Organized Labor's Rank and File Pushes Back

There's reasons to be cheerful. How far will it go?

 

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired
10-19-21

 

A powerful reminder of how important the 14 million members of organized labor are in the US, is the attention recent developments are getting in the media, in particular the serious journals of US capitalism. The Wall Street Journal reported on some of the numerous strikes last week in its business section and last weekend’s Journal there is a frontpage article on the recent strikes and an editorial devoted to them. An organization that has no power would not merit such attention from a mouthpiece of big business like the Wall Street Journal, but the US ruling class is very well aware of the explosive nature and potential power of the US working class.

 

They are also concerned about the effect on mass consciousness these struggles will be having. I got up the other morning to the news that. A Texas school district official told educators if they kept books about the Holocaust in their classrooms, they would have to also offer ‘opposing’ viewpoints”.This cheerful news is on top of the pandemic and its effects on our everyday lives, mass killings, climate catastrophe, the CIA’s new department to counter Chinese aggression, (they keep sailing their ships in the South China Sea threatening our way of life) a crushing US defeat in Afghanistan after 20 years and $2.6 trillion of our money wasted not to mention the increased totalitarian like cancel culture that is trending these days.

 

The mass media generates this mood, the feeling of helplessness, fear of humanity, immigrants, foreigners, of losing one’s home, one’s job and so on. Despair and never ending insecurity is the aim and there’s nothing we can do about it. The ongoing strikes are undermining this gloomy view of the world, that people don’t care, that labor is dead,  and the bosses are aware the longer they go on and if they spread, it changes everything. It makes people happy to put it bluntly.

 

I am not the only one that has pointed out on numerous occasions that there would be a post pandemic upsurge in labor disputes both within organized labor and the unorganized, and this is what is happening. It should be evident to any observer that those workers who have kept the economy going for a couple years and have earned the new name of “essential workers” are not going to let that go. These are the frontline workers who risk the most, “We were healthcare heroes just months ago,”, says Michelle Black, a pharmacy worker at Kaiser; the pandemic Genie will not be put back in the bottle with platitudes.

 

One important aspect of this upsurge starts with the rejection of contracts brought to the members by their leadership. This does not happen often and the labor hierarchy traditionally wears the ranks down until they are forced to concede or literally comes in and takes over local unions or the negotiation process as they did at Boeing some years ago. After all, we can’t be on picket lines forever.

 

UAW members at a Volvo plant and Carpenters in Washington State both refused to accept contracts their leadership recommended to them, rejecting them three or four times, contracts that under normal circumstances would likely have been accepted. There have been strikes at Nabisco, Frito Lay, Kellog and a strike by IATSE  (The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees) narrowly averted this weekend although there are reports of wildcat strikes in opposition to this agreement.

 

Thousands of workers at 14 John Deere plants in Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Colorado and Georgia are on strike after rejecting an offer that included raises of 5 to 6 percent. They are aware that there is an acute labor shortage combined with the supply chain blockages due to the pandemic, “The cards are in our favor right now … it’s never been lined up this well for us,” says one worker at an Iowa plant. John Deere, like many companies (and individuals) has done very well through the pandemic and workers know that the company’s earnings hit, “…. a record $1.79 billion in the second quarter and operating profits hit $489 million.” Washington Post 10-14-21

 

Nurses have been on strike throughout the country and 24, 000 nurses at the huge HMO Kaiser Permanente in California and Oregon authorized a strike by a 96% margin last week. They’re demanding Kaiser drop its plans for a two-tiered wage and benefit system and increase hiring. The nurses’ union has been in the forefront of the struggle for better nurse to patient ratios. Some 50,000 Kaiser workers across the country are preparing for battle as their present contracts are about to expire in the period ahead.

 

There have also been attempts to organize workers at Starbucks and also at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama and at the trendy Whole Foods Market that is now owned by Amazon. The Alabama effort failed but that is not because workers don’t like unions but fear the workplace terrorism of the employers that will be unleashed in the event of a “yes” vote and the fear of losing one’s job. Power attracts, and if the labor leadership refuses to bring real power to the table in the form of mass picketing and shutting down production in response to attacks on workers, most will take the least harmful road.

 

The Pandemic experience, a tight labor market and rising inflation, hitting 5.4% in September, is driving workers’ demands for higher wages and conditions.

 

What Next?

As one of the many who never for one minute thought teachers/educators would strike in right to work states sending shivers through the veins of the labor hierarchy and their friends in the US Congress, I do not claim to have all the answers but there are lessons we can draw and also tell-tale signs of what this basically rank and file driven upsurge will have to deal with.

 

It is important to recognize that concessions won from the bosses today are benefits workers lost in the previous decades as the capitalist offensive savaged the living standards of the US worker. “There is a new militancy out there,” says Teamster president James P Hoffa, but we can be sure that Hoffa and others like him, will make every effort to ensure this “militancy” does not go beyond the parameters that the bosses’ and the labor leadership’s allies in the Democratic Party consider unrealistic or a threat to profits.

 

Taking advantage of the situation because the “cards are in our favor” is obviously the right approach but it cannot be the sole motive for an offensive of the working class against capital. We have suffered decades of defeat and declining living standards on the job and in society as a whole, with cuts in already feeble public services because the labor hierarchy accepts that concessions have to be made when the market and the bosses’ interests demand them.

 

Through their acceptance of the Team Concept-----that workers and bosses have the same economic interests---when the system goes in to crisis, when competitiveness and the capitalist’s profits are threatened, the union hierarchy will aggressively impose concessionary polices on their members going to great lengths to ensure that sacrifices have to be made to save capitalism from itself arguing that to resist is futile because the “cards are not in our favor”. The truth is that the cards are never really in “our” favor as things stand. We have to refuse to play the game.

 

We are already hearing from the top ranks of organized labor that a major aspect of this favorable moment is that we have a “pro-labor president in the White House”. This is how disconnected the present leadership of organized labor is from their members and the average worker, that they refer to a politician in the pocket of one of the world’s most powerful corporations and the head of the world’s most powerful capitalist party as “pro-labor”.

 

And like all movements, there are the usual opportunists that will seek to head the movement and also temper it. The liberal academics who are hauled out by the labor hierarchy to give intellectual credibility to their views will act as a brake on these struggles as well as the numerous left/liberal types, many of them former union full time staff and members of the bureaucracy. Many of them came to the workers’ movement out of the universities.

 

In most of these strikes there has been no attempt from the leadership as far as I can see, to link them together in any way, after all, these unions are all in the same national organization. There are also non-union workers in the same workplaces and now is the time to launch a real campaign to organize the unorganized.

 

So by all appearances, the general outlook of the heads of organized labor has not changed and they will do their very best to ensure that the present upsurge doesn’t go too far. Whether they will be able to do that remains to be seen. The pandemic has changed mass consciousness and also exposed the weak underbelly of US capitalism. Workers are very angry and the massive increase in wealth for the richest and the obscene spectacle of parasites like Musk, Bezos and Branson flying around in the atmosphere add insult to injury.

 

It is inconceivable that the shift in consciousness that has taken place in the wake of the Pandemic will not place some pressure on the lower ranks of the labor leadership and many full-time staff whose job it has been to ensure the concessionary policies of the leadership are carried out and no threat to their relationship with the employers based on labor peace arises from below.

 

If the present momentum keeps going and certainly if it intensifies, it will increase tension between many of the staff on the ground and the higher officials and differences will become more open. The more pressure, the more likelihood of open splits developing. This would be a very serious development and an important one for the working class in the US.