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CounterPunch
September
25, 2002
Employers Attack;
Unions Blink
by LEE SUSTAR
With the Bush administration firmly behind them,
employers are aggressively moving to break the strength of some
of the historically most powerful unions in the U.S.--on the
West Coast docks, in the airlines, and beyond.
Yet rather than prepare union members
for inevitable confrontations, labor leaders are trying to sidestep
these battles. In his Labor Day speeches, AFL-CIO President John
Sweeney sounded patriotic themes and announced "the most
aggressive effort in our history to replace anti-worker, anti-union
elected officials."
But Corporate America isn't waiting for
election returns. With the economy teetering between recovery
and recession, the employers are determined to extract givebacks
from workers and, where possible, to render their unions irrelevant.
Leading the attack is the Pacific Maritime
Association (PMA), the shipping lines' West Coast bargaining
group. Always aggressive, the PMA is this time backed by the
West Coast Waterfront Coalition, a group that includes big importers
such as Wal-Mart, Target and the Gap. The PMA wants to use technology
to eliminate some 1,500 clerks' jobs and eliminate the hiring
hall that is the core strength of the International Longshore
and Warehouse Union (ILWU), traditionally among the most militant
and progressive unions. Some $300 billion worth of cargo--equivalent
to 30 percent of U.S. gross domestic product--passes through
ILWU members' hands each year. Employers dislike having a strong
union in such a critical role--and the PMA was infuriated in
the 1990s when the ILWU invoked a clause in its contract to shut
down the ports in solidarity with death row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal
and again to support the Seattle protests against the World Trade
Organization.
This time, the PMA wanted a strike or
lockout--because it believes it can count on Bush to help break
union power. Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge has threatened
the union with the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act--an 80-day cooling
off period and possibly the use of troops to move cargo--raising
the specter of Ronald Reagan's firing of 11,000 striking air
traffic controllers in 1981.
Taft-Hartley is a serious threat. But
by repeatedly postponing action, the ILWU undermined its only
leverage. If union action did prompt Bush to impose Taft-Hartley,
it would further expose Bush as a corporate front man--and compel
all of organized labor to take up the fight against what union
officials used to call the "slave labor law."
Instead, the ILWU extended the contract
after its expiration on July 1 into September. ILWU President
James Spinosa publicly offered to surrender about 1,000 clerks'
jobs--but the PMA wouldn't take "yes" for an answer.
When Spinosa finally sounded the alarm against government intervention,
he packaged it as an appeal to patriotism, proposing that the
ILWU be responsible for inspecting cargo for terrorist threats.
The IWLU rallied behind the slogan, "Fight terrorists, not
American workers"--a lurch backwards for a union that has
prided itself on international solidarity action in support of
workers from South Africa to El Salvador. Moreover, wrapping
labor in the flag plays straight into the hands of the employers
and a government willing to use "national security"
as a pretext to break union power. Indeed, "national security"
is Bush's pretext for attempting to deny union and civil service
protections for workers in the Department of Homeland Security.
Anyone in the labor movement who believes
that patriotism offers protection for unions should consider
the case of the International Association of Machinists (IAM).
Following September 11, IAM President Thomas Buffenbarger declared
that "[IAM members] will be building the F-15, F-16, F-18,
and F-22s that will impose a new reality on those who have dared
attack us. For it is not simply justice we seek. It is vengeance,
pure and complete."
Instead, it is the employers who seek
to "impose a new reality" on the IAM. The union is
caught in a vise between concession-seeking airlines and Boeing,
which used 9/11 to carry through 30,000 layoffs of commercial
aircraft workers. Management wants to increase workers' health
insurance costs, keep pensions miserably low and subcontract
union jobs at will. Like the PMA, Boeing sought to provoke a
strike. With airline orders collapsing, the company would prefer
to shut down production for a few months to save costs and train
subcontractors--and then starve the IAM into accepting a union-busting
contract. As IAM chief negotiator Dick Schneider put it, "Boeing
put forward a job-killing, money-stealing, retiree-mugging offer."
However, the union did little to mobilize
a "no" vote on the proposed contract. Apparently, the
IAM expected Boeing bosses--whom union leaders like to call "partners"--to
pull back from the brink before the old agreement expired. But
Boeing didn't budge. Union officials then scrambled to call for
a rejection of the deal and strike authorization in an August
28 membership vote. Next, as votes were being cast, IAM leaders
announced that a federal mediator had "ordered" new
negotiations and that ballots wouldn't be counted. In fact, there
was no legally binding order, and Boeing had made no agreement.
IAM members returned to work with no contract and negotiations
in limbo.
If IAM officials hoped to use a powerless
federal agency to escape Boeing's onslaught, another far more
powerful arm of the government is helping the airlines attack
the union. The Air Transportation Stability Board (ATSB), created
as part of the congressional airline bailout bill after 9/11,
requires that airlines seeking federal loan guarantees cut "labor
costs"--a euphemism for concessions. US Airways and United
Airlines have both used ATSB loan applications to try to extract
concessions from the unions. Pilots at bankrupt US Airways did
agree to wage cuts, while IAM mechanics turned them down. Management
then asked a bankruptcy judge to impose the wage cuts anyway,
just as Continental Airlines did in the 1980s. At United--where
the IAM and other unions took concessions in 1994 in exchange
for an Employee Stock Ownership Program (ESOP), management wants
a staggering $1.5 billion in concessions per year.
Partnership--a
dead end for labor
The contradictory role of the IAM at
United highlights the disastrous results of labor-management
"partnership." Employers such as the Big Three automakers
accepted the faAade of partnership during the boom years while
slowly grinding down the membership and strength of the United
Auto Workers. And while the Communications Workers of America
could strike Bell Atlantic/Verizon and win quickly during the
boom, management is attempting to roll back those gains today.
The unions face such attacks without
having recovered from their long-term decline. Just 13.5 percent
of workers were unionized in 2001, compared to about 33 percent
in the midn1950s. In the private sector, just 9 percent of workers
are unionized, a figure comparable to that of the 1920s, when
employers carried out an anti-union "open shop movement"
also known as the "American Plan."
Nevertheless, the corporate scandals
present an extraordinary opportunity for unions to take the offensive
ideologically, appealing to the 50 percent of workers who indicated
in a recent Peter Hart poll for the AFL-CIO that they would like
to join a union. Instead, labor is presenting itself as a defender
of shareholders as well as workers. Labor leaders are themselves
implicated in corporate wrongdoing, with several top officials
accused of insider trading scandals involving a union-run insurance
company and the bankrupt telecommunications company Global Crossing.
One labor leader did speak out on these
issues long before the corporate scandals broke. "Some politicians
ought to wear the logos of their corporate sponsors on their
suits, just like athletes wear them on their uniforms,"
he said in a nationally broadcast speech. "If Abraham Lincoln
were giving the Gettysburg Address here todayOhe would have to
say that we have a government eof the corporations, by big business,
and for the special interests.1"
That labor leader was then-Teamster President
Ron Carey, speaking just weeks after a groundbreaking--and widely
popular--strike victory at United Parcel Service in 1997 that
forced the company to create full-time jobs for part-timers.
Soon afterward, however, Carey was removed from the union by
government overseers amid charges of election violations and
a witch hunt by employers and congressional Republicans. When
Carey finally had his day in federal court earlier this year,
he was cleared of all wrongdoing. But the damage was done: The
union is now run by James P. Hoffa, the leader of the union's
corrupt and corporate-friendly old guard. Hoffa's recently negotiated
six-year deal with UPS, hailed as the "best ever,"
will in fact reverse many of the gains of the 1997 strike by
increasing the percentage of part-time workers at the company
and by widening the wage gap between part-time and full-time
workers. Hoffa's deal is a good example of the only kind of partnership
Corporate America will accept: one that's on the employers' terms.
Partnership inevitably means accepting
the priority of profits over workers' jobs and wages in good
times and concessions in bad ones. But the scale of the crisis
means that it can't be solved on a company-by-company basis even
if unions surrender to management. The airline meltdown, the
hemorrhaging of telecommunications jobs, and the steel industry's
string of bankruptcies demand a different approach--one based
on class struggle and a political challenge to deregulation,
corporate tax breaks, and other free-market policies. For example,
the Labor Day bankruptcy of Consolidated Freightways that wiped
out 12,000 Teamster jobs wasn't simply the fate of a weak company
in a lousy economy. It was the result of its former parent company's
decision to spin off the firm in 1996 while retaining several
high-tech, profitable--and nonunion --subsidiaries, thanks to
the deregulation of the trucking industry. Similarly, the steelworkers
teamed up with employers to pressure Bush to impose steel tariffs--but
failed to win protection for retirees' health benefits and pensions--and
employers demanded more concessions anyway. In the public sector,
unions face a similar challenge. Continuing to fight budget cuts
and layoffs only city by city or state by state isn't sufficient.
Unions must also undertake a political struggle to tax business
and the rich to fund government jobs and services.
Some labor leaders, faced with a fight
for the survival of their unions, will eventually make a stand.
But for now labor leaders are pushing their usual political strategy
of seeking Democratic victories in congressional elections. But
although one in four voters in the 2000 elections came from a
union household, that hasn't translated into political clout.
On the contrary, Hoffa and carpenters' leader Doug McCarron consort
with Bush. Even the liberal New York unions are lining up behind
Republican Governor George Pataki. Meanwhile, the small Labor
Party, which had its third convention in 2002, has declined and
remains unwilling to challenge the Democrats at the ballot box.
For his part, Sweeney has taken his cues from the moderate Senate
Majority Leader Tom Daschle.
Sweeney also kept silent as debate swirled
around Bush's planned war on Iraq--instead using his Labor Day
speech to hail workers' willingness "to fight the enemy
in places we can't even pronounce" after September 11. But
the result of such a war won't only be the slaughter of Iraqis,
but the deaths of U.S. soldiers along with economic and social
costs suffered by workers at home. Unlike the 1960s, when the
U.S. ruling class could offer prosperity at home while waging
war abroad, Bush's "war on terror" comes amid downward
mobility for millions of workers. In this context, antiwar initiatives
taken by union activists after 9/11, such as New York City Labor
Against War and San Francisco Labor for Peace and Justice, can
begin to gain a wider hearing. For example, the Washington State
AFL-CIO convention passed an antiwar resolution at its convention
in August.
Rank-and-file
action
Ultimately, the renewal of the labor
movement will depend on what it always has--the initiative and
action of the union rank and file. Yet there are obstacles to
be overcome. In almost every union, leaders routinely ignore
or suppress all criticism from the rank and file, fill union
publications with happy talk and apologies for the Democratic
Party, and often squelch shop-floor militants on behalf of management.
Even the liberal leaders of the Service Employees International
Union (SEIU) oppose direct elections for top union officials
and have imposed a top-down, corporate-style merger of locals.
Thus in many unions, frustrated activists have responded by attempting
to decertify their unions and replace them with others--including
Bay Area janitors in the SEIU, Teamster flight attendants at
Northwest Airlines, and mechanics at United Airlines. But such
efforts are a diversion from the long, hard work of building
rank-and-file organization that can stand up to employers and
fight, whether or not union leaders are prepared to go along.
Switching unions--or even electing more responsive, combative
leaders--can never substitute for organizing the rank and file.
Labor activists should recall that the
great labor upsurge of the 1930s was preceded by long and difficult
struggles--many of them lost due to the incompetence of conservative
leaders of the old AFL. Yet in those struggles, workers developed
the organization, politics, and tactics needed to win. While
it is impossible to predict when big struggles will break out
again, it is possible--and necessary--to prepare for them today.
Learning the lessons of the past is key--as is rebuilding the
socialist current in the unions that played a critical role in
labor's key victories of the past.
The potential for a fightback is there.
Unlike 20 years ago, when the labor leaders from then-AFL-CIO
President Lane Kirkland on down openly called for a retreat to
help U.S. "competitiveness" against Japan, union leaders
find themselves trapped between workers' bitterness and employers'
aggression. Sooner or later, the battles will take place--the
employers will see to that. The question is whether unions will
be prepared.
Some of the struggles that have broken
out in local and regional strikes--such as the IAM against Lockheed
Martin and Pratt & Whitney, or private-line bus drivers in
New York City--show that some important groups of unionized workers
are prepared to take on tough fights. The best example are the
7,000 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE)
Local 1 in Chicago, who mobilized in a months-long contract campaign
that included an inspiring 4,000-strong march through an upscale
downtown shopping district. But when the strike deadline came,
the union kept talking for two more days--with the state governor
and the president of the Chicago Federation of Labor joining
in negotiations. While HERE did make impressive gains, it could
have gotten more by striking on the eve of a big convention.
But the importance of a strike went beyond
wages and benefits. HERE Local 1 was for decades a dues collection
machine for organized crime--and had never been on strike. Even
a short walkout would have given workers a taste of union power,
boosted labor's prestige in immigrant communities, and taught
management a lesson. Instead union leaders, for the "good
of the city's economy," cut a deal that sold workers' short.
Thus while the level of struggle has
been low, there are tremendous pressures building up beneath
the surface. Aggressive and arrogant employers are determined
to use the weak economy to gut union power. Hesitant union leaders
sometimes mobilize the ranks but cut deals to avoid confrontation.
Large numbers of unorganized workers are receptive to the idea
of unionization, but most have little or no contact with organized
labor, which spends more money on Democratic politicians than
organizing. Rank and file union members are fed up with years
of abuse from management and frustrated at their union leaders'
ineffectiveness, but still lack the confidence and organization
to take the struggle forward.
Nevertheless, the vitality and determination
of the HERE Chicago contract campaign showed the possibility
of a fighting future for labor. At the union's inspiring rally
August 23, the workers--Black, Brown and white, immigrants from
Bosnia and Poland and elsewhere--together chanted the slogan
made famous by the California farmworkers' struggles in the 1960s,
Si se puede--yes we can. As labor faces its greatest challenge
in decades, it will need to rediscover the fighting traditions
and the working-class politics that can fulfill that promise.
Lee Sustar
writes for the International
Socialist Review. He can be reached at: lsustar@ameritech.net
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