April 2011 - Centre for Civil Society - University of KwaZulu-Natal

The last 30 years have seen a rapid increase in the amounts of speculative
capital flowing around the global capital markets, which has placed
another weapon in the armoury of the capitalist class. The globalisation of
capital places pressure on all capitalist states to deregulate labour markets
and facilitate cuts in labour costs. Attempts to radically alter the structure
of UK capital markets as part of a reformist agenda would risk provoking a
rapid outflow of capital, something the domestic state is never going to
allow.
The prospects for effective resistance to casualisation therefore do not lie
in abstract campaigns intended to put pressure on the state to legislate
against the bosses’ interests. There are three main strategies that may
hold some promise.
Worker-Run Temping Agencies
One possible model for mitigating the effects of casualisation is for
workers to set up their own agencies, outside the control of the capitalist
class. It has been suggested that these could be directly run by unions. In a
mature economy with intense internal competition, companies mainly
concerned with reducing costs could respond well to an agency able to
provide workers at or below the cost of workers from other agencies. A cooperatively
managed agency would have much lower overheads than a
private-sector equivalent [this can work where income has been
traditionally low like actors and artists/designers, but didn’t have much
appeal when the ex-dockers tried to promote this idea amongst their
members] being able to provide higher direct wages and benefits to its
workers and possibly providing a site of political re-composition.
There are historical precedents for this. The beginnings of the labour
movement in Italy saw the formation of labour cooperatives amongst
agricultural workers, which resurfaced in the movement of the Italian
“organised unemployed” in the 80s. Similarly, the early French syndicalists
set up (or more accurately took over) the “Bourse de Travails”- labour
exchanges that provided a forum for political agitation.
Aside from the distaste engendered in contemplating managing our own
exploitation, there are issues associated with entering into competition
with capitalist enterprises. One of the factors that caused the co-operative
movement to fail was that it was subject to all the same pressures as
traditional business. Over time hierarchy and bureaucracy developed and
the radicalism ebbed. For a union to take on such a role may exacerbate
the contradiction already implicit within what Negri calls “its traditional
function as half-party and half-merchandise”. However, the class struggle
must take precedence over squeamishness: the question is whether these
forms would help or hinder the self-organising of casualised workers.
The Development Of New Subjectivities
Some initiatives have accepted the new terrain of atomisation and are
seeking to develop a collective identity based on the shared experience of
casualised work. The idea seems to be to attempt to develop a classconsciousness
based not on proximity to other workers but on the insecure
conditions experienced by temporary workers. Apart from the use of
wanky rhetoric like “existential precarity”, my personal opinion is that this
project is of limited usefulness beyond raising the profile of casualised
workers.
Restoring the ties that bind
As described in the previous section, there has been a long-term shift in
hiring practices by the business class. As the form of the labour commodity
changes, the organisational forms that struggle take must also change.