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Speaker 2: As we come margin Martin and the Beauty of the
Speaker 2: Day a million dark in Kegeens one thousand mil, last
Speaker 2: grade are branden by the beauty. His sun sun discloses
Speaker 2: on the paper, arousing roses, red and roses.
Speaker 1: And I actually think like this discussion of like the
Speaker 1: things that give workers power in a particular situation, I
Speaker 1: think was actually that was another thing that was like
Speaker 1: it was so methodical, and I, you know, I hadn't
Speaker 1: thought of it like that at the time, you know,
Speaker 1: I just thought, like, you know, there's obviously early two
Speaker 1: thousands people are still talking about like the death of class.
Speaker 1: We're all middle class now, you know, the working class
Speaker 1: doesn't exist. It does doesn't exist as a you know,
Speaker 1: a political force or whatever. And so I had, you know,
Speaker 1: in my from my political perspectives, like, no, you still
Speaker 1: have workers. You have workers who are you know, working
Speaker 1: in shops or working in you know, like call centers,
Speaker 1: and you know, maybe they're not like you know, in
Speaker 1: the UK, they're not working in steel factories anymore like
Speaker 1: or they're not they're not mining like you know, your
Speaker 1: mining doesn't exist in the same way they're used to whatever.
Speaker 1: But you still have people working for a wage. But
Speaker 1: then what this did was show me that actually that
Speaker 1: was that's actually still quite a kind of a flat analysis,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. And I think, like, just
Speaker 1: as you know, to highlight how often I think about
Speaker 1: this book is I thought about it while watching Sorry
Speaker 1: to Bother You, the film excellent film, brilliant film by
Speaker 1: Boots Riley.
Speaker 3: So good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's excellent film, really, like, you know, can't praise
Speaker 1: it highly enough. But it was a bit and basically
Speaker 1: the main the main character works in a call center
Speaker 1: and you know, and there's an element in the film
Speaker 1: where like they organize a strike. Basically, that's broadly, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't want to give any spoilers away, but I
Speaker 1: felt like one of the underlying messages in it was like,
Speaker 1: you know, the working class has changed, but the working
Speaker 1: class still exists, and the working.
Speaker 3: Class can still struggle in the way that he used to.
Speaker 1: And there was a bit of me that I was like,
Speaker 1: you know, as much as I agree with the message,
Speaker 1: I thought the choice of the call center worker wasn't great.
Speaker 1: And you know, obviously this is not a criticism of
Speaker 1: the film, because you know, the film is art. You know,
Speaker 1: he's not writing a fucking sociological treatise, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean, So like he's made like an artistic film,
Speaker 1: so like this is a I don't want to underline
Speaker 1: that this is you know, it doesn't take away from that,
Speaker 1: and you're not supposed to watch the film as a
Speaker 1: piece of sociology basically, But that aside, if we were
Speaker 1: to watch the film as a piece of sociology, like
Speaker 1: you can't just simply swap out one form of labor
Speaker 1: for another and be like, oh, we can just do this,
Speaker 1: like you know, call center workers can do what carfactory
Speaker 1: workers used to.
Speaker 3: And I think that's what.
Speaker 1: Forces of Labor really kind of brought out for me,
Speaker 1: is that like different workers in different industries have there's
Speaker 1: a there's like a material basis for the power that
Speaker 1: they might have, and so, you know, so she distinguishes
Speaker 1: between and I think it's not the only think of
Speaker 1: her categories. I think she takes them from from another
Speaker 1: thinker called Eric olin Wright.
Speaker 3: And basically she.
Speaker 1: Distinguishes in this thing like associational power and structural power,
Speaker 1: and associational power being the power of, you know, being
Speaker 1: in associations. You know, so like the power of being
Speaker 1: in a union, for example, and then there's a structural power,
Speaker 1: which then I think is divided into this the idea
Speaker 1: of like this market I think which John has already
Speaker 1: mentioned this marketplace bargaining power and workplace barkaining power, and
Speaker 1: you know, the marketplace barking power being you know, in
Speaker 1: the general labor market, how much power do you have,
Speaker 1: Like if you were to lose your job, would you
Speaker 1: be able to be to find another one easily? If
Speaker 1: you lose your job, would you be able to look
Speaker 1: at do you have access to land or whatever that
Speaker 1: you'd be able to grow your own food to sustain
Speaker 1: yourself or whatever. And workplace bargaining power being this power
Speaker 1: that you literally have in the workplace, like again what
Speaker 1: John said about, you know, on the assembly line, if
Speaker 1: you get one group of workers who like walk off,
Speaker 1: then the whole assembly line grinds to a holt. So
Speaker 1: workers end up having quite a lot of power even
Speaker 1: if they don't have like a majority of them going
Speaker 1: on strike at any one particular time.
Speaker 4: And yeah, and this is exactly the kind of key
Speaker 4: difference between the struggles the largely successful struggles in the
Speaker 4: auto industry that Silver talks about in the different regions
Speaker 4: to the textile industry, because she does point out in
Speaker 4: the late nineteenth century, textile workers in the UK were
Speaker 4: successfully able to win a lot better pay and conditions,
Speaker 4: largely on the strength of their associational power that their
Speaker 4: unions in the North of England were so strong and
Speaker 4: had so much support in the community that their strikes
Speaker 4: were so solid that they were able to win better
Speaker 4: paying conditions. But in a lot of other places they
Speaker 4: just have less workplace bargaining power because unlike a car factory,
Speaker 4: if some people on one loom shuts down, it doesn't
Speaker 4: shut down the whole factory, It only shuts down that loom,
Speaker 4: so smaller groups of people can't cause as much as disruption.
Speaker 4: So that's one of the reasons that textile workers have
Speaker 4: less of that kind of structural power. And other reasons
Speaker 4: are things like the machinery of textiles is a lot
Speaker 4: cheaper than it's a lot easier to set up a
Speaker 4: small textile plant, and cheaper than to set up a
Speaker 4: small car factory, So it's much easier for competitive to
Speaker 4: startup a new company or for one company to move
Speaker 4: a plant then doing carfactory workers. And this is kind
Speaker 4: of useful information for us thinking about organizing where we work,
Speaker 4: where we are, and also just thinking about any other
Speaker 4: struggles going on in the world. It's I think I
Speaker 4: find it's a really useful framework that helped me think
Speaker 4: not just about you know, things going on in the world,
Speaker 4: but also just about where you work yourself and where
Speaker 4: the kind of weaknesses are in your own employer. You
Speaker 4: know where the employers week and where you have potential
Speaker 4: strength and that sort of thing.
Speaker 3: It's I think just.
Speaker 4: A really helpful toolkit basically for thinking about and strategizing
Speaker 4: about that sort of thing about organizing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean again that thing of like you know
Speaker 1: what happens if you go and strike? You know what
Speaker 1: happens if people in your section go on strike?
Speaker 3: Like what are the.
Speaker 1: Broader implications of it? Or like if everyone in your
Speaker 1: workplace goes on strike, or if everyone in and in
Speaker 1: your industry goes on strike, what are the.
Speaker 3: Knock on effects?
Speaker 1: And how does that kind of give you and your
Speaker 1: your colleagues's strength basically, And I think there's you know,
Speaker 1: because obviously she actually talks about the textile industry as
Speaker 1: being the leading industry of the nineteenth century, then the
Speaker 1: car industry the leading industry in the twentieth century, and
Speaker 1: there's sort of like an interesting discussion about what might
Speaker 1: be a kind of a leading industry in the twenty
Speaker 1: first century. I think it was really interesting discussion. And
Speaker 1: also I mean, as well as thinking about in terms
Speaker 1: of where we work, or rather where you work, you know,
Speaker 1: like you know, you the listener, the general kind of you,
Speaker 1: how can you organize where you are? It also made
Speaker 1: me think about when you're part of kind of collective organization,
Speaker 1: where might a collective organization you know, direct its collective efforts,
Speaker 1: you know, what I mean, and like where weather like uh,
Speaker 1: and you know, and that and that's one of the
Speaker 1: things that I think is really potentially really useful, you know,
Speaker 1: in terms of not just thinking, Okay, yeah, so we
Speaker 1: we have like a we want to organize like.
Speaker 3: A left political group.
Speaker 1: Uh, and so we're going to think about the ideas
Speaker 1: that we promote, but actually also thinking about what is
Speaker 1: the working class that has to be mobilized in order
Speaker 1: to move the broader you know, not just that one
Speaker 1: set of workers, but actually to move the broader class itself.
Speaker 1: And you know, and I say this as someone who
Speaker 1: you know, I've largely worked in kind of peripheral industries,
Speaker 1: and you know, I think I think about that quite
Speaker 1: a lot, you know, so that even where we've organized something,
Speaker 1: you know, ultimately within the broader class, it doesn't move
Speaker 1: very much much at all.
Speaker 4: You do say that although one of the industries that
Speaker 4: Stilver identifies as a possible as if not the major
Speaker 4: central industry of the twenty first century, possibly one of
Speaker 4: them that has more significance is education, because the labor
Speaker 4: market now does require a high level of education generally.
Speaker 4: And again I didn't used to have this kind of understand.
Speaker 4: But you know, there's areas of education work where workers
Speaker 4: do hold quite a lot of power, but primarily in
Speaker 4: their role as childcare rather than actural educators. Obviously in
Speaker 4: educators in some sense the product is education, but where
Speaker 4: the capacity for education workers in general to cause the
Speaker 4: most disruption is in not caring for other workers kids,
Speaker 4: so that then other workers have to stay home and
Speaker 4: look after their kids.
Speaker 1: Which actually I think kind of during COVID really brought
Speaker 1: that home, you know, like once the school's closed and
Speaker 1: then it was like, well, you know, how the hell
Speaker 1: are people going to work all day? You know, whether
Speaker 1: they're like people who are going into work you know,
Speaker 1: because they're key workers or whatever, or whether they're working
Speaker 1: from home, you know, if their kids are hope, that's it.
Speaker 1: Production is grinding to a whole, you know. And so yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true, you know, I think certainly, interestingly, I think
Speaker 1: that's certainly in the UK. There's an argument for saying
Speaker 1: that the workplace power that workers have in education gets
Speaker 1: higher the younger the children that they work with are,
Speaker 1: but conversely, the strength of organization, the associational power actually diminishes,
Speaker 1: you know, so like primary school workers, so that would
Speaker 1: be like, you know, ages four to eleven. You know,
Speaker 1: they probably have the most power because if they go
Speaker 1: on strike and the kids have to stay home, you know,
Speaker 1: all those parents have to take the day off work.
Speaker 1: You know, you can't leave even you know, even a
Speaker 1: lot of eleven year olds, you can't just leave them
Speaker 1: in the house on their own all day. Next up
Speaker 1: would be secondary school, and which is eleven to eighteen,
Speaker 1: and those kids kind of especially in the older end
Speaker 1: of it, they're probably more likely to be able to
Speaker 1: be left alone at home. But then already you see
Speaker 1: that like secondary school teachers in the UK are much
Speaker 1: better organized than primary.
Speaker 3: School teachers almost always.
Speaker 4: And although I would say that the inverse is generally
Speaker 4: the case when it comes to the support workers.
Speaker 1: Well, that teaching assistants are more powerful in primary school
Speaker 1: than in secondary school.
Speaker 4: And better organized generally, Yeah, you know generally because well
Speaker 4: in the UK, I mean now it's different because the
Speaker 4: Teachers Union does take school support staff, but before that
Speaker 4: it was school support staff. We're in Unison for the
Speaker 4: most part or GMB, and teachers were in one of
Speaker 4: the teaching unions, and historically the organization of Unison, at
Speaker 4: least in the primary was better than secondary.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess.
Speaker 1: I think it's also it's also interesting to think, like
Speaker 1: she does mention a bunch of other industries that have
Speaker 1: the potential to have quite a lot of power. So, like,
Speaker 1: you know, she talks about you know, like janitors and
Speaker 1: cleaners and things like that, and I suppose to a
Speaker 1: certain extent that's or there there have been quite a
Speaker 1: few struggles in that industry, oh, you know, like and
Speaker 1: she mentions like justice v janitors in LA. I think
Speaker 1: you could also think about some of the more recent
Speaker 1: stuff in the UK by smaller unions like UVW United
Speaker 1: Voices of the World and the IWGB, which is the
Speaker 1: Industrial Workers of Great Britain. She mentions that as possibly industry.
Speaker 1: I mean, she's very careful not to say that these
Speaker 1: will be the new industries that struggle will happen in.
Speaker 4: I think that she's more pointing out that the service
Speaker 4: sector is the biggest part of the economy today and
Speaker 4: then looking at examples of where organizing has happened in
Speaker 4: the service sector.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but she is sort of you know, proffering them
Speaker 1: as like a potential alternative to the to like the
Speaker 1: auto industry in terms of like, Okay, this is this
Speaker 1: will be like the center of gravity for new kind
Speaker 1: of working class movement, you know. And she's not saying
Speaker 1: they will, but she said, like the potentially this is
Speaker 1: one possibility for X, Y and Z reason because yeah,
Speaker 1: like you say, services are really important and there's been
Speaker 1: these struggles there. Education, you know, the education industry is
Speaker 1: very important and there's been these struggles there. And transport
Speaker 1: transport is another one. Yeah, and there's some excellent graphs
Speaker 1: as well about again this is this is a little
Speaker 1: bit like a kind of the technological fix, you know
Speaker 1: that Basically she had these excellent graphs and tables about
Speaker 1: how transport strikes move from one form of transport to another,
Speaker 1: you know, so starting off with like trains and then
Speaker 1: moving on to you know, things like aviation and stuff
Speaker 1: like that, which is.
Speaker 3: Again it is really really interesting.
Speaker 1: There's one that she mentions, which is the semiconductor industry,
Speaker 1: you know, like making like MicroSort from small microchips and
Speaker 1: things like that. And I guess you mentioned that because
Speaker 1: like how central it is to so many products and
Speaker 1: you know, around the world. And I think as far
Speaker 1: as I can tell that one has not particularly come
Speaker 1: to fruition in any in any way.
Speaker 4: Well, I think she does address that in that because
Speaker 4: already at that point it was very central. But it's
Speaker 4: a highly automated industry that doesn't need many workers. And
Speaker 4: also because it doesn't need many workers, you can pay
Speaker 4: the ones that there are quite well, so to kind
Speaker 4: of stop it being a terrain of that much struggle.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I guess like one thing, I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't know if there is a second edition that's coming
Speaker 1: out for this, for this particular book, but if there was,
Speaker 1: I think one sector that that sort of feels lacking
Speaker 1: or that I feel like, you know, could could easily
Speaker 1: have gone in there is you know, stuff like yeah,
Speaker 1: like warehouses and couriers and things like that for you know,
Speaker 1: which I suppose is not a new industry, but the
Speaker 1: kind of the logistics sector more broadly, which has had
Speaker 1: huge struggles everywhere, and I think increasingly it's becoming kind
Speaker 1: of more a more prominent feature of capitalism, you know,
Speaker 1: everywhere basically. And I think what's really interesting about the
Speaker 1: logistics sector is that it's recreating the working class that
Speaker 1: capital had tried to eliminate via the spatial fix, you know,
Speaker 1: moving that you know, those big concentrations of workers around
Speaker 1: big urban centers, which was such a pain in the
Speaker 1: ass for the whole twentieth century, and that you worked
Speaker 1: so hard to get rid of them, and now it's
Speaker 1: recreated them in these like Amazon warehouses or these like
Speaker 1: you know whatever DPD or Hermes or you know whatever.
Speaker 1: And I think that is a potential, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: new base of working class organizing. I think in a
Speaker 1: I guess, you know, I don't know. I'm hesitant to
Speaker 1: call it a new industry because obviously warehouses and distribution
Speaker 1: existed before, but I feel like it exists now in
Speaker 1: this logistics sector in a kind of a new way.
Speaker 1: And so yeah, I think that that also has the
Speaker 1: potential to be a new sort of center of gravity
Speaker 1: for Bucker's movement.
Speaker 2: As we come Martin, Martin in the Beauty of the.
Speaker 1: Day that brings us to the end of this episode.
Speaker 3: Preview.
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