Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn placed trade unions at the top of the news agenda this week by suggesting workers' rights and union principles be taught in schools. Gregor Gall, editor of Scottish Left Review, proposes the single most important thing a Labour government can do to resuscitate unions is by assigning every worker a union by default...

Under capitalism in Britain and elsewhere, capital is necessarily organised. Elites and productive forces employ executives and managers to run their businesses to further their own interests, namely, the pursuit of profit resulting from the exploitation of our labour. On the flip side, workers are not necessarily organised. And if labour is organised through its own self-will and effort, it has to do so with its own resources and in its own time in addition to performing the act of day-in-day out labouring. In this sense, workers face a double hurdle to get organised to advance and defend collective interests in the face of capital. By contrast, being organised is in the DNA of capital.



This has been the case since the beginning of capitalism over two hundred years ago. Today, however, the hegemony of the neo-liberal form of capitalism has re-calibrated this fundamental aspect of the capital-labour relationship. Under neo-liberalism, the state has been captured by capital to roll back the gains that labour has made through organising. Workers have time and again sought to use the state to level the playing field in its battle with the forces of capital. Now, these gains have been rolled as the state has engaged in widespread deregulation at the behest of neo-liberal governments.



What does this mean? Trade unions are now weaker than they have ever been in the post-war period. The signs of this are evident and everywhere, be that the increasing ability of employers to act unilaterally, aided by the state; falling levels of union membership and, thus, declining union influence; and increasing levels of exploitation of labour by capital, best epitomised by the working poor on benefits and minimum wages, on the one hand, and sky high company profits and executive salaries, on the other.



It's for this reason that myself and a number of academic colleagues have just put forward a far-reaching and innovative proposal to reverse this power imbalance in the Industrial Law Journal. Our proposal is called a 'union default system'. In all countries around the world including Britain, the de facto system is a non-union default. Workers have to expressly choose to join – and can be dissuaded from doing so by employers and governments. We desperately want to change this.



Under a union default, all workers would be automatically assigned into membership of the appropriate union. This isn't compulsory membership, a contravention of individual liberty or the return of the closed shop by the backdoor – workers will have the right to opt out of membership. How would this be done? The right to be the default union to which workers are defaulted into in any workplace would be gained by the union passing a low minimum support threshold. This would bring with it the right to bargain over pay and conditions. By law, employers would have no role to play in choosing the union.



We believe most workers wouldn't choose to exercise the opt-out unless they were in a country like the USA, where there is often deep ideological antipathy to unions. This is because elsewhere there is evidence of high levels of unmet demand for union representation and because workers would quickly see the tangible collective benefits of membership on their pay and conditions. The default system would lead unions to be stronger and better resourced as well as enabling the more difficult to organise sectors to be organised.



Only a system like this is capable of creating a level playing field for unions to operate on in their bargaining relations with employers. Currently, unions are at a major disadvantage of having insufficient resources and reach to organise the vast majority of workers who are now non-union in almost all countries. We have seen that trying to organise one employer at a time before moving onto the next does not work. Neither does trying to organise multiple employers at the same time. Without the union default, the great ideas contained in the Manifesto for Labour Law will end up being like a house built on sand. This proposal can be the complimentary and necessary foundation for making sure these ideas deliver what they intend to.



The Manifesto for Labour Law was published by the Institute of Employment Rights in 2016 as a programme for government on employment relations for the next Labour government in Britain led by Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell (below). In essence, it underpinned the party's commitments on employment issues in its own 2017 general election manifesto and will naturally do so again in any future manifesto for a general election.