I am a union staffer. I work for an organization, recognized under a legal code as a representative of workers’ interests. I am a negotiator, bargaining with management to write joint agreements. I am an advocate, campaigning for improved working conditions and higher wages. I am a politician, brokering deals, managing political support, selling policy. I am a counselor, offering advice and support, drying tears, referring to specialists. And I am a unionist, arguing with bosses, fighting discipline, seeking more money for less work against managers who seek more work for less money. I work in an environment of contradictions. But make no mistake about it – I work; I have a boss; and my job depends on my ability to serve the interests of that boss.
Yesterday I pulled a draft of an article on union staff – something I started a couple of years ago and never finished up. Lately, though, I have been going through a bit of academic revival, reading again and thinking theory again and feeling like I want to get back to using that part of my brain. And so, a partially-complete and reasonably coherent article seems a good place to start. It’s largely based on two things: my introduction the the union/ union staff class dynamic back when I was an activist with the Telecommunications Workers Union when staff there struck, and a bunch of interviews I conducted when I was working on my Ph.D. – interviews with union staff who had struck their union offices, about the conflicting identities they work with and all-too-frequent tendency of union organizations to engage in the very worst of boss behaviour internally.
I’m looking forward to doing some more work on this, cause the union staffperson does, I think, embody alot of the contradictions and challenges of the union movement overall, and the tensions between staff and union executives go a long way to revealing the tensions that arise when any such movement becomes a more formal organization embedded in a legal system. Not to say that the professionalization of labour has been a wholly-negative phenomenon, or a wholesale sell-out – such characterizations are far too simplistic, and miss the fact that organizations become professionalized precisely because of their successes, bureaucratization and daily efficacy often two sides of the very same development. But it’s complicated, and contradictory, and has the potential to teach us alot about how we organize, the opportunities and pitfalls opened by various choices, and the very difficult work of unpacking the many competing roles that mainstream workers’ organizations play.
So, it’s exciting to be getting back to some brain-work, and continuing the process of sorting out, for myself, the dynamics of my job. A job that tends to be occupied by people who started out as activists and somehow found a way to get paid for that work. People who are often the most critical of mainstream labour even as we work, on a day to day basis, to protect and expand mainstream labour.
I represent people who work for a living against their bosses. I work for a movement whose fundamental premise – however buried beneath organization and opportunism – is still the need to organize workers against capital. On some level, unions do still play that role, however poorly or half-assedly. But as a worker myself, as professional staff, as organizational representative? There, in my work-life, I am not part of a working class movement. I am not, in my work-life, charged with organizing against capital. I work as one small part of a regime designed to maintain, if not increase, productivity, to satisfy workers’ immediate and specific demands, and to both satisfy and dampen their long-term and general aspirations. I serve labour peace, industrial calm, and social good citizenship. My office is a workplace like any other, in which we as employees give up our skills, our experience, and our labour to an employer who directs that labour in its interest. In return, I get a salary, a pension, benefits. It’s not a bad job, as jobs go. But make no mistake – it’s a job. And I am looking forward to subjecting it to a little more analysis.
