Socialist Action /April 2001
Domino Strike Dies after Two Year Battle
"What we really needed was the clout of
the labor movement."
-Domino striker,
New York Daily News (March 1)
When nearly 300 sugar refinery workers struck their
Brooklyn waterfront plant 20 months ago, they knew that they were not going
to win easily. But they had outlasted their bosses, the Domino Sugar Co.
(owned by the British conglomerate Tate & Lyle), in a seven-month strike
in 1992-93. So they had reason to hope. Maybe they could pull it off again.
Besides, the company had practically kicked them
out the door when it proposed a deal that would allow the firm to "reopen
the contract unilaterally and hire more subcontractors to take union jobs,"
reported the New York Daily News. A striker told the paper: "They want
us to sign a contract that says that we can't strike, and they can reopen
it anytime." And then to sweeten the proposed deal, the bosses insisted
on eliminating 100 of the $15 an hour jobs, along with three paid holidays.
On Feb. 27, after enduring two winters outside
the refinery, the remaining strikers, members of the International Longshoremen's
Association (ILA), voted 56 to 48 to ratify a three-year contract that provides
them with a one-time 5 percent raise, in exchange for giving what the bosses
claim is "the operating flexibility which the company sought to improve
competitiveness in the volatile U.S. cane sugar market."
"We got shafted. We got stabbed in the back,"
a worker with 37 years seniority declared to The New York Times. Another
striker said simply, "I don't like the contract at all, but there's
nothing to hold out for anymore."
But the contractual losses aren't the only losses
the strikers have suffered. Once they believed that they were part of the
greater labor movement; that they weren't alone, especially whenever the
bosses put on the brass knuckles.
When they first walked out on June 15, 1999, they
felt strong enough to try to resist the company's greed. "We're ready
to stay out," the union's strike leader said, "until we get a
contract or they close."
But between then and now, unemployment benefits
ran out, a 62-year-old skilled worker slit his wrists, a hundred or so strikers,
a few at a time, went back, and unionized plants in Baltimore and New Orleans
kept operating.
The toughest thing to deal with was the lack of
real fighting support from the labor movement. Of course, there were the
usual routine resolutions of support and solidarity from union officials
at all levels; but there was no mass picketing to halt the continuing production
and distribution of the struck products. And there were donations, but not
enough to offset the loss of their unemployment benefits.
Last November, the local union's vice president,
Joe Crimi, told the Daily News, "We need a nationwide strike fund and
a nationwide boycott." Later, however, Crimi admitted that the members
"are extremely disappointed to the point of outrage that AFL-CIO president
John Sweeney did not get involved at all in what was a two-year strike in
the strongest labor town in America."
On the strike's last day, Crimi told The New York
Times, "It's a complete loss." The paper summed up the strikers'
experience: "For the first nine months of the strike, the 284 unionized
workers showed extraordinary solidarity, without anyone crossing the picket
line. ... By last weekend, 104 former strikers had crossed the picket line....
"The strikers blamed their parent union for
doing little for them-it did not even provide strike benefits. They blamed
the labor movement for turning its back on them by not rallying to their
cause. They blamed their co-workers for crossing the picket line. And they
accused the president of their local of selling them out to put this embarrassing
fight behind him."
It's been said that the American labor movement
is no longer a crusade; it has become an institution with a bad case of
hardening of the arteries. Many of its leaders seem afflicted with senility-like
forgetfulness.
A case in point is Denis Hughes, the head of the
New York State AFL-CIO. When asked about the Domino fiasco, he told reporters
that unions have to come up with better strategies:
"It bothered me from the beginning that the
union wasn't strong enough to put this together. It shows that even in the
best of situations management has an enormous amount of power. One of the
things we have to do better in the trade-union movement is to develop strategies
at the beginning of a dispute, instead of midway through."
Hughes has forgotten that a labor union's strategy
that isn't based on union solidarity is not going to overcome the financial
and political power of the bosses. Whether at the "beginning of a dispute"
or not, workers cannot prevail over bosses determined to drive up profits
at workers' expense without widespread labor solidarity.
Hughes says that 20 months ago he was "bothered"
that the union might be overpowered. But that seemingly didn't keep him
up nights. It certainly didn't spur him to use his well-paid union leadership
position to travel the state and the country, if need be, to mobilize the
support of organized labor for the Domino strikers.
On the other hand, we may be certain that the Domino
strikers' plight didn't keep him from traveling New York State in service
of the politicians of the Democratic Party.
Whatever satisfaction Hughes might derive from
the electoral victories of New York's Democrats (Sen. Hillary Clinton comes
to mind), that satisfaction is cold comfort to nearly 300 Brooklyn workers
who once put their trust in organized labor.
Clearly, the Domino strikers are not poster union
members for the AFL-CIO's push to recruit a million new members a year.
Potential new members looking for an answer to their bosses' profit-driven
greed aren't going to be attracted to leaders and unions that don't win.
-CHARLES WALKER
Socialist Action /April 2001 |