Scribblings

Trade Unions and the Common Good

To start with, I am not sure if there is such a thing as the “common good”. How is it to be defined? Who gets to define it? What you see as the common good could be very different from what I think it is. Certainly, some issues can be decided by objective, scientific evidence, but even such evidence can often be contested and challenged. Ideology and self-interest play an important part in how things are seen by various interest groups.

The world in which we live is very much a social construct and social constructs are very much open to contestation.

I think there is a fair degree of consensus that we are living through a period of climate change. Of course, there are those who deny this, but it is difficult to argue with the forest fires in the west of France, or those in Spain near Madrid. In the north of France where I live, we have not had rain for weeks. You can see the dryness of the land all around you. Where once it would have been green, now it is brown. We are unsure when the rain will come again.

Winding down the use of fossil fuels is one of the things we need to do to help bring our climate back into balance. But not everyone agrees with this, especially if your job is dependent on fossil fuels or if you happen to be a trade union that represents workers in the fossil fuels sector.

Unions in the UK that represent North Sea workers want the government of Andy Burnham to sign off on new oil and gas fields, thereby creating and preserving good-paying jobs. That is what trade unions are for. To protect and advance the interests of their members. They are not altruistic organisations.

Now, I see nothing wrong with unions defending the interests of their members. It is why they exist. But to suggest that the interests of union members and the common good always align is to mislead. Often, they run in opposite directions, as is the case with the North Sea fields. The suggestion that oil and gas extracted from the North Sea will cut the energy bills of UK consumers is incorrect. That oil and gas will be sold on the global market at whatever is the going price. That’s the way the industry works.

A similar story is playing out in Ireland in relation to Aughinish Alumina. The company is an alumina refinery situated on the Shannon Estuary in County Limerick. It is the largest alumina refinery in Europe, and is owned by Rusal, a Russian aluminium company headquartered in Moscow. It is reported that the company is ultimately controlled by the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Close to 500 people are employed at the plant, decent, well-paying jobs by local standards.

A great deal of the company’s output is exported to Russia. Now there can be little doubt that much of this material ends up going into Russian armaments, rather than making knives and forks, even if this cannot be proved conclusively. Can anyone reasonably argue that Russia is importing a valuable war material and then not using it for that purpose in its aggressive war against Ukraine?

As said above, the jobs at the plant are good, well-paying jobs. Who wants to see them disappear because the plant is supplying Russia with war materials? Not the union involved, not the government, nor the local politicians. Moral certainty goes out the window when jobs are at stake. Close your eyes and pretend it is not happening because you do not want to have to make hard industrial and political decisions.

In defending the jobs of its members, the union is properly doing what it is supposed to do. But the advancement of the “common good” would be to cut off supplies of war material to Russia, but that would come at an industrial price and the loss of jobs.

A complex and difficult trade-off to which there are no easy answers.

My wider point is this. Trade unions are fully entitled to represent the interests of their members. But the interest of trade unions should not be conflated with that of social progress. They are not one and the same thing. Trade unions can often be regressive in their policies. This could become even more the case as unions continue to shrink in numbers and become little more than public sector organisations, with a small private sector membership, mostly located in older industries.

These days, trade union density, the proportion of the workforce in unions, across Europe is about 25%, if even that. Two-thirds of all union members work in the public sector. In other words, about 85% of private sector workers in Europe are not union members.

That is unlikely to change anytime soon, no matter how many laws the EU and the UK may pass to help revive flagging union fortunes.

What constitutes the “common good” will always be a political and ideological construct, something to be argued about in the public arena. It is unlikely that there will ever be agreement on the matter because there are simply too many of us with different points of view and different economic interests. What makes sense for me and what works for me does not necessarily do so for you.

When there is no political north star to guide your actions, then all decisions become difficult. We live in an age of political dispersion.

The days when there were great, overarching ideologies are gone. Communism is practically no more, and democratic socialism, or social democracy, is but a pale shadow of its former self. New-right populism is little more than anti-immigration rhetoric, without any sort of coherent economic program. When we look at Trump in the US or Farage in the UK, it is also clear that right-wing populism is also very much a vehicle for the personal enrichment of the leaders, with the Trump vehicle running on afterburners.

Unions struggle to gain traction with new generations of workers. So, they retreat into themselves. What they have, they want to hold. Nothing wrong with that. Let’s just be clear-eyed about what unions are. Organisations that represent their members. Nothing more.

Union interests and the common good are not the same thing.