Great @workersliberty London public forum on the 1980-1 Polish workers’ uprising against the Stalinist state tonight. I’m thinking about their practise of broadcasting negotiations with bosses live, across workplace tannoys, to workers in the occupied shipyard...
...relative to the culture of our labour movement, this seems absolutely fantastical to most of us. Our culture is largely one within which negotiations are a technocratic specialism, sometimes done by people who aren’t even elected, with the mass membership of the union >
< reduced to a kind of stage army, whose role is to provide a bargaining chip for the negotiators, who are the ones ultimately calling the shots. That’s hyperbolic, and varies from union to union, but most union activists will probably recognise *some* element of that picture.
How could we do it differently? Broadcasting negotiations, live, to an occupied workplace requires certain conditions to be in place, but there’s no reason we couldn’t replicate the spirit informing that approach...
... i.e., the negotiators are directly accountable to the mass membership, their role is to express demands formulated on the shop floor, and we decide what they say and do - and therefore need total transparency in order to hold them to account.
I’m not suggesting for a second that union negotiators are going into talks with the conscious intention, or even the subconscious intention, of stitching up the membership. But the operating principle of democratic trade unionism should be to continually reduce, in every >
< possible sense, the distance between union structure, officials, and activity, and the membership of the union, at the point of production - i.e., the workplace. Negotiations that rank-and-file members can either attend, or watch/listen to, is part of that.
We don’t even have to look to periods of an extremely high pitch of struggles for examples of this. Some US unions do contract bargaining in public forums, which union members can attend.
Obviously for this to work, both sides have to agree. The Polish party/state bosses agreed in 1980 because they were faced with a mass workers’ uprising that threatened their power. They had no choice. Sadly our bosses aren’t under the same pressure today.
But we should still look for ways to build that spirit of maximum rank-and-file participation, mass democracy, and accountability into the ways in which our unions operate and conduct disputes.
Would be particularly keen to hear the thoughts of UCU comrades on whether any elements of this spirit could be advanced in their current dispute. @cath_fletcher @dejdavisonvec @drrhianelinor @mike4ucu @jack_saundrs @dr_camila_bassi @SaraMarzagora @drjordansavage
