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CounterPunch
March 22,
2003
The New Employers' Offensive
Labor's War
at Home
By LEE SUSTAR
While the war drive against Iraq has focused the
world on the Bush Doctrine abroad, there is a domestic equivalenta
dramatic escalation of the 25-year employers' offensive. With
the White House leading the way, Corporate America aims to deal
a series of decisive defeats to organized labor and to consolidate
a balance of class forces that overwhelmingly favors employers.
With union membership in the private sector down to just 8.5
percent (and 13.2 percent overall),1 business sees an opportunity
to achieve virtual de-unionization.
Many, if not most, unions face their
greatest struggle in decadesnot just to hold on to some
gains, but to even survive. In February, the leaders of five
of the largest unions, seeking to push a more aggressive strategy
for organizing staged what BusinessWeek called a "palace
coup" on the AFL-CIO Executive Council to create a smaller
executive committee to drive policy.2
Moreover, there is deep unease in the
ranks of organized labor about George W. Bush's agenda, reflected
in the passage of antiwar resolutions in union after union and
the formation of U.S. Labor Against the War. Even the AFL-CIO
Executive Council has voiced opposition to a unilateral U.S.
war on Iraqa major departure from top union officials' lockstep
support for U.S. foreign policy since the Second World War.3
The controversy over the war could presage a wider debate among
union members about how to reverse labor's decline.
The urgency of such a debate can't be
overstated. Even in union strongholds, labor is in retreat in
the face of employer demands for givebacks in wages and benefits.
Unions have already agreed to billions of dollars in concessions
over the last two years in steel, aerospace, airlines and telecommunications.
Where unions hesitate to accept cuts, such as at United Airlines,
Bush's Air Transportation Stability Board and bankruptcy judges
are imposing them anyway.4 Meanwhile, in the public sector unions
which represent 37.5 percent of those workers, the fiscal crises
of states and cities have prompted government demands for cuts
in jobs, pay and working conditions in the public sector as well.
In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg threatened to impose
12,000 layoffs if municipal unions refused to accept $600 million
in concessions.5 In Portland, Oregon, the public school teachers'
union agreed to a 5 percent pay cut and to work 10 days for free.6
Even "good" contracts, such as the Teamsters' agreements
with UPS and freight companies, mask concessions by allowing
the companies to grind down the number of good jobs and working
conditions over the course of five-year deals.7
Government intervention is playing a
central role in this offensive. Since taking office, George Bush
has banned strikes in the airlines; invoked the anti-labor Taft-Hartley
Act in the West Coast dock dispute; banned unions from key parts
of the Department of Homeland Security; imposed new financial
reporting requirements on unions and announced plans to privatize
some 850,000 federal jobs, most of them unionized.8
Bush's anti-union campaign is by far
the most aggressive one from the White House since President
Ronald Reagan fired nearly 11,000 striking air traffic controllers
in the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO)
in 1981. Just to make sure union leaders got the point, the White
House dispatched Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao to the annual
AFL-CIO Executive Council meeting in Florida in February to add
insult to the many injuries Bush has inflicted on labor. When
asked by International Association of Machinists (IAM) President
Thomas Buffenbarger about the new restrictive reporting requirements,
she read out accounts of corruption involving IAM officials.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney called Chao "insulting at
times," adding that, "In all my years, I1ve never seen
a secretary of labor so anti-labor."9
Chao's attack was a rebuff to conservative
union leaders such as Teamsters President James Hoffa, who has
sought to build an alliance with Bush on issues ranging from
oil drilling in the Alaska wildlife reserve to war on Iraq. Hoffa,
along with Carpenters President Doug McCarron, who took his union
out of the AFL-CIO in 2001, had attempted to consolidate a right-wing
opposition to Sweeney. In late 2002, the Carpenters re-affiliated
with the AFL-CIO's Building and Construction Trades Department
(BCTD), a violation of the AFL-CIO constitution and a test of
Sweeney's resolve.10 The building trades are also at odds with
Sweeney over their handling of the $335 million insider trading
scandal that enriched the top labor officials who direct the
union-run insurance company ULLICO, which handles $6 billion
in pension funds for the building trades.11 Former BCTD chief
Robert Georgine, who is CEO of ULLICO, has refused to make public
an outside review of the scandal, which prompted resignations
from the ULLICO board by Sweeney and two other top AFL-CIO officials.12
The formation of the new, smaller executive
committee can be seen at least in part as a countermove against
the right by more liberal-left union leaders. While this isn't
a division remotely on the scale of that which led to the split
of the old CIO from the AFL in the 1930s, the tensions are real
enough. Certainly, the politics of individual leaders matter
in this disputethe palace coup was engineered by the liberal
leaders of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU),
the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) and the Union
of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE).13
The key factor, however, is the pressure from the employers and
the U.S. state on one side and an increasingly bitter and angry
union rank and file on the other.
In fact, the major union contract battles
of 2002 highlighted the increasing pressure on labor officials
from their restive memberships. Although labor officials bowed
to employers' demands in every major battle, bitterness in the
rank and file over concessions has forced leaders of a number
of unions to sharpen their rhetoric against the employers and
at least partially mobilize the membership for action.
If union leaders have been able to get
away with making concessionary agreements, it's because the rank
and file does not yet have the confidence and organization necessary
to take the initiative in the struggle. Nevertheless, the growing
support for antiwar resolutions in union bodies, as well as labor
participation in antiwar protests, reflects a politicization
of sections of organized labor.
This article isn't intended to be comprehensive
account of labor struggles over the last yearrecent articles
in the International Socialist Review provide such an overview.
The aim, rather, is to briefly summarize trends and provide an
analysis. It will conclude with a discussion of the kind of politics
and organization necessary to reverse organized labor's long
decline.
The employers' offensive
intensifies
While the employers' offensive has continued
for more than two decades, the economic boom of the 1990s gave
unions greater leverage to resist and sometimes make serious
gains. After the long strikes and lockouts at A.E. Staley, Caterpillar,
Bridgestone-Firestone and the Detroit newspapers in the mid-1990s,
the 1997 Teamsters strike at United Parcel Service demonstrated
that workers can take on powerful corporations and win. Reform
Teamster President Ron Carey was ousted by government intervention
in the aftermath of the strike on trumped-up corruption charges
for which he was eventually cleared.14 Nevertheless, the UPS
strike finally broke the automatic assumption that a strike equals
defeat that had overshadowed the labor movement since the destruction
of PATCO.
The next three years after the Teamsters'
win at UPS saw strike victories for the Communications Workers
of America (CWA) at Verizon (twice) and US West, for technical
workers at Boeing and janitors in Los Angles and Chicago. This
must be put in perspective, however. While the number of strikes
and lockouts involving more than 1,000 workers jumped from 17
in 1999 to 39 in 2000, it fell to 29 in 2001 and just 19 in 2002.
The number of person-hours lost due to strikes was the lowest
since records were first kept in 1947. (Final figures for 2002
were not available at the time of publication). Even in 1986,
in the heyday of Reaganism, there were 69 such work stoppages.
In 1974, at the height of the rank-and-file rebellion, there
were 424 strikes and lockouts.15
The onset of recession in 2001 gave employers
greater leverage to press their demands in both the private and
public sectors. The 12-day Minnesota public sector strike at
the same time as a New Jersey teachers' strike at the time signaled
an attack on public sector unions at the federal, state and local
levels that is intensifying today. (Those strikes also showed
that even under the ideological pressure of patriotism after
September 11, workers were willing to fight). Despite the recession,
union membership held steady at 16.4 million in 2001, but dropped
to 16.1 million in 2002, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Virtually the entire decline came in the private sector, where
unions represent the smallest proportion of workers in nearly
a century. For the three "heavy metal" unions, the
losses in recent years are staggering. Over the last five years,
the United Auto Workers have lost 95,000 members; the Machinists,
33,000; the Steelworkers, 121,000.16 The losses would be greater
except for mergers and new organizing pursued outside the unions'
traditional jurisdictions. For many unions, the membership figures
are much worse: The 15 biggest of the 66 affiliated unions in
the AFL-CIO represent 10 million of 13 million of the federation's
membership.17
With the economy still limping along
in 2002, union job losses continued to mount, especially in manufacturing.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, hiring is at its lowest
level in 20 years, and the economy has lost 2.2 million jobs
since the recession began in 2001.18 Employers used the opportunity
to bring back "concessions bargaining"the term
for unions' agreement to surrender wages and working conditions
that began in the late 1970s and accelerated following the PATCO
defeat.
Twenty years ago, union leaders from
former AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland on down tried to justify
concessions on the grounds that the U.S. economy had to be more
competitive with Japan in order to prosper. The escalation of
the Cold War in those years provided additional ideological justification
for "national sacrifice."19
This time, union leaders have taken a
different approach. While they have claimed that it was necessary
to take concessions in order to "save" companies like
bankrupt United Airlines and US Airways, in many cases they have
tried to resist them, however half-heartedly. This is not due
to stiffer backbones in the union leadership, but to the increased
working class consciousness after 25 years of sacrifice and expectations
raised in the 1990s boom. In the early 1980s, the employers could
claim that free-market policies were the cure for the economic
stagnation of the 1970s, and workers were prepared to accept
it. Today, in the wake of Enron, WorldCom and the recession,
workers are bitter and suspicious.
As a result, union leaders have had to
articulate the pressure from below and talk tough. In New York
City, for example, Randi Weingarten, president of the 130,000-member
United Federation of Teachers, last year organized an authorization
vote for an illegal strike. While it was a symbolic gesture,
it was able to secure a betterbut still concessionary
deal than originally offered.20 Similarly, Roger Toussaint, the
reformer who now heads New York's subway union, Transport Workers
Union Local 100, also mobilized for an illegal strike before
accepting an improvedbut again, concessionary, deal.21
Elsewhere, however, union leaders' efforts
to sidestep confrontation have led to disaster when employers
were determined to press their advantage. At Boeing, where the
1999 contract supposedly guaranteed job security, 30,000 workers
lost jobs. The IAM leaders went through the motions of calling
for a strike vote on a job-killing proposal from management and
then canceled the vote's results. On a re-vote, the contract
was defeated but strike authorization was denied because the
rejection was less than a two-thirds majority, allowing the deal
to pass. With union officials abdicating leadership, a sizeable
minority of rank-and-file workers, seeing no alternative, had
concluded that there was no alternative but to accept the deal.22
The IAM also found itself under severe
attack at United Airlines. Faced with demands for concessions
from managementwhere it has a seat on the boardIAM
leaders pushed concessions on workers just months after they
agreed to a new contract making up for wage cuts taken in 1994.
At the last minute, they cancelled the vote as United filed for
bankruptcy. A federal bankruptcy judge has imposed the cuts anyway,
and IAM officials have done nothing to oppose them.23
There was a similar pattern at Verizon,
where the CWA and the International Brotherhood of Electrical
Workers (IBEW) mobilized against layoffs despite the company's
$2.3 billion profit in the last quarter of 2002. The center of
the battle was the CWA in New York, where the phone company had
never had a layoff, even in the Depression of the 1930s. But
after months of protests, rallies, lobbying and a multi-million
dollar media blitz, the CWA simply caved when the company laid
off 2,300 workers in New York and 3,450 overallsix days
before Christmas.24
The struggle of the West Coast dockworkers
in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) showed
the same dynamics at work. President James Spinosa mobilized
the union with protests and rallies, in keeping with the ILWU's
unparalleled tradition of militancy and rank-and-file action.
But Spinosa represented more conservative, better-paid elements
in the union and behind the rhetoric he was looking to accommodate
the employers without provoking an explosion in the rank and
file. Spinosa signaled his willingness to come to terms by refusing
to take a strike authorization vote. Management engineered a
crisis with a 10-day lockout, giving the pretext for Bush's use
of the anti-union Taft-Hartley law to ban any job action by workers.
Negotiating with a gun to its head, the ILWU leadership agreed
to a concessionary agreement that will allow the elimination
of hundreds of the best-paying jobs and open the door to outsourcing
and downsizing.25
Elsewhere, union leaders accept concessions
as inevitable and have openly embraced what socialists have traditionally
called class collaboration. Ron Gettelfinger, the new president
of the United Auto Workers, is sleepwalking his way into this
year's negotiations with the Big Three automakers, even though
it has been clear for months that employers will use the problems
of overproduction and declining profits to demand plant closures
that may cause the elimination of tens thousands of jobs at assembly
and parts plants.26
The picture is even grimmer in the steel
industry. United Steelworkers of America (USWA) President Leo
Gerard, the Canadian social democrat known for his fiery left-wing
speeches at global justice rallies, is working with a Wall Street
financier to restructure bankrupt steel companies LTV and Bethlehem
by shifting retiree pensions to a government board (cutting benefits
by half or more), and virtually eliminating retiree health carenot
to mention concessions on working conditions for those workers
still on the job. "[Gerard] is allowing the merged companies
to dump most of the enormous pension and retiree health-care
costs that weigh down an industry with 600,000 retireesand
only 124,000 active workers," BusinessWeek noted. "It's
the ultimate irony that after a long history of bitter clashes
with management, it has taken a labor leader to salvage what's
left of Big Steel."27
Gerard's collaboration with management
may be extreme but it's not exceptional. It follows a logic of
what is called business unionism instead of working-class solidaritythat
is, defending workers' interests by helping management to be
profitable. The struggles and almost-strikes of the last several
months have highlighted the fact that virtually every top union
leader, whatever his or her political stripe, accepts this framework,
despite its disastrous implications for workers.
The crisis of "Sweeneyism"
and the labor bureaucracy
The return of concessions bargaining
has exposed a crisis in AFL-CIO President John Sweeney's strategy
to revive labor since taking office in late 1995. His aim was
threefold: organize the unorganized, strengthen labor's clout
within the Democratic Party and convince Corporate America to
join the unions to create a partnership for a "high road."
Concessions, as shown, have made nonsense
out of partnership. New organizing, while making some inroads
in health care and low-wage service jobs, has failed to reverse
labor's long decline. Teamsters President James Hoffa took a
step in the direction of the kind needed to organize the unorganized
when he called a national strike against the nonunion trucking
company Overnite. But the company's use of replacement workersand
the unwillingness of the Teamsters to use a more aggressive strategy
on the picket linemeant that the strike was defeated.28
Labor saw another big defeat in late 2001 when the UAW lost its
third organizing drive at Nissan, highlighting the failure of
the union to organize foreign-owned transplants even as more
are being built. Only one in three organizing drives succeeds,
in large part because labor laws are so blatantly rigged in favor
of employers that even Human Rights Watch concluded that U.S.
workers' legal right to organize is almost meaningless.29
Labor's political strategy is in total
disarray as well. Despite their success in helping Al Gore get
the most votes in the 2000 elections, the unions soon scrambled
in different directions following Bush's installation in office.
Hoffa and the Carpenters' McCarron quickly allied with Bush.
But even a traditional left-winger, Dennis Rivera of 1199/SEIU
in New York City, lined up with Republican Governor George Pataki
in the 2002 elections.30 Despite labor's attempt to redouble
its efforts in the Congressional elections, labor tailored its
message to individual Democratic candidates rather than clearly
articulate working-class issues. The Democrats' failure to take
on Bush, in turn, led to the GOP sweep and further split between
union chiefs opposed to or allied with Bush. In addition, the
new Democratic governors elected with labor's support in New
Jersey, Illinois and Michigan are administering austerity that
will hit workers hardest.
The crisis can't be simply reduced to
Sweeney's policies, of course. It flows from the role of the
labor bureaucracy in society and is aggravated by the absence
of any working-class political party in the U.S.
After the rise of the militant mass movement
of the CIO in the 1930s, the labor bureaucracy consolidated itself
during and after the Second World War, which dramatically expanded
union membership. As full-time officials removed from the pressures
of the shop floor, union officials have more in common ideologically,
socially and politically with the middle class than the rank-and-file
members of their own unions. After the stormy period of the 1930s
and the pressures of wartime, union officials sought to stabilize
the situationin particular, their own positions.
So, following the passage of the Taft-Hartley
law in 1947, which severely limited union activity and banned
Communists from the leadership, union leaders protested but quickly
adapted. They were happy to collaborate with the employers and
government in anticommunist witch-hunts to remove critics on
the left in the rank and file. In return they were accorded the
status of "Big Labor" to negotiate with "Big Business"
and "Big Government." Unlike their counterparts in
Western Europe, U.S. unions didn't press for an expansion of
the welfare state (such as a national health insurance program)
after the Second World War.31 Instead, labor contracts in industries
like steel, auto and rubber shaped wages and conditions for the
65 percent of workers not in unions. Unions were seen as such
pillars of the U.S. establishment that a leading liberal sociologist,
C. Wright Mills, could title his 1948 study of labor leaders
The New Men of Power.
Burt Cochran, a socialist autoworker
in the 1930s, wrote in the late 1950s:
[S]ince the passage of the Taft-Hartley
law, labor has been preoccupied with rear-guard actions. The
labor movement's achievement of coming through trying times is
likewise compromised by its ready adaptation to the rules of
the game as laid down by the dominant business community. The
labor leaders are not framers of decisions that determine the
structure of this society. They are not even dissenters in a
decade of unexampled reaction. They have sought rather to become
one of the components of the status quo in the hope that they
would thereby be permitted to consolidate their organizations
as a reward for good behavior.32
Labor and U.S. imperialism
One of the most important terms of American
capitalism's acceptance of the union bureaucracy's deal with
American capital was labor officials' total support for the Cold
War and U.S. imperialism. In return, union leaders believed,
their organizations would get jobs in defense industries where
well-paying work would always be guaranteed.
The pattern was set in the First World
War, when Democratic President Woodrow Wilson solicited the support
of AFL President Samuel Gompers for the military "preparedness"
campaign and then entry into the war. In return, the AFL obtained
a quasi-guarantee of government support for the right to organize
in booming wartime industries such as steel and meatpacking.
After the war, the government turned its back as business launched
what would become known as the "open shop movement"
or, more fittingly, as "the American Plan."33
The rise of the industrial unions of
the CIO in the 1930s and the pressures to meet wartime production
needs compelled Washington to launch a new round of labor-business-government
partnership, this time with much greater union involvement. Clothing
workers' leader Sidney Hillman became co-director of the government-run
Office of Production Management, and the Roosevelt White House
catchphrase, "clear it with Sidney," reflected labor's
new clout. In return, union leaders policed the rank and file,
enforcing their no-strike pledge (with the help of the Communist
Party, which justified its efforts on the grounds of patriotism)."34
The Second World War provided the framework
for hardline support for U.S. imperialist interventions afterward,
from the wars in Korea and Vietnam to Washington's military and
political interventions in Latin America and the developing world.
A former Communist Party leader, Jay Lovestone, became the chief
foreign policy operative for AFL-CIO President George Meany and
involved the U.S. labor movement with both the State Department
and the CIA. His handiwork included U.S. union involvement in
repression of democratic and anti-imperialist unions, which earned
the labor federation the nickname, "AFL-CIA."35
The growth of the antiwar movement during
the U.S. involvement in Vietnam did lead to some significant
labor opposition. The expectation that the war would mean both
guns and butter had broken down in the late 1960s as working-class
draftees were being killed in Vietnam and inflation created by
wartime spending ate into paychecks. The attack by some hardhat
construction workers at an antiwar demonstration in New York
has left a false stereotype about blue-collar support for the
war. In fact, there is evidence that opposition to the war was
higher among workers than other parts of the population. Indeed,
it was pressure from the rank and file that pushed UAW President
Walter Reuther to eventually oppose the war.36 Morever, the liberal
and left-wing elements that had survived the McCarthyite witch
hunts of the 1950s voiced opposition to the war early on and
gave material support for the antiwar movement.37 The Labor Leadership
Assembly for Peace was formed by a national meeting of 500 labor
activists in Chicago in 1967. Nevertheless, the conservative
AFL-CIO bureaucracy's hostility to the movement intimidated many
union officials from speaking out, and a broader Labor for Peace
and Justice wasn't created until 1972just a year before
the U.S. troop withdrawal was complete.38
George Meany's successor, Lane Kirkland,
was equally dedicated to the Cold War and U.S. imperial interventions.
In the 1980s Kirkland helped the Reagan administration give a
democratic gloss to its sponsorship of counterrevolution in Nicaragua
and the repressive government in neighboring El Salvador.39 This
proved unpopular with a number of union officials who had come
of age in the 1960s, and a pullback from the State Department
agenda became part of the agenda of Sweeney's New Voices slate,
which took office in late 1995.
There have been real changes, including
the formation of a Solidarity Center, which has carried out some
genuine internationalist outreach to unions in developing countries.
Nevertheless, the change is only partial. As journalist Tim Shorrock
points out, the AFL-CIO is still involved with the National Endowment
for Democracy, a government-run institute which provided much
of the funding and political cover for labor's involvement with
anti-democratic and counterrevolutionary forces in Latin America
and elsewhere, most recently in backing a coup in Venezuela.40
After September 11, labor leaders assumed
their traditional stance of unquestioning support for the U.S.
war in Afghanistan. But the intensifying war has compelled Sweeney
to speak out against the way Corporate America has used 9-11
as an excuse to impose layoffs.
The result is that when the war drive
against Iraq began, the modest labor antiwar forces that emerged
after 9-11New York City Labor Against War and San Francisco
Labor for Peace and Justicesuddenly began to get a hearing.
Antiwar labor resolutions passed in union bodies not typically
known for left-wing causes, such as the central labor councils
in upstate New York. A watershed of sorts came in October 2002,
when a membership meeting of Teamsters Local 705 in Chicago,
one of the largest locals in the union, overwhelmingly passed
a resolution unconditionally opposing war on Iraq. This set the
stage for the formation of U.S. Labor Against the War in that
union's hall on January 11, 2003. As of early March, more than
100 union bodies representing more than 3.5 million members have
passed resolutions opposing or criticizing the war drive.41
The passage of antiwar resolutions helped
to prod the AFL-CIO's Executive Council to take its unanimous
vote opposing a unilateral U.S. war on Iraq. But the bigger pressure
has come from the Bush White House and employers. Consider the
case of the IAM, whose leader, Thomas Buffenbarger, declared
after 9-11 that "it is not simply justice we seek. It is
vengeance, pure and complete."42 Since then, the IAM has
endured bitter strikes at defense contractors Pratt & Whitney
and Lockheed-Martin, suffered thousands of layoffs at Boeing
and concessions imposed by a bankruptcy judge at United Airlines.
Samuel Gompers' deal with the devilsupport
U.S. imperialism's agenda and gain jobs, prosperity and political
influencewas never really good for U.S. workers, who paid
with their lives in wars abroad and for the burden of war spending
at home. In any case, the deal is now off. The devil simply doesn't
need it any longer.
Why hasn't there been
a fightback?
After 25 years of employers' offensive,
all the assumptions that the labor bureaucracy made in the 1950s
have been shattered. Corporate America is willing to accept partnershipbut
only if labor assumes a totally subservient role and union officials
are capable of selling cuts to the rank and file. The most aggressive
phase of U.S. imperialism in decades doesn't offer the prospect
of more jobs, but is matched by an all-out assault on unions.
The Democrats give lip service to labor issues but little else.
Big Labor represents fewer than one in ten workers in the private
sector. The recession has given employers the leverage to demand
even more givebacks that could threaten the very existence of
some unions.
Given the pervasive sense of crisis in
the labor movement, why aren't union leaders carrying out a serious
fight to save their unions from catastrophic setbacks, or at
least sounding the alarm?
The highly entrenched character of the
union bureaucracy and its long record of class collaboration
are central to the explanation. The scandal over ULLICO highlights
the problem. In addition, despite the crisis, most unions quash
any serious debate either in meetings or in publications that
might give the rank and file a voicea legacy of the McCarthyite
anticommunism when any dissenters were dismissed as "reds."
Nevertheless, conservative as they are,
the trade union bureaucracy is based on the rank and file and
therefore is subject to pressure from below.
As the late British revolutionary Duncan
Hallas put it:
The trade union leaders, right wing
included, play a dual role, because, along with the integration
[into capitalism], they retain (as a group) a vital interest
in the preservation of their organizations, working-class organizations,
which are the source of their importance in society, their incomes
and their prospects. It is this fact that makes possible, in
some circumstances, a degree of collaboration between revolutionary
socialists and officials. For we too have a vital interest in
the preservation of the unions. However this does not alter in
the slightest the fact that the bureaucracy as a whole is a conservative
layer, as are all bureaucracies.43
So another question must be asked: Why
hasn't the rank and file been able to organize around the bitterness
of workers to push union leaders into action?
A critical reason is that the U.S. labor
movement is still paying for the destruction of the labor left
in the 1950s McCarthyist witch hunt, which led to the systematic
physical removal of socialist organization from the unions. The
Cold War provided a political and ideological roadblock that
has cut off the U.S. working class from its best, fighting and
most political traditions.
The rank-and-file rebellion that began
in the late 1960s and lasted until the mid-1970s provided an
opportunity for systematic and open socialist intervention in
the labor movement for the first time since the 1940s. However
the scale of the rebellion was not at all comparable to the upturn
in struggle seen in countries such as Britain, France and Italy,
where the revolutionary left could make real inroads. In the
U.S., the hesitancy of the New Left to relate to the working
class, and the ferocity of the employers' offensive by the late
1970s quickly closed down opportunities for socialists in the
unions.
Since then, the tremendous downsizing
held down hiring for more than a decade, cutting off a new generation
of workers from learning the fighting traditions of an already
greatly weakened union organization. The big industrial battles
of the mid-1990s, such as those at Staley and Bridgestone-Firestone
were led by workers in their late 40s and early 50s who had already
endured more than two decades of attacks. While they were willing
to stand up and fight, they didn't have the confidence and organization
to carry out the tasks needed to winmass pickets to stop
production, defiance of the law and mobilizing wider solidarity.
The willingness to fightand endure enormous sacrificewas
present. At the Accuride auto parts plant in Kentucky, for example,
workers who had organized their union in a bitter strike in 1980
walked out in 1998. After a four-year lockout, their spirit of
union solidarity was so strong that they still refused to accept
a union-busting contract despite incredible personal hardshipseven
after the UAW removed their local charter and disowned them.44
In recent months, union leaders' rhetoric
and mobilizations for struggle, however half-hearted, have shown
that they feel the heat from their memberships. Sooner or later,
the pressure from belowor even abovewill reach a critical
point, and some union officials will feel the need to move into
struggle. While the battles of the ILWU on the docks and the
TWU in the subways ended without all-out confrontation, we need
to remember that they came very close to strikes that would have
had huge effects on the U.S. economy and politics. And while
it is too soon to tell whether a new executive committee run
by the big unions will help labor move forward, it's clear that
there will be no top-down bureaucratic solution to labor's crisis.
Renewal for the labor movement will issue from the same source
it always hasan upsurge from below.
Socialists and organized
labor today
The challenge for socialists in the labor
movement today is to connect the defiance seen in recent struggles
with the politics, organization and tactics that are needed to
take the initiativeand to win. That means first and foremost
building socialist organization in the working class itself.
The rise of the CIO in the 1930s makes it clear that without
the central role of the organized left, Trotskyists, Communists
and others, the unions would have never won the decisive battles
that led to the unionization of heavy industry.
Building the socialist left in the labor
movement isn't an optional extra in the effort to turn the labor
movement aroundit's a vital necessity. The labor movement
has been in decline since the merger of the AFL and CIO in 1955,
when the left was driven out of the movement. Over the last two
decades, socialists have played important roles in reform movements,
organizing drives and labor solidarity efforts. While modest
compared to the role that socialists played in previous decades,
these efforts have nevertheless been important. More recently,
in the campaign to defend the Charleston Fivedockworkers
under house arrest in South Carolina after a police attack on
their picket linesocialists helped initiate successful solidarity
efforts. Moreover, the open participation of socialists in one
of the biggest political victories for labor in recent years
helped legitimize the role of socialists in the unions after
decades of a near-total ban.
Socialists have also played an important
role in organizing labor antiwar efforts. And by helping to bring
a controversial issue into the unions, labor antiwar activism
can open the way for the discussion and debate that's needed
in a movement that is dominated by bureaucratic machinery and
scripted meetings devoid of any real input from the rank and
file. The fact that increasing numbers of union members are willing
to take up the issue reflects not only an abhorrence of a war
that seems nonsensical to them, but also a gut-level understanding
by workers that the war is tied up with an effort by Bush and
Corporate America to shift society further to the rightand
at workers' expense.
At the same time, labor antiwar efforts
can provide a vehicle to bring together a left-wing current in
the unions. The potential for this could be seen in the meeting
of "Labor and Veteran Voices Against War" in Chicago
that put Dan Lane, a veteran and a leading activist in the A.E.
Staley struggle of the mid-1990s on the same platform with active
unionists from the ILWU and Brenda Stokely, a municipal workers'
union leader and co-convenor of New York City Labor Against War.
Another featured speaker was Bill Davis, former national coordinator
of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and a chief steward for IAM
Local 701 at United Parcel Service in Chicago.45 Linking the
struggles of veterans who lost friends on the battlefield in
Vietnam and who came home to the war on workers had a powerful
appeal"the likes of which ought to be replicated in
union halls, schools, community centers, veterans' groups, anywhere
that people open to experience and to the strong, true voice
of the heart may gather," as journalist JoAnn Wypijewski
put it.46
The unpopularity of the war means that
rather than the unions simply falling behind the patriotic pressure
to "support our troops," a number of unions will be
pressured from their members to build an even sharper opposition.
And given Bush's escalation of attacks on workers at the same
time as he is launching a war on Iraq, there is a possibility
that the war itself will finally provide a generalized political
debate in the labor movement.
It is, of course, impossible to predict
the course of events. But the intensity of the employers' offensive,
the lousy economy and the war has introduced a volatility into
the labor movement. And although we can't predict when and where
the key battle for organized labor will comeor if the unions
will winwe do know that the increasing social polarization
guarantees that such battles are inevitable. Those working to
revive the labor movement from below need to be preparing for
the struggles that lie ahead.
Lee Sustar
is labor editor of Socialist Worker newspaper and a regular contributor
to the International Socialist Review.
1 Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Union
members in 2002," news release, February 25, 2002.
2 Aaron Bernstein, "Palace coup
at the AFL-CIO," BusinessWeek, March 17, 2003.
3 The resolution is online at www.aflcio.org/aboutaflcio/ecouncil/ec02272003h.cfm.
4 Lee Sustar, "Employers attack;
unions blink," International Socialist Review 25, SeptemberÐOctober
2002, pp. 6Ð8.
5 Nichole Christian, "Mayor wants
layoff lists from agencies," New York Times, March 9, 2003.
6 Clifton Chestnut and Bill Graves,
"Teachers ratify contract," The Oregonian, March 4,
2003.
7 Donny Schraffenberger, "Vote
no on UPS contract," Socialist Worker, August 9, 2002; "What's
wrong with the freight deal," Socialist Worker, February
14, 2003.
8 Lee Sustar, "White House union-busters,"
Socialist Worker, November 22, 2002.
9 Michelle Amber, "Chao meets with
AFL-CIO council; draws criticism from labor leaders," Daily
Labor Report, Bureau of National Affairs, February 27, 2003.
10 Michelle Amber, "AFL-CIO decides
on endorsement process, OKs grassroots effort to mobilize voters"
Daily Labor Report, Bureau of National Affairs, February 26,
2003.
11 Aaron Bernstein, "A life insurer
in need of a lifeline," BusinessWeek, March 17, 2003.
12 Brian Lockett and Michelle Amber,
"Sweeney, two other union officials resign from ULLICO board
of directors over report," Daily Labor Report, Bureau of
National Affairs, December 3, 2002.
13 Bernstein, "Palace coup."
14 Steven Greenhouse, "Former Teamsters
president is cleared of lying charges," New York Times,
October 13, 2001.
15 Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Work
stoppages in 2001," news release, March 22, 2002.
16 "AFL-CIO membership report for
2002," Daily Labor Report, Bureau of National Affairs, February
28, 2003.
17 Stephen Lerner, "Three steps
to reorganizing and rebuilding the labor movement," available
online at www.labornotes.org/archives/2002/12/e.html.
18 Jared Bernstein, "Unemployment
falls but overall job growth remains flat," Jobs Picture,
Economic Policy Institute, February 7, 2003.
19 Lee Sustar, "Labor's challenge
in the recession," International Socialist Review 21, JanuaryÐFebruary
2002, p. 61.
20 "New York City teachers prepare
to vote on contract," Socialist Worker, April 19, 2002.
21 Steve Downs, "Many unhappy with
New York transit deal," Labor Notes, February, 2003. See
also Shaun Harkin, "Givebacks in NYC transit deal,"
Socialist Worker, January 3, 2003.
22 Lee Sustar and Darrin Hoop, "What
happened at Boeing?" Socialist Worker, September 20, 2002.
23 Jennifer Biddle, "Why won't
IAM leaders challenge wage cuts?" Socialist Worker, January
31, 2003.
24 "CWA knuckles under after promising
to fight job cuts," Socialist Worker, January 3, 2003.
25 Lee Sustar, "Power on the docks:
Use it or lose it," International Socialist Review 26, NovemberÐDecember
2002, pp. 7Ð9; Jack Heyman, "ILWU contract is no victory,1
Socialist Worker, January 10, 2003.
26 Lee Sustar, "Where is the UAW
headed?" Socialist Worker, June 21, 2002.
27 Michael Arndt, "Salvation from
the shop floor," BusinessWeek, February 3, 2003.
28 Elizabeth Walpole-Hofmeister, "Teamsters
union calls end to strike against Overnite after three years,"
Daily Labor Report, Bureau of National Affairs, October 28, 2002.
29 Anne-Marie Cusac, "Brazen bosses,"
The Progressive, February 2003, pp. 23Ð27.
30 Tom Robbins, "Labor's cheap
date with Pataki," Village Voice, September 4Ð10, 2002.
31 Marie Gottschalk, The Shadow of the
Welfare State: Labor, Business, and the Politics of Health Care
in the United States (Ithaca, N.Y. and London: Cornell University
Press, 2000), pp. 39Ð64.
32 Burt Cochran, "American Labor
in Midpassge" in Burt Cochran (ed.), American Labor at Midpassage
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1959,) p. 4.
33 Details of this period can be found
in three volumes of Philip Foner's multi-volume History of the
Labor Movement in the United States: Volume 6: On the Eve of
America's Entrance into World War I, 1915Ð1916; Volume 7:
Labor and World War I, 1914Ð1918; and Volume 8: Postwar Struggles
1918Ð1920. All are published by International Publishers,
New York.
34 For an excellent overview, see Nelson
Lichtenstein, Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Cambridge,
England and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
35 See Ronald Radosh, American Labor
and United States Foreign Policy: The Cold War in the Unions
from Gompers to Lovestone (New York: Vintage Books, 1969).
36 Kevin Boyle, The UAW and the Heyday
of American Liberalism, 1945Ð1968 (Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 1995), pp. 219Ð233.
37 See Philip Foner, U.S. Labor and
the Vietnam War (New York: International Publishers, 1989).
38 Albert Lannon, and Marvin Rogoff,
"We shall not remain silent: building the anti-Vietnam War
movement in the house of labor" Science and Society Vol.
66, Issue 4 (2002Ð2003), pp. 536Ð544.
39 "Neither pure nor simple: The
AFL-CIO and Latin America," NACLA Report on the Americas,
MayÐJune 1988, pp. 13Ð23.
40 Tim Shorrock, "Toeing the line?
Sweeney and U.S. foreign policy," New Labor Forum (FallÐWinter
2002), pp. 9Ð18.
41 See the U.S. Labor Against the War
Web site at www.laboragainstwar.org
42 Available online at www.iamaw.org/publications/imail/imail_09122001.htm.
43 Duncan Hallas, "The CP, the
SWP and the rank-and-file movement," International Socialism
95 (old series), February 1977, p. 13.
44 Lee Sustar, "The war at Accuride,"
Socialist Worker, March 1, 2002.
45 Dan Lane and Bill Davis, "Labor
against the war," Socialist Worker, January 24, 2003, p.
5.
46 JoAnn Wypijewski, "Workers against
war," available online at www.counterpunch.org/wypijewski01172003.html.
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