In this extract from the recently released Make Bosses Pay, Eve Livingston sets out why collective action is essential for workers seeking to counter the power dynamics present in modern workplaces.

This article is published in English and Urdu.

By Eve Livingston

Have you ever had a boss who bullied or sexually harassed you, or who ignored your complaint when another member of staff did?

How about one who faked your payslips and kept your tax contributions for themselves? Or who rejected your request for leave while your mother was dying, or while you were having a mental health crisis? Who wouldn’t turn up the heating when the office was freezing?

A boss who paid you less than your colleagues and then said you weren’t a team player when you complained? One who refused you shifts and then fired you for not working enough hours? Who demanded you arrive ten minutes early and penalised you for leaving on time, despite paying you below minimum wage and by the hour? Who sacked you after seven years of service in the midst of a global pandemic? Who paid you so little you had to claim benefits and use food banks? Who put you under so much pressure you drove your car into a tree in an attempt to take your own life?

Read our review of Make Bosses Pay

These are not extreme examples cooked up to misrepresent the boss class by focussing on a few ‘bad apples’: they are real-life experiences recounted to me by a range of workers of different backgrounds and in different sectors throughout the course of researching and writing this book – and they only scratch the surface of the egregious power abuses that unions and their members confront on a daily basis. If you haven’t personally been mistreated at work, your friend, sibling, parent, partner or colleague has.

This kind of conflict is a feature of work. The interests of bosses and workers are not just different but opposed, and in a constant tug of war: we need to sell our labour at a rate that allows us to live a decent life, while they want to extract it at as low a price as possible, for as big a gain as possible. We rely on them for survival but we’re just one of many interchangeable and disposable workers they can pick up and drop as it suits them. Workers are the largest group in society, but power is concentrated with bosses; they choose how much to cede to you. The cards are always stacked in their favour.

Marx wrote of this dynamic when he defined ‘labour-power’ as a worker’s capacity to produce goods and services. It is this which a worker sells to the capitalist class, the owners of the means of production, who gain from their purchase not just the labour but the products of it too. This is capital: the accumulation of profit at the expense of the working class who produce it.

Because we’re indoctrinated into the world of waged labour from childhood – watching parents go to work each day; taking on Saturday and after-school jobs for pocket money; constantly being asked what we want to ‘be’ when we grow up and knowing instinctively it’s a question about paid work – it can seem like an inevitable and obvious feature of society. But take a step back for a moment and consider that our workplaces, where we spend one third of our lives toiling to prop up the other third not spent sleeping, can also be the places where we’re most in danger, where we’re most exploited, where we’re least in control. One of the relationships which has the most control over our lives is also one of the most fundamentally imbalanced.

Put simply, this is why we unionise. As individuals against capital, we’re largely disposable, replaceable and, ultimately, powerless. But the reverse is true of a collective working class; the bosses rely on us to make their profits. Collectivism shifts this power dynamic, clawing back some control from capitalism’s gatekeepers to those of us at its mercy.

Eve Livingston is a freelance journalist specialising in social affairs, politics and inequalities. This extract is taken from her new book, Make Bosses Pay: Why We Need Unions published by Pluto Press in September 2021.