On Workplace Organization
The following article, which has been slightly edited for
publication, was written in 1997 as a comment on an exchange in the
US publication Against the Current dating to 1981/82. The exchange is
available from R&BN address for $1.
The exchange between Stan Weir and Sam Friedman in the pages of
Against the Current poses several important questions:
- The organization of workplace groups and culture
- The relationship of workplace activists to workplace
groups
- The role of organizations in class struggle
Weir's use of the notion of workplace groups to designate the
social networks that arise in the workplace is a particularly useful
one. Class consciousness, if we choose to use such an awkward term,
develops out of a social consensus around a commonality of interests
between people, as against other people arising from social
conditions. It is easy to suppose that class is a "thing." Class is
not. Class is a social relationship.
But class is a social relationship that is hampered and obscured
by walls built by different departments, employments and cultures.
Anyone who has been involved in a strike can testify to the
liberating effects of class struggle. The secondary characteristics
that often obscure our relationships become irrelevant.
Yet even in situations where there is no direct social conflict,
group networks exist. Weir correctly notes that in the majority of
cases we spend more actual time with our co-workers than we do with
our friends and families. Is it any wonder that over time complex
workplace networks develop?
But what of Friedman's contention that activist groups are a vital
"component of informal work groups and workplace culture" ? No one
can deny the positive contribution that activists can make to a
struggle. A quick check on the background of the leadership of many
social movements and trade unions will reveal an apprenticeship in a
radical organization or two. On the other hand, the professional
committee person also has the ability, and usually the will, to
stifle an organization. In preexisting structures new and
enthusiastic volunteers are quickly channeled into routine
assignments where they will pose no threat to the stability of the
group. The survival of the organization is co-important with the
ostensible goal.
The problem with Friedman's notion of activists that "change the
work culture and mobilize the work groups" as against Weir's
conception of leaders emerging by "natural selection" is that it
leads to the replication of existing social divisions. No matter what
the subjective desires of the activists. The radical union
organization is more likely the result of local exceptionalities than
a successful activist leadership. Moreover, when the membership
chooses not to follow its radical' leadership, the leaders
become angry and denounce the membership for its backwardness, its
passivity, its lack of class consciousness etc.
As Michael Seidman pointed out in his study of the popular front
in France and Spain Workers Against Work, those workers who followed
their "radical" leaders' demands for higher productivity were
"disciplined" by their workplace comrades. Regarding this kind of
thinking, Paul Mattick once noted, it is the propaganda of events
that changes the ideas in people's heads.
Weir's comments that automation and the changing nature of work
have tended to undermine workplace groups (along with traditional
union structures) only serves to underline his conclusions about the
need for alternative organization. What form that development will
take is uncertain.; however, given the history of workers' struggles,
both for and against work, it is likely that those new forms will
emerge from workplace groups.
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