Maverick Citizen: Transitional Compass 2: ‘The end of labour’? Revisiting the past to understand the future By Eddie Webster
August analysts like to declare that “labour has come to an end”. The dramatic changes in the world of work, they say, has undermined the bargaining power of labour, making trade unions redundant.“The end of Unions?”
But, side by side with the decline of the craft union, labour in the US was about to experience its most dramatic upsurge. The emergence of the assembly line technologically linking together the factory’s workforce – so that when the line stopped every worker necessarily joined – gave these semi-skilled workers a new source of power. A different kind of trade union – the shop-floor based industrial union – was emerging.
Ironically, in my research in the 1980s on foundry workers on the East Rand , I found that the racialised nature of the apartheid state facilitated the organisation of black workers. Housing large numbers of migrant workers in single-sex hostels with a common set of grievances made organisation into the new industrial unions much easier.
Although the rise of a democratic state has created new opportunities for strengthening union rights, the changing employment relationship into nine different employers in our case study of Heinemann Breweries has redivided workers on the shop floor and weakened their workplace bargaining power.
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