"The working class, its role and
its mission today.
The tasks and concrete experiences of the Communist Party in the working class
and the trade union."
Brussels, 16-18 May 2008
www.icsbrussels.org , ics@icsbrussels.org
Low-wage capitalism―Section 3: Labour struggles in the U.S. since 1980 and strategies for the coming period
Workers World Party, USA
This paper, written by Fred Goldstein of Workers World Party, USA, as a contribution to the discussion of the 17th International Communist Seminar held in Brussels, Belgium on May 16-18, 2008, is a summary of the third and concluding part of a book entitled Low-Wage Capitalism, Colossus with Feet of Clay, soon to be published.
INTRODUCTION
The first two sections of the book discuss the world-wide wage competition instituted by finance capital in the wake of the collapse of the USSR and Eastern Europe and the leaps forward in the scientific-technological revolution which made it possible. The fundamental thesis of the first section on imperialist globalization is that it is laying the basis for an end of capitalist stability in the imperialist countries and a revival of the class struggle, with special focus on the United States.
The technological segmentation of the production process and of services to low-wage areas throughout the globe has allowed the bosses to pit workers in the developed imperialist countries in a job-for-job competition with super-exploited workers in the poorer, low-wage countries. This process is eroding the national determination of wages. Instead wages are more and more being determined internationally under the downward pressure of low-wages in the oppressed countries. This process is destroying the privileged positions of the upper layers of the working class in the imperialist countries and destroying the social foundation of opportunism in the labor movement, of the type first described by Lenin during World War I.
The second section of the book documents the thirty-year decline of the wages and standard of living the working class and the oppressed in the United States under the impact of the global race to the bottom engineered by the giant monopolies. Both of these topics were dealt with in the paper presented at the International Communist Seminar of May 2007.
The third section reviews the last three decades, which have seen an unprecedented retreat of the U.S. working class in the face of union-busting, demands for concessions, and the general lowering of wages and deterioration of working conditions. Yet, even during this period of retreat, the workers have shown a willingness to fight back. The labor leadership of the AFL-CIO, and now Change to Win, has led the retreat and has been the great obstacle to mobilizing the kind of class-wide struggles needed to turn back the capitalist anti-labor offensive. Developing and implementing a struggle strategy will be the task of communists in the labor movement.
We start with two examples--of which there are over a dozen in the book--of strikes in the U.S. between 1980 and 2005.
1985: Hormel meatpackers
The struggle of the Hormel meatpackers of Local P-9, United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) in Austin, Minnesota, became a national cause within the labor movement and the progressive movement in general because the local decided to take a stand against concessions. In the face of opposition from the union’s national leadership, which condemned the strike and suspended the local, the Hormel workers sent agitators to cities throughout the country and got material support from more than 3,000 locals. Movement activists and tens of thousands of unionists and local officials came to the area.
Mass picket lines blocked scabs and shut down Hormel’s operations. The workers faced teargas, police attack, and arrests. Governor Rudy Perpich, a Democrat, sent in the National Guard against the strikers. But what defeated the strike, which lasted a year and a half, was the hostility of the national leadership of the UFCW and the refusal of the AFL-CIO to join the battle on a national basis. This major confrontation, which had been brought on by Hormel, was recognized as a highly significant battle among the rank and file of the labor movement. The workers at Hormel and far beyond showed a readiness and desire to unite and fight back.
1997: UPS Teamsters
The strike against United Parcel Service (UPS) was a powerful one that fought to reverse concessions, which had begun in 1982. The company had won the right to create a two-tier, part-time system of employment. In August of 1997 the 185,000 members of the UPS division of the Teamsters union waged a fifteen-day strike that electrified the labor movement and the working class as a whole. Despite compromises made in the final settlement, it was understood, rightly so, as the first major victory for a significant section of the working class after two decades of defeat and retreat.
The strike was led by Teamsters President Ron Carey, who had democratized the union during his tenure. It was won by meticulous planning for a genuine class struggle, bringing in the rank-and-file at every stage. The struggle was popular in the union movement and among the working class as a whole because it was projected as a struggle against part-time and low-wage work. Sixty percent of the 185,000 UPS workers were part-time workers who earned only $9 per hour, as opposed to $19.95 an hour, plus benefits, for full-time workers.
The strike was won through a major test of strength between labor and capital. The AFL-CIO leadership supported the strike and John Sweeney promised to back the Teamsters’ strike benefit fund with $10 million a week. UPS workers forced the company to agree to turn 10,000 part-time workers into full-time employees, won raises for the lower-paid workers, and warded off an attack on pension funding.
When the strike was over the government quickly framed Carey up on false charges of illegally providing funds for his union election. Acquitted of all charges, Carey was nevertheless driven out of the union by a government board overseeing the union.
Fearing a government attack, the AFL-CIO leadership left Carey to face the frame-up and ouster alone. Instead of standing up and challenging the government to indict the entire top leadership of the union movement, and preparing the rank-and-file to defend the leader who had launched the biggest union challenge to big business in two decades, the AFL-CIO leadership abandoned the struggle. The forward momentum gained by the militant mass struggle of 185,000 workers, backed by workers everywhere, soon died down. What the mass struggle had won was diminished by the craven retreat of the leadership.
TEchnology and Need for Higher Class Organization
The working class in the United States is facing a crisis that will bring to light the urgent need for a leap forward in class organization. This crisis is taking place in the framework of the global restructuring of capitalist production and services, which had already pushed tens of millions of workers and oppressed to the edge of mass pauperization, before the onslaught of the new economic crisis.
Technological innovation is a constant under capitalism. Ever since its earliest beginnings, each generation of capitalists has sought to more thoroughly exploit the workers, most often through the introduction of more efficient, more productive equipment.
Each new wave of technology is directed by capital precisely at eliminating the highest-paid jobs and the areas in which labor organization has been most successful. Its tendency is to drive down the price of labor power―that is, wages. The most pervasive methods of accomplishing this are to destroy union jobs; to deskill jobs, making it easier to replace one worker with another with minimal to no training, which will increase competition among workers; or to direct capital towards new low-skill, low-wage, high-profit industries and avoid unions altogether.
For the working class this means that each new stage in capitalist technological development requires greater and greater class solidarity, wider and wider organization, and more unified struggle to overcome the ever-increasing tendency by the bosses to widen the competition among workers, both at home and abroad.
Building a Broad Working Class Movement
For the working class in the U.S. a whole new class-wide approach must be taken. Marx himself sketched the outlines of what is needed today a century and a half ago.
Marx on unions as organizing centers for the whole class
Apart from their original purpose, they [the unions] must now learn to act deliberately as organizing centers of the working class in the broad interest of its complete emancipation. They must aid every social and political movement tending in that direction. Considering themselves as acting as the champions of the whole working class, they cannot fail to enlist the non-society men [the unorganized―ed.] into their ranks. They must look carefully after the interests of the worst paid trades, such as agricultural laborers, rendered powerless by exceptional circumstances. They must convince the world at large that their efforts, far from being narrow and selfish, aim at the emancipation of the downtrodden millions.
Karl Marx on "The Future of the Unions" from "Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council of the First International," August 1866
What does this mean concretely today in the U.S.? To take the broadest view of the potential strength of the working class and organized labor, it is essential to take into account not only the 15 million workers in the unions plus the 50 million workers who say they want a union, but the hundreds of thousands of activists and community organizers in cities and towns across the country.
The reservoir of strength from this vantage point includes the natural allies and potential members of a broad working-class movement that reaches out and gives leadership in the general struggle to meet the needs and raise the demands of the working class as a whole.
This potential force includes the masses of unorganized workers, the under-employed, and the unemployed struggling to survive. It includes the communities of workers and their families being devastated by home foreclosures and evictions; the groups that have been fighting for immigrant rights; the "living wage" movement; the struggles for universal health care; activists fighting homelessness and demanding affordable housing; neighborhood groups fighting to improve the schools. They include the anti-war movement; groups fighting to save the environment from devastation by corporate polluters; and opponents of police brutality, the death penalty, and the prison-industrial complex.
Above all, class unity can only be attained by supporting the thousands of groups around the country―local, regional, and national―that have been fighting against racism and national oppression, sexism, and gender oppression.
Plant Occupations and the Right to a Job
New strategies and tactics are needed for the crisis. The question is how to put a stop to the present bloodletting of layoffs by the bosses. The issue before the working class and the unions especially is do workers have a right to their jobs? As the creators of the wealth of the bosses do they not have equity, do they not have property rights to the wealth that they have created? By what right can they be deprived of that property?
The labor of the workers has created the wealth that has been invested and reinvested over and over again to create the plants, the offices, the mines, the hospitals, etc. Having created all this property, workers should have a property right to their jobs. In simpler terms, workers have "sweat equity" in their jobs and in the workplace as well.
Workers have every right to prevent the bosses from depriving them of their jobs. This is simply workers defending their property rights. The right to occupy a workplace to prevent closings and layoffs must be established as a fundamental right of the working class. Possession of the plants should be viewed as nothing more than asserting the property rights of the creators of the wealth that built those plants. The capital of the owners is nothing more than accumulated labor of the workers, for which they have not been paid. Seen in this light, the seizure of the workplace by the workers in defense of their jobs is nothing more than laying claim to property that they have created.
Challenging the Capital-Labor Framework
In order to fight management it is necessary to reject the ideological framework of management. Even within the framework of the capitalist system, the workers in their present situation cannot move forward in any significant way unless they challenge the labor-capital framework. The workers will have to challenge some of the basic prerogatives of capital and the ideology of the supremacy of the capitalist market and the rights of capitalist property. Indeed, when the UAW workers seized the plants in Flint, Michigan, when the hundreds of thousands of workers carried out successful sit-downs in 1936 and 1937, they challenged the property rights of the bosses. It was the only way they could win.
Over the past three decades, the bosses have been using the argument of the need to "remain competitive" as their wedge against the workers in the struggle for concessions. However, in the unfolding economic crisis, the argument of "competitiveness" may be superseded by the assertion that shutdowns and layoffs are necessary because the company must maintain profitability and prevent losses.
The question of profitability must be subordinated to the right of the workers to jobs and income. The workers have the right to take over their workplaces and operate them with government or corporate subsidies, if necessary. Workers have the right to demand jobs programs to deal with their crisis as a class.
The capitalist government gives hundreds of billions in subsidies to the military-industrial complex, to corporate firms for research and development, to build infrastructure for corporations, and so on. Workers have a right to demand that this largesse, this charity to the corporations, be redirected to meet the needs of the workers in a crisis.
When the capitalist system utterly fails to meet the most elementary needs of survival for millions of workers, then the workers have the right to deal with the crisis by defying capitalist methods and beginning to establish their own legal rights and their own power on the ground. This will require struggle but it will also demand that the workers get beyond the basic assumptions of capitalism so that their struggle can be effective.
To continue with the question of class-conscious ideology, consider the universal argument of the capitalist class against the workers about the need "to remain competitive." Why do the bosses constantly bring this up in labor negotiations (assuming the workers have a union)? It is a clear statement that the one who wins the capitalist competition is the one with the lowest labor costs. Thus, in order for the capitalist in company A to beat out the capitalist in company B, the workers in company A have to out-compete the workers in company B by allowing their wages to be cut below the others.
Accepting the bosses’ notion that labor must subordinate its demands to the overriding necessity of capital to remain competitive and profitable is a self-defeating ideology. The workers cannot be guided by it. Such arguments completely tie the fate of the workers to the perils of the capitalist market.
To unravel this problem ideologically, it is first necessary to restate the fundamental Marxist truth that the substance of profit is surplus value. And surplus value consists of unpaid labor. Profits are directly proportional to the unpaid labor of the workers. Higher profits mean that more surplus value is extracted from the hides of the workers. If the workers are paid more for their labor, the profits of the bosses are lowered proportionally. This absolutely reciprocal relationship is what lies behind the irreconcilable antagonism between workers and bosses.
To hold the workers responsible for the profitability of capital is to that they agree to intensify their own exploitation to solve the crisis of their exploiters. If this is explained to the workers, they can easily comprehend it.
There are times when concessions may have to be given, because the situation is very unfavorable for the workers. But the idea that concessions must be made so the boss can be "more competitive" chains the fate of the workers to the capitalist market.
The question should be posed: Why must the exploited sacrifice their wages, their benefits, their working conditions, and their very jobs in order to maintain the continuous prosperity of the exploiters, who have lived off the wealth created by the workers in the first place?
Class Consciousness and the Fight Back
The strategy of class-wide fight back, concepts such as a right to a job and the right to occupy workplaces, the need for international class solidarity with oppressed workers around the world and the need for the workers to see themselves as a world class united by the common exploitation – such concepts cannot be spontaneously arrived at. The intervention of a class-conscious revolutionary vanguard that understands and can promote the ultimate goal of getting rid of exploitation altogether, abolishing capitalism, is indispensable to the struggle.
It was Lenin, the architect of the first successful socialist revolution in history, who fought for this conception at the beginning of the twentieth century. He argued for the creation of a revolutionary party, which became known as the Bolshevik Party.
Lenin argued strenuously for bringing socialist, political class consciousness to the workers as a highly important task, along with carrying on economic agitation, strikes, and demonstrations, all of which he put forward in the groundbreaking pamphlet "What Is to Be Done?" written in 1902.
Socialism the only way out
As this paper was being prepared we learned of the tremendously successful and groundbreaking one-day strike on May Day by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union which shut the entire West Coast port to protest the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. This job action by ILWU was the first major political strike in decades. According to a report from one of the strike organizers from Local 10, the job action was organized entirely from below by the rank-and-file caucus of the ILWU.
This is an example of the type of workers’ struggle that will become increasing possible as the war crisis and the economic crisis bring increasing pressure upon workers in the U.S.
Imperialism in the age of the scientific-technological revolution is expanding and deepening exploitation and oppression on an unprecedented scale. What is referred to as "globalization" is in fact the expanded export of capital and the use of cutthroat trade by giant transnational corporations to pile up huge profits at the expense of the people of the world. In short, it is a phase of intensification and widening of the imperialist plunder of the globe.
This process of expanded global exploitation, which is proceeding at breakneck speed due to modern high technology, has profound consequences at home and abroad and is rapidly developing the groundwork for the next phase of the world historic struggle for socialism. Communists in the U.S. will play an indispensable role in this next phase of the class struggle.
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