Trade unions coping with moral harassment

Marxist contributions

Abstract

This theoretical essay is a debate on moral harassment at workplaces from the historical-dialectical materialism standpoint, which discusses the constitution and development of a specific form of violence at work by emphasizing on the consequences on the organization of the working class, particularly the trade unions. Emerging in the 1970s, moral harassment is a capital’s required sort of management addressed against those who then used to contest it, becoming thus a much more efficient, but less explicit tool. It is the logic of capital that arranges certain strategies of action, which necessarily aims to prevent the working class from coming together to organize and to recognize themselves as individuals with common rights, as a class. Unfortunately, the fall time of working class representations has negatively impacted worker’s means of resistance. There are ways for workers to go out of this situation, but they must necessarily be built collectively. Struggles through trade unions run into corporate boundaries, inherent in their own nature, but they can be held to their limits, by achieving and organizing the class in this process. This confrontation needs to be performed as class struggles and not as a search for citizenship since it is inscribed in capital’s board of strategies of keeping its own perpetuation.