IAM and Uber Making Deals Causes Rift Atop Organized Labor

Source: Guardian US

 

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

HEO GED

5-27-21

If adopted, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act  (Pro-Act) is another attempt to amend previous labor law including the National Labor Relations Act, that will make it easier for workers to join unions, weaken some of the existing restrictions on them and improve workers’ rights in general. It will weaken right to work laws and “encourage” secondary boycotts and ban bullying, intimidation and anti-union meetings on company time.  The Pro-Act as it is written now, would also allow the National Labor Relations Board to fine employers for violations of labor law, and would provide compensation to employees involved in such cases. There are some details here.

Desperate to get some help from their friends in the Democratic Party to bolster organized labor’s ranks after years of declining membership, it is the most important piece of legislation for the labor hierarchy and front and center as you can see on the AFL-CIO’s website.

 

This is not the first recent attempt to legislate labor reform. The Pro-Act’s forerunner was the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) which was the be all and end all legislation the labor officialdom hoped the Obama Administration would hand them; the army of union staff worked round the clock to promote EFCA and those that dared criticize it could be met with condemnation or called anti-union. Obama pretty much forgot about it after he got elected with the help of organized labor’s resources and money, some $100 million or more. Like Obama, “Worker Joe” Biden is now touting his support for the Pro-Act.

 

This sort of legislation is crucial to the present leadership of organized labor as it relieves them of any responsibility to organize workers or mobilize the potential rank and file power to fight on our own behalf. It would increase membership and therefore revenue without them having to do any serious work and they can always blame the politicians when the hammer falls.

 

Legislation being developed in New York State has thrown a spanner in these works and opened up a rift in the labor bureaucracy. The legislation, backed by the International Association of Machinists (IAM) would “….allow industrywide bargaining for gig workers, specifically the roughly 250,000 app-based drivers and food delivery worker in New York.”, writes Steven Greenhouse in the Guardian. But many labor officials are claiming it will undermine the passage of the Pro-Act as it does not specify the GIG workers as employees and also denies the right to strike, something that is in most union contracts so I can’t see what is different about that.

Apparently, to avoid GIG workers being called employees which would allow them to fall under the protection of anti-discrimination and minimum wage laws, the Uber, Lyft and other workers covered under this proposed legislation are referred to as “network” workers and the company, Uber for example, as the “network” company. How modern. It should come as no surprise then that Uber finances the Independent Drivers Guild, an affiliate of the IAM that reached an agreement with Uber to represent its drivers back in 2016.

 

So here we have a situation where the leadership of a major union is making a deal with a notoriously bad employer to allow its workers to unionize but on the employer’s terms. It’s helping form a company union in other words. The leadership of the IAM is prepared to increase its membership and “grow the union” (a business term often used by labor officials) at the expense of organized labor as a whole and the working class in general, some 88% of whom are without union representation.

 

Whether this legislation will undermine efforts to pass the Pro-Act is just one aspect of the bankruptcy of the trade union leadership’s policies. The provisions of the Pro-Act are obviously worthy of our support but we have to be realistic here. In my 12 years as a delegate to the Alameda Central Labor Council (the county arm of the AFL-CIO to which affiliates belong and through which they seek strike sanction) the New Deal Era was touted as the era of labor’s triumphalism and Franklin Roosevelt the great savior. He was like a god, he gave us our rights he gave us the right to belong to unions and so on.

 

But these rights had already been taken in the streets, factories and workplaces of the US, As Art Preis pointed out in his book on the rise of the CIO,  Labor’s Giant Step:

 

 “…Labor already had that right to organize---whenever it exercised the right and fought to maintain it. If there were no such right how could the AFL have existed at all?”

 

The labor gains and social legislation that arose in the 1930’s came about through massive pressure from below The point is to recognize that what we have we won through mass direct action and not from the generosity or kindness of the politicians in the two big business parties passing a few laws. In the 1930’s there were strikes of the unorganized, the unemployed. There were housing battles, rent strikes and of course, three general strikes in 1934; San Francisco, Minneapolis and Toledo. Rank and file communists, socialists anarchists and other militant forces were building strong roots among the working class. There were some half million workers occupying their workplaces in this period and the great 44-day Flint occupation in 1936-37 at General Motors and other battles in auto that led to the formation of the United Auto Workers union. (UAW).

 

The present trade union hierarchy is committed to defending the so-called free market and capitalism and when the system is in crisis, their first step is to bail it out. To mobilize the potential power that labor rank and file in a concerted campaign to not only defend what we have but build on it is a threat to their world view, it can only lead to chaos. They will defend the status quo, enjoying the relationship they have built with the bosses based on labor peace. Only an organized and conscious movement from below will change this situation.

 

Workers cannot rely on friendly politicians or legislation to advance our interests. We can only rely on our own strength and independence in action. There are plenty of laws on the books that are supposed to protect us and don’t. As for legislation that claims to stop bosses from intimidating workers on the job or that signing a piece of paper will assure us that they will remain neutral, there is no such thing and never has been. The idea that the bosses will remain neutral is utopian. They never will be neutral and neither should we. We have opposing interests and there are times of open warfare and times of relative calm, but this contradiction in society cannot be reconciled.

 

As for the Pro-Act, of course we should support it but it is no substitute for mass direct action and working class power. The recent events and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement teach us what works and what doesn’t.

 

In a September 2020 article on the Pro-Act the socialist newspaper Left Voice had this to say about the Pro-Act:

 

“Though in important ways weaker than the EFCA; it is not negligible. Getting rid of right-to-work laws would be a boon, though it should be noted how little the Democrats have done to stop the spread of right to work. Nevada and Virginia have Democratic governors and Democratic majorities in their legislatures, and still they refuse to repeal right-to-work. A worker would be forgiven for not believing that Democrats would fight now when they haven’t before.   No, the PRO Act will likely share a similar outcome of being watered down and forgotten after the election.

 

I think that about sums it up.