meta-anarchist
Let’s look at what the prerequisites for the creation and operation of trade unions might be under ancap conditions.
At the start, we have ancap, meaning anarchy (the absence of a generally recognized institution for producing norms and enforcing them, i.e., the state) plus capitalism (developed commodity-money relations, private ownership of the means of production, freedom of contract, and so on). At what point, for what purpose, with what restrictions, and how successfully can a trade union (an organization for coordinating the collective pressure of hired workers on employers) appear in such a society?
Hiring for a job is an ordinary service provision transaction on the part of the employee. Whether these are services for massaging heels, managing document flow, or maintaining a machine is a secondary matter. A service agreement usually specifies the nature and volume of services, as well as the amount and principles of payment. In any case, a contract cannot foresee all conceivable nuances, and therefore allows for a more or less loose interpretation of individual provisions, which is usually expressed in the form of informal traditions. Each party to the contract, naturally, prefers to shape traditions to their own advantage.
The main tool available to a worker in a situation of dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs at work turns out to be the threat of quitting. Essentially, it does not matter whether the employer is complying with the contract. The worker may be dissatisfied with the current conditions, even if they are better than the situation that existed at the time the contract was concluded. For example, they may have managed to increase their qualifications and are confident that they are now worth more. Or they see a favorable change in market conditions that has led to an increase in the employer’s profit, and believe that it would be reasonable for the employer to share part of this profit with the worker.
Faced with the prospect of production losses, the employer may prefer to compromise or even satisfy the worker’s demands in full. Thus, the contract (or the informal practices that do not correspond to the contract) is revised, and the parties move forward in a new reality. Alternatively, the worker receives a refusal and either accepts it or carries out their threat, which logically leads to dismissal.
When there are many workers of this profession both at the enterprise and in the labor market, it is not difficult to replace the dismissed person. Hence a quite natural hint from the workers of a specific profession: to present coordinated demands, threatening a mass refusal to work. If such a practice becomes recurring, it makes sense to form permanent structures for coordination, i.e., a trade union.
Since we are in ancap, I fundamentally do not consider violent ways of raising the stakes in this conflict; we are talking only about peaceful pressure.
What happens next? The higher the direct and indirect costs to the entrepreneur from the workers’ breach of contractual obligations, the higher the probability of an entrepreneurial solution that radically eliminates the problem. This could be the automation of production, moving the business to a region with a more loyal workforce, or simply closing the enterprise and shifting capital into something more capital-intensive than that based on mass unified labor.
Thus, trade unions under ancap are possible, but they generate negative feedback, and the more successfully they operate, the sooner the unions are abolished along with the professional group that spawned them. Therefore, a more stable model seems to me to be one with spontaneous mass actions of discontent, which do not lead to the creation of permanent organizations for inventing new reasons to pressure the employer. Anger works convincingly as long as it is not institutionalized.
