Lessons from militant organising in tenants’ unions
rs21 housing organisers •The last decade has seen an impressive resurgence of tenants organising in Britain in the form of renters’ unions. rs21 housing organisers offer critical reflections on this sector and suggest some key priorities for militant organisers.
Since the neoliberal counteroffensive of the 1980s, many traditional community institutions of the working class have weakened or disappeared (workers’ social clubs, sports clubs, cooperative societies, etc.) and the power of its unions against the bosses and landlords has waned. Lucky then, that we have seen a number of smaller, nimbler unions spring up, organising casualised workers and renters. As renters, we have been at the centre of the hype around the supposed inherent militancy of these new and exciting formations. And indeed, they often have been militant – targeting landlords’ personal addresses, creating pickets that a trade union legally could not, and winning money back for renters in the process. Yet, if we are organisers and hope to undo the historic disorganisation of the working class, we must be sober and practical about the nature and activities of these new renters’ unions, as participants in them.
Like any union, our experience is that renters’ unions harbour tendencies towards conservative politics that, left unchecked, erode their character as fighting organs of class struggle altogether. We might summarise two broad tendencies – NGO-isation and sectoralism – that characterise this conservatising possibility.
NGO-isation sees short-term wins prioritised over long-term strategy, democratic processes eroded and recruitment becoming a numbers game. Development of members as militants is neglected and institutional-legal tactics are prioritised over collective action. However, this is not, as some imagine, simply the result of treacherous leaders, but develops quite rationally. We can easily imagine the following. A tenants’ union builds strength and gets more wins under its belt, concessions start to be won simply with the threat of action. For leadership and paid staff, it appears that in the short term, landlords, councils, and other adversaries are more willing to negotiate when the union threatens, but ultimately promises to avoid, militant action, rather than when they actually take it. At most, if forced to call some action, the union leadership finds its negotiating power in its ability to call the thing off. Small wins can be achieved without taking risk, but doing so raises a dilemma: without taking militant action the organisation can’t build and demonstrate its strength without jeopardising the newly won bargaining position. The solution is natural. Turning to official political and legal bargaining channels ensures a seat at the table from which leadership may continue to secure the wins that justify the organisation’s existence, but means they no longer desire the unruly militant membership that once put them in that position. Militant members are now a liability that might act prematurely or over-zealously. The undermining of democratic decision-making ensures the strategic independence of elected leaders and professional staff, and recruitment no longer needs to be concerned with the militant development of members, but simply recruiting as many people as possible to mobilise for less militant actions to demonstrate the strength of the organisation through size.1
Even the more consciously rank-and-file class organisation, though, can easily be plagued by sectoralism, and this can be seen in tenants or community organising. Sectoralism takes organising the working class seriously, but sees its organising as a political end in itself, eschewing broader political aims and principles that, for it, have nothing to do with ‘building power’ and ‘bread and butter issues’. It is ‘sectoral’ because it treats the working class as just one sectoral layer of society among many whose interests can be advanced, rather than, as communists do, a political agent that can push for democratic and revolutionary change of the whole of society. The working class is a team to support, rather than a structurally powerful agent for universal change. This attitude can therefore often go along with a strange emphasis on the cultural identity of the working class. A good example is the Independent Working Class Association, active in the 00s. While the IWCA focussed on community organising and democratic working-class control of their organisation (escaping NGO-isation), they oriented toward a ‘white working class’ culturalism: a soft patriotism, anti-multiculturalism, pro-policing etc.
The failing of sectoralism indicates that, while the struggle against a landlord or social housing provider can politicise the rent relationship and point towards its abolition, this by no means happens automatically. Militant tenants are just as if not more likely to “see asserting their dignity in terms of liberal egalitarianism”, for example, than as a means to further working-class organisation a political end. It is clear that, as organisers, we need to do more.
The ACORN Model
This all, eventually, leads us to our experiences in ACORN – the community union active in England and Wales, fighting largely on renters’ issues. ACORN stands as a good example of NGO-isation from its outset in 2014, with its founders taking leading staff roles and remaining in them largely until today. Though their power is not explicitly written into the union’s constitution, functionally, they and other national staff are able to steer the ship. If a branch is lucky, it may act with some autonomy, depending on the attitude of its assigned staff member, and how much its activity fits within the vision of the leadership.
From 2020, we were active in a branch with a good deal of autonomy – Oxford. Formed the year prior, the group had some early wins. Our new staff organiser had not been parachuted in by the leadership, but was a local activist, open to being led by members and our electeds. As such, we could experiment, both within the branch and with its activity. We established an organising team for skilling up members, developed a slow-and-steady ‘deep organising’ project in a more fucked-over area of the city, and carried out member-led reviews of tactics, strategies, and their potential problems.
Drawbacks of the branch were also clear, however. As is often the case, particularly with new groups made up of the already politicised, membership was skewed toward a young, white, over-educated layer of the class without care responsibilities. This problem was self-reinforcing because it was often this layer that had more time to commit to organising efforts and casework. Even with underpaid jobs in schools, supermarkets, and the local universities, clocking off meant an opening for class action rather than the beginning of the second workday of reproductive labour – caring for a child, spouse, etc. Nevertheless, the branch’s openness to self-critique, experimentation, and slow organising efforts in unrepresented areas meant this could slowly change. The militancy that the branch built encouraged members to look for more ambitious and creative ways to take collective action.
As we found, however, this was all quite against the vision of the national organisation, which, precisely in an NGO-ised way, prioritised easier, PR-friendly wins based on the threat of radical action, rather than its actuality. Threat of action could be carried out using a set ACORN formula and hope to guarantee an increase in membership numbers. Failures could be quickly forgotten about, or even somehow skewed as wins themselves. Organising drives were intended as the sphere of the paid organiser, not members.
Nationally, ACORN worked hard to instil in its members that it was a democratic organisation that was member-led and encouraged skilling up members and putting them in mid-level leadership positions. It stressed that staff were simply administrative and under the control of the membership. This obscured the real leadership position that staff were in, while also encouraging members to feel a (false) sense of ownership in the organisation and actively participate in its democratic structures.
When our branch was approached by two social housing tenants in an over-55s block in North Oxford who wanted to take on a partial service charge strike, refusing to pay the increase, the organising team decided to support their campaign and they joined the union. The housing block was split between tenants with existing social links that knew each other well, and highly atomised tenants. Quite quickly, those who had more social links joined the union. Many participated in the partial service charge strike, while frequent door knocking, 1-2-1 conversations, and organising social events slowly integrated more residents. The tenants took part in several protest actions, including a march on the housing providers office, and the campaign attracted positive local news coverage. The campaign built a strong sense of community and excitement in the block as well as the union more broadly, but there remained a significant portion of residents who had not yet engaged. Building union density among the tenants had started to slow and we needed a way to move forward.
Another over-55s block in East Oxford with the same social housing provider heard about our actions and got in touch about joining. This housing block was in a more working-class estate and was significantly more run-down with many more outstanding complaints. We had an initial meeting with the tenants and signed up almost everybody who attended. However, at this point the national organisation started to express concern about the campaign. The regional organiser asked us to pause our work asking for a meeting to discuss strategy. Whether an intentional stalling tactic or not, the regional organiser frequently cancelled and rearranged that meeting, or attended but said they had to leave early and couldn’t make a call about it there and then. Meanwhile, we wanted to coordinate with the ACORN branch in Birmingham, because the social housing provider that we were targeting had their headquarters there. However, in practice, ACORN branches are prevented from contacting other branches directly, with communication only going through the regional organiser. Weeks went by and we decided to simply take a vote as a branch to continue the campaign and bypass the regional organiser, citing the coordinated autonomous structure in ACORN’s constitution, which gives branches this power.
Around this same time was the national conference. This is where the membership is supposed to be allowed to propose and vote on rule changes. However, this year rule changes were suspended, citing a recent strategy review. We submitted two motions, a protest rule change motion to overturn the ban on rule changes, and a Palestine solidarity motion that in effect would allow branches to attend Palestine solidarity demonstrations, which previously, in classic sectoralist fashion, we had been told we were not allowed to do. The rule change motion was of course thrown out as we expected, and the national paid leadership organised heavily against the Palestine solidarity motion. National staff called branch secretaries, and local staff organisers met with their branch delegates, to tell them to vote against it. However, many members across the union came together to support it and the motion narrowly passed.
As a result of both the motions submitted to conference and bypassing our local organiser, relations between our branch and the national organisation deteriorated into open hostility. The regional organiser started to intervene in member-defence cases, the national organisers had regular calls with the branch secretary telling them that they should be disciplining us, and ultimately they fired the board member that had been elected from our branch. At this point, the committee resigned in protest and, according to the national organisers, our branch was officially dissolved.
With the branch dissolved, and the morale of members largely sapped away, the possibility of setting up a local non-ACORN community union, as other dissolved branches had done, also faded. However, with the various friends and contacts we had made in other branches, some small efforts could be mounted to continue a push for democratisation. The focus was to counter the isolation forced on branches by the bureaucratic leadership and make members, at least, aware of the cycles of branch clampdowns and member exoduses followed by slow renewals.
Over the next few months, we developed informal contacts from most branches and organised a petition with a number of simple demands – the head organiser should be elected, not appointed; national conference should have real powers to change the rules and the direction of the union; and there should be more powers given to existing elected roles. While we got signatures from across almost all branches, we found that uptake was fairly low. This was because either: the member had not yet experienced the effects of the bureaucratic dominance of the union and didn’t see internal matters as a concern; had experienced the effects of bureaucratic dominance and feared the consequences on their branch of signing; or saw the bureaucratic leadership of the union as essentially effective.
Lessons Learnt
The lessons we can pull from our experience are fairly clear. The twin conservatising tendencies of NGO-isation and sectoralism must be combated from the very beginning. We cannot fall prey to the sense that the union is somewhat radical now, while it is small and nimble, and these problems can be parked until later. While we made attempts to build cross-branch networks, politicise our organising, place the organising roles of members ahead of the paid organisers, and so on, this was often in response to an action by the bureaucratic leadership rather than a purposeful plan. When shit went down, we needed a means to immediately fight back while continuing some of our organising. Particularly cross-branch networks, outside of the tightly controlled cheerleading comms of the central org, would have made such a fightback much more possible, had we intentionally developed them a year prior. In the immediate term, against NGO-isation, we must always-already be organising with fellow members of the rank-and-file to undertake the kind of initiatives that we in our ACORN branch undertook too late, with cross-branch networks as the most obvious example. At the same time, in the longer term, we can look to build communist political organisations that, in history, have sometimes been able to both pressure unions to take more radical action, while also providing an alternative pole of stability to institutional agreements with the state or business. In the best of these situations, working-class organisations have less rational interest in taking short-term and institutionalised bargains.2 Against sectoralism, communism should be drawn out from our day-to-day experiences, but only through linking together all facets of political life, from our experiences of the workplace, to the home, to those of “high politics”, imperialism and the state into a totalising framework.
There are now several local tenants’ and community unions across the country that are a result of crises imposed upon a local ACORN branch by the bureaucracy: Food & Solidarity in Newcastle; Liverpool Residents Action; Lancaster & Morecambe Tenants and Community Union; Sheffield Tenants Union. (Seemingly unrelated to ACORN, there is also the recently formed Southampton Tenants Union.) Should these federate alongside other local tenants unions, perhaps in similar style to the Autonomous Tenants Union Network in the US, this may be a positive development. However, this cannot be seen as a simple means to resolve ACORN’s problems. Unless we face up to the fact that no class radicalism is guaranteed by the activities of the union – even one that takes confrontational action, and appeals to the rank-and-file – we risk repeating ACORN’s trajectory again. If we can take this to heart though, we can chart another course, and begin to reverse the historic disorganisation of our class.
Notes
This article was updated on 14 December 2024 to reflect the fact that Greater Manchester Tenants Union pre-existed ACORN
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