I’m Part Of The Union
After last week’s rail strikes in the UK, we now appear to be heading for a ‘Summer of Discontent’ as a number of other industries look to follow their lead. Unions are suddenly back in fashion, it seems.
The emerging star of the rail dispute has been their leader, Mick Lynch, who has marmalised several politicians and high-profile TV interviewers with his calm demeanour, clear arguments and witty take-downs of their questioning. He refuses to play their game or fall into their ham-fisted attempts to trap him into a ‘gotcha’ moment. “I’m just an ordinary working man representing my members”, he says.
It’s refreshing to hear a working class person on the TV these days and we naturally associate them with Unions. However, the other Unions moving towards action have a very different profile.
Barristers. Teachers. Doctors. GPs.
We don’t associate professional people with this sort of collective representation and action. Perhaps we should.
In the corporate world, unions are largely seen in a negative light (in the UK and US, at least). They are certainly not expected in the executive layers. Belonging to a union would be seen as a ‘career limiting act’ in most.
It goes further. Not only are we expected to negotiate our pay and conditions individually, there is considerable opacity around what everyone gets. In many organisations, discussing it is banned, revealing your own terms is a breach of contract.
Yet we are expected to collaborate, to work towards common goals, to ‘go the extra mile’, in the interests of the company. In our own interests? Not so much.
We are expected to work collectively but are rewarded for individual achievement. We are expected to be open and sharing for the benefit of the company but not for the benefit of ourselves. No wonder much of how we work is dysfunctional.
Perhaps if we encouraged collective representation we’d get more collaboration. Perhaps if we had open and transparent rewards systems, we’d have higher levels of trust.
What are the bosses scared of?
Power To The People
Unions arose in the late 1800s in response to the reliance by organisations on ‘Power Over’. That reliance still persists, even though most people are working in offices and not in factories or down mines.
The perception of management as ‘telling others what to do’ still dominates, even as it clearly fails to cope with the complexity and dynamism of today’s organisational reality. There is a need to move to a different form of power, one that frees people from the constraints of directive management and allows them to contribute their talents.
Today’s organisations need to use “Power With’, an idea that Mary Parker Follett came up with in the early 1900s. Follett saw the role of the leader as creating collective power within the group to enable collaboration, so releasing the potential of everyone.
Surely, some sort of collective representation would compliment this approach, building common cause and identity? Wouldn’t the transparency build trust and a sense of fairness, which would contribute to the cohesiveness of the group?
If the way forward is to give power to teams, as I believe it is, then perhaps that should extend to how they negotiate the rewards they get for their work.
If this seems a little radical and out-there for you, it’s worth looking at the German model. Not only is union representation seen as a positive thing, worker representation on the Operating Board is mandatory. This was put in place after the war by the occupying forces but largely created by the British. It has led to successful co-operation between management and employees and low levels of industrial disputes.
The British government wanted to put the same thing in place in the UK but could not get agreement from British Industrialists. Post-war Britain was blighted by industrial conflict, poor performance, lack of innovation and decay.
By the 1970s, Germany had emerged from reconstruction as a major industrial and economic power. The UK was known as ‘the sick man of Europe’.
You can draw your own conclusions.
Put Your Hands In The Air
Good though Union and worker representation may be, they are the products of the model of ‘Power Over’, part of the ‘them and us’, of ‘bosses and workers’, of oppositional interests and conflict. There are other ways of organising ourselves.
Frederic Laloux observed in ‘Reinventing Organisations’ that ‘the idea that a country’s economy would best be run by the heavy hand of central planning committees in Soviet style has been totally discredited. We all know that a free-market system where a myriad of players pick up on signals, make decisions, and coordinate among themselves works much better. Yet for some strange reason, inside organizations, we still trust the equivalent of central planning committees.”
Or to put it more succinctly, we have free-market economies and Stalinist organisations. Command-and-control, the reliance of ‘Power Over’, the idolatry of the ‘glorious CEO…er…I mean Leader’.
If freedom is such a virtue for markets, if it’s the bedrock of democracy, why isn’t it the organising principle in companies?
Well, for some, it is. Democratic organisations have been around since the early 1800s, although the Co-operative movement really emerged when the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers produced the ‘Rochdale Principles’ in 1844.
Sam Conniff argues in ‘Be More Pirate’ that the Co-operative movement was inspired by an even earlier example of democratic organisation - the Pirates of the Golden Age. The rules that they established through their Pirate Codes, on their ships and in their proto-republic in Nassau (in the Bahamas), included ‘one man, one vote’ and collective decision making.
Whilst we are seeing a devolving of power down to the employees and an increase in autonomy and self-organisation, there remains a divide between those at the top of the organisation and the rest of the workforce. This divide is not just in terms of power but also in terms of pay and remuneration and life experience - and this is a divide that is growing. COVID has made it clear that ‘the bosses’ live in a different world to the people they are supposed to be leading and are woefully out of touch.
I advocate for more self-management and autonomy but is that enough? Do we also need to work towards more equality of power and reward? Should organisations be moving towards more democratic structures rather than continue towards more centralised power and concentration of benefits at the top?
Can we consider the issues of power without also looking at the issues of democracy and representation?
We may joke that we are ‘wage slaves’ but, as my Dad used to like to say, there’s many a true words spoken in jest.
Get Up, Stand Up
Most moves towards to more progressive organisations require, as a starting point, that those at the top give away their power, to a greater or lesser degree. Now, I may be an optimist but I’m also a realist and I’ve seen things go in the opposite direction for most of my working life, so I’m not expecting a sudden reversal in that. Those now at the top have the collection of power and resources ingrained in them as a modus operandi, as natural as breathing.
That’s why I encourage people to have mutinies, to raise their Pirate flag and take the power for themselves. Actually, it’s more of a reclamation of the power that they have been conned into giving away or choosing not to exercise. Everyone has agency, they need to use it to change the circumstance for themselves and their colleagues. They need to use to it to make their work align with the values that guide them in the rest of their lives.
It’s already happening as employees unionise, as they come together around issues like Black Lives Matter, MeToo and inclusivity to pressure their organisations to change. It’s happening as they start internal campaigns around specific issues in their workplace, be that the removal of a senior executive due to unacceptable behaviour, or pushing back against ‘Return to Work’ mandates.
Corporate Activism is used to refer to corporations actively supporting social movements for change but what I am talking about here is Activism IN Corporates.
The general attitude is that if you don’t like what your organisation is doing, you can take your labour elsewhere but it’s not as simple as that. That’s not always an option and anyway, walking away is an acceptance of bad behaviour, an endorsement through silence. Why should people have to compromise their values in this way when what is happening is just wrong?
It’s time to stand up for your rights, to have your own mutinies and to claim the thing that Pirates craved more than anything - freedom.