What is Trade Union Bureaucracy? |  133 

what is trade union Bureaucracy?  
A theoretical Account

— David Camfield1

‘Union bureaucracy’ is an important yet vexed term in the study of 
trade unions and in radical politics. At worst, it can be a label pinned by 
left-wing activists on those union officers whose actions or beliefs are seen 
as repugnant. This usage confers the label of ‘bureaucrat’ on some union 
officials but not on those whose behaviour is seen as praiseworthy. The 
term is also used in a more serious way. Many critical analysts (and others) 
have drawn attention to the existence of a layer of full-time union officers 
and staff and argued that this group of people – ‘the trade union bureau-
cracy’ – plays a conservative role in unions. There are many versions of 
this kind of analysis of ‘the bureaucracy,’ some much more insightful 
than others. Yet there have been scarcely any recent attempts to refine 
and present a coherent theory of union bureaucracy.2 Unfortunately, it 
remains the case that in the study of unions, as John Kelly (1988) argued 
over two decades ago, ‘Rarely is the term “bureaucracy” defined or its 
use justified on any theoretical grounds, and it is normally unclear which 
of several different definitions is actually being employed’ (p.155). More-
over, theories of ‘the trade union bureaucracy’ understood as a group of 
people can function as blinkers to a critical understanding of the character 
of union activity itself. A focus on official leaderships can lead us to ignore 
or neglect how union activity happens, how the relations among members 
and between officials and members are organized. To put the same point 

1 David Camfield teaches Labour Studies at the University of Manitoba and is the author 
of Canadian Labour in Crisis: Reinventing the Workers’ Movement (2011). Thanks to David 
McNally, Charlie Post, Alan Sears and Sheila Wilmot for discussions about some of the 
ideas in this article, earlier versions of which were presented at the Annual Meetings of the 
Society for Socialist Studies in 2009 and at the 2010 Toronto Historical Materialism conference.

2 Brenner (1986), Leier (1991) and some of the essays collected in Hyman (1989) represent 
original contributions that attempt to clarify the character of union bureaucracy. The past 
two decades have seen very few theoretical contributions on this question. Darlington and 
Upchurch (2012) is a notable exception. 



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differently, bureaucratic forms of social practice in union organizations 
risk escaping examination when ‘the bureaucracy’ is the centre of our field 
of vision. When this happens, the result is a very partial understanding of 
unions as working-class movement organisations. 

Consequently, this article proposes an alternative theoretical account 
of union bureaucracy and union officialdom (members who hold elected 
or appointed union office, and union staff). This account seeks to incor-
porate the best insights of the tradition of critical analysis of ‘the trade 
union bureaucracy’ (full-time union officials) into a theoretical framework 
founded on an original conceptualization of bureaucracy as a particular 
mode of existence of social relations, whose relevance is not limited to 
the study of unions.3 The development of an explicit conceptualization of 
bureaucracy as a social phenomenon and, on that foundation, an account 
of union bureaucracy is intended to address the problem of theoretical 
unclarity identified by Kelly. Another reason for addressing the nature 
of bureaucracy itself is that Marxist writers on bureaucracy (e.g. Mandel, 
1992) have tended to pay relatively little attention to theorizing the phe-
nomenon at the most basic level, in contrast to the care paid to concepts 
such as class. The account proposed here attempts to grasp core pro-
cesses of bureaucratization within unions in capitalist societies. It identi-
fies the sources of bureaucracy in unions as wage-labour contracts, the 
separation of conception from execution in human practical activity, the 
political administration of unions by state power and union officialdom. 
The perspective advanced encourages analysis that combines attention to 
different manifestations of bureaucracy throughout union organizations 
with examination of the specific role of full-time officers and staff (rather 
than one or the other). The article concludes with a brief discussion of how 
this theory directs our attention in the analysis of contemporary unions, 
with specific reference to the US and Canada.

tRAdE union BuREAuCRACy AS tHE oFFiCiAldoM 
When the concept of union bureaucracy is used in a serious fashion 

(rather than as a superficial political criticism), it usually refers to a 
group of people. This is how the concept figures in classic sociological 
studies such as Robert Michels’s oft-cited book of a century ago on 

3 An anonymous reviewer pointed out that this theory could be used to scrutinize the 
“’NGOization’ of social movements” and “the relationship between NGOs and social 
movements,” but I am unable to address those issues here.



What is Trade Union Bureaucracy? |  135 

working-class movement organizations (1966)4 and C Wright Mills’s 
1948 book on US union officials, The New Men of Power (2001, p.224). 
Union bureaucracy is equated with a group of people by most Marxist 
writers. For Ernest Mandel (1992), it is a layer of full-time officials that 
has carried out ‘the usurpation of decision-making power’ within the 
union organisation; a stratum of full-timers who have not accomplished 
this are ‘an incipient bureaucracy’ (p.68). For Alex Callinicos (1995), the 
union bureaucracy is ‘a social layer made up of full time officials with a 
material interest in confining the class struggle to the search for reforms 
within a capitalist framework’ (p.16). Robert Brenner (1985) uses the 
term in a similar manner, and many more examples of this kind could 
be cited. This usage is also common among non-Marxist radicals. For 
example, historian Mark Leier (1991) advances a perspective on union 
bureaucracy influenced by the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Leier argues 
that the bureaucracy is made up of leaders whose ‘offices are protected 
from immediate and effective control by the membership’ (p.420). By 
including shop stewards as part of the bureaucracy (p.424), Leier differs 
with the previously-mentioned writers, but he shares with them the idea 
that the term ‘union bureaucracy’ refers to a group of people.

In identifying the widespread use of the term trade union bureau-
cracy in this sense, I do not want to imply that all those who use it in 
this manner theorize union bureaucracy in the same way or equally 
well. For example, Callinicos (1995) argues that union struggle within 
capitalist society inevitably requires compromises with capital, 
which must be negotiated by workers’ representatives. Some of these 
representatives become full-time officials and ‘the effect, whatever 
the beliefs of the officials, is to isolate them from those they repre-
sent.’ Removed from the paid workplace and no longer employed by 
capital, they ‘come to see negotiation, compromise, the reconciliation 
of capital and labour as the very stuff of trade unionism’ (p.17) and 
oppose struggle because it threatens negotiations and union funds. 
Mandel (1992)’s theory is different in important respects. In Power 
and Money, he sees the ‘cultural underdevelopment’ of the working 
class (the normal ‘status of the proletariat under the rule of capital’) 
as the basis of union bureaucracy (p.60). At the same time, he identi-
fies an inexorable organizational logic that creates a bureaucracy: ‘the 
development of mass political or trade-union organisations is incon-

4 While Michels’s focus is on political parties and he does not use the exact term ‘union bureau-
cracy,’ his work considers unions as well as parties and his discussion of party bureaucracy 
equates it with a group of people. See the comments on Michels by Perusek (1995).



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ceivable without an apparatus of full-timers and functionaries. At the 
most basic level, it is impossible to collect, centralise and administer 
the dues of a million members through purely voluntary labour’ 
(p.59). Leier (1991)’s notion of bureaucracy is different again, as he 
argues that the bureaucracy’s ‘distinguishing characteristic...is their 
power over the membership’ (p.420). My point is simply that these 
writers share a certain understanding: union bureaucracy means the 
labour officialdom. 

The strengths and weaknesses of these specific accounts is not my 
concern here, though it is worth pointing out that they are all more sound 
theoretical efforts than Michels’s belief in an iron law of oligarchy rooted 
in the allegedly universal incompetence of ‘the masses’ and the inherent 
nature of organization itself (Michels, 1966; Barker, 2001; Perusek, 1995) 
or Lenin’s influential but deeply flawed idea that union officials are 
conservative because they are part of a ‘labour aristocracy’ bribed with 
imperialist super-profits (Lenin, 1920; Post, 2011). These theories high-
light the significance of the existence of layers of union officials, par-
ticularly full-time officers and staff, and nothing that follows should be 
interpreted as dismissing the importance of this social phenomenon, to 
which I will return. 

The most important problem common to such accounts is that 
their focus on full-time union officials is conducive to neglecting how 
union activity is socially organized more broadly. At worst, it can lead 
to a depiction of union officialdom as a rotten crust beneath which 
lies a pure, untainted organization and membership. Another pitfall 
is that in situations where there are few or no full-time officials – as 
is the case in many smaller union locals in the US and Canada – the 
theory implies by definition that bureaucracy is not a significant issue, 
since there are few or no bureaucrats present. Above all, focusing on 
the head can, so to speak, lead to neglect of the body. For example, 
Callinicos (1995) devotes most of a chapter on ‘Capitalism, the unions 
and union leaders’ to ‘the union bureaucracy.’ It says very little about 
how relations between officers (whether lay, to use the British term 
for workers holding union office who remain on the job, or full-time) 
and other members are organized in the country whose unions are 
at the centre of the book, the UK. It also pays scant attention to the 
nature of collective bargaining relations or how the regulation of 
unions by state power (the political administration [Neocleous, 1996] 
of unions) influences UK unions, including the officialdom. Ques-
tions about the condition of union organization in paid workplaces 



What is Trade Union Bureaucracy? |  137 

and in branches (union locals), levels of member participation and 
control, the relationship between unionized workers and the non-
unionized majority of the working class and the gender and racial 
order within British unions are raised barely or not at all. This kind of 
critical analysis leaves many important dimensions of a union move-
ment unexamined or treats them as of little importance. The elabora-
tion and defence by Ralph Darlington and Martin Upchurch (2012) of 
the same theoretical perspective on full-time union officials for which 
Callinicos argues is less narrow in scope. However, it has little to say 
about unions as bureaucratic organizations, rather than the character 
of the stratum of officials at their head. 

This suggests that to identify bureaucracy with ‘the bureaucracy’ 
is too limited a notion. We need a theoretical approach that embraces 
other phenomena too, not just full-time officials. If union bureaucracy 
is not to be equated with the officialdom, what is it? Richard Hyman 
(1989) has proposed that bureaucracy in unions is ‘a corrosive pat-
tern of internal social relations manifest in a differential distribution of 
expertise and activism; in a dependence of the mass of union mem-
bers on the initiative and experience of a relatively small group of 
leaders – both official and ‘unofficial’’ (p.246). To distinguish bureau-
cracy as a social relation from union officers and staff as a group, one 
can use the term ‘labour officialdom’ to refer to the latter. From this 
perspective, to the degree that the relationship between members and 
the officers and staff is one of dependence, then what we have is a 
bureaucratic officialdom.

This approach has the advantage of conceptually distinguishing 
the phenomenon of bureaucracy from that of the officialdom as a 
social layer. It allows us to understand many contemporary unions 
as bureaucratic mass organizations headed by particular bureaucratic 
officialdoms. Unfortunately, it also creates new problems: it severs 
bureaucracy from any notion of regulations that constrain agents, 
and its emphasis on dependence on leaders blurs the line between the 
problematic of bureaucracy and the broader problematic of subaltern 
agency, self-activity and leadership. The latter is relevant in situa-
tions where bureaucracy is absent or insignificant. For these and per-
haps other reasons,5 Hyman’s approach, while a thoughtful attempt 
to move beyond the limitations of a conventional Marxist theory of 
union bureaucracy, is flawed and unsatisfactory.

5 See Darlington and Upchurch (2012) and the rejoinder by Hyman (2012).



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wHAt iS BuREAuCRACy?
To raise the level of theoretical reflection on union bureaucracy to a 

higher level in a way that allows us to understand many unions as bureau-
cratic mass organizations, it is helpful to pose the question directly: what 
is bureaucracy? I suggest that bureaucracy is best understood as a mode 
of existence of social relations in which people’s activity (labour) is organized 
through formal rules that limit their ability to determine its character and goals, 
and which they themselves are not able to alter with ease. Although informal 
rules may also affect people’s activity in similar ways, one of the distin-
guishing features of bureaucracy as a social phenomenon is the formal 
character of rules, as recognized by Max Weber (1952).6 It should also be 
noted that the understanding of bureaucracy suggested here does not 
claim that all social organization involving formal rules is bureaucratic 
(as might be argued by supporters of an extremely individualistic ver-
sion of anarchism); rules are bureaucratic only when they limit people’s 
ability to determine the character and goals of their own activity and 
cannot be easily changed by those affected.

This form of organizing social relations, while commonplace in 
contemporary capitalist societies, does not originate with capitalism. 
Bureaucracy can be found in societies that long pre-date capitalism. 
Anthropologist David Graeber (2006) argues that bureaucracy occurs 
where ‘social situations...founded on structural violence’ (by which he 
means ‘forms of pervasive social inequality that are ultimately backed 
up by the threat of physical harm’) are being managed (pp. 4-5). The 
development and geographical expansion of capitalism is associated 
with the spread of bureaucracy; as Georg Lukács (1971) noted, the con-
cern for prediction and calculability in the capitalist enterprise observed 
by Weber is part of a broader drive to subject different aspects of social 
life to ‘an increasingly formal and standardised treatment...in which 
there is an ever-increasing remoteness from the qualitative and material 
essence of the “things” to which bureaucratic activity pertains’ (p.99).

One of the ‘forms of pervasive social inequality’ most relevant to 
bureaucracy is the separation of intellectual from manual labour and 
the monopolization of the former by a small number of people. Alfred 
Sohn-Rethel (1978) argues that intellectual labour, as distinct from 
manual labour, is defined by ‘the use of non-empirical form-abstractions 
which may be represented by nothing other than non-empirical, “pure” 

6 The conceptualization of bureaucracy being proposed here is obviously not Weber’s. My 
point is simply that Weber was right to recognize the significance of formal rules to the 
phenomenon of bureaucracy. 



What is Trade Union Bureaucracy? |  139 

concepts’ (p.66). Intellectual labour in this sense, he contends, first arose 
with the emergence of philosophy in Greece, a development made pos-
sible by the ‘non-empirical real abstraction’ (p.66) involved in a ‘social 
synthesis’ – Sohn-Rethel’s term for ‘the network of relations by which 
society forms a coherent whole’ (p.4) – that is ‘in strict spatio-temporal 
separation from all acts of man’s [sic] material interchange with nature’ 
(p.67). Thus intellectual labour was made possible by ‘the generalisa-
tion intrinsic in the monetary commensuration of commodity values 
promoted by coinage’ (p.102). The first occurrence of coinage he dates 
to ‘about 680 BC on the Ionian side of the Aegean, in Lydia or Phrygia’ 
(p.59).7 A number of questions can be raised about Sohn-Rethel’s account.8
However, for present purposes, what matters is that intellectual labour 
has been a source of bureaucracy to the extent that it has been monopo-
lized by privileged social groups with the power to impose restrictive 
formal rules that organize the life activity of other people. Examples of 
such groups include priests and other office-holders in religious institu-
tions and scientists in the service of state power.

A related but distinct form of domination giving rise to bureaucracy 
is the separation of the activity of conceptualizing the goals and methods 
of human activity from its execution.9 We can see rudimentary examples 
of this before the development of capitalism, for instance in rule-books 
of military organisation and state administration and in patriarchal 
laws that authorize men’s control over women’s labour. But it is under 
capitalism that the separation of conception (thinking) from execution 
(doing) becomes pervasive. As Cornelius Castoriadis (1988a) observed 

7 According to Seaford (2012, p. 82), “opinion has now shifted to a date towards the end of 
the seventh century.”

8 To contemporary readers Sohn-Rethel (1978)’s historical argument as presented in com-
pressed summary here may appear as simply an example of the kind of Hellenocentrism 
that was so marked in Eurocentric German culture in the 1800s. For discussion of Egypt 
(where he locates the earliest initial manifestation of the separation of intellectual labour), 
Asia and Greece, see pp. 86-103. An assessment of his theoretical account would require an 
interrogation of both his general claim about the social conditions required for the emergence 
of intellectual labour and the specific geographical and historical coordinates he posits for 
its emergence, bearing in mind the critique of Western European Hellenocentrism raised 
by authors such as Goody (2006). Kapferer (1980) raises a number of questions about Sohn-
Rethel’s argument, including about his claim that social synthesis in ancient Greek societies 
was based on commodity exchange. Seaford (2012) defends Sohn-Rethel’s analysis.

9 I distinguish the separation of conception from execution from the split between intel-
lectual and manual labour in order to help us recognize examples of the former that do 
not involve the use of what Sohn-Rethel calls ‘non-empirical form-abstractions which may 
be represented by nothing other than non-empirical, ‘pure’ concepts’ and to grasp that in 
contemporary capitalist societies intellectual labour itself is subjected to the separation of 
conception from execution. For a brief discussion of this in the case of physics see Schmidt 
(2000, p. 140). Schmidt (2000) deserves to be read by anyone concerned with bureaucracy in 
contemporary society. 



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in 1960, the ‘arbitrary end’ of ‘maximum production’ ‘is accomplished 
through the ever-heightened separation of direction and execution, by 
reducing workers to the status of mere executants, and by transferring 
the functions of management outside the labor process’ of producing 
goods and services (p. 273). As Harry Braverman (1998)’s better-known 
and slightly later version of such an analysis argues, capitalist develop-
ment fuels an ‘incessant breakdown of labor processes into simplified 
operations taught to workers as tasks,’ creating more ‘labor from which 
all conceptual elements have been removed and along with them most of 
the skill, knowledge and understanding’ (p.319). Even Paul Thompson 
(1989), who does not argue that the separation of conception from 
execution is a necessary feature of capitalism’s organization of labour 
processes, recognises that competitive accumulation drives capital to 
reorganize production in order to reduce costs, and that this ‘sets limits 
to the use of workers’ creative capacities and constrains attempts to 
dispense with hierarchical relations’ (p.243). Whether one accepts the 
stronger or the weaker claim (or an intermediate position), it is evident 
that the separation of conception from execution takes place on a large 
scale in the sphere of paid work in capitalist societies. This is a feature of 
labour processes in capitalist societies in all but their earliest phases, and 
is often enforced through formal rules. Although capitalist development 
creates new productive forces and patterns of workplace organisation 
that generate novel kinds of conceptual work, employers have histori-
cally proceeded to attempt to separate conception from execution within 
such new types of labour. The example of computer programming work 
illustrates this trend (p. 111-112).

Importantly, the process of separating conception from execution is 
not limited to the sphere of paid work.10 This separation is also basic to 
public political life in capitalist societies. In capitalist states with liberal 
democratic systems of government the contours of the political admin-
istration of society are decided by small numbers of elected officials and 
unelected high-ranking civil servants; other citizens are left to execute 
what is decided for them. Whether in the relations between employers 

10 A merit of Castoriadis’s work is his sensitivity to this, but he errs in going so far as to claim 
that ‘the fundamental social relationship of modern capitalism’ is that ‘between directors and 
executants’ (1988b, p. 201). Writing in 1963, Castoriadis displaced the relationship between 
capital and labour from the core of capitalist society: for classical Marxism, ‘Society was seen 
as dominated by the abstract power of impersonal capital. Today, we see it as dominated by 
a hierarchical bureaucratic structure’ (1993, p. 31). He contrasts ‘the market’ to ‘bureaucratic-
hierarchical organisation’ as ‘the central structuring moment of contemporary society’ (p. 31). 
In so doing he wrongly conflates market with capital (value). Such a perspective is extremely 
ill-equipped to understand the rise of neoliberal capitalism and its current crisis.



What is Trade Union Bureaucracy? |  141 

and wage-workers or between state power and the governed, this sepa-
ration is frequently accomplished by organizing people’s life activity 
through the restrictive regulations of bureaucracy. 

In the understanding proposed here, then, bureaucracy refers to a 
form of social relations, a way of organising social activity, rather than a 
group of people. This conceptualization is quite open, but also delimits 
the concept clearly. Bureaucracy does not encompass all situations in 
which people’s ability to determine their own objectives and how to act 
are constrained. It is present when such constraint is associated with 
formal rules that people cannot easily change themselves. For example, 
a small business run in an utterly arbitrary and despotic fashion by 
an owner who ‘micro-manages’ a workforce of people carrying out 
extremely deskilled work and who goes to great lengths to prevent 
workers from having access to information about the enterprise’s affairs 
is not a case of bureaucracy. Instead, it is a classic case of the employer 
control strategy that Richard Edwards (1979) dubs simple control.

This conceptualization also recognises that bureaucracy is not the 
only phenomenon that can impede subaltern self-activity. The phenom-
enon of substitutionism needs to be distinguished from bureaucracy. Sub-
stitutionism involves one or more persons substituting their own actions 
for those of a larger number of people. To put it differently, substitutionist 
actions are those which do not raise the level of self-activity among mem-
bers of a given group. Bureaucratic methods are often substitutionist – as 
in the case of union rules which allow rank-and-file members little or no 
way to be involved in union affairs and which assign all important tasks 
to officers and staff, thereby substituting executive members and staff 
for an active membership – but not all substitutionism is bureaucratic. 
For example, a militant local union president who preaches ‘leave it to 
me’ to members and attempts to squelch or take control of any initiative 
that does not emanate from himself is undoubtedly a barrier to workers’ 
self-activity. However, his behaviour should only be considered bureau-
cratic if (or to the extent that) it involves the use of formal rules that limit 
workers’ ability to determine their own goals and actions.11 

The conceptualization developed here can help us to understand 
how bureaucracy can pervade the practice of unionism. It is broad 
enough to cover a range of practices found in contemporary labour 
movements, including some phenomena excluded by the ‘bureaucracy 

11 My use of substitutionism is influenced by but not identical to that in Cliff (1960), which 
discusses it as a problem in the relationship between workers and a political party ‘act[ing] as 
proxy in their name and on their behalf, regardless of what the workers thought or wanted.’ 



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as officialdom’ approach. For example, it alerts us to the fact that basic 
distinguishing features of how unions are politically administered by 
state power in Canada and the US – the legal and contractual prohibition 
of mid-contract strikes and sympathy strikes, and the requirement to 
resolve mid-contract disputes through grievance and arbitration proce-
dures – are sources of union bureaucracy. These legal impositions take 
complaints about the employer out of the hands of unionized workers 
and channel them into a formal process. Once a grievance enters 
the process, it is ‘owned’ by union officials, not the workers affected. 
Another example of bureaucracy in the labour movement is when union 
rules sanction the monopolization of access to important information 
by a union executive or negotiating team. Members deprived of such 
information are less able to act independently. A union organizational 
structure that allows few or no opportunities for democratic decision-
making by members during a strike is also an example of bureaucracy; 
even if the members have democratically set the goals of the strike, their 
inability to direct its course means that only a few people can determine 
how it is conducted. A union whose constitution gives members who 
hold no union office few or even no ways to participate in its affairs on 
an ongoing basis – for example, because general membership meetings 
are rare – is also bureaucratic. In such unions a few people conceive and 
execute union work, leaving most members with literally no way to get 
involved. When rules of order for the running of union meetings impede 
members’ influence, this too is a case of bureaucracy. These examples, 
which are simply meant to give a sense of some of the ways that bureau-
cracy can be manifested within union organizations, suggest just how 
much is missed when a theory of union bureaucracy focuses solely or 
mainly on union full-time officers and staff.

tHE SoCiAl RootS oF union BuREAuCRACy
What gives rise to union bureaucracy? It is arguably still true, as 

Alvin Gouldner (1955) claimed, that the root causes of bureaucracy are 
most often seen as human nature and the complexity and size of orga-
nizations such as unions (p.498-500). Even Darlington (2010), a Marxist, 
has written that ‘a hierarchical and bureaucratic structure... is inherent 
in the requirement that unions are administratively efficient’ (p.9). As 
Gouldner (1955) argues, such explanations, found in the work of theo-
rists including Weber, Michels and Talcott Parsons, are shot through 
with ‘pessimism and fatalism’ (p. 498). A few years after Gouldner pub-
lished his challenge to the dominant sociological theories of bureaucracy 



What is Trade Union Bureaucracy? |  143 

of the day, Castoriadis responded to the claim that large organizations 
must inevitably be bureaucratic by arguing that the need to organize 
centralization in organizations is indeed an inevitable and objective 
problem. However, it is a problem that can be resolved either through 
bureaucracy or direct democracy. ‘A general meeting of strikers, an 
elected strike committee, the commune, the soviet, the factory council – 
that’s centralisation’ (Castoriadis, 1988b, p.207) or, more precisely, these 
are anti-bureaucratic responses created by self-organized workers in 
struggle to the problem of centralization. Castoriadis’s demonstration 
that there are alternatives to bureaucratic organization suggests that 
theories which deduce union bureaucracy as simply the inevitable out-
come of organizational scale are flawed. Instead of adopting an empty 
fatalism, we need to explore the determinate social conditions out of 
which union bureaucracy arises.

Arguably the most important cause of union bureaucracy is the practice 
at the centre of unionism itself: negotiating the price of labour power. The 
subordination of wageearners to capital in the paid workplace sphere leads 
organized workers to seek to regulate aspects of their working lives through 
collective agreements with their employers. The unequal balance of power 
between capital and labour is the reason why workers tend to try to codify 
wage levels and conditions of work in contracts. Only when workers’ col-
lective power and willingness to confront employers is so strong that they 
find it unnecessary or even undesirable to fix wages or conditions will 
wage-earners not try to lock in such matters in contracts. The ‘episodic and 
discontinuous character of working-class struggle under capitalism’ (Post, 
1999, p.122) means that circumstances in which wage-earners enjoy such a 
highly favourable relationship of forces are both uncommon and generally 
short-lived. These rare situations have given rise to unions that refuse to 
sign contracts, such as the Industrial Workers of the World in the early 20th
century and some early locals of the Committee for Industrial Organisation/
Congress of Industrial Organisations (CIO).12 

Once contracts are in place, employers, who are concerned with the 
uninterrupted production of goods and services, have strong incen-
tives to insist that there be no strikes for the duration of the agreement. 
Similarly, they have an incentive to assert their control over how their 
employees work. Since it is rare for the balance of class power in the 
paid workplace sphere in capitalist societies to be decisively in workers’ 
favour – after all, this is the fundamental reason why workers fight for 
collective agreements in the first place – unions face pressures to accept 

12 See Brissenden (1957), p.115, 324, 330, 371; Lynd (1996), p.5.



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limits on strikes and to recognize managerial authority. Such conces-
sions arise directly out of the relations between capital and labour in 
the labour market and the labour process. When formalized, they are 
bureaucratic: they limit workers’ ability to determine the character and 
goals of their activity. This, then, is the source of union bureaucracy at 
the very core of unionism, probably its most important source.

Although the rule-governed separation of intellectual from manual 
labour is an important source of bureaucracy in contemporary capitalist 
societies, above all in matters related to the natural sciences and society, it 
is not especially important in the case of union bureaucracy. If we follow 
Sohn-Rethel (1978) and understand intellectual labour as involving ‘the 
use of non-empirical form-abstractions which may be represented by 
nothing other than non-empirical, ‘pure’ concepts’ (p.66) – for example, 
abstract time, space and motion – then it is difficult to see them as impor-
tant to unionism. 

A far more important source of union bureaucracy is the separation 
of conception from execution. This is a key element of the alienation of 
labour – the structural lack of control by workers over the labour process, 
workplace organization and production in general – that is a hallmark 
of capitalist societies after their earliest phases (Rinehart, 2006). In soci-
eties in which the separation of conception from execution has become 
normalized, or even just common, it is little surprise that workers tend to 
organize unions in ways that bureaucratically reflect and reproduce this 
separation. Organizing in this way is consistent with how many aspects 
of their social lives are structured, including schooling, paid work, 
state-citizen relations and, often, voluntary associations. The separation 
between conception and execution can be seen in, for example, union 
rules that give enormous decision-making power to staff and elected offi-
cers, treating the membership as passive executants. This corresponds to 
how many employers treat employees, state officials treat citizens and 
religious authorities treat members of their congregations. 

Nevertheless, it is also noteworthy that the tendency for workers to 
organize unions in ways that embody this dominant feature of capitalist 
society coexists with a countertendency: workers can and do organize in 
directly democratic ways. This democratic impulse arises out of experi-
ences of workers’ self-activity and self-organization, and disrupts the 
separation between conception and execution. It can be observed most 
clearly in the most democratic contemporary unions, such as the fledg-
ling National Union of Healthcare Workers in the US (Early, 2011); the 
unions affiliated with France’s Union syndicale Solidaires federation 



What is Trade Union Bureaucracy? |  145 

(Coupé, 2007); and in forms of collective action such as strikes in which 
workers make important decisions in mass meetings and elect recallable 
strike committees.13 Many unions bear, to some extent, the imprint of 
both this democratic countertendency and the tendency to reproduce 
the separation of conception from execution. The relative strength of the 
two in a particular case is the product of a concrete history.

Capitalist state power is also a significant root of union bureaucracy. 
States often impose formal rules that influence the social organization of 
unions. Such rules are examples of what Mark Neocleous (1996) dubs 
political administration, his term for the legal and administrative activity 
of capitalist state power in civil society. Political administration consti-
tutes legal persons as both subjects of rights and objects of administra-
tion and regulates the working class through mechanisms that respond 
to workers’ struggles but in ways that aim to extinguish their subversive 
potential (p. 88-92, 110-116). It is very common for capitalist states, once 
they legally recognize unions, to use their legal and regulatory powers 
to compel unions to structure themselves in ways that limit members’ 
ability to determine the goals and methods of action. Bans on strikes 
or restrictions on the timing and nature of strikes are perhaps the most 
frequently imposed restrictions. In the US, the ‘gradual metamorphosis 
of grievance arbitration from a voluntary and private mode of dispute 
resolution into a semicompulsory, institutional system for the manage-
ment of complex enterprises’ (Klare, 1978, p.377) was driven in large part 
by a series of judicial decisions, and the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 imposed 
important restrictions on strike action (Green, 1980, p.198). In Canada, 
legislation passed in the 1940s prohibited all strikes during the term of a 
contract and made grievance arbitration compulsory (Fudge and Tucker, 
2001). However, we should not forget that bureaucratic rules concerning 
such matters need not be imposed by state power, since they also arise 
from within capital-labour relations in the labour process and the labour 
market, as argued above. For example, in the US the initial 1937 contract 
between General Motors and the United Auto Workers ‘established a 
grievance procedure designed to circumvent the shop steward systems 
and prevent wildcat strikes’ and the 1940 contract stipulated that the 
grievance procedure would be the only way that the union would chal-
lenge management actions (Edsforth, 1987, p.177, 193). The new bureau-
cratic state mechanisms for the political administration of labour that 
were instituted in Canada in the 1940s amplified and generalized devel-
opments such as management rights clauses and grievance procedures 

13 For example, the wildcat construction strikes in Britain in February 2009 (Gall, 2010).



146 |   Great Recession-Proof?:
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that had already begun to emerge in collective bargaining (while also 
drawing on the US Wagner Act model of industrial legality and elements 
of pre-war Canadian legislation) (Camfield, 2002, p. 318).

Having argued that fatalist theories which simply deduce union 
bureaucracy from the existence of large-scale organisation are uncon-
vincing, this article has discussed three social roots of union bureaucracy: 
contracts arising out of the wage relation, the separation of conception 
from execution and the political administration of unions by capitalist 
state power. It is now time to return to our starting point, the union 
officialdom. In addition to being a fourth source of union bureaucracy, it 
deserves some examination as a specific phenomenon.

wHAt ABout tHE oFFiCiAldoM?      
So far this alternative account of union bureaucracy has said 

almost nothing about union officials. Some readers may be inclined 
to think that this is a theory of bureaucracy that gives bureaucrats 
an alibi. My concern, however, has simply been to foreground what 
is so often neglected or ignored in discussions of ‘the trade union 
bureaucracy,’ namely bureaucracy as a form of social relations. To 
use an imperfect analogy, this is no more an alibi for union officials 
than Marx’s theory of the capitalist mode of production is an alibi 
for capitalists. The more bureaucratic a union is, the more bureau-
cratic its officialdom. But we should be more careful about making 
sweeping generalizations about union officialdoms than some radical 
theorists have been. 

That said, there is plenty of historical evidence that as collec-
tive bargaining relations become more established, giving rise to or 
strengthening union bureaucracy as discussed above, unions tend to 
acquire (more) full-time officers and staff. Three examples will illus-
trate the pattern. As local contracts between craft unions and employers 
spread in the US and Canada at the end of the nineteenth century 
these unions began to hire full-time ‘business agents’ to administer 
their contracts. As Craig Heron (1996) puts it, these staff, along with 
the top officers and organisers of the craft unions, developed into an 
officialdom which began to develop a concern with protecting the union 
organization, its assets, its procedures, and its contractual obligations, 
as well as their own status and salaries. By denying access to central 
strike funds or ordering strikers back to work, these full-time officials 
sometimes put brakes on workers’ anger and resentment (p.32).14

14 See also Heron (1999) and Green (1980, p.35-40).



What is Trade Union Bureaucracy? |  147 

Half a century later, the stabilization in the US and Canada of col-
lective bargaining between employers and industrial unions that had 
recently become more bureaucratic also brought with it an expansion 
of union officialdom; the need to process grievances within the new 
mandatory grievance and arbitration systems was an important reason 
for this growth (Heron, 1996, p.80; Green, 1980, p.187). In South Africa, 
after the passage of the 1995 Labour Relations Act, which established a 
new mode of industrial legality, the officialdom of the Congress of South 
African Trade Unions swelled with the development of a layer of full-
time shop stewards (Appolis and Sikwebu, 2003).

Many more similar cases could be cited.
The development of an extensive union officialdom is significant for 

a union movement. Regardless of their ideological outlooks or personal 
commitments, full-time officials (whether officers or union staff) have 
material conditions that are objectively different from those of the mem-
bers they are supposed to serve.15 They do not share workers’ working 
conditions. They are often more highly-paid than rank-and-file mem-
bers and lay officials. Full-time officials are only indirectly affected by 
employer attacks on wages and working conditions. Full-time officials 
who deal with management on a regular basis are particularly subject 
to employer efforts to enlist them in efforts to limit work stoppages, get 
workers to accept managerial control on the job, motivate workers to 
work harder, and the like. These material conditions create a real ten-
dency for full-time officials to be less sensitive to the realities of workers’ 
lives on the job and more attuned to management’s desires than are 
rank-and-file workers. This is true even when a union is an insecure 
organization with very few full-time officials and meagre funds. 

To the degree that serving as a full-time official actually becomes 
an occupation rather than a temporary commitment, this existence cul-
tivates a different outlook. As the Welsh radical pamphlet The Miners’ 
Next Step observes, full-time officers become ‘”trade unionists by trade” 
and their profession demands certain privileges’ (Anonymous, 1912, 
p.3), or at least tends to. For full-time officials who can contemplate 
remaining full-timers for years, the union ‘constitutes...a whole way of 
life – their day to day function, formative social relationships with peers 
and superiors on the organisational ladder, a potential career, and, on 
many occasions, a social meaning, a raison d’être.’ Preserving this exis-
tence imposes its own imperatives:

15 This is also true for part-time officers (and other union members who are allowed time 
away from work for union activity), though obviously to a much lesser extent. 



148 |   Great Recession-Proof?:
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To maintain themselves as they are, the whole layer of officials 
must, first and above all, maintain their organizations. It is thus easy to 
understand how an irresistible tendency emerges on the part of the trade 
union officials... to treat their organizations as ends in themselves, rather 
than as the means to defend their memberships – to come to conflate the 
interests of the organizations upon which they depend with the interests 
of those they ostensibly represent (Brenner, 1985, p.45).

The material need to preserve the union in order to continue as a 
full-time official, which gives rise to the tendency to treat the union insti-
tution as an end in itself, is just as significant for a radical who takes 
office because of a sincere desire to further the fight for workers’ rights 
as it is for someone who becomes a full-timer as a way to boost their 
income and status and escape from highly alienated labour. 

An individual official may, of course, remain personally more com-
mitted to the workers she serves than to defending the union as an 
institution. The case of National Union of Mineworkers’ leader Arthur 
Scargill in the 1984-1985 miners’ strike in Britain springs to mind.16
Brenner’s point is not that all full-time officials are always more con-
cerned with the institutional fate of unions than they are with workers’ 
interests. Rather, it is that the officialdom as a whole cannot reproduce 
itself without preserving union institutions. There is more than one 
way to do this. An orientation to preserving union institutions is often 
accompanied with overtly class-collaborationist ideology, but need not 
be. It does not necessarily translate into a refusal by full-time officials to 
mobilize workers in struggles that defy the law to some extent – consider 
the political strikes organized by leaders of the Canadian Auto Workers 
(CAW) and most public sector unions during the Days of Action in prov-
ince of Ontario in the second half of the 1990s (Camfield, 2000) and the 
efforts by leaders of the British Columbia division of CUPE to organize 
sympathy strikes to support striking teachers in 2005 (Camfield, 2009). 
The central issue is that when union officialdoms become consolidated 
social layers their continued existence depends on the security of union 
institutions. Consequently, the actions of full-time officials as a group 
will be influenced – and, in the last instance, determined by – the goal of 
preserving these institutions.

This allows us to pinpoint why union officialdom as a social layer is 
a fourth source of union bureaucracy. Motivated by the need to preserve 
union institutions in order to reproduce themselves as an officialdom, 

16 See Callinicos and Simons (1985), which combines an appreciation of Scargill’s strengths 
with observations about his political weaknesses.



What is Trade Union Bureaucracy? |  149 

full-time officials tend to organize union activity in ways that reflect 
their distinct interests as a group. Officials tend to favour ways of func-
tioning that give themselves a great deal of decision-making power, at 
the expense of democratic rank-and-file control. As The Miners’ Next Step 
puts it, of the privileges demanded by ‘”trade unionists by trade”...the 
greatest of all these are plenary powers...every inroad the rank and file 
make on this privilege lessens the power and prestige’ (Anonymous, 
1912, p.3-4) of full-time officials, who for this reason have an interest 
in opposing such democratizing moves. In short, full-time officials tend 
to organize union activity in ways that enhance their own sway. These 
are bureaucratic when they involve formal rules that limit the ability of 
members to determine the methods and goals of union action. This is 
a general tendency of the behaviour of full-time officials where union 
officialdom has become consolidated as a social layer; obviously there 
are individual exceptions. 

When this kind of practice does arise, it can be challenged by the 
influence of active members firmly committed to democratic methods 
designed to limit the power of full-timers, such as the radical Welsh 
workers who a century ago proposed The Miners’ Next Step. There are 
undoubtedly full-time officials who are so deeply committed to member-
ship control that they seek to develop rather than curtail it. Nevertheless, 
full-time officials do generally tend to promote bureaucratic functioning 
rooted in their distinct interests as a social layer.

Contrary to a common assumption, the sway of the officialdom is not 
always exercised against militancy or radicalism. Full-time officials may 
try to advance one or both within unions within a bureaucratic frame-
work. This can be seen, for example, in the militancy of the Justice for 
Janitors campaign initiated by leaders of the Service Employees Interna-
tional Union (Tait, 2005, p.188-189, 200-202) and the CAW’s left turn in 
the second half of the 1990s.17 However, as a theoretical generalization, 
we can say that once a union officialdom has crystallized as a social layer 
it will tend to display institutional conservatism. The strength of this 
conservatism varies enormously, and is influenced by a range of factors 
including the extent of union bureaucratization, the degree of unions’ 
institutional security, the intensity of class struggle and the ideology of 
the union in question. The conservatism of union officials is not found 
only in stable contemporary unions in advanced capitalist countries; it 

17 This turn and the CAW’s subsequent evolution have not yet received adequate study, but 
see Gindin (1995) and Allen (2006). Recognizing the possibility of bureaucratic militancy 
implies a questioning of the notion (present in Voss and Sherman [2000]) that militant 
mobilization is evidence of a challenge to bureaucratic unionism.



150 |   Great Recession-Proof?:
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has manifested itself in far more fragile and less bureaucratic organi-
zations. For example, late nineteenth-century US and Canadian craft 
unions had weak legal rights, few officials and small bank accounts. Yet, 
as discussed above, their full-time officials were increasingly preoccu-
pied with the defence of union institutions as well as contract obliga-
tions and their own perks. In addition to noting the tendency to a con-
servatism based on the preservation of union institutions, we can also 
conclude that full-time officials tend to favour their own control within 
union organizations, thereby promoting bureaucracy. 

AnAlyzinG unionS todAy
Where does this theory direct our attention in the analysis of unions? 

First, by highlighting the importance of formal rules that limit workers’ 
ability to determine the character and goals of their actions and which 
they themselves are not easily able to change, this approach directs our 
attention to the double-sided nature of collective agreements and labour law. 
Both are often sources of union rights as well as restrictions on collective 
action. 

For example, many basic features of US and Canadian labour law 
qualify as bureaucratic. In the US, the law prohibits sympathy (‘sec-
ondary’) strikes (Lynd and Gross, 2008). It also bans ‘bargaining over 
managerial decisions “which lie at the core of entrepreneurial control”’ 
and makes grievance arbitration ‘semicompulsory’ (Klare, 1978, p.337). 
Canadian law goes even further in its imposition of bureaucracy. It 
makes labour board certification the only permissible route to union 
recognition, bans recognition strikes, requires grievance arbitration 
procedures and (in most jurisdictions) a pre-strike compulsory concili-
ation process, contains a blanket prohibition of mid-contract, political 
and sympathy strikes, makes management rights clauses in contracts 
mandatory and requires the Rand Formula for union security (Fudge 
and Tucker, 2001, p.302-315). Such instances of bureaucracy are widely 
accepted by unionists, precisely because they are mandated by law. As 
Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer (1981) have argued, ‘Integral to the law 
is a moral topography, a mapping of the social world which normalises 
its preferred contours – and, equally importantly, suppresses or at best 
marginalises other ways of seeing and being’ (p.33) and, I would add, 
doing. Although many instances of bureaucracy stemming from law 
and contract have the straightforward effect of making it difficult for 
workers to engage in collective action against employers and govern-
ments, some – such as exclusive representation rights and the Rand 



What is Trade Union Bureaucracy? |  151 

Formula’s requirement that all workers covered by a union contract pay 
union dues – have effects on workers’ power that are more complicated. 

Second, this theoretical perspective underscores the significance of 
others kinds of formal rules restricting the activity of unionized workers, 
chiefly those found in union constitutions and other union rules. In both 
the US and Canada, bureaucracy is widespread in the form of organi-
zational structures and practices at all levels – from locals all the way 
up to the top labour centrals – that make it difficult or impossible for 
unionized workers to determine what their organizations will do and 
how they will do it. In these countries, this kind of bureaucracy is not the 
result of the political administration of labour by state power. US laws 
in fact guarantee many union members a number of basic democratic 
rights (Benson, 1979) while Canadian law and administration impose 
very few requirements on the internal organization of unions (Lynk, 
2002). Much more significant as an influence on union organizational 
structures in the US and Canada is the pervasiveness of the separation 
of conception from execution in social life. The working-class movement 
is affected by the norms of societies in which organizations are gener-
ally understood to be properly run by small numbers of managers and 
‘experts,’ with little or no popular participation. This approach has been 
unchallenged in the most influential political traditions within US and 
Canadian unions. What Heron (1996) writes of the politics of Canadian 
union officials in the years after the Second World War was also true of 
the outlook of many of their US counterparts (Mills, 2001): they ‘had 
always emphasized the importance of expertise and centralized bureau-
cratic administration, rather than direct rank-and-file initiative’ (p.80). 
Following the legal entrenchment of unions and collective bargaining 
in the US in the 1930s and in Canada in the following decade, newly-
consolidated labour officialdoms put a stronger bureaucratic stamp on 
union organization.

The perspective advanced in this article broadens our under-
standing of what union bureaucracy is. Bureaucracy is not a group of 
leaders. Nor is it an external cage in which unions are trapped. Rather, 
as a mode of existence of social relations, it is, to varying degrees, 
a significant quality of unionism itself – to be precise, of particular 
forms of union praxis in specific times and places. Where union 
bureaucracy exists, it is usually deeply internal to unions as working-
class movement organizations. For this reason, ‘resolutionary radi-
calism’ at union meetings and conferences and the denunciation of 
bureaucrats offer no escape from bureaucracy, which can only be 



152 |   Great Recession-Proof?:
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weakened through the promotion of forms of action whose char-
acter and goals are determined by workers themselves. Self-activity, 
self-organization and democratic control from below are central to 
anti-bureaucratic unionism, in which the conception and execution 
of union activity are brought together through workers’ active par-
ticipation in and control over their organisations. Conditions which 
are conducive to this kind of unionism and practices that foster its 
development deserve study.

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