Chapter 3: Solidarity Bargaining
Part I. Defining the thing.
Defining solidarity bargaining
The solidarity wedge begins with solidarity bargaining. As Ursula Le Guin wrote “[l]ight is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light”. A concept is defined by both its positive and negative attributes, and so it goes with solidarity bargaining. To properly define it, it is also necessary to set out what it is not.
As such, it is not a short cut for the hard work of organising a union. It is not a way around the struggle. It is neither a replacement for the necessity of organising deep and thick bonds between workers in the workplace nor a way of avoiding an analysis of, and proactive organising campaigns in, sites of strategic worker leverage within the economy as it is presently constituted, from logistics nodes to sites of necessary social reproduction.
Rather, solidarity bargaining is a means through which such struggles can be connected with each other and the broader working class in relations of solidarity. Solidarity is the way union workers stand up for the working class as a whole, and in doing so more and more of the working class stands up.
It connects, not displaces, particular and localised worker struggles.
Solidarity in bargaining
Solidarity, as previously elaborated, is a two-way street. When workers stand up for each other, they can win improvements and build their own power. But beyond that, their actions can strengthen workers’ standard of living and power in seemingly unrelated workplaces and industries.
Through solidarity, workers are invited to both benefit from the agency of other workers and to stand up themselves — it’s why solidarity goes both ways. Solidarity is a mutual and collective recognition of interdependence and a common humanity.
Solidarity bargaining is a universal invitation to the wider working class to join already organised and militant segments of workers and together build the power to win ambitious and necessary changes to our lives. With enough solidarity, workers can again collectively make history.
Solidarity bargaining, therefore, is a strategy to critically engage with actually existing collective bargaining and labour law regimes with a view to expanding and deepening relations of solidarity across as much of the working class as possible within a given political community.
A concrete example of such solidarity at work in industrial organising can be found in the 2023 United Auto Workers (UAW) stand-up strike against the Big Three US auto manufacturers — Ford, Stellantis (formerly Chrysler), and General Motors. In fact, October 30, 2023 might go down in history as the day when solidarity bargaining was born.
Thanks to rolling stand-up strike actions, in which workers took staggered strike actions at successive plants, tens of thousands of members of the UAW working for the Big Three US automotive manufacturers won transformative concessions. These included significant wage increases, life-changing provisions for labour hire workers, and the inclusion of new electric vehicle plants into the master contracts. UAW members also won the right for workers to strike to protect their job security during the life of the contract.
As impressive as these achievements are, however, there’s another element of the UAW strike that may prove transformative for the international labour movement. In addition to improvements to their rights and conditions, US auto workers ensured that their agreements governing the Big Three will all expire on April 30, 2028. That is, on the day before May Day 2028, a new round of struggle will open for auto workers in the middle of the US Presidential election campaign. The UAW also issued an open-ended invitation to the broader US union movement to organise the expiry of their contracts for the same time. This is a big win that both lays the basis for expanded industrial power and invites workers and unions across the United States to demand similarly aligned contract expiry dates.
If other unions and workers take the opportunity, it means that May Day 2028 could see a strike wave of historic significance at a point when American political democracy is as otherwise dead as Lazarus. If solidarity bargaining becomes a dominant industrial strategy across multiple nations, international worker solidarity becomes, once again, a material reality in the streets.
There is nothing new about workers striking together on May Day. It was a day born from workers striking for an eight-hour day. Workers’ struggle is the very genesis of May Day, and there’s a rich history of strikes and protests timed to coincide with it. It’s also not new for unions to line up contracts to expire simultaneously years in advance. But what is new is calling on other unions on mass to follow suit in order to generalise bargaining and industrial action beyond one union. This was the UAW’s historic move.
By laying the groundwork for broader and deeper strikes, ideally drawing in new groups of workers organising, it builds the potential for a class-wide impact. That’s solidarity bargaining. In short, it’s a strategy that uses collective bargaining rounds at previously disconnected workplaces to prepare for struggles that can draw in broader and broader sections of the working class.
It is a strategy designed to precarious post-neoliberal state of the union movements across the neoliberal world and build them up, once more, into engines of international solidarity. One, therefore, should always be open to ways in which the development of workers themselves are ready to make such a proactive strategy redundant.
This post is located within the third chapter within the second of three parts for the overall project. Part Two is Solidarity within Wage Labour and outlines a strategy to nurture solidarity between workers within the wage labour relation as it currently exists. Use the about page to locate where you are in this broader project.