The recent BART strike in the famously liberal San Francisco area had many folks here screaming for a new law that would put an end to public transportation workers’ right to strike.  When a bus strike threatened, I felt their pain.

Certainly many of the people now wanting to limit the rights of public transport workers in the SF Bay Area were among those jeering Wisconsin’s Republican  Governor Scott Walker’s successful attempt to take collective bargaining rights away from public workers’ unions.

Sure, the notion to suppress public transport strikes isn’t exactly the same thing, but it comes out of the same concerns and the same jealousies.  The public workers are better paid and have more benefits (because they have benefits) and more job security (again, because they have some job security) than most of the people relying on them.  So it’s, to use Occupy speak, 99%er v. 99%er (albeit the %s are actually smaller), with no solidarity for striking workers, which, of course, is how it is likely to remain.

During the uprising in Wisconsin against the Governor’s plans, poll after poll showed majority support for the rights of public workers to continue to have unions. But those were nationwide polls that were not taken during the heat and impact of a public worker strike. In other words, there’s a strong tendency to feel supportive of working people, along with countervailing feelings of jealousy towards public workers and a lot of extant stress that makes people impatient with disruptions.

The reality is that only 6.9% of workers in the private sector are part of a union and, compared not to bankers and financiers, but to other workers, the heavily unionized public workers have a sweet deal.  The common left response is to try to start unionizing other workers again.  That’s fine but it’s not going to be very successful.

Traditional unions were powerful and effective during a time when big companies needed solid life-long workers to operate the machinery of production.  Today, as the result of technological change, production is increasingly mechanized and almost entirely globalized.  Big companies — which themselves are prone to suddenly being absorbed (or prone toward collapsing) into even bigger conglomerates — no longer require the services of life long workers.  Rather they close down production facilities here and open them up there.  Resultantly, when they do require a few workers here, they have a ready pool of willing, desperate laborers who are happy just to get a job… any job.  These workers would never dream of forming or joining a union.  After all, it’s widely understood that every job is temporary and every worker is replaceable.  (Indeed, in the mid-90s, President Clinton was fond of telling us that contemporary people would have to “change jobs seven or eight times during their lifetimes.”  His laughable solution was worker-retraining programs to help us compete with each other in the marketplace.)

So if today’s situation requires some unity amongst wage earners (and former wage earners), what is to be done? Perhaps what is needed is a National/International Union.  Anybody who believes in decent wages and benefits for working people can join (including the many wealthy people, among them business owners, who share these values) and you needn’t be employed at the moment to participate.

How this National/International Union would bring about political and economic change is a subject for debate and discussion among those who would join.  My purpose here is to toss out an idea to people who understand that unionism has been a necessary countervailing force against market opportunism in the past, but that it needs to be reconstituted and recreated on a much greater and more complex scale now.  And in this increasingly linked up world, what better way is there to do this than to create a national and international network… a new national and international union that uses contemporary means of communicating and unifying and that is not dependent on the permanence of jobs and companies and institutions in this rapidly changing and increasingly uncertain world.

Of course, in the USA, there is the problem of illusion. Average citizens have been encouraged to view themselves as “free agents,” working and negotiating their way through the complexities of rapid economic changes in competition with one another.  A hyperactive and distracting celebrity culture has further pushed public consciousness towards this notion of each individual as an isolated economic player by offering up the illusion that anyone can be rich. The post-2008 reality of diminishing opportunities has yet to sink in and, even if it does, fantasy has a deep and compelling grip.