On the Role of the Trade Union

On the Role of the Trade Union

In bourgeois societies like ours, trade unions form the bridgehead of workers’ interests within corporations and companies.
A trade union is therefore the lobby of workers, which ideally has cross-sectoral action capability and fights here as a direct front against capitalists and their austerity policies.

Historically, trade unions have always served as an important instrument for workers in bourgeois societies to fight for better wages and working conditions.
In industrial struggles, all major milestones—such as the introduction of the 8-hour day and the 40-hour workweek, paid annual leave, protection against dismissal, women’s suffrage, or continued payment during illness—are rooted in the ambitions and organizational capacity of trade unions.
In the best case, a trade union can be the most important organizational tool to unite large numbers of workers behind a cause – because; protesting alone is ineffective.

Trade Unions in Bourgeois Societies

A bourgeois trade union only represents workers as permitted by capital.
It is true; through the freedom of coalition (Art. 9 Paragraph 3 of the Basic Law), every employee is allowed to organize unionically.
However, this is only allowed as long as the union does not attempt to act as a revolutionary force, and it remains what it is:
An instrument of the class compromise.
As a closed class compromise in the form of collective bargaining, capital agrees to raise workers’ reproductive costs (i.e., living expenses) just enough so they still show up for work the next day.
But a revolutionary act is certainly the uncompromising political measure that exists; to prevent the union from becoming such a revolutionary instrument, revolutionary actions are prohibited for unions.
For example, general strikes, i.e., strikes where workers in a region stop work across all sectors regardless of their specific employment, are de facto banned by bureaucratic hurdles in trade union law. (See: WF VI G – 3000-103/06)

“The ability of certain groups of employees to block central economic functions (“structural power,” see below), as well as the potential—fulfilled or not—to organize many people unionically, endows trade unions with a high degree of economic and political power at least in theory. For this reason, they are under special scrutiny by state authorities and employers. These institutions often either directly oppose, attempt to integrate, or co-opt trade unions.” (Frauke Banse, *Money for Trade Unions*, p.292)

In theory, trade unions hold the capacity to block key economic functions (structural power) and, with their (theoretically) immense potential for mass mobilization, almost monopolize the power over the actions of workers in bourgeois society.
Of course, capital can never be deprived of power (see storming of the Trade Union House on May 2, 1933) and ensures that the relationship between capital and labor, mediated by the union, always benefits capital.
For example, the DGB, which with 5,850,000 members hosts a significant portion of German trade unionists, has been represented since the 1960s in international union cooperations by the SPD-affiliated Friedrich Ebert Foundation, which former Federal President Roman Herzog called one of the “most effective and proven instruments of German foreign policy.”
Is this the clear dividing line between itself and the enemy?

Misconceptions about Trade Unions

The engagement with trade unions is also contradictory in that many leftists see them as revolutionary tools—although they are quite the opposite.
The new collective bargaining agreement, the new tariff contract, even the 40-hour week or current efforts like reforms to the citizen’s income—all are means by which capital keeps workers in their exploited and alienated state satisfied and sufficiently subdued so that they do not revolt.

Trade unions often serve as instruments of the ruling class, aiming to reach a compromise with workers that determines the absolute minimum they are willing to accept in terms of exploitation.
And this is not without arrogance; because when strikes occur, which are a right of union members to advance collective bargaining, the frustration of bourgeois media and their audience is directed not at the company but at the strikers.

The real power, even in the most intense worker struggles, lies with the employer, who can rely on the fact that no matter how long they make the strikers and fighters wait, public anger will never turn against them.
This anger towards the strikers is reproduced by bourgeois media and ingrained into everyday life.
Trade unions and those organized within them have no other choice; because without collective agreements, strikes, and legal avenues, workers in bourgeois society have nothing left—and everything they have fought for has been won by union members before them.

Trade unions can alleviate workers’ misery, improve conditions of exploitation—they can never end it—otherwise, it would not be enshrined in the Basic Law.
To quote Lenin (who, in turn, quotes Kautsky):
“The question can only stand as follows: bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle ground here (…). Therefore, any diminution of socialist ideology, any deviation from it, simultaneously strengthens bourgeois ideology. People speak of spontaneity. But the spontaneous development of the workers’ movement inevitably leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology; it proceeds according to the program of the Credo because spontaneous workers’ movement is trade unionism, mere union activity, but trade unionism is precisely the ideological enslavement of workers by the bourgeoisie.”
Merely union activity—this is the idea that a union without socialist ideology and clear class analysis is just a union, but can never be an emancipatory or revolutionary means.
Without a socialist tendency, the union will always serve as a tool of class compromise and subordination—subordinating workers’ interests to capitalists’ profit maximization.