Hell is Other Workers

Hell is other people.

                        -- Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit.

Within the Canadian labour movement it is axiomatic that the worker is never wrong. This is true even in cases where there is conflict between union members with no involvement by management at all. For example, if an employee alleges that she has been harassed by a co-worker it is their employer that the union will act against, grieving that a workplace where such misconduct can occur is not being run properly. Furthermore, should management then move against the accused the union will represent and defend him in any ensuing disciplinary process.

Recently, for a period of more than two years, I held office in the local union of the blue-collar workers at a Nova Scotian university. During that time I had direct knowledge of dozens of workplace disputes. In the large majority of these instances workers were ranged against one another, but even in those cases where management had some part, typically it was a worker who was at fault.

For those not blinkered or blinded by union dogma, this finding will not be surprising. I am a custodian (i.e., a janitor). My job is unpleasant, socially stigmatized, and not very well remunerated. It is an occupation that scarcely anyone would choose to take up if any decent alternatives were available. It is only to be expected that people in this line of work will become frustrated with their jobs and consequently will misbehave. Sadly, more often than not it is their workmates that they will mistreat, partly because they spend more time with them than with management, partly because a fellow employee is an easier target than a supervisor.

This is a reality that is studiously ignored by organized labour. This is no accident. The framework of contemporary industrial relations has survived largely intact from the 1940s when the Canadian government passed legislation that defined the role and powers of unions. In return for mandatory recognition in the workplace and an automatic dues checkoff, unions agreed to the suppression of all job action except for that sanctioned by the state (and, as amply illustrated by Stephen Harper, the state reserves the right to reduce even this sphere of activity at its pleasure).

This historic capitulation contributed in two ways to the rise of the doctrine of worker infallibility. To start with, it is built into the dispute resolution system itself. The grievance mechanism is an adversarial juridical process that takes court proceedings as a template. As such it encourages a given party to always maintain in the first instance that a disputant's position is utterly without merit.

The second connection is that the dogma nicely suits the institutional requirements of the soi-disant House of Labour (the self-regarding name that Canada's mainstream union bureaucracy gives itself). Faced with the task of justifying their role as the mediator between employees and bosses, unions offer their members the fiction of the irreproachable worker as a sop: to compensate for their practical impotence, the rank and file are fobbed off with the consolatium of an ostensible moral superiority. After all, it is only those with no power who are totally innocent...

There is more than one way in which the doctrine of union member infallibility actually undermines the working class as it confronts capital at the present conjuncture. To begin with, it is infantilizing. To say that whatever goes wrong in the workplace -- even one worker assaulting another -- is always the fault of the employer is to accord superhuman status to supervisory personnel.

This approach teaches workers that they are powerless to improve their own working conditions and instead must rely on the labour bureaucracy to pressure management into doing this for them. As it is, workers today are only too likely to conceive of their union as something separate from themselves. The rank and file remit their union dues and in return they expect value for their money from union officials. Members see themselves as consumers and unions as service providers. Here, the customer is always right and the worker is never wrong.

One reason for this is that people's relation to all of the other major institutions in our society, be they governmental or corporate, is variously that of client or of servant. Either one pays for a service -- with taxes or fees, as the case may be -- or one takes orders as an interchangeable cog in the machinery of enterprise. The doctrine of worker infallibility reinforces this mindset with the immediate practical consequence that it renders intractable many problems that might admit of a solution were they appropriately addressed.

If demobilization of the rank and file is one consequence of this dogma, disaffection is another. At the university where I work, my fellow custodians know perfectly well that it is far more common for their workmates to abuse the system than it is for management to discipline staff unfairly or arbitrarily.

A striking example of such disaffection in my Local was revealed during a recent round of contract negotiations. A clause in the Local's collective agreement stated that management could terminate a worker's employment summarily and without possibility of appeal simply by showing that he had committed one of several listed infractions (e.g., being intoxicated on the job). In other words, the collective agreement effectively gave the employer carte blanche to fire anyone; even non-unionized workers have greater protection than this under Canadian law! Yet when the union leadership suggested that we attempt to have this article struck in collective bargaining the membership were opposed.

My immediate reaction was one of incomprehension: I simply couldn't imagine why my co-workers would want to retain a measure that denied them any job security whatsoever. However, once they explained their rationale it did make a sad sort of sense. In brief, the workers trusted management not to give anyone the sack without just cause but they did not trust the union to show discretion in determining which dismissed workers to support. The members feared that the union would use sophistical arguments and procedural prestidigitation to achieve the reinstatement of rogue employees.

No doubt this mindset stemmed in part from the law and order mentality that gives rises to sentiments such as: "Obviously he's guilty or why would the cops have arrested him?" and "You don't have to fear surveillance if you haven't done anything wrong." However, there was also justification for it at the level of experience. In my bargaining unit of 325 workers only a handful have been dismissed over the past decade and in each case the firing was amply justified.

On the other hand, to cite one example, my union's lawyer recommended contesting a dismissal on the grounds that addiction is a prohibited ground of discrimination under provincial human rights legislation and the fired worker was covered by this clause since he was a marijuana smoker. This employee had been dismissed after it was conclusively shown that he had stolen from his fellow custodians on numerous occasions. He had long been under suspicion by both the employer and his own co-workers and was caught after security measures were put in place specifically to monitor him. Needless to say, the people who worked with him were outraged at the thought that he might be re-hired.

In a separate instance a custodian was fired after repeatedly violating the university's sexual harassment policy over a period of some years. In the incident that finally led to his ouster the complainant decided against pressing criminal charges only after being assured that the offender's employment would be terminated. Here too the union considered trying to force the university to rehire the custodian by alleging discrimination on grounds of disability (the basis of this being a note provided by the custodian stating that he had been diagnosed with a mild personality disorder).

This is not to argue that neither of these men deserved help -- though surely the time when that could have been most useful to them was before their behaviour escalated to the point that the employer felt obliged to fire them. Be that as it may, the main point is that the union extended no consideration at all to those victimized by these workers, even when those affected were also union members. Small wonder then that many amongst the rank and file feel that unions only serve the interests of free riders.

Similar attitudes are generated in the non-unionized working population as well. While the majority of unorganized workers recognize that they would be likely to benefit personally from union representation this does not mean that they are sympathetic to the struggles of workers who are already unionized. A principal reason for this is that unorganized workers resent the unions' insistence that their own members are without fault. Since most people would acknowledge that they (or at any rate their workmates) are fallible, they understand that this union dogma functions as a means to distinguish those worthy workers within the House of Labour from the ruck without.

The same mentality comes into play in contract negotiations. In collective bargaining a union will introduce all manner of examples to show that its members are paid less than a comparable group in some other workplace, but never will the union admit the relevance of instances where its members receive more than their counterparts elsewhere. Furthermore, that a union might ever ask if its members are already adequately remunerated in reference to a more or less objective standard -- e.g., a multiple of Statistics Canada's Low Income Cutoff -- is simply unthinkable. For the unions the question is not whether, say, $100,000 per annum (a fairly standard salary for tenured professors at the university where I work) is enough to live on; instead they ask whether other workers in the same classification at a similar institution receive still more. This bullish approach to wages is a major reason why unorganized workers are so often antipathetic to unionized employees who strike, particularly when the main issues are monetary.

Under the current industrial relations regime the average employee, whether unionized or not, is more harmed than helped by the principle that the worker can do no wrong. The doctrine, moreover, has the additional pernicious effect of stymieing any tendencies towards radical systemic change.

When an employee is cited for an infraction of workplace rules the inevitable first reaction from her union is to aver that the worker did not commit whatever offence she stands accused of. If the facts are too damning to be denied the union will often shift to arguing that the employee's misconduct was due to some form of personal stress, or that her workplace was not being managed properly. What the union will under no circumstance acknowledge is that working under capitalism is ipso facto an affront to our humanity and thus it is only to be expected that workers in a capitalist system will resist this degradation (however unconsciously) by flouting the rules of their employment.

There is no more central insight in Marx's thought than that, under capitalism, "the product of labor is alienation, production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation." [Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844] While any given instance of refractory behaviour in the workplace may be attributable to some more immediate trigger, in the final analysis capitalist relations of production themselves suffice to account for worker misconduct.

To be sure, the enervating effects of the capitalist mode of production will make themselves felt differentially according to the specific conditions of a given workplace and type of employment. Marx noted that capitalist manufacture "converts the labourer into a crippled monstrosity, by forcing his detail dexterity at the expense of a world of productive capabilities and instincts." [Capital] From Marx's era and through much of the 20th century this was most clearly seen in Taylorist assembly line production.

With the Canadian economy's ongoing trend towards "dematerialization" the paradigmatic case today might well be the service industry and, in particular, the fast food sector. Here staff are trained to ready and present their wares in the same undeviating order and fashion for each transaction, all the while having their exertions timed by management. In jobs like these, normal operations suffice to leave workers disgusted with their occupation. Having a tyrannical supervisor can certainly add to an employee's misery but it is unnecessary to explain it. Worse yet, the nature of the work is such that even the most competent and well-intentioned manager can only make the job less intolerable; she can do nothing dissolve its fundamentally alienating character.

Of course, it is not true that all workers hate their jobs. Even now there remain occupations, particularly professional ones, where employees enjoy significant autonomy and are relatively free to exercise their creative abilities, and there are some individuals employed in the most wretched of jobs who nonetheless derive satisfaction from their work. Nor is this is to suggest that those workers who are dissatisfied will be aware that capitalism is the ultimate cause of their malaise and is what leads them to violate the rules of the workplace. Indeed, if that were the case then it could be expected that they would also recognize that acts of petty rebellion are generally self-defeating and that they should instead concentrate their energies on organizing for change.

This false consciousness is in significant part what makes organized labour's doctrine of worker infallibility so infuriating. The unions, instead of helping their members understand that the degradation of labour is at the very core of our political economy, and that employee misconduct is a natural and predictable (though profoundly misguided) consequence of this, take note only of proximate causes.

Yet it is not enough for the unions to conjure away Marx's embarrassing recognition that, under the capitalist mode of production, "man's own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him." [The German Ideology] The House of Labour also finds it necessary to obscure the fact that the specialization of labour under capitalism requires some workers -- indeed, the great majority -- to take jobs which by their very nature entail unpleasant working conditions. So the unions are quick to assure workers that all occupations are of like worth instead of acknowledging that there is something profoundly wrong with a society that condemns certain people to perform nasty, boring, repetitive and often dangerous tasks while others have safe and stimulating employment.

Since, ex hypothesi, one job is as good as another and the worker can never be wrong, any problems in the workplace must be due to poor management. It is no coincidence that this suits the union bureaucracy down to the ground. There is no better way for the chief executives of the House of Labour to ingratiate themselves with capital and the state than to keep workers from recognizing that capitalism is intolerable and irredeemable. By pretending that action at the level of the individual workplace -- or even of the individual worker -- is all that is needed to fix what is wrong with people's working lives the unions keep at bay any impetus for systemic change.

Curiously this ostensibly pragmatic approach not only forestalls revolutionary action but also makes it more difficult to resolve quotidian problems. For example, it helps no one when a union defends the conduct of an employee who has been reprimanded by management for abusing sick time. If the truant was to have been disciplined but is reprieved by the intervention of her union then all she thereby gains is the right to resume moiling under the same conditions that prompted her to skive off in the first place. This being the case it is only to be expected that she will remain as miserable as before and consequently will continue to absent herself on a regular basis. Meanwhile her co-workers will see their workloads concomitantly increased to make up for the shirker's malingering.

An alternative approach would be to enter into a candid discussion with the truant and her workmates about what is really involved in working under capitalism. By showing how the alienation of labour makes work odious the shirker's fellow employees could gain a sympathetic understanding of her absenteeism while at the same time causing her to recognize that no matter how many sick days she takes she won't feel any less miserable when she finally does go back to work. The whole group, including the erstwhile truant, could then determine collectively how to address the problem (e.g., they might decide to take it in turns to call in sick on days when this would cause least inconvenience to fellow workers).

While the union bureaucracy overall is likely too large, entrenched and self-serving to change radically there is no reason why activists at various levels of the labour movement cannot recognize that workers are not holy fools but fallible human beings exploited by an unjust system. By helping workers comprehend the true nature of our political economy we can at once prepare the way for revolutionary action and help them in concrete ways in their current struggles. And this is the key: by showing people how they can achieve a measure of dignity in the workplace here and now through understanding and acting upon a Marxist analysis of capitalism -- which is to say, through praxis -- we lay the patient groundwork for future revolution.