From: "Jeff Sparrow" <jeffs-AT-werple.mira.net.au>
Subject: M-I: when things get BAD
Date: Sat, 22 Nov 1997 00:09:55 +1100


Jim wrote::

"Why do you suppose masses of workers partiipated in those terrible and 
bloody strikes in the '30s? Was it out of a sense of moral indignation of
because the workers and their families were being fucked?

Question 2: Why do you suppose  the percentage of workers who belong to
trade unions in the US is so low (I don't know about Australia)? Granted
that the answer is complex, the main reaswon must be that most workers
don't feel the need to organize -- beause they are not being pushed down to
and below the poverty line. (Majority workers, that is.)"

Jeff writes:

Answer one:
All kinds of reasons. It wasn't simply poverty (in fact, in Australia the
onset of the depression initially led to a dramatic slump in struggle: the
mass strikes took place precisely when unemployment fell). Clearly, the
economic situation was important (although the speed of the crash was
probably as signficant as the crash itself, if you see what I mean). 

But there were other crucial factors as well. There had been a revolution
in Russia only a few years earlier; there had been slaughter on a scale
never before seen during the first world war; there were mass working class
parties (many of which claimed to be revolutionary); fascism was on the
rise, and so on.

Answer two.
Unionisation in Australia is higher than in the US, but it is falling. The
main reason is the legacy of thirteen years of collaboration ('the accord')
between the union officals and the Labor Party, in office until 1983. This
process, which was pushed by the left of the union bureaucracy, meant that
wages fell far more under Labor than they did under the previous
conservative government. After years of shrinking pay packets and union
inactivity, naturally many working people are cynical and demoralised.

It has nothing to do with workers' lack of misery. The working class is 
probably worse off now than it was in the early eighties, before Labor took
power. It was far more militant back then.

As it happens, the sections of the class that have shown a little fight
lately (miners, dock workers) are relatively well paid. I don't think
forcing them back into poverty will do anything to foster their fighting
spirit!




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