Introduction Part IV

Global warming, the limits of possibility, and the universal

This post is part of an ongoing series forming The Solidarity Wedge. Introduction Part III can be found here. Use the about section of this publication to find other installments.

This update follows on from the previous post, and continues setting out the central observations and assumptions the solidarity wedge rests on.

"Soon I will rest" by GollyGforce - Living My Worst Nightmare is licensed under CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/?ref=openverse.

Global warming

The climate crisis is here. The very enormity of this rift in the systems supporting life means that it is a feature of the field of class struggle which simply cannot be ignored. In fact, global warming’s intensity is a reflection of the relatively acute subjugation of workers under capital’s dominant logic.

I have often joked that dealing with the climate crisis would have been a lot easier in the early 1970s Australia compared with the 2020s.¹ In facing a climate of deteriorating stability, extreme weather events and a technological transition across multiple energy systems that all ends up to a systemic level threat where the cost is chiefly born by workers, the Australian union movement would have likely called a series of strikes, and forced the negotiation of a social democratic settlement in Canberra.

The relative weakness and precarity of workers, in other words, is itself a barrier to implementing effective climate policy. In 2019, Camila Alvarez, Julius McGee and Richard York published the results of their research into the relationship between unionisation (measured on a density basis) and CO2 emissions per capita in Nature and Culture. The authors found that even when controlling for relative differences in labour conditions across countries, unionisation promotes better climate outcomes at a national level.

There is thus a two-way flow to the strategic relationship between the revival of workers organising and the climate crisis. In one direction, a renaissance of workers organising and taking action is a precondition for ambitious and meaningful climate action that matches the scale of the crisis.

In the other direction, no meaningful strategy for restoring workers’ sense of collective responsibility can ignore the daily experience of global warming, climate disasters and the way in which the elite attempt to shift those costs onto workers. The exploitation of people and planet are merely two sides of the same capitalist coin.

The scale of bargaining and organising shapes the limits of possibility

In the absence of mass critical education the scale of worker bargaining and organising shapes (not determines) the limits of possibility.² I took this lesson from thinking about the 60-year gap between the curtailing of the struggle for reduced working hours in the United States and Australia.

The fight for a reduced work week largely ceased in America with the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935. Yet in Australia, regular wins in the reduction of the working week occurred through to the early 1990s and largely (but not totally) ceased with the introduction of enterprise bargaining. Even as reductions to the working week spluttered in Australia, other countries such as France and Germany pushed through their own reductions down to 35 hours and 28 hours in some cases.

Time is not only wrested back in the form of regular working hours but also paid days off. In the early 1930s neither American or Australian workers had a minimum universal right to paid time off. This remains the case for American workers today. Australian workers, however, progressively won more and more paid holiday time. In 1941, workers generally won the right to one week off. In 1945, this became two weeks of annual leave, then three weeks in 1963 and finally four weeks in the early 1970s. Australia has only fallen behind better international standards since the 1990s as more European countries have shifted up to five weeks of paid holiday time and beyond.

This record of contrasting achievements and their absence as far as reclaiming time for workers to live their lives informs my view that the legal architecture of an industrial relations system influences workers’ perception of possibility. Moreover, bargaining on an enterprise by enterprise basis restrains workers from taking up broader social struggles and questions. In an age of crises where such struggles have existential implications, this is no small matter.

The tendency of decentralised bargaining to marginalise labour as a social actor is a problem which requires solving, and this is possible with a bargaining strategy that starts within the system as it exists but has a critical stance to such a system. The aim of such a strategy is to create the social conditions conducive for a new and better labour relations regime. This relies on finding a way to assert the independence, cooperation and agency of labour within a system that is actively hostile to its assertion of humanity.

The universal and the total

This newsletter is essentially a consideration of the necessity, urgency and practicalities of nurturing relations of solidarity both within and beyond wage labour. In shaping a strategy like the solidarity wedge that has the aim of universal relevance to workers in a given political community, it is my responsibility to have some conception of universality especially as it applies to diversity of experiences within a social class.

I am not seeking to assert the primacy or dominance of either class or workplace solidarity in the daily experiences of every worker. Oppression takes many forms and solidarity can spring forth wherever people relate to each other as people. For solidarity occurs whenever people recognise their common humanity despite dominant relations of commodification and objectification. Humanity is more than its commodified labour, and class domination is a cramped prison for the soul. Class is a common thread that connects our experiences but does not define who we are.

My strategic analysis, therefore, rests on the universal relevance of class, and the necessity of workplace solidarity taking hold.

Universality, in this respect, should not be confused with totality. The strategies outlined in this newsletter should not be read as a total program of activity. This holds both for questions of gender, sexuality, race and other human attributes (which are central to the actual lived class experience), and also to experiences of workplace organising and claims.

In short, the way in which I use universal in the posts to follow is in the sense that the strategy for action seeks to start with each worker’s common experience of economic precarity without asserting that the entirety of any worker’s experience is reducible to this issue or precluding action on other issues.

1. Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything (2015) has a detailed discussion on the breakdown of the social democratic settlement and its negative impact on effective climate policy.

2. I’m suggesting that this is more of a tendency capable of being subsumed by the will of an organised workforce rather than an iron law of history.