• They/Them

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BlueSpaceCanary
@BlueSpaceCanary

The IWW famously does not allow bosses (usually defined as "people with hire/fire/disciplinary power" to join the union. This made sense when the union was a young union focused on organizing industry, but I think today it a) makes less sense than it once did, and b) inadvertently gives capital a free hand to play very dirty in labor relations.

Consider the shift manager. On the one hand, they often have no hire/fire/disciplinary power at all, but on the other they can still be tyrants as vicious as any foreman. And then, if I can borrow one of your hands, dear reader, we can place in it the third fact that in terms of their economic interests they have far more in common with the workers they manage than with their corporate overlords (the foremen of yore did too, but to a much lesser degree IMO).

And then consider the corporate line manager. In theory they have fire power, but they may not have hire power even in theory (e.g. see Google's unhinged hiring process) and in practice their fire power is also heavily constrained by corporate process & policy. A corporate line manager can make your life miserable and probably get you fired eventually by sabotaging your work, but unlike Ye Olde Foreman they cannot simply throw you out on the street. And again, their economic interests have infinitely more in common with their reports than with the VP three or four layers of management above them.

I think it's instructive to look at how US labor law handles managers, because if you're a radical left-wing union like the IWW you can usually just assume that every aspect of US labor law was designed with undermining you as at least a secondary goal. "Supervisors" are explicitly not granted the protections of the NLRA, which defines a supervisor thus:

The term "supervisor" means any individual having authority, in the interest of the employer, to hire, transfer, suspend, lay off, recall, promote, discharge, assign, reward, or discipline other employees, or responsibly to direct them, or to adjust their grievances, or effectively to recommend such action, if in connection with the foregoing the exercise of such authority is not of a merely routine or clerical nature, but requires the use of independent judgment.

Awfully similar to the Wobblies' own criteria for excluding someone from the union, isn't it? And I think the reason is pretty simple: excluding managers from labor protections both makes them more beholden to their own bosses and cuts away what should be a fundamental shared interest between them and non-managers, i.e. the shared struggle against the executives and capital owners who the company serves.

I don't know what the solution here is, because it's still true that line managers have the power to be awful petty tyrants and we can't just ignore that. But I think ceding the ground entirely to capital has been a disastrous mistake.


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in reply to @BlueSpaceCanary's post:

I've always felt like the classification of managers as capitalists on the grounds that they represent the interests of the owners is kind of dubious. Every employee, in conducting their duties, is representing the interests of the owners. Mapping out disciplinary power and inflated compensation (as a proxy for bought loyalty) is strategically important, but these things don't really constitute a different relationship to the means of production. Kind of feels like an arbitrary way to save a theoretically tidy and rhetorically convenient dichotomy from being complicated by the compresence of conflicting incentives.