File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_1997/aut-op-sy.9710, message 148


Date: Tue, 28 Oct 1997 12:25:48 -0800
From: Max Anger <squert-AT-sirius.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: FWD: AFL-CIO Still Languishing



This is an interesting article since it looks at the details of union
success and failure.
But I'd say it's ideas about what success could be are a bit deluded. 

At 05:50 PM 10/28/97 +1100, 
billbartlett-AT-saturn.vision.net.au wrote:
>>Date: Mon, 27 Oct 1997 08:45:23 -0800 (PST)
>>To: Recipients of The_People List <eenets-AT-igc.apc.org>
>>
>>THE PEOPLE
>>NOVEMBER 1997
>>Vol. 107 No. 8
>>
>>AFL-CIO STILL LANGUISHING
>>UNDER SWEENEY'S REIGN
>>
>>"Everything we do is connected to organizing," said John
>>Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, in his opening remarks to
>>the federation's biennial convention in Pittsburgh on Sept. 22.
>>
>>The subject was one the convention returned to time and again,
>>ultimately passing by voice vote a resolution urging member
>>unions and locals, according to a NEWSDAY account, "to increase
>>spending on organizing from the current $150 million a year to
>>$1 billion by the year 2000." In so doing, the federation hopes
>>to rebuild its dwindling ranks, which presently stand at only
>>14.5 percent of the nation's "workforce."
>>
>>Sweeney was elected on a reform platform in 1995 that pledged
>>to reinvigorate the labor movement. Thus far, however, his
>>efforts have the character of smoke and mirrors. Calling
>>sellouts and hollow victories resulting from such struggles as
>>the DETROIT NEWS strike and the UPS strike "victories" doesn't
>>make them so.
>>
Well, these struggles could have been victories for the unions even if
they were defeats for the working class. Notice the comment further onward
on job organizing versus class organizing. 

>>Regardless of how he planned to do it, however, adding more
>>duespayers to the rank and file of the AFL-CIO's affiliated
>>unions was central to Sweeney's appeal within the federation's
>>leadership from the start. He was elected over former
>>secretary-treasurer Thomas Donahue largely on the strength of
>>his "success" as head of the Service Employees International
>>Union. New tactics and new vigor were the order of the day and
>>the things that were going to distinguish a Sweeney
>>administration from the do-nothing legacy of the Lane Kirkland
>>years.

It IS true that the AFL has put more effort into organizing than previously.
They have gotten some things out of it, even if workers haven't gotten much
out
of it. 

>>
>>According to NEWSDAY, however, progress in swelling the
>>duespaying ranks of the dwindling federation has been less than
>>spectacular. "Since Sweeney took office, the AFL-CIO's ranks
>>have increased less than half a percent." As the federation's
>>organizing director put it, "The message is we are not doing
>>enough."
>>

Remember also that until recently, union membership was declining,
turning that trend around certainly is worth something (although the 
increase could come from the present relative labor shortage.
But even this could be enough to make the labor bosses 
happy). And considering that employers have been struggle hard against 
union membership, this is an indication that some level of struggle is
taking place. 

>>That is not necessarily so. It could also be that the
>>federation is doing too much that is wrong.
The question is,  wrong from what perspective?

>>
>>What of this supposedly new focus on organizing? Is there
>>potential in it to benefit workers, to help build a movement
>>through which they can defend and advance their own interests
>>as a class? The question boils down to the KIND of organizing
>>the AFL-CIO proposes to do.

This is a good point. 

>>
>>Despite what Sweeney and other top officials of the AFL-CIO
>>have to say on the subject, the federation and its affiliates
>>aren't in the business of organizing workers, and never have
>>been. Their strategy has always been to organize around skills
>>and trades--around jobs--rather than around industries and
>>their products. This focus on jobs and monopolizing the skills
>>that went with them cuts to the heart of why the unions are
>>failing at their own business.

Right and then wrong. The AFL's business has been organizing around jobs,
around workers in the particular position and condition they are in now.
This is indeed their business. Whether they fail or succeed, they aren't
going 
into the DIFFERENT business of full class struggle, especially in the current 
political climate. 

>>
>>The AFL (and since the 1930s, the CIO) was much more successful
>>at organizing jobs during the Roosevelt-Truman years than at
>>any time since. 
>>That was a period when capitalists in large-
>>scale, heavy industries had more use for the unions and the
>>discipline they imposed on their members. The skills required
>>to operate the old assembly lines and to carry on other
>>manufacturing operations were in large supply on the labor
>>market. Where they were not in large supply, training programs
>>controlled by the unions helped to insure that they would
>>control the supply.
>>
>>By monopolizing jobs and the skills they required, the unions
>>could lock out the vast majority of the working class. The
>>unions were able to "corner the market," so to speak, and by
>>holding the threat of job competition posed by a vast army of
>>unorganized workers over the heads of the rank-and-file
>>membership, the unions were successful at maintaining
>>discipline. Thereby they performed an invaluable service to the
>>industries they bargained with. The duespaying members were
>>beholden to the unions for their skills and for the opportunity
>>to work. In this way the unions nurtured job consciousness and
>>poisoned the soil against the growth of classconsciousness.
>>
>>Since the first wave of automation in the 1950s, which
>>corresponded closely to the merger of the AFL and the CIO, the
>>ground has steadily been cut out from under the feet of trades-
>>based unionism. Union membership has been in steady decline, in
>>lock step with the forward march of technology that has wiped
>>out many of the old skills and dramatically altered the nature
>>and reduced the number of jobs in many industries. The
>>wholesale destruction of old skills and old jobs decimated the
>>unions. Displaced workers were dropped from the membership
>>rolls in droves, and some unions completely disappeared as the
>>old trades were swept away.
>>
>>The AFL-CIO has failed to rise to this challenge, not because
>>of a lack of organizing, per se, but because it fails to
>>organize WORKERS. 
Failure is relative. AFL-CIO bureaucrats have succeeded in still 
having a job, often a high-paying job. 

>>What is happening to the unions and their
>>members today testifies to the correctness of the SLP's
>>contention that it is high time to recognize that UNIONS MUST
>>BE REVOLUTIONARY OR THEY ARE NOTHING.
>>
The previous paragraphs are useful as far as they go 
but the conclusion doesn't seem to use the lessons of 
those paragraphs fully. Taken literally, the conclusion is absurd.
Unions are not revolutionary and they will continue to be 
a bit more than nothing for the foreseeable future. 

It was noted above that union success in the 1950's came with the tacit 
support of the capitalist class as a whole. It's not noted above that the 
capitalist created a legal structure designed to allow only this sort of 
unionism and even then allow it only with the blessings of the higher
authorities (National Labor Relations Board and whoever pulls their 
strings). 

A more logical conclusion would be that labor unions as continuing
institutions 
in the modern era are organs of labor discipline and will remain so until 
wage itself ends. It is logical for unions to organize around skills
instead of 
industries, to organize for benefits that tie workers to jobs rather than
total 
compensation, to organize for compensation instead of work-place 
conditions/control, to organize for a "family wage" and every sort of tactic 
that ties a worker more closely to their condition of employment. 

Certainly, there are exceptions to all these tendencies. But capitalist
relations 
tend to impose these general tendencies and the police often deal with the 
exceptions. 

>>Workers seeking better means of defending themselves must,
>>accordingly, recognize that if their class interests are to be
>>advanced, they need a unionism that rejects any alliance with
>>the capitalist exploiters; a unionism that completely alters
>>the basic form, tactics and objectives of the union movement; a
>>unionism that conforms to the present industrial mold of
>>society, 
Actually, today society seems beyond a mold of even having separate
industries - it seems to have reached the point of a single social factory.

>>and whose tactics are based squarely on the fact of
>>the class struggle.
>>
>>The new kind of unionism workers need is Socialist Industrial
>>Unionism.
>>
>>Socialist Industrial Unionism means, first of all, that workers
>>adopt for their labor movement the goal of ending class
>>exploitation entirely by organizing to assume direct,
>>democratic control of the entire economy and to operate it in
>>the interests of all society.
>>
>>With an industrial democracy of labor as its goal, Socialist
>>Industrial Unionism would seek to organize ALL the workers in a
>>given industry, including those presently unemployed, into a
>>common organization. 

Gosh, even this seems a bit backward. At one time, unemployed people
might still have had connection to a particular industry. A large number
of people these days are simply looking for anything.

>>In keeping with the principles of
>>socialist democracy, all the officials of such unions would be
>>elected directly by the rank and file.
>>
>>Unlike the bureaucrats of the present unions, officers of
>>Socialist Industrial Unions would receive the same compensation
>>as the workers they represent and the rank and file would hold
>>the power of immediate recall over them. They would have the
>>privilege to serve, but not the power to rule.
>>
>>This De Leonist concept of industrial organization combines the
>>tasks of organizing the workers' strength to resist the attacks
>>of the capitalist class, and mobilizing working-class forces
>>for the ultimate overthrow of the capitalist system of
>>exploitation. De Leon saw the industrial union movement as "at
>>once the battering ram with which to pound down the fortress of
>>capitalism, and the successor of the capitalist social
>>structure itself."
>>
Whether a union is hierarchically organized or directly democratically
organized, it would still operate on the basis of bargaining over wage 
relations in a capitalist society. There are some obvious 
contradictions involved in such an institutions being
the basis for a new society. These contradictions came out
most strongly in Spain in 1936+ as the CNT continued to
operate under the framework of capitalism instead of over-throwing
capitalist relations (but they did self-manage a bunch public works
that anarchists can fondly look back on. More on this would be 
a whole post in itself. )

Obviously, as revolutionaries, we all want the working class to 
organize itself. And certainly if workers at a work place organize 
themselves now, they will do so for their immediate benefit. 
It is quite likely this will take the name union, whatever the exact 
content of the self-organizing.  
As far as organizing that continues on a longer-term, more 
self-conscious basis, certainly I'd say revolutionaries should 
advise people organizing not to take the union, specifically to avoid 
the connotation of a labor brokerage as well as the content.

But beyond this, it is seems quite like that the character of the modern
world that we see, the quiet submission of the vast majority occasionally 
punctuated by brief, extremely powerful surges of unrest, will continue. 
Given this character, it seems more likely that the working class will
over-throw capitalist relations without being "organized" than that it will
ever become "organized" under capitalism.
At the same time, the degree of people's before crisis has a powerful
effect on people's actions during a crisis, so whatever small level of
organizing happens today is quite important. 

The phantasy of industrial/syndicalist unionism is also very much under-cut
by 
the interest capitalists as a whole feel towards allowing workers to organize
as "workers qua workers," as workers tied to their jobs and only as workers 
tied to their jobs. The legalities of unionism are very much tied to
forcing activity 
to be on the plane of the single skill and the single work place (and
moreover, 
the makers of laws would make even more if they to find class struggle 
unionism at all effective). To go beyond the conditions of job unionism, 
it would often be necessary to  break the law - this obviously stands against 
the logic of unionism of satisfying the immediate interests of the working
class 
on a continuing basis in the present society. 
Sabotage, for example, allows workers to put tremendous pressure on the 
capitalist class but any organized effort at this immediately feels the long
arm of the law. Even an industrial union must attack the tactic of sabotage
in 
order not to feel the threat of legal action. And to this extent, it can
weaken 
the leverage of a very combative workforce.
Also, the capitalist unions have many resources that they can offer workers 
during struggles, something that again makes various syndicalist schemes 
less appealing to the average workers. 

(Note that the IWW of the early twentieth century did practice sabotage on a 
regular basis and was often able to operate outside the usual framework of
union legality, which was only barely in place at that moment. 
But while certainly the IWW called itself a union, it was often a 
instrument of struggle that was only used at times of strike
rather than being a institution that would broker labor on a 
continuing basis. Note also that this institution did not spread
to manage all of society but was crushed by both the state and
by the rising ideologies of Stalinism and liberalism.
The modern totalitarian organization of society certainly does
not bode well for schemes of gradual transition. Rather than
facing each other piece-meal, factory by factory, each class faces 
the other as a whole. This certainly explains the history of late 
twentieth century, where capitalism has imposed it's interests
and it's vision of reality almost completely).

>>By taking the shape of each industry it organizes, uniting all
>>workers in industrywide units instead of dividing them by
>>crafts and contracts, the form of the Socialist Industrial
>>Union promotes solidarity in action and prepares workers to
>>seize control of the tools of production and to continue
>>operating them in the future socialist society.
>>
And why, exactly, would people want to do this?
Maybe fifty years ago, keeping most of the factories going might 
have been a useful activity but in a world where most 
production goes to the creation of useless or harmful do-dads 
(as well as destroying the environment, etc.), obviously creating
momentum for continuing normal production, is not particularly desirable.

But also, this scheme is rather unlikely. Just as this society is no
longer organized around particular industries, few workers have 
a strong identification with particular or want an identification
either a particular industry or with their job in particular.

Considering that the working class is most directly face-to-face with a 
single unified *society factory*, it is imperative that the working class
organize itself on this same unified basis (though of course such
organizing would part and parcel of a revolutionary situation. It couldn't
quietly happen while things remained as they are now). 

>>By organizing along the lines of modern productive forces,
>>Socialist Industrial Unionism steadily builds the structure for
>>a new industrial form of government.
>>
How many states these days allow the structure of a new 
government to form quietly within them. With police, intelligence 
services and mass media, the ruling class is extremely harsh
on all thus forces that are not quietly part of the "mold."
But this is not simply a high hurdle. It is part and parcel of
the present society's social factory - all interests of society 
are unified by the market economy with the state actively 
enforcing this unity in visible and invisible manners.
The unity of this social factory is indeed also a weakness,
since there is a level where average people can 
simultaneously reject capitalism as a whole - consider 
May 68 in Paris. But the unity of the present social 
factory naturally requires new tactics. 

>>By preparing the mass working-class organizations for taking,
>>holding and operating the instruments of production, it
>>prepares the working class to directly assume power.
>>
My comments above are more particular instances of the 
basic Marxian tenant that the goal of communism is the abolition
of all classes - including the working class. 
Now the goal of the working class is indeed to take power.
But, as mentioned earlier, unions are institutions which take
workers in the particular condition they have under capitalism,
i.e. working in their jobs in a factory office etc.. The goal is for 
the working class to take control as the dispossessed as 
a whole, as those who have nothing to lose from capitalism but 
their chains. In this sort of organization - which in the past has often
taken the form of Soviets or councils - the working class is in the 
position to both exercise power and change the fundamental 
conditions of production and society. 
While the direct democracy of a council is indeed different from 
today's bureaucratic unions, what's more important is that 
they institutions for exercising a different form of power.

>>That's the kind of organizing we need today--organizing to help
>>workers assume control over society, rather than to help labor
>>bureaucrats control jobs and duespayers.
>>
Again, it's critical to ask what sort of control workers exercise.
To be able to control the production process in a factory means 
little or nothing if the market economy still controls the purpose
and direction of that's factory's production, meaning the market
economy still controls production over-all.

>>Decades have passed since De Leon and the Socialist Labor Party
>>first advanced this plan for winning the class struggle in
>>favor of the social majority, the working class. 

And it doesn't seem that this plan has allowed the working class
to win in the mean-time. Certainly Marxism 
is just as old BUT a marxian analysis is not a "plan for winning 
the class struggle" but an analysis of the conditions
of political economic struggle - by this token it is applicable to both
victory and defeat. A "plan for winning the class struggle" must, by 
self-description, actually win in order to prove itself.

>>But today the
>>Socialist Industrial Union program of the Socialist Labor Party
>>stands out more than ever as the sole solution to the massive
>>array of social and economic problems visited on that class by
>>capitalism--the one kind of unionism that stands a chance of
>>really making a permanent difference in workers' lives.
>>

Relative to the claims of unionism, class struggle is certainly the only
force that
is going actually improve the conditions of workers in this society. 
It is appealing to conjure a unionism that encompass the various forms 
such class struggle would take but it is not particularly likely or useful. 
It more important to advance and be a part of all form that class 
struggle actually takes today. 

>>--Ken Boettcher contributed to this article.
>
>
>
>
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