I don’t know how many times I have been asked: “Why don’t young people join a union?” They hope that through me, a young trade unionist, they will find the definitive explanation, and the magic solution to this issue.
I have never not replied, although the replies vary depending on the starting point. If we take a market-based approach to the issue, for example, it seems logical that if people are joining the labour market later and later, they will also join a union later. Furthermore, we have also seen how, in this labour market, there has been a rise in short-term contracts, part-time work, mini-jobs and a high staff turnover, with the result that people do not identify with their job, and so nobody fights for their post or defends their rights.
Another reason could stem from the new realities of work. We are witnessing, first-hand, a change in labour relations. This change is being driven by technology, which is advancing at a faster pace than we can digest, and we are already suffering the consequences: the dizzying rate of change has overtaken us and the traditional structures (namely trade unions) that defend society’s interests and try to rebalance inequalities are just too slow to respond.
Technology is given as the excuse for this change, with its potential to increase, ultimately, the individualism and isolation of workers (the technology that came with the industrial revolution also brought with it new forms of organising, the birth of the labour movement and of the collective struggle for better rights). This new technology is producing exactly the opposite trend in the working class. Almost inevitably, the old organisations that were formed in response to the industrial revolution and whose struggle was based on collective action are no longer in a position, for multiple reasons, to continue in that role in this new phase.
Do we need a new Karl Marx, someone who by defending the values he is said to embody (Marx considered himself to be of the working class) opens our minds to a new way of thinking?
Masters of our own work?
Even worse is the philosophy governing work today, which seeks to make the working class believe we are the masters of our own work. But workers are not “masters” according to Marx’s greatest goal (an emancipated working class which owns of its own labour power). We are only “masters” in the neoliberal sense: one can ‘be your own boss’, ‘develop your own project’, we are told not to let anybody limit our capacity to work, with the idea that “nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week” (according to Tesla CEO Elon Musk). We have let this individualism and competitiveness get into our heads, every one of us, since we were very young, hence the lack of interest in the collective defence of our interests, or collective growth.
One of the principal causes for this lack of union membership or militancy is the failed system we find ourselves in. Young people in the developed world have grown up through a major economic crisis that has swept everything away with it. They know that, for the first time in history, a generation, their own, will experience worse living standards than the previous one, without this being triggered by warfare. And for this generation, which is my generation, the question is a simple one: why should we support an economic system that is leading to the destruction of our planet? Why should we allow a small minority to enjoy excessive wealth while for everyone else the situation is getting significantly worse?
In short, young people are not joining trade unions because they see unions as part of the problem. Every time we prop up this broken system that they hate, we lose credibility.
Every time we try to work towards social balance, we are playing the neoliberals’ game. And we play their game because in order to maintain this system, there has to be a counter force that exerts (or appears to exert) pressure. Every success of social democracy is perfectly measured. There hasn’t been a single victory by the working class in the last 60 years that has strayed from the path previously laid out by the neoliberals. Ultimately, we are their necessary evil; we are ‘leopards’ or gatopardistas, a concept from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 novel The Leopard, which encapsulates the philosophy that everything must change in order for it to stay the same.
Those who support tinkering around with the current system say things like, “what is different now is the way in which young people from around the world have risen up, around an idea as simple as it is necessary,” in response to the current climate protests. They comment on “the unusual and very individual leader [Greta Thunberg] who made a ground-breaking speech… which was so necessary! It’s high time that young people woke up, and furthermore, in such a perfectly ordered, quiet way”. Don’t believe any of it. The climate movement, like all others, is already perfectly measured, and neutralised, and moreover it has already had its economic benefits in return.
Behind this idea of self-organised platforms and 100 per cent horizontal structures lies the clear intention of dismantling and rapidly intervening in the movement. The more anonymous the leadership, the easier it is to control. We must reclaim structured organisations with recognisable and accountable leaders. We must reinvent them to make them really democratic and transparent, to ensure they serve the common interest – not the flawed organisations we have today. It is the only way to harness the generalised discontent and all the anti-system youth who demand change, and the anti-system youth who – without meaning to, without realising it – are ever more easily manipulated.
In short, we only have one way out, to break away from everything. We must break away from our role of propping up a broken system. We must look up, take in the lie of the land and be ambitious once more. No more propping up, no more reinventing the same system over and over again. Start from scratch, build the type of society we want and start believing in ourselves as the fundamental factor that will change everything so that, this time, nothing remains the same.
