rivista anarchica
year 41 n. 362
May 2011

Italiano

Union dibate/1

Little manual of the perfect union man
by Dom Argiropulo of Zab

Open Letter to a young graduate, thinking the young aspirants to practice the noble art of protecting workers.

 

Dear young graduate, no one has yet hired you permanently in any workplace. You get some advice for college you may also honored with the highest grade, your professor's thesis has found you some advice on a budget, work up here and there. But we know that you have a fixed idea in your brain: want to be a trade unionist. You have this strange vocation to defend the weak and the exploited; want to study at close range the conduct of the working class, you want to participate actively in the production world, but being in the right place.

So let me give you some advice from top or bottom of my middle age. Especially since I also had to think about things similar to yours several years ago. Years passed in a flash of fireworks and fireworks.
Read below some practical advice that can be very useful to you in order to avoid possibly (but it is somewhat unclear) some mistakes, serious or else minor, which tend to reproduce from generation to generation.

1. It is not a trade unionist said that before being such, should have experience in any job. Although some still believe (quite incorrectly) that those who have never worked in any factory or office, you will understand just some of the needs of those who will protect, you do not torment yourself and see that you take directly from your favorite union.
2. If your favorite union did not take you, look for another, which is close to your political beliefs and social thing would be very pleasing and harmonious in the context of your training in the role. However, should this not be possible without a well take any trade union that has appreciated your work: you, after all, you are a technician and then you can pretty much leave the strategic and political decisions to others. You just have to prepare and execute the operational means to achieve goals that others set. If you have problems with their conscience, find a nice combination of voluntary and there pours your scruples, leaving your beautiful soul free to act in a non-union.
3. Once you are sure that you take your seat in the union structure, will leave him for a couple of years and go 'to work in some factory or office, master of some friend or (better yet) some co-operative union of your daughter the same. So you can say, once back in your place in your union, you have really worked out there and you're really a worker like the others and then know the real needs of those employees.
4. Whatever the position you are going to occupy in the facility, remember that the main thing most valued by each organization (and therefore also a kind of union, of whatever orientation is) is the growth in the size of the organization itself.
5. From 4 follows that your main concern will be to recruit as many new members. Indeed, it is known, the skill of the trade unionist is measured primarily on the number of cards that has managed to do: which means (the precise lay readers for any of the material) the number of new input by his acolytes, and his alone, between the ranks of the organization.
6. Remember that "your" card holders are your main reference (after the supreme leaders of your property, that is). So you have to follow them personally, and lovingly, even beyond the distinction of tasks that includes the union structure.
7. So keep an updated list of your players and listen to them, from time to time, at least by phone. Facts come to find in your office executive or senior trade union and addresses all the problems they will put you (or if you're really good, he 'only pretends to deal with them). It is also questions that the industrial action have nothing to do, never say no and never return to other case management proposed, or rather, even downloaded off the task that was entrusted to you, but 'always the impression that you (and only you) what he is dealing with the pain.
8. Always says, and repeat with absolute conviction, that any failure of your actions (but we hope that these losses are reduced in number during your entire career) is due to external causes and insurmountable that your boss is a bastard, in that 'public office is a corrupt official who works against us, the government has changed the rules to our disadvantage, the new lawyer for the union is unable (and we have already changed, obviously, or we're gonna change) The economic situation is cyclical and what is the maximum we can reduce (if possible) the number of planned layoffs from some factory (and we've reduced struggling tremendously, really: one hundred laid off instead of one hundred twenty), and so on.
9. Every now and then is a tour in the workplace where you have the largest number of "your" students. Announced in advance with the owner of the production unit: it is not nice to unpleasant surprises, and then, if you wait, you can enjoy a better reception.
10. When the going gets tough (the destiny no one can drive and can also radicalize the struggles, from time to time, not your fault, of course), you must be the toughest of all: that you have to look as strong and the most ruthless in pursuit of the objectives of the struggle.
11. From the above follows that if there is an event with parade, you must be at the head of the procession and in the most visible place. If there is even the occupation of a factory or a public office or blocking a motorway or railway line, you must be there with the most frantic of your employees, without having had a first contact and appropriate protection with fellow Democrats digos cops (you're the boss of the "insurgency," but you're also right that guarantees to the authorities that the "uprising" will not go beyond certain limits).
12. The decentralized bargaining in the workplace are a pain in the ass: try to avoid them as much as possible. If you can not ever participate in the decentralized trading and let the delegates of your RSU union in the workplace if the Cavino alone (especially when it comes to delegates from the union rompicazzo requiring some kind of impossible results).
13. Remember that decentralized bargaining is very dangerous. The workers are never happy with the results: what's good for someone is very ill on others, you can not please everyone and therefore it is absolutely necessary to give priority. You must first meet "your" writing that you have brought other members, then they are the ones you have been helpful in the past and you can be useful in the future, then those who do not ever break my balls with their problems or even their disputes, then stranded dissidents, the dissidents then sunk (those, if you can, try to damage them too seriously).
14. Workers who are not members of your union you will not ever have to take: do not have to waste energy in the defense of people who do not pay their share for the organization. At most you can take care of those who earn your union snatches rival organization. Of course, this only if there is reasonable hope of success, otherwise let them stew in their own stock and expected to come crawling for help at your feet after being sting by the organization to which they belonged.
15. If you make a trade unionist in the public sector workplaces where managers belong to your union itself can really let the manager do the same, which will operate at the same time, the terminal organization of the specific area of public administration and membership of a reference operating your union. There were so many of these situations, you may relax and consider yourself lucky quite considerably.
16. If the banality of everyday practice in the workplace make bad if security conditions worsen, if there is no risk of dismissal or redundancy payments even if you do not achieve the desired results in decentralized bargaining, deflect all the hostility of workers at higher levels: the government sucks and there is an enemy, the senior managers of the union are unable (but we will work from the bottom to change it and have the best), the international situation is really a serious structural crisis, the troops intergalactic invasion of planet Earth are coming and can not now be concerned that you even lost your additional three hundred euro a year.
17. Every so often the largest trade unions, unions of state call them (as do the extremists stinking and unable to really deal with the problems of workers), are purchasing campaign. No hesitation then, 'Go to work well for people who gives you more (not only the current wage to take account of, but also a certain amount of benefits and the provision of career opportunities and other useful when you've tired of doing the champion of the proletariat).
18. Take kindly the rotation in the positions that your managers or even offer you will require: increased from metal workers to pensioners and retired from the civil service and public service to the school and from school to the caf and caf to the patronage and the patronage to territorial secretary, and again from then on. Runs as possible and do not tie you to any place and at any class. Do not worry about the technical and perhaps different skills required in different areas: it is not so difficult to acquire new ones. And you do not have to be a specialist in the field. If you have real career ambitions, you must be a generalist and your "best" must be to be able to manage relationships with people, with all the people (inside and outside your organization) can be useful.
19. If your union, there are powerful groups opposed and there are a majority and one or more minorities well structured and organized, you will always be with the majority at the helm of the structure where you are at that time included: you will be easier , and much progress in a brilliant career.
20. But 19 is not an absolute rule. Although the majority is already saturated with people whose ambitions have not been met, then you should be with a minority, to which belong some places, however, and leadership positions: then seeks to place share of the minority to which you have chosen to belong. When they are a minority of states that the principles which you think so, then it is much better, because it appears more credible when you speak on public occasions and when it counts on the ideology and strategies of the organization.

Very different advice

And for now I'll stop here, with these initial suggestions. I would not saturate your young brain is a plethora of information not easily manageable in a first approach to the activity that you propose to undertake.
Take care to store a few notions that I sent and let me know, my dear young man, if something is not clear or if you some useful study on any aspect of reality I have described hastily and with little precision.
Please note that individuals are varied and different that what I may appear trivial and obvious might not be for you. In this case, on specific request, I could go back on things known and less known, so as to make it even more useful my few and poor advice.
In the rest of your career (hopefully of many brilliant and victorious laurels) you will realize that they need to very different notions and very different advice.
So do not turn to the past and not thinking of your dear little noticed as a teacher trainer of trade unionists. Remember what you now say this is just the first step of your journey. And I gave you useful instructions at this first step and a few others following. Then things get complicated (or, sometimes, it is easier) increasingly. And each ends up being the best teacher himself. Will draw valuable lessons from your successes. Other lessons still more precious from your failures.
But I have yet to say one last thing, before I let you with my best wishes for success is where are you, but off as if you already own elsewhere. Get distances from your destiny, you know it looks like I was a stranger to yourself, spitting in the faces of your weaknesses.
Only away from you that you can maintain the necessary coldness that will allow you to get the desired success.