Keep The Federal Government Out of The UAW

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

3-10-20

The Wall Street Editorial Board is having a field day with the news that federal prosecutors have charged former United Auto Workers (UAW) president Gary Jones with embezzling more then $1 million of members’ dues money. Other senior UAW officials have pleaded guilty including two former UAW vice presidents and others.

This criminal activity does tremendous harm to our movement and all rank and file union members must unequivocally condemn it.  However, we must consider the source of the criticism. The Wall Street Journal has no criticism for the disastrous strategy the UAW leadership used in the recent negotiations with the big three auto companies or the strike strategy striking only one auto manufacturer while the others were left running. As bad as stealing members dues money is, it has caused nowhere near the amount of damage to workers’ lives as the defeatist strike strategy that is really more like 24 hour protests for weeks on end that wins workers next to nothing in return. No advice from the WSJ there. So as far as I am concerned, working people or trade union rank and file members do not need lessons in morality from the world’s leading defender of organized plunder.

The trade unions were built through heroic struggle in the face of violence and brutal repression from the employers and their agents. Thugs, and various unsavory, and reactionary forces were recruited by the employers to smash unions and attack workers in struggle as the mass media and serious publications of capitalism like the WSJ or its predecessors went on a propaganda offensive. Go read the headlines during the early years around the 8-hour day movement and 1886, the bosses’ media whipped up fear as if the world would end should workers win the 8-hour day.  

Workers who attempted to get together to discuss raising wages were found guilty of conspiracy and had the pleasure of being tried by a jury composed of business and property owners as property qualifications kept workers from such positions.

Throughout the 20^th century, workers who were not citizens were deported. Striking workers shot, like at River Rouge, or driven from company homes by employers’ goons. Despite this, the bosses were eventually forced to accept unions but their assault on them has not stopped.

Leaders like Jones and others soil that history and give ammunition to those who want to destroy workers’ organized collective power completely. Perhaps more importantly, it has a psychological affect. The capitalist media uses these instances as a confirmation that leaders always betray us. There is no avoiding it. Sort of like Christian philosophy-----we are born evil.

According to the Journal, the US Labor Department found that in 2016 20% of the department’s investigations in to union activity led to a criminal case.  Even if that is true, when compared to criminal activity in the institutions of capitalism it lags a long way back. A ruthless anti-worker individual, Rupert Murdoch, who smashed the newspaper unions in Britain firing 6000 workers, owns the Wall Street Journal. He was a good friend of the hated Margaret Thatcher.

There are laws and workers rights violated every minute of every day. These are never reported on. OSHA, the government agency whose responsibility it is to safeguard workers on the job is a joke and most often shows up after workers have died. OSHA covers around 7 million workplaces and has less than 2000 permanent full-time employees with Trump cutting that further. The US Chamber of Commerce, an organization representing capitalists opposed OSHA as useless as it is. The most important protection a worker can have as far as safety on the job is concerned is a strong union presence and strong steward system. We are strongest on the job and in the political arena when we rely on our own collective strength.

We live in a corrupt society and capitalism is a corrupt system. Often when they retire form public office, the political representatives of capital resurface as legal bribers for corporations paying members of Congress to pass laws that benefit them. That’s all legal. The embezzlement of $1 million is small potatoes by comparison. It’s only big news in the mass media and the more serious journals of capitalism because it undermines unions and strengthens their argument for “right to work” laws. “Workers should have the ability to look after their own interests and opt out of paying dues, since union leaders are too often in it for themselves.” Over a century and a half of struggle has taught us how absurd that statement is.

Anyone who wants to take the time to find out for themselves will see that our lives, in a union or not, have been improved drastically because unions exist. With all their faults, it would be a catastrophic defeat if our enemies succeeded in smashing these organizations. All of society has benefited because of it. The motive behind the Wall Street Journal and the federal government’s assault on unions is undermining the power, or more accurately, the potential power of organized workers.

Many well intentioned shop steward or workplace activist has ended up betraying those they claimed they would defend; the road to hell is paved with good intentions as the saying goes. We have to understand why that happens. There are only two sources of power in the workplace and in society and that is the bosses or the capitalist class, and the organized workers. If a leadership is not firmly rooted in the rank and file and the working class as a whole, the danger of betrayal becomes greater. I say this from experience. Without my co-workers and the union I would not have lasted one day at work. But it takes conscious work. 

The bureaucracy that heads organized labor is corrupt, but primarily they are corrupt or bankrupt ideologically; they accept capitalism as the only form of social organization. They see themselves at best as labor brokers; the unions as employment agencies with them as the CEO’s. They do not have an alternative to capitalism and do not see workers as the force for change in society. So when the only system they can envisage goes in to crisis, they move immediately to rescue it. This is the source of their betrayals and what opens the door to this sort of criminal activity.

Some of the best of them may walk away, others, given that they see no way out, will enrich themselves. And there is no doubt this bureaucracy has taken measures to entrench itself further such as forcing individual locals in to larger bodies but it is absurd to suggest that a 14 million members or a huge portion of them are incapable of forcing any change in their organization.

As rank and file union members, we have some responsibility other than simply paying the dues. The days when we could pay the dues and the labor hierarchy would produce the goods (for a significant number of us ) are over. The rank and file of organized labor is in a war on two fronts. One is the struggle to defend our living standards against the bosses and the savagery of the market------the easier of the two. The other is the internal struggle against the present leadership and their policies of class collaboration. There are threats now that the federal government will take over the UAW to "clean it up".  But changing the situation within organized labor is the union rank and file's business. It took sacrifice to build unions and it will take sacrifice to transform them.

"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." *

It is necessary to build opposition caucuses in the workplace and the union halls where we can, and openly campaign against the present concessionary pro-company policies of the leadership. Ignoring the leadership, using every excuse in the world not to challenge their policies and class collaboration is not valid. We must participate in the struggle for the consciousness of the members and the working class as a whole. And part of that struggle is putting forward a program and demands that connect to workers’ needs and a strategy for winning them. It is this that will draw the best rank and file workers in to the struggle and build that alternative that will play such an important role as the capitalist offensive forces workers to look for a way out.

I read today that the feds are investigating sexual harassment in the UAW as well. Whenever we suspect or see discrimination in our unions like this we must speak out and organize against it. It is correct that criminal activity is punished. But it is the responsibility of the rank and file member to step forward, to fight to take control of these organizations our ancestors built in the face of extreme violence by the US ruling class, their two parties, the state and the media.

We must oppose the federal government taking over the UAW or any union.

*1840's appeal from New England laborers to their fellows to abandon the idea that the employers/capitalists would solve working people's problems.  Philip Foner History of the Labor Movement Vol. 1 p192