To describe this line of reasoning as selective would be a gross understatement. After all, let’s assume that labor unions are as evil as the RTW lobby says they are. Even granting that for the sake of argument, labor is not the only interest engaging in collective bargaining. What about the individuals involved in the employing corporation? Aren’t these businesses effectively “capital unions” exploiting incorporation laws to achieve a better bargaining position relative to labor? Isn’t the reason why investors pool their resources and form businesses to get better deals in the market through economies of scale? Isn’t that why they try to get investors rather than simply borrowing all the money for their start-up costs–to spread the risk and the reward?

So unions of labor are only one side of this story; to emphasize collusion on the workers’ side is to leave another form of collusion totally unaddressed. Corporations are capital unions, organizations whose members work together to negotiate wages and benefits (and other costs, of course) downwards to get the best return for themselves. Why is one form of collusion wrong and the other not?

I’d add that, in historical comparison to labor unions, corporations are much more fully creatures of the state. While labor unions have existed for much of their history in legally unrecognized forms, arising from the spontaneous organizing efforts of workers themselves, government-granted incorporation has always been a necessarily statist activity. There’s nothing free market about dictating to the market that corporations must be dealt with on their own, special terms. Conferring limited liability, entity status, and other privileges on corporations is intervention to skew the market, a crime that can only be laid at the feet of the state and the capitalists that run it.

I view this RTW movement as not only the argument that capital gets to deal with labor in a privileged manner, but also a defense of the entire balance of power between employers and employees. It’s about more than just authoritarianism and a system that favors capital over labor; it’s also about the legal codification of class distinctions inherent in the structure of production. To the extent capitalists decry so-called “class warfare,” I believe they are trying to gloss over the privileged terms on which they want to do business, allowing them to claim there are no classes of consequence while entrenching them further. That allows them to safely defer to the market, while ensuring it always delivers the balance of power they desire.

After all, if RTW folks truly believe that each and every worker deserves the right to negotiate individually with the capital union, why stop there? Why not also grant each and every shareholder, investor, creditor, and other owner of the corporate capital union the right to negotiate individually with the worker himself or his labor union? Why should both the worker and the owner be forced to deal with the extractive, exploitative management class as the exclusive agent of the corporation? If it’s unfair for the labor union to monopolize labor relative to a given employer, isn’t it equally unfair for the capital union to monopolize capital relative to a given employee?

The reason is that capital unions are politically and legally favored in labor negotiations, because they have always been favored. Our entire political economy is built around doing business on their terms. If you want a genuinely free market in labor, you can start by ridding yourself of the biased narratives that explain how collective barganing is virtuous and crucial for those with money, but unnecessary and evil for those who don’t.

The Industrial Workers of the World is an economic organization without affiliation with any political party or any non-political sect. I as an Industrialist say that industrial unionism is the broadest possible political interpretation of the working-class political power, because by organizing the workers industrially you at once enfranchise the women in the shops, you at once give the black men who are disfranchised politically a voice in the operation of the industries; and the same would extend to every worker. That to my mind is the kind of political action that the working class wants. You must not be content to come to the ballot box on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, the ballot box erected by the capitalist class, guarded by capitalist henchmen, and deposit your ballot to be counted by black-handed thugs, and say, “That is political action.” You must protect your ballot with an organization that will enforce the mandates of your class. I want political action that counts. I want a working class that can hold an election every day if they want to. (my emphasis)

As a Wobbly, however, the ideology of class struggle informs my activism on labor. Solidarity is never unconditional, as my friend Chris Lempa pointed out to me in a letter. True common purpose in the struggle against bosses must be framed in terms of legitimate class theory in order not to degenerate into the business-as-usual, reformist, junior-partner-in-the-ruling-class unionism that has prevailed since the Wagner Act. And so while I support public sector unions in this conflict, I find it difficult to place them in the traditional model of class struggle.

In the private sector the class dynamics are clear: workers and bosses can be easily seen as in zero-sum competition. One gains at the expense of the other, the prize is effective control over the means of production, and the players line up along the party whose control they favor. Customers and suppliers represent the third parties who, while not powerless in the equation, tend to deal with the organization as a whole on a voluntary basis. The adversarial relationship is more centered inside the organization, and market pressures from the third parties are accepted as a given. Much of the decline in labor power has arisen from capital’s superior marketing of the narrative that union gains come at consumer losses.

This analysis falls apart when applied to the public sector. The government has no equivalent market pressures to which it is compelled to respond. As a monopoly producer, government has every incentive to pacify its workforce by delivering higher wages and benefits. The taxpaying consumer of these services is without recourse. Politicians cannot be seen as perfect analogs of the boss class, nor can civil service management be viewed in the same sense as private sector management. Indeed, to invoke the oft-cited preamble to the IWW constitution, does the public sector working class and the public sector employing class really have nothing in common?

As a former public school teacher, my wife offered me an example of organizational dynamics in the public sector that might better explain the class disposition of the various players. Who is the favored class within the public schooling institution? Surely not teachers - they are serially overworked and underpaid, but even more importantly from a radical labor perspective, they enjoy little control over the workplace. In fact, the history indicates that teachers have been viewed by the establishment as nearly as much in need of control and discipline as the students they teach. Curricula are designed not merely to guide student learning but, to the greatest extent possible, make classrooms teacher-proof. The fear has always been that a genuine relationship between teachers and students would be harmful to the institution as a whole, and so a factory model guided the development of modern pedagogy.

So, who is exploiting teachers? Who is denying them control of work conditions? Who is playing them off against the end consumers (students and parents) to limit their power and influence?

It would easy to say: the public, through their designated politicians, from the Governor down to the School Board. However, the public has very coarse control over the schools (or any government function) through political means. The public is not the “boss class” in any meaningful way, least of all because they desire maximum effort from teachers at a minimum wage. They are imprisoned customers given a modicum of choice but no exit, and as they work for a living just like teachers they are more likely to see their interests aligned than opposed.

What about the politicians? Surely they have outsized control, at least as the managers. They seek to maximize their own control over the institution and position themselves for personal political advantage in the larger establishment. While market pressures may not factor in directly, they still have to deal with budget pressures, balancing interests among the entire government. The relative competition may not originate in the market so much as among the interest groups of the state: those seeking to grow one department’s budget at another’s expense, or those who favor capital over government power and fight taxes.

But even if politicians are the boss class, that is still insufficient to explain organizational dynamics within the school. Where is the class managing affairs on a daily basis on the boss’s behalf? Who implements the control over workers? Who sees their interests as more aligned with the bosses than with the workers? The answer is obvious when you think about it.

The school administration is the management class of public schooling. They are the class with fat salaries, minimal work to do, and an interest in running the school as a factory. They prefer stability to true empowerment and education. They hold both teachers and students in check. Their class actually grows pretty steadily, soaking up funds from those who actually teach, while implementing stupid policies like zero tolerance to subsume more and more of the classroom under their direct management.

I’ve focused on public schooling, but I imagine this model could apply to just about any civil service field. You have the people who do the work - in a zoning office, for instance, it’s the clerks and surveyors and those who actually effect the end product. Then you have the city administration and the Mayor / Board of Supervisors / etc., who use the institution as a means to a political career focused on directing others and taking credit for it. They don’t care about zoning per-se; their interest is in stabilizing the organization so they can grow the parasite administrative class and pursue their agenda of personal aggrandizement and its ideological trappings (set aside your feelings about zoning laws in general for a moment).

As a Wobbly and a mutualist, then, I’d like to see radical labor take a stand that does not simply provide unconditional solidarity to public workers, but pushes them to take increasingly radical stances on issues of workplace control. What do we want: state-recognized and -enforced collective bargaining rights, or a movement so powerful it can operate without the state’s permission? Are we fighting for a bit higher wage and benefits for public workers, or an end to the wage system? Do we want civil servants to be treated with slightly more respect by their overlords, or do we instead demand worker control of these capital-serving institutions?

After all, we’ve established that public sector unions are the last vestiges of something approach a fair deal between labor and capital. Perhaps we should remind capital why they sought to give us that deal to begin with, thus securing a better position for labor in all sectors. To accomplish this, Wobblies and all radical unionists must reassert the primacy of the class struggle and creatively compose the narrative that frames the public and private sector worker grievances in class terms. Only a rebirth of class consciousness will push the center of the labor movement leftwards and secure our interests. It’s not enough to defeat Governor Walker or even to respond to these periodic crises in labor relations with solidarity: we have to resurrect the class struggle.

It suffices to say that Jim has been co-working at a local space for some time now. Where he sees opportunity is in an organization that could take care of the administration - invoicing, taxes, space provisioning - leaving freelancers, small proprietors, and other independent developers free to pursue their business. The organization could be run on the mutual model, where all the “clients” are owners.

I’m intrigued by this idea, but I want to skin a slightly different cat. My experience of co-working has been quite different due to Richmond’s lack of a dedicated space for it. Our group has had to be more ad hoc, using Twitter and Google Groups to spontaneously organize meetings at local coffee shops on an irregular basis. Everything I’ve read on starting a co-working venue stresses the need to build the community first, rather than getting the location and expecting people to come to it.

Building on this idea of community-centric development, where developers working on their own client projects reach out to each other for mutual aid and support, I start to wonder whether the co-working group could not be more. Having worked as an employee for software companies - especially consultancies, agencies, contractors, and the like - it begins to occur to me that what we’re building in the community solves many of the problems that impel developers towards employment in the first place.

After all, while it’s no cakewalk, freelancing in the development world has never been easier. Especially in the emergent technologies such as more dynamic, web-oriented languages and mobile development, work is plentiful. The capital requirements are almost zero, as you probably already own everything you need to get started - an internet connection, a computer, and maybe a phone. It’s all about your ability to deliver, to manage client relationships, and carve out an area of expertise that differentiates you. Plenty of tools exist for managing the invoicing, taxes, and client communication for pennies a day.

Because of the relative ease of going out on your own, we should expect to see an increase in independent developers. The demand is definitely there; while it can be a good deal for us individually, it’s often an extremely good deal for the client. Agencies have so much overhead they need to balance that their rates can be three or four times what we can afford to charge. While we may boost our earnings by eliminating all that overhead, it seems clear to me that, more often than not, the client is the one who benefits the most by the lower costs and decreased commitments that come from piecemeal contracting with independents rather than investing in a full scale relationship with another business.

The danger is not that we cannot compete, but that we become an alternative to wage labor for these clients and that they will treat us as such. Reduced compensation is not the only downside of employment; there’s also the lack of control and the sense of dependency that people feel towards their employer. By having a more flexible contract from which either party can more easily walk away, we get more bargaining leverage to be sure, but that says nothing about the relationship we will have once we agree on a billing rate. Clients can be just as bossy and disrespectful as bosses, and they will often try with independent contractors what they would never dream of trying on a consultancy.

Indie developers get treated like ersatz employees precisely because, often, that’s how we sell ourselves: hired hands to the the client’s bidding. We’re cutting out the staffing agency, perhaps, but we’re certainly not positioning ourselves as serious competitors to agencies who aren’t selling services so much as bundles of expertise. In order to have control over the kind of work we do, in order to build a reputation as a source of solutions and not just a tech odd jobber, we have to be able to compete with the IT firm. But what is a firm / agency / consultancy, after all? It’s just a bunch of people who do what we do, with a few differences.

First, they know where to find each other on a regular basis, and so they can work together as a rule rather than as a special appointment they make with each other. Freelance for a while and you’ll realize this is no small matter. In doing so, they build a rapport, a collective competency that multiplies their individual capabilities. Being able to break problems up into sections and tackle in tandem - or being able to have a manager who can help organize this - increases predictability and, often, quality.

Second, it’s not just their status as a team; it’s the diversity of their skills. Very few agencies only do development; they usually couple it with a hefty dose of design, marketing and strategy acumen, project management, client management, etc. A one stop shop staffed with a team of people all specializing in different parts of the delivery of software can serve as a compelling package deal. Clients are willing to pay three to four times what freelancers will charge just to have all their technology needs taken care of by one vendor.

Third, they don’t have to focus on running the business per se: the bookkeeping, the billing, the facilities management, the recruiting, following up on leads, getting paid. Because the people doing our kind of work are employees, they enter into the employment agreement assuming these details will be taken care of (or that they will focus on these details and not have to do development work). The organization handles mundane concerns that so often bog independents down.

Before we ask how we indies can compete, we should first ask ourselves whether we really want to. I’m not convinced we should position ourselves as direct competitors necessarily. Doing our own bookkeeping and client management may suck sometimes, but it’s awfully grounding; we never lose perspective and get disconnected from the meat and potatoes of how we earn our living. There is a certain confidence and self-reliance from knowing that what you’re building is yours. You’re expanding your skill set beyond being a geek prodigy to being a person who can have an impact in the industry and in the community on your own terms, not some boss’s or accountant’s. If your point is to grow to become an agency, then this article isn’t going to appeal to you anyway, because I think employees suck just as much as employers.

But the facade of a fully integrated, unified, monolithic firm can make freelancers seem quite inadequate. It’s a myth, of course: there’s very little that an organization can bring to bear on a problem independent of the specific individuals involved - specific individuals that can vary in quality, are not always easily replaced when they up and leave, etc. Committing to delivering consistency to clients outside the boundaries of the firm can be dishonest when there’s no consistency within the boundaries of the firm, but we’ve convinced ourselves that’s the myth clients want to hear. That’s why firms place so much emphasis on building their own corporate brand; because it serves as a convenient stand-in for the people who actually do the work but could leave anytime. The brand will never quit, and the client’s relationship is with the brand, not the people.

The myth of the firm works, not because it’s a uniquely superior solution for the client, but rather because a more honest arrangement has not been demonstrated competitive. After all, the biggest strength of a firm is the productive relationships developed between the workers. Funnily enough, this is precisely what we’re building in a co-working community; a place where people know they can go for support, for assistance in an area outside their expertise, for a rapport and feeling of camaraderie. If this is where the agency’s strength lies, there’s no reason independent producers couldn’t come together to build their own teams that are not tied to a brand or a boss but can nevertheless produce client value at least competitive with a firm.

Imagine a non-profit entity organized by independent developers in a town for the purposes of managing a workspace and perhaps administrative staff for our individual businesses. We don’t go into the office because we need to; we go because we want to - because we want the company, we want to compare notes on solutions or commiserate about problems, and we want to see what others are doing. We build the relationships with each other without needing to control each other via employment.

Now some interesting possibilities arise. Imagine if I am trying to sign a client for a project, but they need more development labor than I can provide. Or they need a designer. Well, it just so happens I know some guys I can call in. They may not work “for” me, but we have a rapport, we’ve worked through problems in the past, and I trust them. I know what they bill. I can bring them in and do the work - perhaps as subcontractors, perhaps through an ad hoc entity, perhaps as independent contractors with the client. It doesn’t really matter; what matters is that we’re finding a way to meet a client’s needs outside of growing our own business and hiring people. We’re capturing the strength of the firm without becoming it.

Here are some other possibilities:

• We offer training for people who want to get involved in software development, and give them opportunities to exchange their time and energy to learn the skills they’d need to build their own business and perhaps join our group.

• We become a destination for clients who, perhaps at first, merely want advice. We place an emphasis on educating them about quality so they can make informed decisions about IT services. By making them better clients who can employ our expertise in a less distorted, more efficient manner, we help the entire industry. And we get great leads.

• People who still work for “the man” in I.T. now have another option. They have more leverage in demanding better pay and treatment from their employer, because now they see the alternative. They might even be able to pick up some work from us if they get fired or need to quit. This raises the bar for wage labor and all boats rise.

If some of the above sound like a trade guild or union, then you’re understanding me. But it neither has to necessarily work out like that nor like anything in particular. The precise direction in which any of this would evolve is a secondary concern.

What’s more important to me is that we see the potential and possibilities in the act of striking out on our own. We don’t need to conform to the standards set by a bunch of large, corporatist behemoths who thrive off of inefficiency and mediating between the client and the producer. We don’t have to think of our independence as wage labor by another name. There’s room for real organizational innovation in the business of software development.

By taking initiative in solving our own problems, by meeting our own needs creatively and unconventionally, we might transform this stagnant and conservative industry. Who knows, we might even provide an organizational model for how workers in other industries can better work. Remember: we didn’t stop working for “the man” just to do business like him!