Whither the dues check-off?

So the answer to excessive bureaucracy in unions (a problem in many unions) is to have union activists spending their time once a month collecting dues from members who have more bills than money?  Without the Rand formula the current union movement will be knee capped and destroyed.  The emphasis for unions will switch to getting members to pay their dues and the unions that survive will likely be even more bureaucratic since the pencil pushers will be even more in control.

Unionist did you read past the first paragraph? He is not advocating any of the things you highlight in your post.  I thought he raised some good points. Renewing the union movement in Canada is going to take some bold action and not the same type of rear guard actions that it has been engaged in over the last two decades as the leadership has moved steadily backwards one minor concession at a time.

Sam Gindin wrote:

There is no disagreement that having to collect dues directly from the members would put the union in constant contact with the members and it would give individual workers greater control over what happens with their dues. But greater contact does not necessarily mean better contact. It is not obvious that having to regularly collect dues is the best way, or even an especially good way, to communicate with members and increase leadership accountability. If shop stewards are primarily acting as a collection agency, they may end up harassing workers rather than involving them. And it will often be much more productive to focus on issues without the collection of dues getting in the way. Moreover, if workers can individually withhold their dues, this may only open the door to greater fragmentation. Rather than taking an issue to a membership meeting where a binding collective decision is made, some workers might just refuse to pay because they are peeved that their personal priority was not a collective priority.

As a tactical question, the relevance of how dues are collected is a matter of context, of place and historical moment. In India, the dynamic new labour central, the NTUI (New Trade Union Initiative) has from the beginning collected dues one member at a time and this seems to work well; the union is actively opposed to moving to the check-off system. Yet if Canadian and American unions lost their check-off, the decline of trade unionism would only be amplified. Given the current weakness of unions as a social force, the aggressiveness of business and state attacks on unions, alongside the problematic commitment of the members to an institution they are not sure can deliver, the capacity of unions to adjust to the loss of automatic dues would at best be questionable.

My wife went to a regional conference about the new merged union that she now belongs to.  It is interesting stuff and in some respects harkens back to the era when unions were illegal and so they offered workers services through benevolent societies. She liked it because as a CEP union activist she has been vocal about some of the things that are proposed and so she felt a pride of ownership.