Class Power and Union Capacities: A Research Note on the Power Resources Approach

Abstract

Arguably, the power resources approach (PRA) is the most elaborate and most significant attempt to establish a methodology for labour studies in recent years. It provides a toolkit for identifying sources of workers' power in capitalist societies. In my view, it has two particular strengths. First of all, it enables labour scholars to conduct strategic research that can help labour activists and trade unionists in their day-to-day-struggles. Second, it is a low-threshold approach that is easy to grasp and use. A significant number of students in the German programme of the Global Labour University, most of whom are closely aligned with organised labour, employ it when they write coursework or MA dissertations. Consequently, Stefan Schmalz, Carmen Ludwig and Edward Webster are right to argue in the Introduction to the recent Special Issue of the Global Labour Journal (2018: 113) that the PRA crosses the divide between academia and labour activism. Nevertheless, the approach is marked by certain theoretical shortcomings, which need to be addressed -not least because they have important political implications.In this short research note, I focus on just one theoretical issue (the implicit transformation of class power as a relation into compartmentalised capacities of workers and workers' organisations) and one contribution to the debate (the Introduction by Schmalz et al.). A more detailed, critical assessment of the PRA can be found in a separate article (Gallas, 2016). Schmalz et al. (2018: 115) start from the following assumption: "The PRA is founded on the basic premise that the workforce can successfully defend its interests by collective mobilisation of power resources in the structurally asymmetric and antagonistic relation between capital and labour". 2 This quote shows that for Schmalz et al. the PRA is informed by a Marxian understanding of class as a structurally conditioned relation of power and conflict: class power is exercised by workers mobilising their resources together while facing capital as an antagonist. The existence of this antagonist suggests that the relationship of forces between both sides impacts how resources can be mobilised, and what kind of strategic choices are available for labour.Crucially, Schmalz et al. implicitly transform this relational notion of power into a compartmentalising one through how they understand power resources. They speak of "levels of 1 I would like thank my fellow editors at the GLJ for detailed comments on a draft version, which helped me to clarify my ideas. Furthermore, I have benefitted greatly from a conversation with Bastian Schulz on the power resources of workers in countries of the Global South. To be clear, I have written this article in personal capacity; it does not represent the views of the Editorial Board as a whole. Any flaws and omissions are my own.

Migrant Labour and Workers' Struggles: The German Meatpacking Industry as Contested Terrain

“…Likewise, labour turnover might be an expression of labour unrest in a Silverian understanding (Silver, 2003), but might also be part of the reorganisation of domination. Our findings contribute to the recent debate on the power resources approach in this journal (Gallas, 2018;Nowak, 2018;Schmalz, Ludwig and Webster, 2018). They caution against conceptualising "power" as something that can be accumulated and invested into class struggle.…”

Technopolitics from Below: A Framework for the Analysis of Digital Politics of Production

“…Thus, every delegation of power to a higher level by definition increases its distance from its social base, and thereby also the probability of an emergent, separate, and institutionalized self-interest. A substantial literature has shown that, in the course of the institutionalization of trade unions and parties, these institutions develop their own institutional logics which do not necessarily coincide with those they are meant to represent [90][91][92]. Thus, German trade unions are regularly conceptualized as "intermediary organizations" [93]: they mediate between capital and labor.…”

“…It is generally assumed that the major effect of digitalization on labor markets is a polarization in terms of skills[90][91][92]. The emphasis on de-skilling is not aimed at challenging this thesis but is due to the fact that the object of research was manual work, where de-skilling clearly outweighs upgrading.…”

Power Resources and Global Capitalism

“…The issue of class relations leads us to an important misunderstanding of the PRA by some of the responses. In particular Gallas (2018) and Nowak (2018) perceive the PRA as a self-referential research heuristic that is largely detached from an analysis of global capitalism. At this point, it is important to clarify the intention of the PRA and to outline some of the discussions that took place a decade ago on the development of this approach.…”

“…It is particularly striking that Nowak (2018) and Gallas (2018) both refer in their articles to labour conflicts in former German state-owned companies and state-dominated or highly regulated economic sectors (airlines and railways) in order to criticise the PRA without contextualising the cases in the larger development of German capitalism, thereby drawing a distorted picture of the role of unions in these developments. For instance, in the case of recent labour conflicts in the railway sector, marketisation has played a major role, both changing working conditions and eroding institutional power, a process German rail unions EVG and its predecessors GDA and Transnet did not vigorously challenge as they relied on a strategy of social partnership without reflecting upon the changing context.…”