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This is a personal project by @dellsystem. I built this to help me retain information from the books I'm reading.

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The concept of organising – perhaps opposed to selling services, though not necessarily so – is used to outline how union renewal could be achieved. This can refer to the introduction of specialist functions to represent different groups of workers, for example to cater specifically to the needs of casual workers. There is, however, an ambiguity in what is meant by the term organising. Melanie Simms and Jane Holgate illustrate this by arguing that the new approaches have ‘tended to see organising as a “toolbox” of practices rather than as having an underpinning political philosophy or objective’. This has created a situation in which organising is being adopted without asking ‘the fundamental question of what are we organising “for”?’ The move towards focusing on organising is nevertheless positive. The response by ‘key policy makers at the TUC and in affiliate unions’ was to look towards ‘US programmes such as the Organising Institute and Union Summer which were explicitly intended to attract underrepresented groups into the union movement’. Part of the problem is that ‘existing labor unions’ – in the UK, as well as globally – ‘have proved incapable of mobilizing mass rank-and-file militancy to resist the ongoing deterioration in workplace conditions and the systematic erosion of workers’ power’. Immanuel Ness continues to point out that despite this, ‘workers are developing new forms of antibureaucratic and anticapitalist forms of syndicalist, council communist, and autonomist worker representation’. These experiments in new forms of organisation are important because they are ‘rooted in the self-activity and democratic impulses of members and committed to developing egalitarian organizations in place of traditional union bureaucracies’.

—p.142 Precarious Organisation (118) by Jamie Woodcock 5 years, 3 months ago