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Today's
Stories
March 6 / 7, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Understanding the World with
Paul Sweezy
March 5, 2004
Chris Floyd
Uncle
Sugar: How the WMD Scam Put Money in Bush Family Pockets
Ron Jacobs
Chaos
Reigns: Haiti and Iraq
Lisa Viscidi
Guatemalan
Refugees: a Difficult Return
Yves Engler
Canada and the Coup in Haiti
Mike Legro
Those Bush Ads: Some Dead Bodies Are Worth More Than Others
Javier Armas
A Night of Inspiration: Oakland Benefit for Grocery Workers Strike
Bennett Hoffman
"Who Cares About Haiti, Anyway?"
Bill Christison
Faltering Neo-Cons Still Dangerous
Website of the Day
Haiti Support Group
March 4, 2004
Diane Christian
Sex
and Ideals
Sen. Robert Byrd
Stop the Stonewalling, Mr. President: Fairy Tales, Bush and the
9/11 Commission
Norman Solomon
Assuming the Right to Intervene: The US Press and Haiti
Jack Brown
A Fragrant Saga of Mexico's Greens
Hal Cranmer
The
John Kerry Experience
David Lindorff
Greenspan's Pension
Sam Smith
The Election is Over, We Lost
Christopher Brauchli
Goin'
to the Chapel: The Gay and the Dead
Brian D. Barry
The "Perfect" World of E-Voting: A Computer Scientist
Reports from the Polling Booth
Richard Oxman
Arsonists for Haiti?
Peter Phillips
Haitian
Fantasies: Mainstream Media Fails Itself, Again
Tariq Ali
Notes on Anti-Semitism, Zionism and
Palestine
Website of the Day
What If Boeing Ads Told the Truth?
March 3, 2004
Heather Williams / Karl
Laraque
Marines
Retake Haiti
Jack McCarthy
Guy's
Our Guy: "I am the Chief. My Hero is Pinochet."
Robert Sandels
The
Purloined Label: The Struggle Over the Havana Club Trademark
Juliana Fredman / James Davis
Israeli Organized Crime
JG
The Yuppie Silence on Haiti
Emilio Sardi
The
Colombia/US Free Trade Deal: It's About More Than Trade
Alan Farago
Swimming in Sewage
Mike Whitney
"Blood
Will Have Blood": 143 Murdered in Liberated Iraq
CounterPunch Wire
Nader's Legislative Record in the 1960s
Steve Perry
Kerry
Advisory: Remember Lena Guerrero
Nelson George/ Marcus Miller
Miles Davis & Hip Hop: a Conversation
Website of the Day
$10,000 Is Yours for the Taking: The USS Liberty Challenge
March 2, 2004
William Blum
If Kerry's
the Answer, What's the Question?
Conn Hallinan
Haiti:
the Dangerous Muddle
JoAnn Wypijewski
The Bravo
H-Bomb Test: One WMD They Couldn't Hide
Mike Whitney
Regime Change in Haiti: the Bush Dominos Keep Falling
Ra Ravishankar
Afghanistan, the Liberation That Isn't: an Interview with Mariam
from RAWA
Dan Bacher
Merle Haggard & the Politics of Salmon: "Clearcutting
is Rape"
Greg Moses
Oscar White
Brandy Baker
Mel Gibson's Minstrelsy Show
Little Tucker Carlson
What I Did on My Vacation
Robert Fisk
All This
Talk of Civil War, Now This
Merle Haggard
Kern River
Website of the Day
Rebel Edit
March 1, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Morris
Thanks War Criminal in Front of Billions
Richard Oxman
Oscar's
Obit: Thanking Bob McNamara
Elaine Cassel
Writing and Reading as "Terrorism"
Mickey Z
Thomas Friedman's Education
Mike Whitney
George Will and Anti-Semitism: a Cul-de-Sac of Prejudice
Heather Williams
Haiti
as Target Practice: How the US Press Missed the Story
Cathy Crosson
Chanson d'amour haïtienne
Website of the Day
God Hates Shrimp
February 28 / 29, 2004
Stephen Green
Serving
Two Flags: Neo-Cons, Israel and the Bush Team
Gary Leupp
Another Senseless Bush Battle: Defining and Protecting Marriage
William A. Cook
Israel:
America's Albatross
Ron Jacobs
Kucinich: Good Fight; Wrong Battlefield
Ben Tripp
A Nosegay of Posies: Queer Weddings at Last!
Leilla Matsui
Dances with Crucifixes
Mike Whitney
Dismantle
the Military Goliath
Yoel Marcus
Down and Out in the Hague
Uri Avnery
The Dancing Bear
Linda S. Heard
Britons and Americans Condemned to a Hobson's Choice
Al Krebs
Unmasking a Secret American Empire: Land, Water & Cotton
Stan Cox
Life (Pat. Pend.): Genetic Commandeering
JG
The Haiti Boomerang: "After The Looting & Pillaging,
Your Hunger Will Remain"
Rick Giombetti
Censorship at the Seattle P-I on Forced Psychiatry
Keith Hoeller
The Bankruptcy of Mental Health Insurance Parity
Dave Zirin
Colorado Football: Buffalo Swill
NADERAMA
Alan Maass
Nader and the Politics of Lesser
Evils
Michael Donnelly
Regime
Rotation: Anybody But Bush...Again?
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Exeunt Serenaders; Enter Nader
Doug Giebel
So Nader's Running? Get Over It
Bruce Jackson
An Open Letter to Naderites
CounterPunch Wire
Stalinists for Kerry! and Other Roars from the Crowd
Poets' Basement
Davies, Scarr, Kearney & Albert
February 27, 2004
Thomas C. Mountain
A
White Jesus During Black History Month?
Laura Carlsen
Americans
Abroad: Bush is Persona Non Grata
John B. Anderson
Nader's Campaign Brings Back Memories: Creating an Open Electoral
Process
Jason Leopold
Spying
on Kofi Annan
John Chuckman
Nader,
Risk and Hope
Standard Schaefer
An
Interview with Michael Hudson on Putin's Russia
Ray McGovern
Punished
for Honest Intelligence
Saul Landau
The
Haiti Redux
Website of the Day
Bush: Why I'm Running for Re-election
February 26, 2004
Brandy Baker
Is Nader
on to Something?
Jacques Kinau
AEI
to Colombia: "Can't Give You Anything But Guns, Baby"
Norman Solomon
Bugging Kofi Annan: UN Spying
and the Evasions of US Journalism
Greg Weiher
A Purloined Letter: the Zarqawi Gambit
Walt Brasch
Janet Jackson, Bush & No. 542: There are No Halftime Shows
in War
Shadi Hamid
The Music World Explodes in Anger
Norman Madarasz
As Canadian as Corruption
Chris Floyd
Bullets and Ballots
Virginia Tilly
The
Deeper Meaning of the Wall
Amy Goodman / Jeremy
Scahill
Haiti's
Lawyer Says US is Arming Haiti's Anti-Aristide Paramilitaries
Website of the Day
Clear Channel Sucks
February 25, 2004
Dr. Susan Block
Saddam's
Sex Therapist and the Rape of Free Speech
Bruce Anderson
Treacherous Bastards: The Greens and the Dems and Nader
Ron Jacobs
Our Power is on the Streets and
in Our Hearts
Mike Whitney
Bush
and Gay America: the Politics of Duplicity
Sam Husseini
Jesus in 100 Words
John L. Hess
Kick Off or Flub?
Sam Hamod
Bush's Newest Red Herring
Cockburn / St. Clair
Winning
with Nader
Website of the Day
VotePact
February 24, 2004
Ralph Nader
Why
I'm Running for President
Greg Moses
Rally
the Mob! Bush, Gay Marriage and the Constitution
Douglas O'Hara
The
Merchants of Fear: Smearing Nader
Phillip Cryan
Frozen in Time: The WSJ's Paranoid
Lens on Latin America
David Lindorff
John Kerry's China Connection
Jason Leopold
Cheney's Shame: Halliburton Faces New Charges
Gary Younge
Haiti: Throttled by History
Kromm, Masri & Purohit
Why No Democracy in Iraq?
Steve Perry
Tangled Up in Red and Blue: Beware the Electoral College
February 23, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israel's Apartheid Wall on Trial
at The Hague
Kurt Nimmo
Richard Perle, Executioner: "Heads Should Roll"
Jonathan Franklin
US Soldier Seeks Refugee Status in Canada
Al Krebs
The Liberal "Intelligentsia" v. Nader
Josh Frank
Nader's Nadir? Not a Chance
Bruce Jackson
Nader, Another View: "He's as Evil as Bush"
Gary Leupp
A Misguided
Attack, The Passion, Rabbi Lerner and the Gospels
February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
February 19, 2004
Cecilie Surasky
Anti-Semitism
at the World Social Forum? That's Not What I Saw
Ray McGovern
Iraq
Hawks and Deceptive Intelligence: Did They Really Think They'd
Get Away With It?
Tariq Ali
How Far
Will Bush Go in Iraq?
Ralph Nader
Whither
the Nation?
Wayne Madsen
Would Kerry Purge the Neo-Cons?
Norman Solomon
The Collapse of Dean's Cyber-Bubble
Christopher Brauchli
Cheney, Halliburton and the NYT
Mike Whitney
Bush's Iraq Strategy: "I Hope They Kill Each Other"
Lewis Carroll
Bush the Mighty Helmsman from Yale
Website of the Day
Sex Toy Horoscope
February 18, 2004
William Wilgus
Bush:
AWOL and Dereliction of Duty
William Blum
Mush-Minded
Liberals
Dave Lindorff
Bush's China Syndrome
Greg Weiher
Why
is Kerry Getting a Pass?
Mike Griffin
Killing the Messenger: the AFL-CIO's Attack on Harry Kelber
Mark Hand
Kerry Tells Peace Movement to "Move On"
February 17, 2004
Mike Ferner
The
Countryside Murders in Iraq
Mokhiber / Weissman
Corporation
as Psychopath
Marjorie Cohn
DrakeGate:
a Victory for Free Speech
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's
Endgame: a Review of Chalmers Johnson's "Sorrows of Empire"
Greg Bates
Nader Ambush: a New Low for The
Nation
Ximena Ortiz
A Bush
Doctrine, of Sorts
Gary Leupp
Whatever Happened to Gen. Khazraji?
Sen. John Kerry
"The Cause of Israel is the Cause of America"
Steve Perry
Kerry
1, Drudge 0
February 16, 2004
James Johnston
Huddling
with the Cheeseheads in a NASCAR World
Sara Eltantawi
To
Wear the Hijab or Not
Bruce Anderson
Kevin
Cooper and the Midnight Needle
Elaine Cassel
Feds
on Campus: the Drake Subpoenas
Rahul Mahajan
Bush,
Is the Tide Finally Turning?
Kevin Cooper
The Ritual of Death
Stan Cox
Goodbye, Howard Dean
Larry David
My War
Steve Perry
Bush and the Guard: the Cover-Up's the Thing
Website of the Day
Prison Patriots: Help This Vital Film Get Made
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
Weekend
Edtion
March 6 / 7, 2004
The Labor Movement
State of Emergency, Signs
of Renewal
By LEE SUSTAR
A sense of emergency pervades the U.S. labor movement.
Scattered organizing successes haven't compensated for job losses
due to plant closures and restructuring. Labor-management "partnership"
arrangements involving traditionally powerful unions have resulted
in tens of billions in concessions in the steel, auto and airline
industries. Originally proposed as temporary solutions for hard-hit
industries, these givebacks are fast becoming the standard. The
three biggest supermarket chains made similar demands to force
59,000 1grocery workers onto the picket lines for several months
beginning in October 2003-a battle which has gained widespread
solidarity and support despite repeated strategic blunders by
the union.
Meanwhile, labor is fast losing leverage
with which to bargain. The proportion of workers in unions-union
density-in the private sector dropped from 9.6 percent in 2002
to 8.2 percent in 2003. 2By contrast, peak union density in the
mid-1950s-about 35 percent-was virtually all in the private sector.
In some industries, "the very future of collective bargaining
is in question," write the editors of a recent book on labor
relations. 3State intervention against the unions is on the rise,
from George W. Bush's anti-union measures to federal bankruptcy
judges who regularly threaten to rewrite labor contracts.
The crisis has spurred a coalition of
major union leaders, known as the New Unity Partnership (NUP),
to demand a far-reaching restructuring of the labor movement
to organize the unorganized. Talk abounds of a formal break with
the AFL-CIO. 4A separate split emerged between the mostly blue-collar
unions that backed presidential candidate Richard Gephardt, known
for pro-labor votes in Congress, and Howard Dean, who promised
unions nothing but was seen as "electable" by the heads
of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the American
Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).
The result was a double debacle for labor: With the SEIU and
AFSCME pushing Dean's "electability" and the International
Brotherhood of Teamsters touting Gephardt's Washington connections,
union voters went for a candidate who could claim to be stronger
on both counts-John Kerry. Labor then shuffled into line behind
Kerry, with perhaps less political clout than ever. 5
There are other, hopeful elements emerging
in the labor movement, however. There is a growing willingness
from the rank and file to fight back and a greater opening for
political activism beyond electoral politics.
The last months of 2003 saw strike victories
by workers at Yale University and at Chicago sanitation companies.
6Soon afterward, a rebellious rank and file nearly forced the
leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union to call a strike against
a poor contract. 7Votes in three important Teamsters locals in
Chicago, Milwaukee, and Seattle ousted incumbents aligned with
the union's conservative top leadership. 8Meanwhile, labor backed
a series of rallies to support immigrant rights as part of the
cross-country Freedom Rides that culminated in a rally of 100,000
in New York in October. 9The following month, unions turned out
20,000 workers in Miami to protest the Free Trade Area of the
Americas (FTAA)-and stood up to police violence to hold a march
that the authorities tried to prevent. 10 Next, thousands of
workers demonstrated in cities across the U.S. for the right
to organize on International Human Rights Day. And throughout
2003, U.S. Labor Against the War, while modest in size, legitimized
antiwar and anti-occupation politics in the unions-a long overdue
and important development, especially given labor's decades of
collaboration with U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. 11
To be sure, unions will throw everything
into the 2004 elections. Nevertheless, the struggles and activism
seen in recent months reflect labor's efforts to come to grips
with its crisis, however haltingly and unevenly. Both labor's
potential and limitations were on display in the United Food
and Commercial Workers (UFCW) fight against concessions on health
care and other givebacks, with the main battle in southern California
mobilizing labor solidarity on a scale unseen in years despite
the UFCW's confused and contradictory strategy. Whether or not
the workers prevail, the struggle has already shown concretely
that unionized workers and working-class communities will rally
behind a struggle over issues that effect all working people,
both organized and unorganized. As labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein
told the Los Angeles Tim es, "Some strikes begin to transcend
themselves and this is one of them. It is becoming a politicized
event which people need to take a stand on, one way or another."
12
Escalating attacks from the employers
above, stirrings from the ranks below, splits in the leadership,
new openings to activism and organizing-all this makes for a
potentially explosive combination. The run-up to the next AFL-CIO
convention in 2005 will therefore lead to a much more far-reaching
debate over labor's future than was the case when AFL-CIO President
John Sweeney ousted the old guard in 1995. The left in the unions,
weak though it is, will have an opportunity to engage in that
debate to put forward a strategy of rank-and-file organization,
union democracy, opposition to concessions, and union organizing
campaigns based on workers' activism and movement-building.
The employers' offensive
in overdrive
The recession of 2001 and the weak recovery
have allowed business to escalate its assault on workers on a
scale unseen since the Ronald Reagan presidency of the 1980s.
As in the Reagan era, tax cuts for the rich provided an ideological
and political packaging for a multi-front war on workers. Real
wages stagnated or declined for the majority of workers as a
growing share of income was channeled to profits. 13 To compensate,
workers increasingly relied on borrowing, often using credit
cards with sky-high interest rates as consumer debt topped $2
trillion and personal bankruptcies reached a record 1.6 million
in 2003. 14 Moreover, the loss of three million jobs since 2001
led to the worst job market since the Great Depression of the
1930s. Long-term unemployment increased by 70 percent between
2001 and 2003, with two million people jobless for twenty-seven
weeks or more. 15 Holding onto a job is only part of the battle.
Of the approximately forty million people without health insurance
in 2001, nearly 26 percent were employed by a large company.
16
Employers have held down hiring by boosting
productivity gains to levels even beyond those seen during the
boom years of the 1990s-an increase of 4.3 percent in 2002_2003.
17 There was virtually no investment in the high-tech equipment
that had supposedly boosted productivity in the nineties. The
implication: Fewer people on the job worked harder to produce
more, even as their wages stagnated or declined. 18
The Bush administration may have accelerated
the employers' offensive, but it continued unabated during Bill
Clinton's presidency. Clinton presided over the passage of the
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), welfare "reform,"
deregulation, balanced the budget by eliminating jobs and cutting
social spending, and catering economic policy to Wall Street
bankers. 19 While the Democrats and Republicans advance this
program in different ways, they both carry out the agenda set
by big business in the early 1970s. As the Princeton University
economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman put it, "You
can't understand what's happening in America today without understanding
the extent, causes, and consequences of the vast increase in
inequality that has taken place over the last three decades,
and in particular the concentration of income and wealth in just
a few hands." 20
The unions: The dimensions
of the crisis
As the chief obstacle to this transfer
of wealth from labor to capital, unions have been in Corporate
America's crosshairs continuously. Employers used the 2001 slump
and persistent unemployment to complete the virtual elimination
of collective bargaining in some industries. The transformation
is most stark in freight, where organized truck drivers were
once the symbol of Jimmy Hoffa Sr.'s Teamsters and union power.
Today, union membership in trucking stands at just 18 percent,
with United Parcel Service (UPS) accounting for a disproportionate
share. The younger Jimmy Hoffa's poorly planned and ultimately
defeated strike against the trucking company Overnite only highlighted
the union's weakness, and the increasing presence of non-union
Federal Express in freight has put additional pressure on the
union. The truckload carrier sector of the industry is essentially
deunionized. "It is reasonable to believe that at some point
union contracts will be untenable in the industry," wrote
Michael Belzer, a former Teamster and now an academic authority
on the industry. 21
Even where unions retain substantial
leverage, employers have used the weak economy to demand concessions
that have eliminated more jobs and limited or cut wages and benefits-and
union officials have in most cases endorsed the givebacks. This
is true even where the employers are highly profitable. At Verizon,
the dominant telecommunications company in the U.S., the union
agreed to concessions on health care and job security worth $1
billion, according to company executives. 22
In the airlines, employers used losses
to justify concessions that rolled back years-if not decades-of
union gains. Justified as necessary to rescue the airlines after
the September 11, 2001 attacks, the concessions were in fact
the employers' solution to the overcapacity, which has characterized
most U.S. industry in recent years. At bankrupt United Airlines,
the cuts in wages, jobs, and work rules will total $2.56 billion
in each year of a six-year contract. 23 (United's mechanics then
punished the International Association of Machinists (IAM) by
voting to replace it with a craft union). At U.S. Airways, also
bankrupt, the company obtained $7.9 billion in concessions over
seven years and terminated the pilots' pension plan. 24 American
Airlines used the threat of bankruptcy to extract $1.8 billion
annually in a four-year agreement-and then disclosed the existence
of a bankruptcy-proof pension plan for top executives. 25 The
union givebacks, moreover, follow a decline in real wages in
the airline industry since the 1980s, with flight attendants
wages dropping by at least 20 percent. This has taken place in
the most heavily unionized private industry, where about 39 percent
of workers belonged to unions in 2002. 26
In the steel industry, some 600,000 retirees
are the primary targets for concessions. Backing an industry
restructuring through bankruptcy courts, the United Steelworkers
of America (USWA) has allowed employers to cut off retiree health
benefits and dump pensions into the government's Pension Benefits
Guarantee Corp., which is more than $11 billion in the red and
pays only a portion of what retirees are owed. 27 This, as well
as teaming up with employers to push higher tariffs on steel
imports, is the union's strategy to protect the remaining 124,000
steel jobs-at the cost of abandoning previous generations of
workers. To this end, USWA President Leo Gerard has forged a
high-profile alliance with Wilbur Ross, a Wall Street financier
who launched the International Steel Group (ISG) on the ruins
of LTV Steel and Bethlehem Steel. (U.S. Steel made a similar
acquisition, taking over bankrupt National Steel and cutting
off 35,000 retirees and dependents from benefits.) 28 Ross supported
the now defunct steel tariffs on China and other countries. Yet
ISG has sold an entire former LTV steel mill and shipped it to
China, where it will launch production in two or three years
and put additional low-priced steel on the market. 29
The United Auto Workers (UAW) also made
unprecedented concessions in a four-year contract negotiated
in September 2003 covering 307,000 workers-but mainly targeted
workers of the future. New employees at Delphi, formerly owned
by General Motors (GM), and Visteon, a spin-off of Ford, will
make about $14 to $16 an hour, about $10 per hour less than current
workers and workers in assembly plants. The exact size of the
wage cut wasn't immediately known, however, because the UAW agreed
to finalize negotiations after the contract was ratified. The
agreement abandons a sixty-six-year-old principle of equal pay
for equal work-and to ensure its ratification, the UAW pooled
the votes of GM workers with those at Delphi; likewise with Ford
and Visteon. 30
Assembly plant workers will take a hit,
too, paying more for prescription drugs. The deal includes a
signing bonus. Pensions won't increase at all for the first time
in decades, and base wages will rise just 5 percent over the
next four years. 31 In fact, base wages of auto assembly workers
have been virtually unchanged since 1980, once inflation is taken
into account. 32 On the shop floor, the contract opens the door
for more "team concept" production in which many job
classifications-and the seniority-based right to bid for them-are
eliminated. 33 These so-called modern operating agreements will
help speed UAW job losses. By the end of the new contract, the
UAW, which had a peak membership of 1.5 million in 1979, will
be left with only 600,000 members, many of them outside the auto
industry. 34
The UAW's plan to rebuild its membership
centers on gaining neutrality agreements with employers to organize
parts plants. In exchange, the UAW takes wage cuts and helps
improve quality. So when parts maker Metaldyne bought a DaimlerChrysler
parts plant in New Castle, Indiana earlier this year, the UAW
agreed to reduce wages by one-third in exchange for the opportunity
to organize that company's non-union plants. 35 Workers' paychecks
may be shredded, but the UAW dues base can expand-or so union
officials hope.
The reality is that the UAW, which set
the standard for raising wages in manufacturing to ensure a decent
standard of living for blue-collar workers, is now setting a
precedent for driving them downward. One wonders how union leaders
conclude that this strategy will appeal to the 80 percent of
auto parts workers who are nonunion-let alone the better-paid
workers at nonunion "transplants" owned by Nissan,
Toyota, Mercedes, BMW, and others.
The scope of the concessions in the auto,
steel, airline, and other industries may be shocking to many
union members. Yet they are perfectly logical from the perspective
of labor-management partnership that has characterized U.S. union
leaders' strategy for the past half-century. In the heyday of
U.S. capitalism, during the 1950s and 1960s, this approach could
deliver rising living standards for workers, even if capital
was given a free hand to extract enormous levels of profit. With
the emergence of a more competitive, globalized economy since
the 1970s, however, employers seek to obtain concessions-or impose
them-at every opportunity. Well-paid union leaders, insulated
from the rank and file and accepting of the primacy of profit,
have with rare exceptions agreed to help the employers carry
through cuts and "restructuring" in return for a guarantee
of their privileged positions. Thus, the fiery labor leaders
to be found in the history books have given way to a new generation
of colorless technocrats, well schooled in selling management's
reasons for demanding givebacks-a bad economy, foreign competition,
a budget deficit, anti-union laws. Balanced between the employers
and the workers, the labor bureaucracy seeks to avoid confrontation
whenever possible.
Concessions: The next
wave
However much union leaders may try to
avoid it, more conflict is inevitable. A case in point is the
attempt by UPS to pull out of the multi-employer pension plan
that covers Teamsters in the freight industry. During the 1997
strike, the union won not only a chance to get full-time jobs
for part-timers, but also defended the union's pension plan.
This time, UPS-which had already won concessions in the 2002
contract that will reverse the part-timers' gains-is trying to
get its way through Congress. The proposal to partition UPS pensions
from other companies would leave thousands of Teamster retirees'
pensions at as little as $12,900 per year-about a third of current
benefits. 36 (Meanwhile, Teamster pension trustees have agreed
to substantial benefits cuts in one major plan, provoking a series
of rowdy protests in several Teamsters locals. 37 )
If UPS succeeds, the rest of Corporate
America will follow. David Stockman, former budget director in
the Reagan administration and now CEO of auto parts maker Collins
& Aikman, in November called on the federal government to
establish a trust fund to take over pensions for the auto industry.
38 Overall, corporate pensions are underfunded by at least $350
billion. 39 Several large businesses have threatened to terminate
their pension plans and toss them to the government, a move that
would slash benefits and aggravate the crisis still further.
40
What about the public sector, where unions
retain more influence? A full analysis is difficult because of
the many and diverse government entities with which unions have
contracts. (It should be noted that, due to anti-union laws in
many states and at the federal level, nearly seven million public
sector workers lack the right to collective bargaining. 41 )
However, a brief look at the nation's three largest cities makes
it clear that they face the same issues as their private sector
counterparts: outsourcing, rising health care costs, and demands
for greater productivity.
In New York, the largest public sector
union, the 120,000-member AFSCME District Council 37, hasn't
had a contract-or a raise in base wages-since July 2002. The
union remains in a drawn-out battle with Mayor Michael Bloomberg
over the city's demands for streamlined work rules and cuts in
sick days, vacations, and more. Bloomberg intends for his models
to be the public schools, where he's demanding a "thin contract"
that would wipe out forty years of teachers' union work rules
overnight to boost productivity as well as privatizing custodial
services. 42
Across the country, Los Angeles County
public sector workers, members of SEIU Local 660, didn't face
such aggressive demands on productivity in their contract signed
in late 2003. They did agree, however, to a one-year wage freeze
in 2004 and a below-inflation pay raise in the following two
years. If the county's health insurance costs rise above a specified
level-a strong possibility-it will wipe out even that small increase.
43 Next in line to negotiate a public sector contract in the
LA area are teachers, who've already experienced cuts related
to California's budget crisis and are now expected to surrender
much more. 44 In Chicago, where municipal unions have long been
entrenched in the Democratic Party political machine, labor leaders
felt compelled to call an emergency protest against Mayor Richard
Daley's plans for 1,000 pre-Christmas layoffs-the latest in a
series of job cuts and productivity campaigns by the city. 45
The pattern is similar throughout the public sector.
If employers-public and private- are
confident enough to push these aggressive demands, its because
they're working hand in glove with the most anti-union White
House in decades. Since taking office, George W. Bush has announced
preemptive bans on airline strikes, used the anti-union Taft-Hartley
law against West Coast dockworkers, barred unions in much of
the Department of Homeland Security, moved to implement new rules
cutting overtime pay for millions of workers, imposed restrictions
on union finances, and more. In their frequency and aggressiveness,
these anti-labor attacks by the White House recall those of the
Republican administrations of the 1920s.
This anti-union drive set the stage for
the biggest labor battle since the late 1990s-the grocery strike
and lockout.
The grocery wars
Unlike the more powerful unions in heavy
industry or the airlines, the grocery workers' union, the United
Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) had little room to retreat
when confronted with a new round of harsh demands over health
care and wages. With Wal-Mart now surpassing Kroger as the number
one grocery retailer in the U.S., the big grocery chains (and
some smaller regional ones) resolved to break the power of the
UFCW with a series of simultaneous attacks across the U.S. in
the autumn of 2003. A month-long strike of 10,000 workers against
locally owned chains in St. Louis ended in a partial victory;
a two-month walkout at a West Virginia-based Kroger chain concluded
with a partial defeat. 46 But the main battle was bound to be
in southern California.
The numbers explain why. Some 59,000
workers are employed by the three biggest grocery retailers-Safeway's
Vons and Pavilion stores, Kroger's Ralphs chain, and Albertsons
stores. Both union and management agree that the outcome in southern
California will set the standard for the entire industry in advance
of ongoing contract negotiations in Indianapolis, Chicago, Denver,
and other cities.
Even by today's harsh climate for labor
bargaining, the California employers' demands are devastating.
They seek an agreement that would force workers to pay a share
of health care costs that, according to UFCW estimates, would
total $95 per week for insurance-a huge sum for low-wage and
often part-time workers. In addition, wages for new hires would
be capped at a lower tier. Managers would be able to outsource
union work without limits and have greater say over the number
of hours employees could work. UFCW leaders had to draw the line.
47 The union walked at Safeway's Vons and Pavilions stores October
11. Ralphs and Albertsons locked workers out the following day.
Unlike the steel or airline bosses, the
top three grocery chains can't plead poverty. Their combined
operating profits rose from $5.1 billion in 1998 to $9.7 billion
in 2002. 48 However, the threat of Wal-Mart is pressuring them
to move decisively while they can-and they've got the firm support
of big capital. "When talks aimed at settling the Southern
and Central California grocery strike resume, the supermarkets'
negotiators will have a staunch, if invisible, ally at the bargaining
table: Wall Street stock analysts," the Los Angeles Times
reported in late December. Mia Kirchgaessner of the investment
bank Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. wrote that the strike and
lockout is "one of the best investments food retailers could
make," one that "is likely to continue to pay off over
a number of years." 49
In Los Angeles, where unions have made
their greatest strides in organizing in recent years among low-paid
immigrant workers, a defeat for the UFCW would be an especially
damaging blow. From the beginning, the Los Angeles County Federation
of Labor, led by Executive-Secretary Miguel Contreras, took the
UFCW under its wing. The UFCW leadership also understands the
stakes. In early December, the union convened a national meeting
of local presidents and top officials in Los Angeles. "We
want to throw the question out there, 'How do we win this strike?'
Because we can't lose it," said Greg Denier, the union's
communications director. 50
Realizing that a strike is too big to
lose isn't the same as knowing how to win it, however. The UFCW
has mobilized labor solidarity unseen in years, yet shies away
from the kind of tactics that could win the struggle. First,
the union withdrew pickets from regional distribution centers
that supply the warehouses, apparently under pressure from the
Teamsters, which represents some 6,000 drivers and warehouse
workers at the company. Next, it pulled picket lines from Kroger's
Ralphs chain as a show of "goodwill" to a southern
California public hard hit by the autumn wildfires-even though
the UFCW was still on strike against that company in West Virginia.
(It was later disclosed that the three chains are sharing profits
for the duration of the strike/lockout, negating the union's
attempt to play one off against the others.) Just before Thanksgiving,
the UFCW returned pickets to the warehouses as the Teamsters
agreed to pay strike benefits to members who honored picket lines.
A month later, the warehouse pickets were pulled again, apparently
because the Teamsters' chief, Hoffa, chafed at paying strike
benefits any longer. 51
Returning to negotiations just before
Christmas, the UFCW offered to accept what union leaders said
was $350 million in health-care concessions-but the employers
refused and talks collapsed after one day. 52 As the struggle
passed the three-month mark, most workers saw their health care
benefits cut off. The stepped-up involvement of the AFL-CIO lent
some new energy to the struggle with a lively January 31 rally
of 20,000 union members from across the LA area. Days later,
however, the UFCW leaders sowed confusion by suddenly proposing
binding arbitration to settle the strike. 53
And even as the AFL-CIO worked to spread
solidarity actions across the U.S., the UFCW couldn't get all
of its own local leaders on board. In Chicago, the big UFCW Local
881 has refused to participate in an anti-Safeway publicity campaign,
seeking to negotiate a separate contract with that company even
as it moves to close several stores in its Dominicks' chain.
Highlighting its internal disarray, the UFCW announced-four months
into the struggle-that the number of workers on strike and locked
out was 59,000, not the 70,000 it had long reported. Some 11,000
workers had remained on the job at smaller chains whose owners
will eventually sign the master contract.
The UFCW leadership's erratic conduct
of the strike is in keeping with its history. Formed in a merger
in 1979, the union has steadily absorbed smaller unions-some
entirely outside its jurisdiction, and in most cases keeping
their own bureaucracies intact. 54 The result is a union that's
large but scarcely coherent-an organization dominated by powerful,
and sometimes corrupt, regional chiefs and extravagantly paid
top officers. 55 The union is notorious for breaking the strike
of Hormel meatpackers by UFCW Local P-9 in Austin, Minnesota
in 1985_1986, where workers took a stand against concessions.
The UFCW president at the time, William Wynn, argued that givebacks
were necessary to restore a pattern in the meatpacking industry.
The result of his strategy was the transformation of one of the
best-paying blue-collar industries into one characterized by
sweatshop conditions endured by low-waged immigrants. 56
The hatchet man in the takeover of Local
P-9 was Joseph Hansen, who became the local's trustee and who
negotiated a union-busting contract. Today, he's the secretary-treasurer
of the UFCW and in charge of collecting solidarity donations
for the grocery struggle. Douglas Dority, who became UFCW president
when Wynn retired amid corruption charges, was also personally
involved in the takeover of Local P-9. The impact of that betrayal
is still being felt: UFCW officials recently allowed an 11-month
strike by 400 meatpackers at a Tyson plant in Wisconsin to die
an agonizing death. 57
The New Unity Partnership
and the debate on labor's future
In 2002, a top official of the SEIU,
Stephen Lerner, published a document on a strategy to reverse
labor's decline. "The labor movement as it is currently
constructed is incapable of increasing the size and power of
unions in the United States," he wrote, adding later, "We
cannot wait for consensus. A group of organizing unions needs
to start acting like a labor movement and demonstrate how labor
should operate." 58
A year latter, that group had taken shape
as the New Unity Partnership (NUP). It's core is the three Ivy
League-educated union presidents, Andrew Stern of the SEIU, John
Wilhelm of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE),
and Bruce Raynor of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and
Textile Employees (UNITE). Also taking part are the Laborers
International Union of North America (LIUNA), and, from outside
the AFL-CIO, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters which withdrew
from the federation in 2001. The NUP's plans were leaked to the
media on the eve of the August 2003 meeting of the AFL-CIO executive
council in a bid to upstage Sweeney and seize control of labor's
agenda. While a formal split may or may not be in the offing,
there's no doubt that Sweeney will face a strong challenge when
he seeks re-election at the 2005 AFL-CIO convention.
The crux of the NUP's argument is that
unions have weakened so much that they can no longer set the
standards for non-union workers within the same industry. This
in turn weakens their leverage with employers and their appeal
to non-union workers in that industry. Lerner argues:
Unions diluted their industrial strength
by organizing haphazardly in a misguided effort to survive....
Trying to gain members to make up for losses-a little public
sector here, a little manufacturing there-these unions are becoming
"general workers' unions." They become "jack of
all trades and master of none," attempting to improve conditions
in many industries where they represent too few workers. "General
worker unionism" allows a union to mask its decline in its
core industry. 59
There is little to argue with here. What's
controversial is the NUP's solution, outlined in the leaked document:
a radical, top-down restructuring in which small unions would
be merged with larger ones; jurisdictions redrawn according to
fifteen targeted industries; local labor councils would be abolished
and replaced by appointed officials; and 77 percent of budgets
would be allocated for organizing, with most of the rest slated
for politics. As for the rank and file? "The workers...would
be no more than the dues units they already too often are, though
every once in a while they'd be herded onto buses, dressed in
identical T-shirts and 'mobilized' for some purpose decreed from
the top," wrote labor journalist JoAnn Wypijewski. 60
Some have compared the NUP to the Committee
for Industrial Organization, the caucus within the old AFL that
later split to form the independent Congress of Industrial Organizations
(CIO) in 1936. The difference of course is that the CIO was created
in response to an insurgent strike movement, led by socialists
and communists, which organized general strikes in three cities
in 1934. As Herman Benson of the Association for Union Democracy
wrote, "The ideological flavor of the [NUP] plan recalls
the old-fashioned disputes of yesteryear; a weird combination
of old AFL conservatism with its strictly assigned jurisdiction
and the old radical industrial unionism with its imaginary unions
concocted out of wheels and charts." Benson notes that Lerner
calls discussion of union democracy "too narrow," concluding
that the "NUP seems to see union democracy as an inconvenience,
even an impediment." 61
Politically, the NUP is thoroughly contradictory.
It groups progressives like Stern and Wilhelm with the old-guard
Laborer's chief Terrence O'Sullivan and the conservative Douglas
McCarron of the Carpenters, who's made a point of forging a close
alliance with George W. Bush. Yet even here, the supposed leftists
are willing to make a right turn in the name of pragmatism: Stern,
Wilhelm, and O'Sullivan called on other union leaders to join
them in donating $1,000 or more to the re-election of Republican
House Speaker Dennis Hastert. The same three, along with McCarron,
bought tables at a Republican Congressional Campaign Committee
dinner.
It's this emphasis on political realism
that led the SEIU to back Howard Dean for president, breaking
with Sweeney and the blue-collar unions aligned with Richard
Gephardt. Stern's longtime rival, AFSCME President Gerald McEntee,
later joined him in the effort, driving another wedge into labor's
top leadership. Thus, for all the talk of innovation and willingness
to break with tradition, the SEIU, the driving force of the NUP
and the largest union in the AFL-CIO, is pushing organized labor
to back a candidate with a long record of anti-union positions
such as privatization. Such is the core of the radical-sounding
rhetoric that surrounds NUP: a leaner and meaner labor bureaucracy
that's interested in membership mobilization (as opposed to democracy)
in order to organize the unorganized and gain bargaining clout.
Nor is NUP's political strategy an innovation. It's essentially
a repackaging of labor's dreary tradition of punishing enemies
and rewarding friends-who turn out to be enemies as well. As
election 2004 approaches, the NUP, alongside the rest of the
labor establishment, will be working all-out to elect a Democratic
candidate, no matter who it turns out to be. For NUP leaders
are just as hostile as Sweeney to the development of an independent
political alternative to the Democrats.
When it comes to fighting concessions,
the NUP has no alternative either. In Chicago, for example, SEIU
Local 73 is preparing to accept the outsourcing of public sector
janitorial jobs. In exchange for retaining the right to represent
those workers, the union will accept a $5 per hour wage cut.
Membership dues, presumably, will not be reduced. The question
remains: How can labor organize the unorganized when it fails
to defend even the status quo for its current membership? The
NUP has no answer.
Nevertheless, the debate created by the
formation of NUP is to be welcomed. Just as Sweeney's ouster
of the conservative Lane Kirkland in 1995 opened the door for
more activism and openings to the Left, so too the NUP debate
will force another discussion of the state of organized labor.
The house of labor has been on fire for some time, but only now
has someone sounded the alarm. The rivalries and splits at the
top-along with the activism seen around the grocery strikes-are
setting the stage for arguments and struggles in which long-held
assumptions of the labor movement will be questioned-from picket-line
tactics to unquestioning support for the Democratic Party. Moreover,
their rivalries will create a tendency for one faction or another
to outbid its competitors for support by undertaking new organizing
drives, protests, and more. And the more resources that are put
into organizing-even with a flawed bureaucratic scheme-the better
potential for activists in the shops to carry out the necessary
one-on-one work that's essential to reviving union growth.
The recent protests against the FTAA
in Miami provided a glimpse of things to come in the labor movement.
The AFL-CIO made a high-level decision not only to protest in
the streets after a long absence from such activity, but also
to reach out and forge alliances with direct-action protesters,
global justice activists, and international supporters. Sweeney
as well as NUP leaders Stern and Raynor were on the scene to
address the crowd with speeches-and all three denounced the brutal
police tactics. The politics were often contradictory-gestures
of international solidarity came alongside calls for higher tariffs-but
the dominant message was one of workers joining across borders
in a common struggle. This was a very different approach than
labor took in the battle over NAFTA in the early 1990s. Furthermore,
workers ranging from south Florida construction trades, to laid-off
UNITE textile workers in North Carolina, and Steelworkers from
the Midwest showed themselves to be open to radical and socialist
ideas. Finally, the harsh treatment of the unions at the hands
of the state foreshadowed the treatment that workers in struggle
will face in the coming months and years. It was a blunt message
from capital to labor that said, in effect: Our days of treating
unions as respectable partners are over-so what are you going
to do about it?
What will it take
to win?
For all its poor leadership, the grocery
strike and lockout shows the potential for a very different kind
of struggle-one based on more militant action. The grocery workers'
solidarity rallies have attracted unions from across southern
California-teachers, electricians, communications workers, health
care workers, public sector employees, and others. The highlight
was a "stop-work" rally by the ILWU, which used its
contractual right to hold a meeting during work to shut down
the docks and stage a noisy mass picket and rally with the UFCW
in November. Asked why the dockworkers took such action, an ILWU
member replied simply, "An injury to one is an injury to
all." 62 Many LA labor and community activists have turned
out for several protests and mobilized their unions and community
groups to participate. Some of the most spirited action took
place during Thanksgiving week, when the Teamsters were honoring
picket lines and morale was high. The rallies reflected the tremendous
diversity of the U.S. working class today-Black, white, Latino,
Asian, all united in a common struggle.
The Teamsters' support, while it lasted
only for a month, nevertheless represented a break from the picket-line
crossing that has become routine in strikes. University of California-Berkeley
labor expert Harley Shaiken called the Teamsters' decision to
honor picket lines "the rebirth of labor solidarity."
63 When the Teamsters officials pulled back from that decision,
many rank-and-file members were reluctant to go along. At two
distribution centers, where UFCW members work alongside the Teamsters,
the UFCW members defied their leaders and refused to withdraw
the picket lines, keeping the facilities shut down. 64 Unfortunately,
the UFCW members didn't have the confidence to spread their pickets
to other warehouses.
If the UFCW leadership's strategy has
been vacillating and contradictory, it's because there is a lack
of organization in the rank and file that could push the struggle
forward, as is the case with virtually every union today. Still,
because the union has been forced to move into action by pressure
from the employers, they've set in motion activity and opened
up debates that can create the context for just such an organization.
Until rank-and-file union members are capable of asserting themselves
in such struggles, however, the likeliest scenario is one of
further hesitations-putting up a fight, then retreating when
the employers raise the stakes.
Whatever the outcome, the activism and
solidarity of the strike/lockout have set new standards for the
labor movement. It has shown conclusively that workers-both union
and non-union-will rally behind such a struggle and give it enormous
material support. Further, the grocery struggle shows that labor
has the potential to take the step that union leaders failed
to take in the defeated strikes of the 1990s-action to stop the
employers' mass scabbing operations. The question is whether
and when the pressure to do so will emerge from among rank-and-file
union members.
The outcome of the grocery wars will
be judged by hard numbers-wages, benefits, work rules, and so
on-and rightly so. However, there is also a less tangible, but
nonetheless crucial, criteria-whether the struggle can help knit
together networks of labor activists in the UFCW and across different
unions. This is important not only to continue to build solidarity
for future struggles, but to discuss how to revive the labor
movement and take the first steps towards rank-and-file organization.
The possibility of doing so is clear-and
not only in southern California. There's a connection between
the fortitude of a worker standing strong after four months on
a picket line in LA, and the determination of steelworkers from
Arkansas protesting the FTAA in Miami despite a police-state
crackdown in the streets. The union banners at the massive immigrant
rights rally in New York City recalled the best of organized
labor's traditions of solidarity and justice, as did the ILWU
stop-work rally in support of the grocery workers.
These protests and struggles, coming
despite the tremendous losses the movement has suffered, provide
a hint of the potential for labor to meet the challenges ahead.
Socialists in the
unions today
It has been half a century since the
McCarthyite anti-communist witch hunts physically removed socialists
as a significant organized current within the unions-one that
could mobilize for struggle and hold union leaders accountable.
The impact of speed-up, inflation, and the confidence that came
with a full-employment economy led a wave of strikes from the
late 1960s to the early 1970s-a rebellion that was influenced
by the antiwar and Black Power movements, particularly in the
automobile industry. The rank-and-file rebellion in those years
did create the opportunity for some renewed organizational connections
with socialists and a militant rank and file.
Many socialist organizations sent members
to "colonize" industry to help develop these struggles.
The International Socialists was the most systematic in this
regard and played an important role in establishing rank-and-file
groups in several unions, most importantly in the Teamsters.
Other such groups developed independently, such as Miners for
Democracy, which ousted a corrupt leadership that had a reformist
rival killed.
While Teamsters for a Democratic Union
(TDU) survived as a reform group, the onset of recession in the
early 1970s and the subsequent employers' offensive led to the
demise of virtually every rank-and-file organization. After decades
of conservative business unionism and the virtual absence of
socialists in the unions, efforts to consolidate rank-and-file
organization were especially difficult. As Kim Moody writes:
The absence of a well-organized socialist
left in most of these movements meant that the fragmented consciousness
inherited from the modern business union practices of the post
World War Two years, though challenged by action, was not displaced
with a broader class consciousness or significant movement toward
independent working class politics. Even the more visible rank
and file organizations had little contact with one another. They
fought their battles with their employers largely within the
spheres of their own "private welfare states." Furthermore,
they fought from a position of assumed job security, while the
new militancy kept real wages ahead of inflation for most groups.
As noted above, the economy was growing fast and the impact of
falling profit rates on the economy as yet marginal. The "common
sense" of the period had been challenged by the actions
taken by millions of workers, as well as by the anti-war and
social movements. But there was no socialist left within the
working class, nor even a left focused on workers' struggles,
that was big enough to bring these strands together.... The fragmented
consciousness encouraged by modern business unionism not only
survived, but was now reinforced by a sense of economic insecurity
across the class that allowed the bureaucracy to re-impose its
authority and to open a new period of retreat and concessions
bargaining in the 1980s. 65
These retreats still weigh heavily on
the labor movement. The votes by autoworkers, steelworkers, and
machinists to accept devastating concessions in recent years
flows from nearly two decades of retreat. Gains in wages in the
late 1990s-along with overtime-partially made up for lost ground
in the 1980s, and employers and union leaders alike have crafted
union contracts to include early retirements and lower-tier wages
for new hires as a way to undermine union strength without unnecessary
confrontation. Distrustful of union leaders' willingness to lead
a real fight, workers have accepted such deals at the expense
of labor solidarity. Given the lack of political alternative,
even good trade unionists often feel that they have no choice
but to accept what they are offered. Many are class conscious
and bitter about the growing pressures in their lives, but have
become cynical or lack the confidence to fight.
Elsewhere, however, the employers have
either been confident enough, or felt compelled to, carryout
more aggressive measures, while workers have tried to draw the
line and elect more assertive or reformist leaders. Examples
of this include the Chicago Teachers Union and the Transport
Workers Union Local 100 in New York City, which represents subway
and bus workers. In both cases, new leaders were elected-with
the support of key activists who are socialists-as a rejection
of the accommodations and concessions by the old guard. Yet in
both unions over the last two years, these leaders stopped far
short of achieving their promised goals in bargaining and went
to extraordinary lengths to pass contracts. They were able to
do so because there was no rank-and-file organization that was
able to mobilize for action when the leaders were reluctant to
do so. In the 1970s, by contrast, rank-and-file movements were
able to carry out wildcat strikes or force official ones in the
old-guard dominated Teamsters union.
The case of the Teamsters in the 1990s
highlights the limits of reform union leadership without sizable
rank-and-file organization on the ground. Reformer Ron Carey's
election in 1991 would have been impossible without the long
years of work by TDU and other activists in the union. The successful
UPS strike of 1997-which electrified the country and won an outpouring
of support-should have set the pace for the entire labor movement.
Instead, Carey was removed from office on corruption charges
(found to be baseless in federal court years later) with no support
from the AFL-CIO or even TDU. Certainly, it would have been difficult
to mount a successful campaign to defend Carey given the intensity
of the government's drive to remove him. But it could have provided
an opportunity to organize against state intervention in the
labor movement, which has only increased in recent years.
The argument here isn't that the election
of reformers is irrelevant. Sweeney is preferable to Kirkland.
The election of Carey was an enormous step forward for the Teamsters,
and James P. Hoffa's subsequent election was a huge step backward.
Nor is the argument that union activists should wait before electing
reformers to office. Rather, the point is that the revival of
the labor movement won't come from above-from individual reformers
or initiatives like the New Unity Partnership-but from the source
it always has: the rank and file. This is inevitably a long-term
process.
Where does this leave socialists in the
unions today? Unlike the 1930s or even the 1970s, socialists
in the unions are seldom concentrated within the same industries
and unions. Some have been activists since the 1970s, and a newer
generation of socialists has established itself as activists
in recent years. The challenge, therefore, is how to move from
individuals or small groups of socialists in a particular union
to initiate the activity that can lead to the kind of rank-and-file
organization that can influence union politics in the long haul.
While this activity may at times include running candidates for
union office, the goal of the rank-and-file organization is different.
The intent is to increase workers' own
capacity to fight for their interests on an ongoing basis-to
prepare the ground for the future when socialists will contend
for leadership in working-class movements. This isn't a matter
of abstract debate about what the world should look like, but
a contest over the ideas, strategies, and tactics put forward
by the labor movement-from how to handle an abusive supervisor
to how to win a strike. Thus, while rooted in the struggles on
the job, the rank-and-file strategy is also aimed at connecting
workers' day-to-day struggles with a broader socialist analysis
of the world and the building of a political alternative. It
is in this way that the links between socialist organization
and the working-class movement will be re-established over time.
Today, strike levels remain at historic
lows. But the activism around the southern California strike,
following the victories at Yale and the Chicago sanitation strike
and the near-strike in the teachers' union in Chicago, point
to new possibilities for building a labor movement that knows
how to fight.
Conclusion
The labor movement's crisis, evident
for more than two decades, is approaching a breaking point in
the months and years ahead. It will likely take some organizational
expression in the form of splits and mergers, but will also open
up political debate in the movement on a scale unseen in decades.
In this context, socialists will have
an opportunity not just to make their ideas heard, but to have
their strategies tested in practice. Where union leaders seek
to solve the crisis with bureaucratic restructuring at the expense
of workers' democracy, socialists will counterpose a vision of
grassroots activism, militancy, resistance to concessions, and
solidarity. In any case, the employers' increasing aggressiveness
guarantees that more-and more bitter-confrontations are in the
offing. A confident, well-organized group of socialists in the
unions, however small, can make an important contribution to
the rank-and-file resistance that's taking shape.
Lee Sustar
is labor editor for Socialist
Worker newspaper. He can be reached at: lsustar@ameritech.net
This article originally appeared in
the International Socialist Review.
Notes
1 "UFCW Revises
Number of Workers in Labor Dispute," Los Angeles Times ,
February 13, 2004. The union initially claimed that 70,000 workers
were involved, but later disclosed that 11,000 workers employed
at smaller chains remain on the job.
2 "Union Members
in 2003," Bureau of Labor Statistics, January 21, 2004,
available online at www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm.
3 Paul F. Clark,
John T. Delany, and Ann C. Frost, "Private Sector Collective
Bargaining: Is This the End or a New Beginning?" in Clark,
et. al, Collective Bargaining in the Private Sector (Champaign,
Illinois: Industrial Relations Research Association, 2002).
4 Aaron Bernstein, "Breaking
Ranks with the AFL-CIO," BusinessWeek, September 5, 2003.
5 "AFL-CIO set to
endorse Kerry next week," Associated Press, February 13,
2004.
6 Lee Sustar, "Sanitation
Workers Win in Chicago," Socialist Worker, October 17, 2003,
available online at
http://www.socialistworker.org; Kim Phillips-Fein, "Yale
Workers Win," Nation , October 6, 2003.
7 Jesse Sharkey, "Chicago
Teachers Say 'No Deal,'" Socialist Worker, October 24, 2003.
8 Stephen Franklin, "Upset
in Teamster Elections: New Local Chief Ousts Incumbent on Second
Try," Chicago Tribune, December 8, 2003; Teamsters for a
Democratic Union Web site, "Reform Teamsters Sweep Local
174 Election," and "Reformers win in Milwaukee Local
200," available online at www.tdu.org/.
9 "10,000 [sic]
Rally for Immigrants Rights in New York," Associated Press,
October 24, 2003.
10 Lee Sustar, "Defying
the Police State in Miami," Socialist Worker, December 5,
2003.
11 See U.S. Labor Against
the War Web site, available online at http:// www.uslaboragainstwar.org.
12 Nancy Cleeland, "No
End in Sight for Store Strike," Los Angeles Times, December
9, 2003.
13 Paul Krugman, "Our
So-Called Boom," New York Times, December 30, 2003.
14 William Branigin,
"U.S. Consumer Debt Grows at Alarming Rate: Debt Burden
Will Intensify When Interest Rates Rise,"
Washington Post, January 12, 2004.
15 Economic Policy Institute,
"Economic Snapshot," January 14, 2004, available online
at http://www.epinet.org.
16 Commonwealth Fund,
Sherry Glied, Jeanne M. Lambrew, and Sarah Little, "The
Growing Share of Uninsured Workers Employed by Large Firms,"
October 2003, available online at http://www.cmwf.org.
17 Bureau of Labor Statistics,
"Productivity and Costs: Preliminary Fourth Quarter and
Annual Averages for 2003," January 12,
2004.
18 Bureau of National
Affairs press release, "Tepid Labor Market Will Restrain
Wages," January 15, 2004.
19 Lance Selfa, "Eight
Years of Clinton-Gore: The Price of Lesser-Evilism," International
Socialist Review 13, August-September
2000.
20 Paul Krugman, "For
Richer," New York Times Magazine, October 20, 2002.
21 Michael H. Belzer,
"Trucking: Collective Bargaining Takes a Rocky Road,"
in Collective Bargaining in the Private Sector, 330-31.
22 Steven Greenhouse,
"Labor Adopts New Strategy," New York Times, September
20, 2003.
23 Micheline Maynard,
"United and Delta Increase Pressure on Employees for Concessions,"
New York Times, January 15, 2004.
24 Micheline Maynard,
"US Airways Outlines Case for Additional Concessions,"
New York Times, February 7, 2004.
25 Edward Wong, "New
Labor Realities," New York Times, April 17, 2003.
26 Nancy Brown Johnson,
"Airlines: Can Collective Bargaining Weather the Storm?"
in Collective Bargaining in the Private Sector,
16, 34.
27 Kathy M. Kristof,
"Pension Bill Seen as Band-Aid," Seattle Times, February
3, 2004.
28 Michael Arndt, "The
Steelworkers' Leo Gerard is On a Rescue Mission," BusinessWeek,
February 3, 2003; Nanette Byrnes, "Is
Wilbur Ross Crazy?" BusinessWeek, December 22, 2003.
29 "Shuttered Steel
Plants Sail From U.S. to China," Wall Street Journal, December
8, 2003.
30 Ted Evanoff, "Auto-Parts
Giants Target Wages in UAW Talks," Indianapolis Star, October
5, 2003.
31 Jamie Butters and
Jeffrey McCracken, "GM Execs: UAW Pact Will Save Billions,"
Detroit Free Press, October 16, 2003.
32 Harry C. Katz, John
Paul MacDuffie, and Frits K. Pil, "Autos: Continuity and
Change in Collective Bargaining," in Collective
Bargaining in the Private Sector, 64. Inflation data were obtained
by using the inflation calculator at the Columbia Journalism
Review, available online at http://www.cjr.org/tools/inflation.
33 Mike Hudson, Bill
Vlasic, and Mark Truby, "UAW, Big 3 Unite to Rebuild,"
Detroit News, September 21, 2003.
34 Bill Koenig, "Big
Three Plans to Close Eight Plants, Putting Thousands of Jobs
at Risk," Bloomberg News , October 16, 2003.
35 Evanoff.
36 Mary Williams Walsh,
"Congress to Weigh Easing UPS Role on Pension Funds,"
New York Times, December 16, 2003.
37 Details can be found
on the Teamsters for a Democratic Union Web site, available online
at http://www.tdu.org.
38 Jeff Plungis, "Big
3 Seek Pension Relief," Detroit News, November 9, 2003.
39 "Pension Perniciousness,"
Washington Post, January 26, 2004.
40 Lee Sustar, "Corporate
America's Pension Rip-off: Don't Let Them Steal Our Future,"
Socialist Worker, January 30, 2004.
41 United States General
Accounting Office Report GAO-02-835, "Collective Bargaining,"
September 13, 2002, 10.
42 David M. Herszenhorn,
"Teachers' Union Warns of an Impasse in Talks With the City,"
New York Times, February 7, 2004; "Bloomberg is Urged to
End Use of Private Custodians in Schools," New York Times,
February 12, 2004; Steven Greenhouse, "Labor Escapes Givebacks,
But Future Battles Loom," New York Times, June 26, 2003;
and "Competence Questioned in Nasty District Council 37
Election," New York Times , December 29, 2003.
43 Sue Fox, "LA
County and its Largest Union Hammer Out Pact," Los Angeles
Times, November 6, 2003.
44 "High Stakes
for the Schools," Los Angeles Times, December 18, 2003.
45 Fran Spielman, "City
Hall Warns Unions of Layoffs," Chicago Sun-Times, May 23,
2003; Rachel Osterman, "1,000 Join Protest of Layoffs by
City," Chicago Tribune, December 18, 2003.
46 Thomas Lee and Jack
Naudi, "Grocery Worker Vote Could Have National Impact,"
St. Louis Post-Dispatch , October 31, 2003; "Kroger Workers
in 3 States Ratify Deal," Associated Press, December 12,
2003.
47 Kelly Candaele and
Peter Dreier, "A Watershed Strike," Nation , October
23, 2003.
48 Candaele and Dreier.
49 James F. Peltz, "Wall
Street is Chains' Not-So-Silent Partner," Los Angeles Times,
December 22, 2003.
50 Nancy Cleeland, "No
End in Sight for Store Strike," Los Angeles Times, December
9, 2003.
51 Nancy Cleeland, "Missteps
Hurt Union in Supermarket Strike," Los Angeles Times, February
11, 2004.
52 N. Renuka Uthappa,
"Supermarket War of Attrition Drags into Fourth Month,"
Labor Notes, February 2004.
53 Mike Freeman, "Union
Proposes an Arbitrator Decide Long-Running Dispute," San
Diego Union-Tribune, February 5, 2004.
54 Leslie Papp, "Big
Unions in Retail Industry to Merge," Toronto Star, June
11, 1993.
55 Richard Greer, "Showdown
Expected When Food Workers Gather," Atlanta Constitution,
July 25, 1993.
56 For a full account
of this struggle, see Peter Rachleff, Hard Pressed in the Heartland:
The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement (Boston:
South End Press, 1993); Hardy Green, On Strike at Hormel: The
Struggle for a Democratic Labor Movement (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1990). For an overview of the UFCW's decline
in the industry, see Disintegration and Change: Labor Relations
in the Meatpacking Industry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Wharton School, Labor Relations and Public Policy Series, 1989).
57 Bill Linville, "Tyson
Strike Goes Down to Defeat," Socialist Worker, February
6, 2004.
58 Stephen Lerner, "Labor's
Structure Stands in Way of Organizing," Labor Notes , December
2002.
59 Ibid.
60 JoAnn Wypijewski,
"The New Unity Partnership: A Manifest Destiny for Labor,"
Counterpunch , October 6, 2003, available online at http://www.counterpunch.org/.
61 Herman Benson, "The
New Unity Partnership Bureaucratizing to Organize?" Counterpunch
, December 1, 2003, available at www.counterpunch.org/.
62 Sarah Knopp and Dana
Blanchard, "This is Solidarity," Socialist Worker,
November 14, 2003.
63 Harley Shaiken, "Grocery
Strike Animates Unions ," Los Angeles Times, December 4,
2003.
64 Karl Swinehart and
Gillian Russom, "UFCW Strike at Crossroads," Socialist
Worker , January 2, 2004.
65 Kim Moody, "The
Rank and File Strategy: Building a Socialist Movement in the
U.S.," Solidarity Working Paper (2000), available online
at http://solidarity.igc.org/
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