective forms of class action as two sides
of the same incomplete process – so that social emancipation may become
not just a mere speculation but a historical truth.
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