Socialist Action /September 2001
Caribou, Jobs, and Union Bureaucrats
By CHARLES WALKER
When a jobless worker takes a backbreaking, even
demeaning job at less than a "living wage," it is not only understandable-it
makes good economic, strategic sense, right? Who would tell a desperate
worker to starve rather than labor for a pittance?
But what makes good strategic sense for an isolated
individual up against the economic advantage of even small-time bosses (not
to mention corporate giants) certainly doesn't make the same good sense
for workers who have joined together into unions, seeking better jobs and
wages.
Organized workers worldwide have showed time and
again that their combined power is capable of great, even historic victories
over ruling elites. For example, in the U.S. during the Great Depression
and again in the early post-World War II years, organized workers forced
significant concessions from the country's most powerful corporations.
Millions of Americans stood up against the giant
corporations, exercised their natural right (not some paper right) to organize
unions, and refused compulsory labor by carrying out militant strikes that
at times defied the bosses' so-called property rights (as in the sit-down
strikes that occupied plants). During those days it seemed to some unionists
that nothing could halt the march of organized labor-but itself.
Unfortunately, not only was organized labor's march
halted; the labor movement began an incremental retreat that continues to
this day. Labor's retreat is marked by a decline in union membership, and
a constant rise in the cost of living for workers, though that's somewhat
masked by the increase of two-income households.
Strategy of mobilized workers in action
Underlying organized labor's retreat is the abandonment,
in practice, if not in name, of the strategy that relied on the power of
mobilized workers in action.
That strategy has been replaced by the practice
of substituting workers' "representatives" for the workers themselves.
In turn those "representatives," a relatively small minority of
organized labor, have ditched all hopes (if they ever had them) that workers
can or should even try to achieve great victories over their bosses.
Consequently, today's union "representatives"
justify their relatively privileged, hierarchical positions by gaining small
concessions for some workers when they can-though sometimes, as we'll see
below, at the expense of other workers.
On the economic field the name given to the strategy
of relying on mobilized workers acting in their own interests is class struggle
unionism. Its polar opposite is the method of today's labor "representatives"-class
collaborationism, also called business unionism.
Class collaboration's false premise holds that
workers and bosses share an identity of interests far, far greater than
any differences that are bound to arise. The collaboration between bosses
and union officials often takes the form of joint labor-management boards
or "teams" and plant committees, or tripartite commissions, that
despite their stated aims have been found to hold down wages and abridge
the right to strike.
In the United States, the Democratic and Republican
parties are the political equivalent of job "quality circles,"
collaborative traps where the bosses' big bucks far outweigh the influence
of the unions' numbers.
Sweeney backs Bush on Alaska oil
On Aug. 1, AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney gave
a world-class exhibition of class collaboration when he publicly lined up
behind President Bush's threatened despoliation of an oil-bearing portion
of a major Alaskan coastal plain wildlife refuge that's a wondrous natural
treasure and, incidentally, home to calving caribou.
While Sweeney might not be able to tell the American
caribou from its slightly larger cousin, the European reindeer, he probably
doesn't have anything against the threatened caribou, or against the peoples
who have depended on the caribou for ages-much as some Native Americans
once depended on the bison of the Great Plains.
Sweeney just wants to see some jobs created, and
no doubt argues that that's what organized workers want their leaders to
do. Clearly there's an urgency to creating jobs in a world where workers
are faced with massive global joblessness, where nearly one-third of the
world's workforce is either jobless, underemployed, or earns less than it
takes to escape poverty.
But Sweeney and his crowd-which includes the like-minded
bureaucrats that sit atop the Teamsters, the Laborers, the Operating Engineers,
the Coal Miners, and the Seafarers, among others-believe that it's smart
for workers to sell a piece of mankind's natural heritage to the bosses,
undermine an ancient way of life, and endanger workers' lives with increased
global warming for a handful of jobs, for "40 pieces of silver."
In short, Sweeney and company act as though what's
good for the oil and power barons is good for their unions' members and
their families. And of course the bosses and their political henchmen agree.
"This endorsement [by Sweeney] just underscores
what we have been saying all along: This [Bush] energy bill is good for
American workers, it's good for American jobs, it's good for America's economy,"
said James Hansen, Republican chairman of the House Resources Committee.
A workers' job program needed
The strategy of Sweeney and Co. certainly isn't
the militant strategy that would be possible if the AFL-CIO's 16 million
workers mobilized. Combined with their families and potential allies, these
millions are the nation's majority. Sweeney's strategy consists of settling
for what the bosses will give him without a fight, rather than what the
might of organized labor is entitled to. Put another way, Sweeney is selling
workers the bosses' jobs program, not fighting for a workers' job program.
Of course, there are dues-paying workers who will
say, "What the hell, a half a loaf is better than nothing. At least
it's a job. Nothing is perfect." But those dues-paying workers are
merely reflecting the fact that their unions are not the fighting organizations
that their grandfathers and fathers could count on to stand up to bosses,
courts, and cops.
So with their power shackled, or left untapped,
by their misleaders, and not having the perspective of mobilizing themselves
to fight, the workers settle for what the static relationship of forces
allows them to aspire to (that is, the relationship of forces without the
weight of a fighting membership on the scales).
If the weight of a fighting membership were placed
in the balance, workers could reasonably demand that wage increases be tied
to an accurate gauge of inflation; that productivity gains be used to reduce
the workweek with no loss of pay, rather than force workers to endure unemployment
with a fraction of regular wages.
They could demand that idle plants and equipment
be put to work, as long as there were unfulfilled human needs, rather than
just when there was a profit for the boss. And they could demand, of course,
that joblessness be eliminated by permitting the sharing of all the socially
useful work. That would be a workers' program for jobs.
Instead of a workers' program for jobs, Sweeney
and his bureaucratic cohorts continue to support the bosses' attempts to
place the burdens of their profit-driven system on the backs of workers,
their loved ones-and the caribou.
Socialist Action /September 2001 |