Book Review. Two Defeated Workers’ Struggles: Are There Lessons?

“The Other New York: A Story of Human Transformation”
Bruce Richard
Self-published
Kingston: 2015

“The Battle of Grangemouth: A Worker’s Story” 
Mark Lyon
Lawrence and Wishart
London: 2017

by Marian Swerdlow

Source

 

“The Other New York” relates the fight by the men who collected the change from parking meters in New York City in the late 1980s.  The work, formerly done by unionized city employees, had been privatized in 1987.  The new workforce, around one hundred mostly young, African American and Latinx, got low pay, no benefits, and were given shoddy, dangerous equipment that made bloody stumps of their fingers and wreaked havoc on their bodies.  The boss forced them to work so fast it was unsafe and exhausting.  Lugging around all that cash around every city neighborhood made them targets for violence as well.  

In 2015, one of them wrote this book to describe the “transformation” of the title.  At the beginning, the men took their anger and frustration out on each other, insulting, belittling, and even stealing from each other.  A growing number of them realized this was self-defeating and began to convince the others to change their relationships so they could fight together to improve their conditions.  They transformed themselves into a collective of solidarity.  They began meeting every morning before work to discuss their problems and conditions.  They tried to unionize, but their boss signed a sweetheart contract with a mobbed up local, which they soon realized would give them no help. 

So they turned to each other.  They began slow-downs and sick outs.  They sought the help of community and civil rights leaders and attorneys, and received some favorable press.  When one of their leaders was fired, instead of driving their vans around collecting money, they drove en masse to City Hall and shut down traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge.  The next morning, the contractor locked them out and replaced them with scabs.  The agents of their mobbed up “union” were signing up the scabs.  The scabs were unable to collect meter fees through a combination of ignorance of the job, and the strikers’ sabotaging of the vans.  However, the City proved it was willing to lose weeks of meter revenue in order to break the strike.  Ultimately, the strikers all lost their jobs.  

The workers of “The Battle of Grangemouth” would seem to have little in common with the parking meter collectors.  They worked for one of the largest manufacturing complexes in Scotland, a petrochemical plant that employed thousands, members of one of the UK’s largest unions, UNITE.  One common feature is privatization: Grangemouth was privatized, ending up by 2006 under the ownership of a private equity firm, Inneo, owned by one man, John Ratcliffe. Ratcliffe’s was the usual modus operandi of private equity firms, highly leveraged acquisition - Inneo even received large government subsidies from Tory Westminister -  and to maximize short term profitability by squeezing the workers and by running the plant into the ground.

Among the squeezes were changed work shifts, tough restrictions on sick leave or light duty for injury, lay-offs, and dangerous cut in safety procedures. In 2008, Inneo demanded the pension be changed from defined benefit to the equivalent of our 401(K) plans.  

The Grangemouth workers, unlike those in New York City, were not a new workforce, and they had an honest, if typically bureaucratically cautious, union.  They had worked under far better conditions before Inneo, so they were willing to fight from the beginning.  They held a 48-hour strike against the pension change in 2008, and were able to beat it back. 

But this made Ratcliffe determined to break the union. As conditions worsened, the workers voted to strike in November 2013.  In response, Inneo hit the workforce with what it called a “survival plan”: a list of greatly reduced term and conditions, and threatened to close the plant if the workers did not accept it.  Simultaneously, it fired the two highest union officers in the local on fabricated charges. Because Inneo owned many other properties, and private equity firms are notorious for closing shops and businesses, the workers were unsure whether the threat was a bluff.  Frightened for their jobs, demoralized by the firings, the union membership blinked, and voted to call off the strike and accept the “survival plan.”

The question is, in either, or both, of these cases, how could the workers have won?  In my opinion, the answer is that as long as they fought their battles without the active support of other workers, they couldn’t win, whether they were a hundred unskilled, for all purposes non-unionized guys collecting parking fees, or a couple of thousand skilled workers in an immense union. 

They could have won if other workers had joined their strikes.  If all, or even many, of the employees of city contractors, and city employees themselves, had seen this strike as an opportunity to redress their own grievances and end their own mistreatment, and joined in the job actions of the parking meter collectors, they could have won.  If all the Inneo’s employees, in all the plants and enterprises it owned had understood that what was happening at Grangemouth was almost certain to happen to them sooner rather than later, and agreed to strike along with the Grangemouth workers in November 2013, they could have won.  

Solidarity has to be more than joining strikers for a few hours on the picket line, or contributing to the strike fund. Shouting “Shame! Shame!” as scabs are bused in, is a waste of breath.   It is necessary but sometimes not even sufficient to stop production: workers cannot allow extra work to be moved to their plant while another local is on strike. It has to be taking the same risks as the strikers: risks to jobs, and even life and limb. Sometimes this will necessitate international solidarity, which has to be built as a two-way street.  The labor bureaucracy will tell workers they can’t do this, it’s illegal, it violates the contract.  Workers have to be ready to defy their official leaders, their contracts and the law.  

In its most intense, conscious and militant form, this is what Rosa Luxemburg describes in “The Mass Strike,” in which when one group of workers takes up the fight against the boss, it becomes contagious, throughout the industry, the city, the country, even internationally.  In its highest form, this requires a widespread existence of some form of class consciousness, a willingness to break laws and contracts where they exist, to risk everything and do physical battle with the armed agents of the bosses and the state.

There have been periods in US history like this: 1934 - 37, most recently.  At that time, a sufficient layer of the working class had been radicalized by going through the Great Depression.  Only a small number were conscious socialists, but many more understood the difference between their interests and the bosses’, and had developed a contempt for politicians and for labor bureaucrats.  The Great Depression was a near-death experience for the U.S. working class, and it left enough of them angry and fearless enough to take the risks of a struggle that, however briefly, had both the capitalist class and state on the back foot.  Yes, there were leaders, mainly conscious socialists, who were brilliant strategists and tacticians.  But without the willingness of large numbers of workers to dare everything, those leaders would have been useless.

Some hopeful observers believe the pandemic has been a similar experience for the U.S. working class, pointing to an uptick in the number and size of strikes, as well as the very significant number of workers leaving their jobs, holding out for better pay and working conditions.  The important question is, will these lead to a growth of the class solidarity, organization, and combativity necessary to achieve lasting social change?