by Karyn Pomerantz
9-26-2023
The surge in union struggles in the United States has energized and inspired hope among workers throughout the country. Sick and tired of non-living wages, dangerous conditions, and long precarious hours, baristas, students, and nurses and industrial workers are demanding economic and lifestyle changes in worksites as varied as Starbucks, schools, UPS, auto plants, and railroads. Will this increase union membership, encourage more strikes, and slow our worsening living conditions?
This article discusses the successes and failures of organizing on the job and strategies for building an anti-capitalist movement within unions. It gives current examples of how corporate bosses, politicians, and union leaders collaborate to defeat workers’ struggles and ways we can overcome their betrayal.
This leads us to consider several questions:
- What has emboldened this movement?
- Are union leaders maximizing the potential of these actions or collaborating with the companies and government to control and limit them?
- Does the government protect the public or big business? Is it a neutral arbiter between bosses and unions or is it trying to limit worker demands and action?
- Can we build a movement within unions to challenge racism and capitalism, and even consider and build for system change, a revolution for workers’ power?
The Workers’ Bottom Line: Class Consciousness
Workers in any job need unity to defeat their bosses. The owners and bankers have the power and money. However, they cannot make any profit unless they pay their employees less than the value of what they produce (exploitation). They increase their earnings by slashing pensions and health care benefits, hiring new workers at lower wages, and pushing faster rates of production while threatening unemployment to those who resist or can’t comply.
Since we vastly outnumber them, the capitalists use racism and other divisions to weaken us. They pay women, black, and Latino/a workers less than whites on average and tell white workers that they should protect their “privilege.” Their media teach us to stick together with people with the same skin color, nationality, sex, sexual or gender characteristics regardless of class, so-called identity politics. With this, a woman Amazon packer can believe she has more in common with a woman Amazon manager than with a male Amazon packer, a distinction based only on gender. Capitalist culture also demeans workers as being less intelligent and creative than rich, well-educated business people.
To counter this, communists believe in creating unity based on class consciousness, identifying as someone who works for a living regardless of the job, income, or nationality. Professors and bus drivers are all part of the working class. An injury to one is an injury to all captures this spirit. Class consciousness promotes international solidarity rather than narrowly focused patriotism or allyship.
Is It Worth Organizing Within Unions?
Unions are a powerful way to build this unity through class struggle, pitting workers against the owners and their collaborators from the government, police, banks, military, and boards of directors.
Unions provide a place for members to fight their bosses, to educate people about class relationships, build rank and file leadership, and gain experience in struggle. They can fight for such reforms as higher wages, health benefits, faster times to reach the top wages (wage progression), and shorter work hours. These improvements are not secure, however. The capitalists will always undermine these gains through inflation, longer wage progression periods, and unequal pay scales and retirement benefits for different groups of employees (tiers).
Some revolutionary organizers will argue that it is not useful to organize in unions, that it is more productive to create separate revolutionary organizations. This was an issue during the attempted Russian revolution of 1905. Lenin argued that it was critical for revolutionaries to join organizations to educate and recruit members to the movement rather than isolate themselves in left-wing groups. In the 1930s, the Communist Party USA dissolved its independent trade union groups to join established ones. They advocated that revolutionary unionists intentionally use the union structure to build anti-racism and recruit members to a revolutionary party, not only to militantly oppose the boss but to replace their system with one run by the working class.
Who Rules US Corporations? Insights from the UPS Teamster Union Sell-Out
UPS worker organizers, Linni Johnson and Audrey Myers, reflected on the lessons they learned from the Teamsters Union struggle in August 2023. It ended in a sell-out when the Union bosses accepted a pitifully inadequate agreement:
“In the context of UPS, we can see this (class relationship) in a few different ways. First, UPS itself is not “just” UPS. Carol Tomé, for example, is not only the CEO of UPS, but also on the board of Verizon, Norman Brothers, an Executive Vice President at UPS, is on the Board of the Atlanta Police Foundation (which, unsurprisingly, has been a strong supporter of Cop City). Brian Newman, UPS’s CFO, was formerly the Chief Strategy Officer of Pepsi. The UPS Board of Trustees has executives from or formerly at Heinz, IBM, Colgate-Palmolive, GE, Nike, the Federal Reserve, and other major corporations and bourgeois institutions. Additionally, as is the case with all major corporations, large institutional investors and finance capital firms have huge ownership stakes in UPS and likewise are the company’s major creditors. …
In understanding that UPS workers are not only exploited by the UPS corporation, but by the entire capitalist class, we can begin to understand the vested interests that different sections of the ruling class have in this contract fight and in averting a strike. … But it does not suffice to simply see the economic dimensions of the whole bourgeoisie’s stake in this struggle.
The bourgeoisie’s most fundamental interest in this, and every manifestation of the class struggle, is to preserve the political conditions—its class dictatorship—of its exploitation and domination of the proletariat. And this means stomping out any potential major strikes that could spark an intensification of class struggle throughout society. … (Johnson and Myers, 2023).”
Union Manipulation of Workers
It’s not just the corporations who squash labor rebellions. While voicing militant rhetoric, the union leaders of the railroad and UPS unions sold them out by siding with the government and companies. President Biden pressured the 12 RR unions to give up their demands for stable schedules and paid sick leave and continue to work rather than risk violating the law. Courts typically deliver injunctions against such illegal strikes and promise high fines often along with prison terms. UPS workers voted overwhelmingly against the proposed contract. While it seemed to promise high wages and air-conditioned vehicles, it would only deliver wage increases spread over many years and air conditioning only for new trucks provided in 2024. Again, the government pressured the union to avert a strike, and they quickly obeyed. In northern Virginia in early 2023, the local ATU689 union trusted the local government to resolve a long strike. When the government decided not to, the workers gave up their difficult struggle.
UAW STRIKE
Over 140,000 US auto workers are currently (September 2023) demanding a 40% wage increase (after years of falling behind inflation), increased retirement pensions, and, after years of 12-hour days, a shorter work week without a loss of pay. Union president, Shawn Fain, hailed as a militant leader, called out only 14,000 workers during the first week of the strike and another 13,000 during the second. Praising the Ford Motor Company for making progress negotiating, he left them on the job. These leaders resemble the liberal politicians like Biden who threaten big business but end up protecting it instead. Meanwhile, the media, as always, distorts the true story of company earnings and working conditions, exaggerates the company’s concessions, and creates more sympathy for the company than for the exploited workers and their families.
Organizing Within Unions to Build Solidarity
With all these conflicts, we can still win temporary reforms, unite workers, make political demands (oppose wars and racism), stop work in support of other strikes, learn leadership and organizing skills, and engage members in political education. Unions can become schools for revolution. In the 1970s, communist bus drivers in DC called a wild-cat (illegal) strike to win their demands. During the Black Lives Matter uprisings, another bus driver refused to drive protestors to jail. Workers can create and rely on rank-and-file committees to implement strategies and conduct community outreach and support among non-union members.
The movie, Pride (2014),depicted one such impressive effort of the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM). Initiated by the leader of the British Young Communist League, it offered support to the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) that was on strike from 1984-85 after the reactionary Thatcher government tried to close the mines. LGSM activists raised tens of thousands of pounds, organized marches, sponsored concerts, and built personal relationships with mining families. After initially rejecting this support because of homophobia, the miners eventually rejected homophobia and accepted the LGSM’s comradeship. Hundreds turned out for the 1985 Gay Parade, and the campaign helped change Union attitudes about gay people. Almost 30 years later, critics and the public acclaimed the film which won the Queer Palm award at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival.
Learning From History
US labor history teaches many lessons about capitalism and the necessity of fighting racism, including immigrants and women, and using militant action to prevent scabs or sustain a sit-in or picket line.
Unions developed during the 19th Century to oppose the horrid conditions of work that included child labor, dangerous conditions (especially for black workers), and long hours for meager wages. The most oppressed, black workers, and the most class conscious, communists, led many organizing drives in the South’s sharecropping fields, facing lethal Klan retaliation. Black porters on the railroad’s Pullman trains traveled over eastern and western routes under demeaning, exhausting conditions, and eventually organized the successful Pullman strike of 1894.
The fight for the eight-hour day in 1868 is one of the most significant victories. It united workers from many industries who fought pitched battles to win. Workers gathered in Chicago’s Haymarket Square after weeks of striking for shorter working hours. A suspected policeman tossed a bomb into the Square, killing many. The bosses and press used this to accuse the leaders of terrorism. The cops arrested them, the courts charged them with murder, and the prisons hung most of them. They became celebrated as working-class heroes, and the First Communist International (the world’s communist parties) declared May 1 a revolutionary holiday to honor the working class.
By the early 20th Century, skilled craft workers like carpenters and plumbers formed unions based on trade under the American Federation of Labor (AFL). It rejected black and less skilled workers that enabled bosses to use them to break strikes, deepening divisions and heightening violence between workers. Unions often excluded women as well until young women created the textile and garment workers’ unions, further strengthening the power of unions.
Communists later formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) that represented all workers in an entire industry, such as steel, mining, and transportation. Socialist, anarchist, and communist organizers, such as Eugene Debs, Lucy Parsons, Mother Jones, and Big Bill Haywood, led many of these efforts. Militant widespread national strikes and rebellions erupted among railroad workers in 1877. In 1936, rank and file auto workers at Ford and Chevy plants in Detroit and Flint, Michigan took over the factories for 44 days in a militant, coordinated sit-in known as the Flint Sit-Down strike that created the United Auto Workers (UAW). They sparked union drives at other major companies, including US Steel that unionized without a strike (http://www.plp.org/pamphlets/flintstrike.html).
The Communist Party organized the Meatpackers Union in Chicago. The Union was intentionally multi-racial, elected black leaders, and fought housing discrimination.
The McCarthyism of the 1950s was a response to the power of communist leadership of many militant labor struggles. McCarthy and his cohorts in the government and courts stripped organizations of radicals like Paul Robeson who were jailed and fired; Hollywood was pressured not to make progressive movies, and popular writers like Dalton Trumbo were blacklisted. Class struggle declined, and unions became more conservative with union reps compromising workers’ demands. Union officers enjoyed higher pay that was closer to the salaries of the company owners than the rank-and-file employees. They still do.
What Now? Sharpen the Struggle!
These lessons can help us prepare to fight for stronger reforms and union campaigns. Just don’t expect that any major improvements, such as a shorter workday, will last. In fact, reform struggles reveal the futility of only tweaking capitalism, trusting union leaders, and relying on the government and its courts, cops, and media.
But we can learn to rely on our rank-and-file brothers and sisters, build multiracial organizations and leadership, engage in class struggle, join political study groups, and prepare to take power. This requires unity and solid bonds between workers everywhere.
While this sounds easier said than done, there is a world to win and one guaranteed to lose without such class consciousness and struggle.
For further reading and watching:
With Banners and Babies (film) provides an inside look at women’s roles in the Flint Sit-Down strike.
Labor’s Untold Story: The Adventure Story of the Battles, Betrayals and Victories of American Working Men and Women. United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, 1979
Foner P. History of the US Labor Movement (10 volumes) and Organized Labor and the Black Worker. Multiple years.
Johnson, A and Myers, L. The UPS Struggle and the Tasks of Marxists in the Labor Movement. August 2023.
Kelley, R DG. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. UNC Press, 1990.
Progressive Labor Party. The Great Flint Sit Down Strike. http://www.plp.org/pamphlets/flintstrike.html
The Multiracial Unity Blog 