The Trade Union Contradiction After the COVID-19 Pandemic: Social Harm and the Failure to Transform Work

The COVID-19 pandemic was the crucial escalatory event in the history of digitalisation and algorithmic governance, entrenching conditions that are hostile to union organisation and workplace solidarity as such, while reallocating workers to areas of production most difficult to unionise. Yet across the West, the pandemic was experienced by trade unions as a beneficent reversal of their fortunes, as workers turned to them for protection during uncertain times, governments brought them closer to decision-making than they had been for decades, and—in the US—the new Biden Presidency professed to offer them a privileged role in a post-neoliberal order. ‘The trade union contradiction’ between institutional optimism and disastrous conditions is the common thread connecting very different models of trade unionism: from Nordic countries—where unions are strong but anti-antagonistic and relatively compliant with government agendas—to the UK—where unions are weak but relatively antagonistic to government agendas. This chapter surveys how trade unions responded to the calamity of the pandemic, before offering what has hitherto been lacking: a theoretical vocabulary for how the crisis could have been negotiated with a more robust conception of social harm and with greater ambition for transforming work for the better.