Unionism

(From L. unio). Association formed to defend the professional and economic interests common to its members. System of organization of salaried workers based on unions. U. was born in England in 1824. The right of workers to form associations of their own was recognized in 1868. U. later spread to several countries of Europe and the Americas, and in the twentieth century became to the entire world. At times the union movement plays an important political role, participating in the struggle for power (e.g., the Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s). Unions and the union ideology tend to reflect the acuteness of economic confrontation in society, though under favorable economic conditions they serve as the basis for collaboration between labor and capital. This can be seen, for example, in the case of the AFL-CIO in the US. In authoritarian regimes, the unionist ideology is used by union bureaucrats and the single party system to manipulate the masses for the benefit of the ruling elite. This is seen in the example of the official unions in the USSR and their inheritors today in Russia, in the relations between the official unions and the presidents of Mexico and Argentina, and in the vertical unions under the Franco regime in Spain. Toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, anarch-syndicalism and revolutionary syndicalism were powerful, but today the process of union de-structuring is giving way to fragmented autonomous groups that occasionally coordinate actions around specific grievances.