A hallmark of anarcho-syndicalism has always been a working-class-wide orientation to organizing, strategy, and tactics. This distinguishes it from trade unionism, which focuses organizing on specific jobs, tasks, trades, or, at most, workplaces.
A working-class-wide orientation means just that—not only organizing all employed workers (workers who have successfully sold their labor power to capital through the labor market). It means organizing the working class without regard to employment status or freeze-frame location in labor markets. It means organizing reproductive as well as productive workers, precariously employed and unemployed. It also means organizing illicit labor or workers in illicit industries (like sex workers for example).
Sometimes, unfortunately, class-wide organizing also requires defending the least privileged or most marginalized workers from attacks–not from capital and the state but from more privileged (unionized) workers. This has become a too-frequent need recently, as unionized city workers have been deployed by businesses and local governments to harass unemployed and homeless workers, to decamp tent cities of unhoused workers, or clear streets of poor, unhoused, or criminalized working-class people.
Syndicalists need to confront this mobilization of more secure workers against our more insecure working-class siblings. Class-wide organizing means building relationships, alliances, and solidarity between securely employed or unionized workers and more precarious or marginalized members of the working class. This requires active solidarity with those who have been thrown out of the capitalist labor markets—unemployed or precariously employed workers. It also means organizing illicit labor, such as sex workers and binners (people who collect recyclables from trash bins in order to gain money on returns).
In Metro Vancouver (unceded Coast Salish territories), where I live, we have seen this need growing as unionized workers (members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE)) have been rather routinely deployed to decamp unhoused working-class people from city streets or from homeless camps and tent cities. They have used violent tactics to enact street sweeps of unhoused people on behalf of businesses, property owners, and reactionary politicians. These same sorts of deployments have occurred in virtually every city in Canada over the last several years. All involving unionized workers to do the dirty work of capital and states.
Syndicalists need to address the harms done by more privileged workers—from a class position. One example of doing this comes from my time as an IWW member and anarchist free space organizer in Toronto. There, unionized workers were moving unhoused people from the streets and taking their belongings. Rather than make a moral appeal to a city government that did not care, we contacted CUPE and did some educational work on the need for class solidarity. We, including the unhoused fellow workers themselves, also spoke directly with the workers, from a class solidarity perspective, and came to an arrangement that stopped the sweeps.
One thing to do in the short term is for syndicalists to attend local labor council meetings and argue explicitly for class-wide solidarity. This can include education on health and safety protections against doing such work in the immediate term, as one example. But it can also provide opportunities to mobilize directly against unions that sit idly as workers do the bidding of businesses and politicians in the interests of accumulation–and to offer solidarity where they choose to do the right thing.