First Published: The Call, Vol. 7, No. 39, October 9, 1978.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.
It’s been almost three months since UAW President Doug Fraser grabbed front-page headlines with his July 19 denunciation of the bosses’ anti-labor offensive. Since that time, many of America’s top labor bureaucrats have followed Fraser’s lead with similar calls for “struggle” against the employers.
But has this “tough talking” approach by many of labor’s top misleaders concretely benefitted the workers movement? If not, then what is the best road forward in fighting against the capitalist offensive?
Recent developments on the labor scene show that the answer to the first question is definitely, “No.”
“Fight back on all fronts!” exclaimed Al Barkan, a top AFL-CIO official at a pre-Labor Day conference of that organization’s Industrial Union Department.
Yet barely three weeks after that statement, the AFL-CIO leadership remained completely silent on the postal workers’ forced arbitration settlement, thus allowing 570,000 postal workers to get saddled with a sellout contract.
“I am convinced that the only way organized labor can repel the armies of right-wing radicalism,” noted International Association of Machinists (lAM) head William Winpisinger at the same July conference, “is by fighting for a total redistribution of this nation’s income and wealth.”
Then on Sept. 25, Winpisinger, in his “toughest” move yet, withdrew his union’s support for the Carter administration and threatened to form a third political party separate from both the Democrats and Republicans.
But while all this was going on, Winpisinger’s boys negotiated contracts at several McDonnell Douglas and General Dynamics plants limiting wage increases for those aerospace workers to 6% the first year and 3% for the second and third contract years. With inflation running close to 11%, that’s not much of a “redistribution” of wealth.
“[The corporations] are trying to eliminate the labor movement from American society,” was how steel union boss Lloyd McBride put it at the pre-Labor Day conference. He acknowledged that this anti-labor offensive could “produce the same conditions that were largely responsible for the Great Depression.”
But 360,000 steelworkers can look at McBride’s role at last month’s USW convention in Atlantic City and see whether or not there has been any change in the sellout; collaborationist policies of the McBride machine.
At the convention, McBride crushed all attempts to get rid of the ENA no-strike agreement, which bans industry-wide strikes in steel. This ensures that USW members will continue to be handcuffed in their efforts to stop layoffs, speedup, declining real wage levels, unsafe conditions, discrimination and other problems that they face.
Further, McBride buried every attempt at instituting genuine democracy for the union’s rank and file, including killing the demand for membership ratification rights on contracts.
Each of these examples points to the fact that there has been no change in the class collaborationist and anti-rank-and-file policies of the trade union bureaucrats. Despite all the huffing and puffing by labor’s misleaders, few if any doors blocking the workers’ paths have been blown down.
Meanwhile, the labor force continues to be hit by strong attacks from the capitalists on living standards and working conditions (See parts I and 2 of this series in The Call, issues of Sept. 4 and 11). But there is more at stake here than simply what the bureaucrats have not done. It’s also important to examine what they are doing. i.e., formulating a program to restrict rank-and-file initiative and struggle and channel the workers’ anger into relatively harmless avenues.
Doug Fraser, for example, has summoned leaders of 100 labor, civil rights and liberal groups to a meeting in Detroit on Oct. 17. The purpose of this meeting will be to solidify a “new liberal coalition” that will pressure the Democratic Party for more concessions to labor.
“The strategy we propose,” says Fraser, “aims to make the Democratic Party [ struggle] against the reactionary capitalist-money power of the Republicans.”
The workers, however, can’t place their hopes in the Democratic Party to beat back the anti-labor assault.
Since Roosevelt’s time, the Democratic Party has posed as the party of the “common man.” But Jimmy Carter is a Democrat and a liberal one at that. And he has held the presidency through two of the worst years for labor in a decade.
In the same way that Fraser now trumpets his “new liberal coalition,” two years ago he said Jimmy Carter was “labor’s friend.”
Fraser and his “new liberal coalition,” though, are aware of the dissatisfaction with Carter and want to leave the door open to supporting the even more liberal Sen. Ted Kennedy. But is that any choice for the people?
History says no – the history of the recession-filled John Kennedy White House in the early ’60s and the history of Massachusetts, which the Kennedy family has run for years. Labor has no paradise in that state, which many are now calling “Taxachusetts” because of the repressive tax policies which hit hard on poor and working people. Boston, in addition, has the highest cost of living in America.
Fraser’s new, liberal electoral coalition is really just a blueprint for defeat. Not only does it advocate trust in enemies, it dis- misses any discussion of organizing the rank and file to struggle for their demands on the shop floor and, through militant actions.
In fact, Fraser’s strategy is echoed by the whole AFL-CIO leadership in a new pamphlet just released by that 13-million member labor federation. Entitled, “Workers’ Foes ... They’re Going For Broke,” the booklet proposes only four kinds of action by labor in the fight against the anti-worker offensive:
1) Register more union members to vote.
2) Raise more money from workers for liberal politicians.
3) Criticize the anti-labor “right-wing” better in union publications (and presumably defend the liberals better);
4) Use the mails better to instruct union members in who to vote for.
That’s the extent of the top labor organization’s program for action against the bosses. In place of the day-to-day struggles on the shop floor, the union misleaders are trying to substitute an illusion – that the liberal capitalists can be relied upon to “defend” the workers.
The real road ahead is to transform the unions into organizations of militant class struggle that can mobilize the rank and file around a fighting program.
A fighting program is one that demands democracy within the union, urges the organization of the non-union South, defends the rights of minority workers and opposes all forms of inequality and discrimination. It must insist on keeping the right to strike as one of the workers’ most important weapons and rally all its members to fight layoffs, speedup and for a shorter work week with no cut in pay.
That’s a program and a union that will turn the “one-sided class war” Fraser hypocritically moaned about into two-sided class war!
But who will build these fighting trade unions? Not the labor bureaucrats. Their new rhetoric and their recent actions confirm their role as agents for the bosses.
It is up to the rank and file to battle against their employers and fight to reclaim their unions at the same time. This will be the subject of Part 4 of this series.