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| William "Big Bill" Haywood |
Trumka had this to say: “We will join the President as partners to help build bipartisan support for a sustained and strategic investment in America’s future. Labor and business, Democrats and Republicans should all be working together to ensure that we make the investments we need now to secure our future.”
Trumka’s post-speech statement also states: “President Obama certainly understands our need to be competitive in manufacturing, new technology and skills.” Trumka also added that Obama, “must also understand that last-century trade deals that reward and encourage corporations that outsource American jobs will do little to generate net new jobs in the United States or raise living standards here or abroad”
These comments reveal the fundamental problem that plagues the Labor movement and that has such catastrophic consequences for working people, our living standards and the natural world in which we live. The most harmful strategy that the Labor leaders pursue is what is called the Team Concept. Every top Labor official supports this strategy. The Team Concept is based on the understanding, a false understanding, that workers’ interests and employer’s interests are the same; most workers know this in our gut, which is why we find it distasteful. The policies that flow from it are devastating. In order to keep our jobs we have to ensure that our individual employers, our own personal bosses, drive their rivals from the marketplace.
How do we do that? We do that by helping the boss reduce the cost of doing business. We take wage concessions that Union leaders recommend so our boss can buy Labor power (hire human beings) more cheaply than her rivals; Union bureaucrats don’t impose these concessions on themselves mind you and if we don’t take them, we passively accept Union officials who impose them on workers not yet employed (new hires) causing division and resentment on the job and toward the Union. On the advice of trade Union leaders we give up protections and Union rules on the job that might slow production, hinder profit taking and strengthen our employer’s rivals in the struggle for market share, though they are rules and protections that make our workplaces more humane.
We speed up, cut corners, take fewer breaks etc. And what happens in the workplaces of our employer’s rivals? Well his workers have to outdo us. They give up more, work even faster than we do. Competition is a losing game for workers; it is a race to the bottom.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the more we give, the more workers in other workplaces have to give to outdo us. It’s an employer’s dream scenario; it makes paupers of us and enriches the bosses. And it’s obvious that a generalized and united movement of workers and youth, across racial and gender lines, blue collar and white, Union and non-Union, immigrants and native born, a movement of all workers that can repel these attempts by the employers to drive us back to 19th century conditions is made all the more difficult when we are all siding with our own bosses in his struggle with his rivals for market share.
The same logic applies to this issue of outsourcing. When the capitalist talk about freedom, they are talking about the freedom to move capital where they want, when they want and to buy Labor power as cheaply as possible in order to maximize profits. US corporations aren’t investing in China to raise the wages of workers there. They are moving production to China and to Vietnam because humans are cheap; Unions are weak or simply company Unions and profit, which has its source in the unpaid Labor of the working class, is abundant.
So the idea that we have to be “competitive” has to be rejected outright. We must reject that we should compete with other workers for who gets to keep a job by working faster and more cheaply for our boss than the other guy. We have to unite with all workers whether at home or abroad and wage a united struggle against all the giant corporations whether domestic or foreign. We don’t take a position that we in California get to keep a job at the expense of a worker in Texas, or that we in the US keep our jobs and the Japanese or Germans or Mexicans lay off their workers. Instead we demand what we need regardless of what the employers, the Democrats or their friends atop organized Labor say is realistic and we build a united movement around these demands and develop a strategy for winning them. We have the numbers so it’s not that difficult really.
In his opening address to the 20th biennial convention of the California State Labor Federation in 1994, to which I was a delegate on occasion, then Executive Secretary, Jack Henning said:
"The two party system can't give relief because capitalism in large finances both parties. In one way or another. We may say it finances the Republican Party more. But have you ever known Democrats en masse to turn down the enticements of capitalism?
"There should originate, in the leadership of the AFL-CIO, a call to the unions for the only answer that is noble: global unionism is the answer to global capitalism.
"We were never meant to be beggars at the table of wealth. We were never meant to be the apostles of labor cannibalism on the world stage. We were meant for a higher destiny. We were never meant to be the lieutenants of capitalism. We were never meant to be the pall bearers of the workers of the world."
Henning never did anything to bring this to fruition, was an obstacle in fact, and made the comments as there was a resolution for the Union movement to break from the Democrats at this convention but the statement is no less valid. But the Union leadership won’t take these steps without being forced to because they accept the laws of the market and that we have to help US capitalists compete with their foreign rivals. They believe domestically they have to help Union employers compete with non-Union which brings the same result; all workers lose. Any opposition group or caucus claiming to stand for change, that seeks to replace the present leadership will act no differently than the present leadership if they do not reject this view of the world.
Labor history in the US has another side to it though. Compare Trumka’s cowardly ingratiating remarks to the following. An 1840's appeal from New England laborers to their fellows to abandon the idea that the employers/capitalists would solve working people's problems stated:
"Brethren we conjure you...not to believe a word of what is being said about your interests and those of your employers being the same. Your interests and theirs are in a nature of things, hostile and irreconcilable. Then do not look to them for relief...Our salvation must, through the blessing of God, come from ourselves. It is useless to expect it from those whom our labors enrich." (1)
At the founding conference of the IWW in Chicago in 1905, Big Bill Haywood, the president of the Western Federation of Miners opened the conference with the following:
"Fellow workers. ... This is the Continental Congress of the working-class. We are here to confederate the workers of this country into a working-class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of the working-class from the slave bondage of capitalism. ... The aims and objects of this organization shall be to put the working-class in possession of the economic power, the means of life, in control of the machinery of production and distribution, without regard to the capitalist masters." (2)
This is part of our history, a great and honorable part of our history, and this history, although almost forgotten by some and driven in to the recesses of memory of others by the immense social power of US capitalism and its media and education system, will be rediscovered in the movements of the US working class that US capitalism will force on to the scene as their system sinks deeper in to crisis.
(1) Philip Foner History of the Labor Movement Vol. 1 p192
(2) Philip Foner: The IWW 1905 -1917 P29
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