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A Fourth International Tendency (FIT) pamphlet, February, 1988. Used by permission.
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Drastic changes in the world system of capitalism have adversely affected the living standard of the working class in Western Europe and North America. The latest technology in commodity production and distribution has created financial and political crises that plague the imperialist powers. Nowhere are these effects of the structural reorganization of capitalism more politically volatile than in the United States.
In a previous issue of the Bulletin IDOM (No. 43, July/August 1987) Steve Bloom described the internationalization of the capitalist productive process, and listed some of its consequences. My purpose here is to review briefly a series of events leading to the present impasse of labor unions in the U.S., to call attention to some recent efforts to revitalize the unions as basic working class defense organizations, and to introduce The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution, where most of the answers to labor’s problems can be found.
On August 15, 1971, the Nixon administration abruptly announced what soon became known as its “new economic policy.” One feature decreed a 90-day wage/price freeze. George Meany, then AFL-CIO president, called it “patently discriminatory” against working men and women. Leonard Woodcock, president of the United Auto Workers at the time, was more bombastic. “If this administration thinks that just by issuing an edict, by the stroke of a pen, they can tear up contracts, they are saying to us they want war. If they want war, they can have war.”
This seemed to imply that the union officialdom would defend the interests of the workers and mobilize the ranks to fight against rising prices and growing unemployment.
Nothing of the sort happened. Instead, top union officials agreed to serve on a government-sponsored tripartite Pay Board, consisting of representatives of business, labor, and “the public.” The ostensible purpose was to “fight inflation.” In this way the union movement was tricked into accepting Nixon’s wage freeze and blocked from mobilizing against unemployment and for general improvement in the standard of living of poor people, the “underprivileged.”
An analysis by Les Evans in the Socialist Workers Party’s monthly magazine International Socialist Review (October 1971) pointed to the changing economic relations among the imperialist powers. Evans said: “The continuing inflation and the U.S. balance of payments deficit are only symptoms of the fundamental crisis.... Corporations everywhere today are striving to find areas for capital investment and for sales – under conditions of market saturation and generalized overproduction.” He warned: “The conditions are ripening for a revival of the escalating trade wars and competitive devaluations that characterized the 1930s.”
In the ensuing years the crisis of capitalism intensified, and the drive to lower wages and weaken the unions in this country kept pace. Top officials of the union bureaucracy adjusted to the increasingly hostile environment by seeking allies among “fair” employers and “friendly” politicians – with disastrous results for the unions, and for unorganized workers as well as union members.
This policy and its consequences were accurately summarized in 1979 by Douglas Fraser when he was UAW president and momentarily a disappointed practitioner of class collaboration. The occasion was the breakup of the Labor Management Group, a top level, quasi-governmental committee of eight major corporation executives and eight ranking labor leaders, including Fraser. This group met regularly under the guidance of Professor John T. Dunlop, a former secretary of labor, and tried to find agreement on such issues as energy problems, inflation, unemployment, rising health costs, labor legislation, etc. The group split when the corporate executives reneged on their implied promise to support the Labor Reform Bill that was being pushed in Congress at the time by the union bureaucracy. The bill was defeated. Fraser charged that “Corporate leaders knew it was not the ‘power grab by Big Labor’ that they portrayed it to be.”
He concluded that “the business community, with few exceptions, have chosen to wage a one-sided class war today in this country – a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society. The leaders of industry, commerce and finance in the United States have broken and discarded the fragile, unwritten compact previously existing during a past period of growth and progress.”
Fraser went on to explain how the “unwritten compact” worked:
For a considerable time, the leaders of business and labor have sat at the Labor-Management Group’s table – recognizing differences, but seeking consensus where it existed. That worked because the business community in the U.S. succeeded in advocating a general loyalty to an allegedly benign capitalism that emphasized private property, independence and self-regulation along with an allegiance to free, democratic politics. That system has worked best, of course, for the “haves” in our society rather than the “have-nots.” Yet it survived in part because of an unspoken foundation: that when things got bad enough for a segment of society, the business elite “gave” a little bit – enabling government or interest groups to better conditions somewhat for that segment. That give usually came only after sustained struggle, such as that waged by the labor movement in the 1930s and the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
The implication is that the union movement should again organize “sustained struggle” as in the 1930s. But the union bureaucracy- including Fraser and his UAW successor proved incapable. Union bureaucrats are conditioned to seek collaboration with the employers. They do not understand how to fight against the employers and do not believe in the wisdom or success of class struggles.
The 1980s brought the most unrelenting attack on the bastions of organized labor by the employing class since the rise of the CIO in the 1930s. It began in 1981 with the Reagan administration’s bashing of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO). Not only was the air traffic controllers’ strike broken and all strikers barred from future employment in that capacity, but the leaders were prosecuted and the union outlawed. In this way the government signaled all employers – large and small – that open season on the unions had arrived. The objective was to roll back the union movement to the open-shop days of the pre-CIO resurgence.
This process began long before Reagan and proceeded at a steady pace. But the Reagan administration made it official policy. The union bureaucrats ran for cover at every turn. The result, over the years, has been a decline in union membership and a withering of union influence within the unorganized sector of the working class. Since 1968 the percentage of organized workers relative to the total eligible workforce has declined from around 25 percent to no more than 18 percent. The decline in total membership has been less precipitous, down from a 1968 peak of 20.7 million to the present level of around 17 million. These 17 million organized workers (13 million dues-paying AFL-CIO affiliates) are an influential social factor and a potentially powerful political force. The decline in the influence of union ideology and leadership standing within the working class and especially within the unorganized sector – has been more detrimental than the decline in membership. The two, of course, are related. The fact is that today many workers who never experienced the advantages of union protection do not believe that union membership will raise their wages, secure their jobs, or improve their conditions of life. They have little confidence in the power of unionism.
The continuous attack on the unions was both prompted and facilitated by the deepening economic crisis of the capitalist system and the restructuring of commodity production on a world scale. As noted by Evans in his 1971 analysis of Nixon’s “new economic policy, the search for new areas of capital investment had intensified and competition among the industrial nations for new markets was growing. But the flow of capital at that time was already beginning to find new channels of investment.
Technological advances in transportation systems, improvements in the means of communication, foreseeable possibilities of the new “computer science,” and the growing awareness on the part of industrial investors of a vast pool of cheap productive labor throughout the colonial and semi-colonial world created what then became known as “the multinational corporation.” Mostly they were spawned by U.S. capital seeking investment opportunities.
Old plants and equipment in the pre-World War II industrial centers of Europe and North America soon became obsolete in the rapidly expanding and internationally coordinated world of new manufacturing ventures. Much of the industrial machinery of Europe was destroyed by the war, but the modernized facilities that were built after the war on the old models no longer adequately served the profit demands of capitalist investors. The same was found to be true in North America (Canada included) where modernization had lagged because of the early postwar advantages of U.S. industrial capacity and military might.
The restructuring process proceeded erratically, often with false starts and reevaluations. But the trend was retrenchment, elimination of outmoded operations, reduction of the workforce, dispersal (especially in the auto industry and in light industries such as garment and home appliances) of parts manufacturing and, increasingly, basic units of the finished product. Final assembly plants were shifted to new locations, frequently for no immediately apparent reason. But the end result today is that General Motors advertises a car in its Pontiac line which is designed in Germany (for style) and built entirely in Korea (for low labor cost in production and competitive pricing in the world market).
All U.S. heavy industry is hit by the changes. Obsolete plants are closed. The industrial heartland surrounding the Great Lakes, where ore mines, steel mills, auto plants, and tire factories were once the mainstays of the economy, has been transformed into the “rust belt.” The auto industry, while continuing to manufacture and distribute more cars and trucks than ever before, no longer depends on the assembly lines in Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, and Buffalo.
The steel industry has undergone the most visible devastation. Old mills stand idle, relies of a past era, in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Buffalo, and Cleveland. The Youngstown, Ohio, area which was once almost entirely dependent on the thriving steel industry no longer produces steel. The industry moved away, leaving behind abandoned furnaces.
This transformation period which accelerated in the mid-1970s and reached high speed by 1985 unsettled the workforce and produced pockets of mass unemployment. In the beginning it brought on a large number of isolated strikes, many provoked by the employers. Most were lost by the workers. In addition to their newly developed ability to quickly shift production operations from a struck plant to another where no union existed or where the representative union was bound by a no-strike contract, the employers also had the repressive power of federal and state government on their side.
The courts routinely issued injunctions against mass picketing. Strikebreakers were protected. Strikers frequently came under physical attack by police and national guard units. Many strikers were jailed, heavy fines were imposed on unions, and in some instances union members were fined for refusing to work. These legal strike-breaking techniques became standard practice under the Reagan administrations, but they had been carefully prepared long before Reagan’s appearance on the political scene, going back at least to passage of the 1947 Taft-Hartley law. Since then the U.S. Congress and state legislatures have systematically put in place anti-labor laws that can be used effectively to break strikes. The Reaganite administrators in government agencies have encouraged the aggressive use of this unchallenged discriminatory legislation.
Even though the changing features of capitalist production were not yet clearly recognized nor fully understood, the industrial workers discovered soon enough that forces beyond their control were closing in on them. Their jobs were disappearing. Their wages were shrinking. Their entitlements (family health care, guaranteed annual wage/supplementary unemployment benefits, wage escalators geared to rising prices, pensions and other old-age assistance) secured by union contract were fading away. Their ability to hold either the employers or the government responsible was gone. The weapons of union protection – most importantly the strike or threat of strike – that seemed effective in earlier times no longer worked. Many blamed the union bureaucracy (and very often the union) for their inability to strike back, their impotence when faced with disaster. One of the lessons they drew is strikes don’t pay.
In the 1960s and 1970s strikes of at least 1,000 workers for one full shift averaged 285 a year. In 1985 there were 54 such strikes, the lowest in four decades according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This does not mean the workers had grown passive during this period. They had become more cautious. And they were looking for better methods of struggle.
When the steel industry left Youngstown, the United Steel Workers of America closed its offices and discarded its long established Youngstown District. It had been the center of some early struggles of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee in the 1930s upon which the USWA was founded. Local leaders of the union, loyal to its militant tradition, began almost immediately to reconstitute an organization for unemployed steel workers and others. They sought help and support of church and civic groups, and ad hoc committees against mill closings and for unemployed relief were created. Some of these committees became permanent organizations with dues-paying members. They demanded attention from local politicians and developed a variety of plans to take over the idle mills.
These efforts became common in the 1980s to all the blighted areas where the steel industry had once flourished. Union-church-civic coalitions formed in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and elsewhere. They gave themselves appropriate names: Ad Hoc Plant Closing Coalition (Cleveland); Upper Ohio Valley Reindustrialization Project; Mon-Valley Unemployed Committee (Pittsburgh); Coalition Against Plant Shutdown (Canton, Ohio); etc. These coalitions formed at different times under pressure of local circumstances, with varying degrees of stability. Some waged militant and highly publicized struggles against the banking interests in their localities. A few mills were reopened or remained in operation for awhile under an arrangement with the banks that allowed for “workers’ ownership,” and the workers stayed on the job at reduced wages. Such schemes were inevitably short-lived because the obsolete facilities were neither socially nor economically viable.
In Detroit and other auto centers locals of the UAW, in collaboration with concerned church groups and liberal politicians, have called demonstrations against plant closings. These have publicity value, but were never intended to mobilize the workers and the unemployed to protect their own interests.
One of the most unexpected products of the ferment in the working class generated by the anti-union climate and the reactionary political drift in this country has been the emergence of union organizing consultants, the best known of which is Corporate Campaign, Incorporated. This consulting firm, headed by Ray Rogers, established a reputation for imaginative propaganda techniques and effective organizing methods when it was hired by the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) to help bring the notorious J.P. Stevens Co. to the bargaining table. Rogers’ innovative “corporate campaign” strategy extended the fight against the anti-union textile firm beyond the traditional picket lines and boycotts to the corporate boardrooms, including stockholders and financial bank lenders. J.P. Stevens agreed to a contract covering 3,500 workers at its plant in Roanoke Rapids, N.C., in 1980.
An increase in strike activity in 1986 seemed to indicate a new mood of self-confidence in some sectors of the union movement, a determination on the part of union members to halt the tendency of their officials to grant concessions in the form of lower wages, fewer fringe benefits, and worse working conditions without any sign of opposition. This reversed the steady decline in strike activity during the previous several years. City workers were again on the picket lines in Detroit and Philadelphia. AT&T was struck across the country by 155,000 telephone workers. The Aluminum Company of America was struck by its 15,000 workers who belong to the steelworkers union. For the first time in 27 years U.S. Steel (now called USX Corp.) was picketed in nine states by 25,000 USWA members facing massive layoffs. This action was deliberately provoked by the corporation. The union called it a lockout.
Several other strikes were called at scattered auto plants, on the waterfronts of both the East and West coasts, in a California cannery organized by the Teamsters union, and in other workplaces around the country None of these strikes recorded great immediate gains for the workers involved, but in every instance they served notice on the employers that workers were reaching the limits of endurance, that more was being demanded of them than they would bear.
Another result of the combined government-company attacks was a minor revolt against entrenched union officials, which continues to smolder. At the local level more militant representatives are being elected. The elections are usually bitterly contested, and they are not fought over “who is the bad guy. More often they turn on debates about union strategy. What is our relation to the company? How should we treat the employer? What kind of action will most benefit us? These questions divide the workers and determine the outcome of many union elections today.
In 1984 Jim Guyette, a militant at the George A. Hormel Co. meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota, was elected president of Local P-9, United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). The company had forced wage concessions from the workers and was demanding more. The new leadership at Local P-9 sought help from the International officials of the UFCW, from the seven other UFCW locals, and from the labor consulting firm that had won praise for helping win a union contract at the J.P. Stevens Co., Ray Rogers and his associates. Local P-9 adopted the “corporate campaign strategy” recommended by Rogers.
In August 1985 Hormel demanded concessions that could not be met, thus provoking a strike. The union’s corporate campaign strategy involved direct participation in the strike by a fully informed membership. All members and their families enrolled in the campaign to explain to the entire community in Austin and the surrounding area what the issues in the strike were and how the Hormel Co. was tied to and supported by local banking interests and other corporate connections. P-9 members asked for support from all other unions in Austin and from farmers who sold pork to Hormel. As the strike continued P-9 strikers visited other UFCW locals in the Hormel chain and set up picket lines. This won sympathy and support throughout the Hormel chain, and in plants operated by other companies.
The Hormel company responded by rounding up scab labor and calling upon its political servants in local and state government to disperse the picket lines and protect the scabs. The governor of the state of Minnesota complied by calling out the national guard and stationing troops in Austin.
At the Austin union headquarters P-9 had set up a commissary to feed the strikers. At the outset it encouraged a local strike support committee which solicited food and other assistance from sympathizers. It collaborated fully with a similar support committee in St. Paul, capital of Minnesota, established to help publicize the strike and collect food. The St. Paul committee delivered tons of food to the Austin commissary.
The strike committee published a news bulletin to keep the strikers and townspeople informed of latest developments. The local held regular membership meetings to decide what to do at every stage as the strike continued.
Teams of strikers, consisting of P-9 officials and rank-and-file members, visited unions in major cities of this country and spoke to membership meetings everywhere. They collected thousands of dollars to support the strike, and made it the best known union struggle since World War II.
In September 1986 the International officials of the UFCW signed a sweetheart contract with Hormel to cover the scab workforce. They revoked the charter of Local P-9 and set up a new UFCW local to represent the scabs. But this did not resolve the problems of the workers in the meatpacking industry, nor did it satisfy the demands of the employers.
The Austin strikers, having launched a boycott campaign against Hormel products, had moved almost immediately to set up their own local union when UFCW top officials bureaucratically seized control of Local P-9. They continued their struggle for improved wages and working conditions, and to win back their jobs. Toward that end they eventually founded the North American Meat Packers Union (NAMPU), now seeking to rebuild unionism in this chaotic industry.
The strategy and tactics of the P-9 strike were an innovation for the post-World War II period. The fact that the ranks were mobilized, kept fully informed, and called upon to decide what could be done was a radical departure from standard union procedure. Their decision to take their case to the union movement at large, to call upon townspeople and local farmers to help them, to set up their own support system to feed and care for strikers’ families, to track down and expose the financial connections of Hormel was all new. Nothing like this had been seen since the 1934 Minneapolis Teamster strikes. It was that tradition which was partly responsible for the audacious course of the year-long 1985- 86 meatpackers’ strike in Austin.
The impact of this strike within the union movement and among radical political organizations was greater than any other struggle since the advent of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
It demonstrated new possibilities.
Labor Notes, a radical labor publication, called a conference for November 14-16, 1986, to discuss New Directions for Labor. This conference was concerned with international solidarity and union struggles throughout the world, but among the prominent guests and speakers were leaders of the P-9 strike. It was notable not only for what was said there but also for the fact that it was attended by more than 800 militant union members, secondary union officials, and others. This was a measure of the interest generated by the P-9 strike. Of course, many questions were left unanswered.
This year several attempts have been and are being made to call conferences for the purpose of finding answers to the unanswered questions. Mostly these attempts are narrowly based, limited to segments of the radical movement or to militant oppositionists in the unions who disagree with the policies of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy.
A recent conference called by the Hormel strikers and their supporters was different. It was held in Austin, May 23, 1987, attended by 87 workers from several Midwestern states. The majority were packinghouse workers, some on strike at the Cudahy plant in Wisconsin and at the John Morrell plants in Sioux City, Iowa, and in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Connie Dammen, one of the organizers of the conference and a Hormel strike leader and charter member of NAMPU, said the conference was called to allow rank-and-file workers in the meatpacking industry to assess their problems and seek answers. She said, “six months from now we would like to schedule another conference.”
This first conference accomplished more than most who attended thought possible when the call went out. They succeeded in drafting a 15-point set of demands that packinghouse workers (and most other workers) want and need. It is their rank-and-file Packinghouse Workers Bill of Rights (see Bulletin IDOM No. 43). It deserves careful attention because it is the most succinct statement to date of the economic and political issues that impinge on the daily lives of working people in this country. Having these demands clearly formulated by representative and respected union militants is certainly a gain of new territory at the present stage of the struggle for workers’ rights. But the struggle to win these demands lies ahead. And the question remains: How will the victory be won?
A common sentiment expressed at the conference of rank-and-file packinghouse workers last May was the need to return to slogans such as solidarity, no concessions, rank-and-file control, etc. Most conference participants recognized that the history of the early struggles of the CIO movement can help the struggle today.
One of the best sources of information about the method of struggle in the earlier period is the four-volume history of the 1934 Minneapolis strikes by Farrell Dobbs (Teamster Rebellion, Teamster Power, Teamster Politics, and Teamster Bureaucracy, Pathfinder Press, 410 West St., New York, NY 10014). This is useful because the leaders of those strikes understood better what they were doing and were more conscious of the political relationship of class forces in this country at that time than those who got involved in the leadership of other strikes in those days. The leaders in Minneapolis were revolutionary socialists, guided partly by Leon Trotsky’s analysis of world events in that fateful decade. They were supporters of Trotsky, members of the Communist League of America, imbued with a world outlook. This certainly did not pre vent them from focusing their attention on the details of the strikes and drawing upon their own earlier experiences in the pre-World War I socialist movement and in the union struggles of the 1930s. It was, in fact, their greatest advantage.
One of the benefits of reviewing how the Minneapolis strikes were won is the discovery of a similarity in method to the more recent P-9 strike in Austin. In both situations the strike leaders began with the idea that the great mass of workers who would be drawn into the action would need to be completely informed at all times, take full responsibility for the course of their actions, and participate consciously in the decision-making process. This idea is the key to the successes in both struggles.
Some will argue that in 1934 the Minneapolis strikers won, and in 1986 in Austin the strikers lost. But this is not entirely true. In Minneapolis the strikers won a temporary victory and succeeded in building a solid union movement in that city. They also succeeded in transforming the Teamsters union and extending their influence through the over-the-road drivers section of the union which they created. But the most important gains were destroyed by the Roosevelt administration when it prepared to enter World War II, and much of what the 1934 strikes won was lost in 1940. The struggle in Austin and throughout the meatpacking industry is not yet over. And no one can say what the outcome will be.
This was also true in Minneapolis. The Trotskyist leaders of the Teamster movement there never thought their struggle was completed. When they succeeded in consolidating some of their initial gains, they turned their attention to what remained to be done. In many respects the needs of the working class in this country in 1936 were very similar to those listed today in the Packinghouse Workers Bill of Rights.
In 1938, in consultation with the leaders of the Minneapolis Teamsters and others, Trotsky drafted what is now known as The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution (available from Pathfinder Press, New York). It is a generalized statement of the Marxist method of organization, illustrated with an explanation of specific transitional demands. This was intended as a programmatic guide to the working class transformation of society throughout the world. Most of the transitional demands were suited to the needs of the vibrant industrial union movement in this country at the time.
In some respects the times now are similar to the pre-World War II period. That is why union militants today will benefit from a careful study of the Transitional Program.
The similarities and differences between the United States in the 1930s and now relate to the economy as well as other aspects of our society. The surface differences are readily seen. But the basic economic problem remains the same. It is what Les Evans predicted in his 1971 analysis of the Nixon administration’s “new economic policy,” mentioned earlier. Evans foresaw “escalating trade wars and competitive devaluations that characterized the 1930s.”
This is a problem for the ruling class of this country and all other countries. It is also a problem for working people everywhere in the world. Top AFL-CIO officials are preoccupied with this problem as if obsessed. They demand solid support for protective legislation from their “friends” in Congress. This is the deciding issue in their view.
At the Steelworkers’ 1986 convention AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland told the delegates that “the major cause for this new economic crisis is the flood of cheap, foreign imports inundating our markets.” He is the chief proponent of the national “Buy America” campaign. When GM announced plans to close its Norwood, Ohio, assembly plant the AFL-CIO unions mobilized a demonstration of 3,500 angry workers last May against Japanese imports instead of against GM management. One of the chauvinist slogans shouted was, “Drop another bomb on Hiroshima.” Ohio’s Lt. Governor Leonard and U.S. Senator Metzenbaum (both Democrats) were on hand to lead the demonstration and fire up the marchers with demagogic speeches. Such demonstrations serve to divert attention from the financial directors of U.S. industry and their political servants who ought to be held responsible for the unemployment, hunger, and suffering in this country.
Every major industrial country in Europe has a high rate of unemployment. Unemployment also afflicts Japan. If the great mass of working people in all these countries can be led to believe that they are likely to lose more jobs because of “foreign imports,” the most probable result is another international trade war as in the 1930s which led inevitably to armed conflict. Bomb dropping in the atomic age is not the same as in 1945. This game today, once begun, is destined to be the last.
The solution is in the transitional program, the programmatic concepts on which the Fourth International (the international association of revolutionary socialist organizations) was constituted in 1938.
This document begins with the crisis of the capitalist system. “Mankind’s productive forces stagnate. Already new inventions and improvements fail to raise the level of material wealth. Conjunctural crises under the conditions of the social crisis of the whole capitalist system afflict ever heavier deprivations and sufferings upon the masses. Growing unemployment, in its turn, deepens the financial crisis of the state and undermines the unstable monetary systems.” This reads as if it were written today to describe our present “stagflation.”
The seemingly insuperable problem then, as now, was the contradiction between the magnitude of the social crisis and the consciousness of the working class, the only social force capable of solving the crisis. That contradiction and its inherent solution is presented in terms of the union struggle at the time, as follows:
The unprecedented wave of sit-down strikes and the amazingly rapid growth of industrial unionism in the United States (the CIO) is the indisputable expression of the instinctive striving of the American workers to raise themselves to the level of the tasks imposed on them by history. But here, too, the leading political organizations, including the newly created CIO, do everything possible to keep in check and paralyze the revolutionary pressure of the masses.
Here Trotsky contrasts the “instinctive striving” of the workers to the limitations imposed on them by the determination of the union leadership to limit the struggle to the confines of the capitalist productive system and its political facade. This contradiction can be resolved in favor of the needs of society only if the workers are able to pursue their own class needs to the end. This requires continuous struggle (entailing temporary setbacks and victories) in the course of which the workers gain self-confidence and learn the secrets of government.
In the 1930s, as now, the problem was how should the workers conduct the “continuous struggle” from their vantage point, what strategy was indicated? The employers devised their own battle strategy, guaranteeing that there would be no letup in the struggle. Their master plan in those days, when the union movement was on the offensive, was to placate the advanced battalions of the working class and eventually roll back the gains of the new unions.
Today the employers are on the offensive. In this respect the roles of the two central antagonists in the struggle are reversed. But the needs of the workers in both instances remain the same: full employment, adequate wages, decent housing, expanded educational opportunities, free health care, and an assured income when unemployed. Union struggles for these most basic social needs, through strikes and parliamentary political action, have been limited in the past to “minimal demands” which could be won without disturbing the existing economic and social system.
Trotsky proposed “transitional demands” in conjunction with or as an extension of the “minimal demands” usually advanced. In the years immediately preceding the advent of World War II he foresaw the possibility of the mobilization of the working class in its own self-interest so as to postpone or avoid the coming catastrophe. “It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist program of revolution,” he wrote. “This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.”
This was written fifty years ago. Given the condition of U.S. industry, are workers now in a position to make demands? What are “transitional demands”? What is the level of “today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class”? Do “transitional demands” apply? Can they be understood and explained? Is the underlying concept relevant?
Before addressing these questions it is necessary to understand the essential character of these demands. They are designed to develop the independence and self-reliance of the working class, and prepare this social class to lead the democratic struggles that will reorganize society. In this fundamental respect they are the extended political transformation of such minimal union demands as higher wages and better working conditions which accept the worker-employer relationship as permanent, the assumption being that workers cannot survive without a prosperous employer to sign the weekly paycheck. Transitional demands, to the contrary, recognize that workers are the only essential human element in the productive process, that in our advanced stage of mass production the private owner and the present wages system are superfluous, and that continued protection of the employers’ need for private profit at the expense of the workforce is the cause of most social ills.
What follows is a sampling of transitional demands, and a brief explanation of their applicability.
The concept embracing these “generalized slogans” is neither so complex nor abstract as some present-day union officials may pretend. It comes in direct response to what was recognized by Trotsky in the late 1930s as the “two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, unemployment and high prices.”
During the early “pump priming” experiments of the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal (1933-36), the economic wisdom was that mass unemployment forced prices down because consumers lacked money to buy the goods they needed. The simultaneous rise of unemployment and consumer prices was considered impossible. But this is what happened in Roosevelt’s second term, as the New Deal was transformed into the War Deal in 1937. Monetary inflation coincided with the economic recession of 1937-38 and the result was an increase in unemployment while prices continued to rise. Many at the time thought this was accidental, a freak occurrence, something unlikely ever to happen again. But throughout the postwar years this phenomenon became so common that it is now accepted as part of current economic wisdom. Economists say it is here to stay. It is no less absurd than it was 50 years ago, and no less devastating to the working class standard of living.
During World War II the unions accepted a wage freeze and the government promised a price freeze, but prices rose steadily while wages remained frozen. By 1943 the disparity between wages and prices was such that workers in the war industries began a series of wildcat strikes demanding wage increases geared to the rising price index. They got promises of a “price rollback” from Roosevelt and the union officialdom.
In the early postwar years wage increases won in the 1946-47 strike wave failed to close the gap. At this juncture union-management negotiations began to particularize, to sort out, different aspects of the indicated solution. In 1948 General Motors agreed to include an “escalator clause” in the UAW contract. This was inadequate but it embodied the principle of a sliding scale of wages (adjusted quarterly in this case) in accordance with the Labor Department’s Consumer Price Index This arrangement was accepted by the other auto corporations and improved in succeeding contracts. It helped regulate and control rising labor costs during the period of expanding U.S. industrial output in the 1950s and 1%0s and seemed to work so well that by 1970 the escalator clause was included in all major union contracts.
When the anti-union offensive of the employers reached full fury at the start of the 1980s the escalator clause was among the first concessions most unions made. In this decade of anti-concession struggles the escalator clause or cost of living allowance (COLA) is an almost forgotten issue, one reason being the relatively slow rise in prices for the past few years. But signs of inflation, combined with employer demands to roll back wages to meet the prices of “foreign competition,” will surely bring the union demand for a sliding scale of wages to the fore again.
This brief history of the ill-fated “escalator” shows how basic concessions by the employers can be turned to their advantage and used by them to lull the workers and their unions into a false sense of security. In this case the protection afforded by the union contract applied only to those workers covered by the particular contract. As wages for union members continued to rise along with the steady increase in prices the discrepancy between wages and living conditions of the organized and unorganized sectors of the working class grew. The union movement became more isolated from the vast majority of the class which remained unorganized and which the union bureaucracy made little effort to organize. The limited use of the sliding scale of wages concept, combined with similar twists of other useful weapons of struggle and socially necessary goals, contributed eventually to political isolation of the unions. Anti-union propagandists then began to paint the union bureaucracy as “big labor” and the union movement as a “special interest group.”
Distortion by the union bureaucracy of other badly needed social gains is best illustrated by the failure to fight for socialized medicine, full employment, and free public education at the university level.
The other side of the sliding scale of wages/sliding scale of hours equation is what became known in most union contracts in the late 1960s and 1970s as “supplementary unemployment benefits” (SUB). This additional protection for union members in basic industry against temporary unemployment began as a demand for the “guaranteed annual wage.” SUB was the next best thing, and it was an almost meaningless give-back when plant closings began and permanent unemployment replaced temporary layoffs.
In the 1930s when Trotsky introduced and explained the sliding scale of hours concept he underscored the transitional character of the demand for living wages:
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural” the time is ripe to advance, along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum. would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
In this brief paragraph the distinguishing feature of transitional demands is clearly stated: they are demands consciously advanced to protect all sectors of the working class, as a viable social class, in times of economic crisis and social disintegration. They appeal to the whole class for unity in self-defense.
In the above-quoted paragraph, Trotsky seems to refer to the need for public works only in passing. The fact is that in the 1930s federally financed public works sustained millions of families in this country. Some who depended on these projects organized themselves, either as public works sections of newly established unions (as in Minneapolis) or independently. They demonstrated and called strikes for more money and more jobs. But the government began curtailing these socially useful programs as the Roosevelt administration siphoned resources into the arms buildup that was underway in 193&. The impending war was an overriding issue in those days. Major emphasis on the need to expand rather than curtail public works was inadequate to expose the danger of war or to address the immediate economic needs of the working class at that juncture, and to relate them to the long and short-term effects of the war economy.
Present circumstances, however, cry out for a massive federally financed public works program. Those vast amounts of wasted military appropriations ought to be immediately halted. Congress should allocate comparable sums of money for public works to rebuild the public transportation system (railroads and highways), clean up the industrially polluted environment, organize a more meaningful and egalitarian educational system, build decent public housing for the homeless, create socially productive jobs for the millions of unemployed, relieve the staggering debt burden that disrupts farm production and bankrupts family farmers, etc.
Recognition of these far-reaching social needs, coupled with the demand for public works, does not mean that the cure for all contemporary social ills can be found solely in this demand. But it will be useful in reviving the union movement around common goals, and in helping to restore self-confidence in the working class to the extent that its potential as a transitional demand is recognized and that it is advanced in conjunction with other such demands. It is an essential part of a transitional program to transform U.S. society today.
This demand was popularized in the slogan, “30 for 40.” It stood for a 30-hour workweek with no reduction in pay. In this form it was raised by some UAW locals and formally adopted by the International in the early 1950s. Other unions followed suit. For more than a decade it was routinely included in a laundry list of demands before the periodic formal contract negotiations began, but this demand was never seriously endorsed by the bureaucracy of any major industrial union. (Some craft unions in the building trades, notably the electricians, successfully demanded the 6-hour day/5-day week under the guise of creating jobs for unemployed workers. But the real intent and actual result was to raise the weekly wages of those normally employed by forcing the contractors to pay more in overtime rates.)
The reason the heads of industrial unions refused to make the shorter workweek a central demand, even in times of high unemployment, is because the employers were adamantly opposed to it. They argued that if adopted in any of the basic industries (auto or steel) it would further distort the national wages system and disrupt the economy. In response to arguments for a drastic revision of the federal wages policy, which legalizes the 40-hour week, the employers countered that such a change would raise production costs and price U.S. commodities out of the competitive world market. The union officialdom accepted these arguments at face value and repeated them to justify their failure to address the problem of technological unemployment.
The AFL-CIO News reported (July 4, 1987) that “international labor bodies are pressing a worldwide drive to shorten the workweek without any loss in wages.” If the AFL-CIO bureaucracy bestirs itself to support this “worldwide drive” it will be in conjunction with the Democratic Party and other employer institutions, strictly in accordance with past practices.
During cyclical “recessions” union-management negotiators have always skirted the problem of unemployment, always treating it as if it were a temporary misfortune. As a pacifier for high seniority workers in basic industry they eventually devised the SUB formula which provided for those workers longest on the job to take leave with nearly full pay when the corporations announced temporary layoffs. This neat arrangement was supposed to satisfy everyone, allowing the last-hired workers, who would ordinarily be the first out, to stay on the job. This benefited only a very small group. It created no new jobs, allowed for the continuous numerical decline of the workforce caused by the introduction of new machine and electronic technology, and ignored completely the growing numbers of unemployed who were permanently squeezed out.
The demand for a shorter workweek aims under present-day conditions to create jobs. But in the history of capitalism employers have never willingly accepted reductions in hours of work. To the contrary, they have always sought ways to extend the working day, as they are doing now by imposing compulsory overtime while handing out layoff notices.
Unemployment is the scourge of the labor movement. Workers need jobs. The demand for a massive public works program, combined with the demand for shorter hours of work, offers a solution. These demands must be explained, fought for, and won.
The transitional character of these demands will become more evident in the struggle to win them. They are intended to satisfy the needs of contemporary society, and they can be won only by the working class in struggle against the employers and their political agents in government.
The finances of most major corporations are shrouded in secrecy.
Even though U.S. industry and associated banking interests continue to record greater profits year after year, several of the largest corporations in steel and some other industries have recently filed for bankruptcy. In these cases the workers are left high and dry. Their jobs are gone, and their accumulated pension and health funds as well. The unions that represent these victimized workers charge that corporate management is falsely claiming bankruptcy in order to shed all its obligations incurred under legally ratified collective bargaining agreements.
Developments of this kind clearly show that the union movement ought to demand public hearings and an open inspection of the corporations’ books by independent accountants representing the workers, their families, and community allies. This would be the traditional union response.
The demand to “open the books” was first widely popularized by the UAW in the 113-day strike against General Motors in 1946. The strike leadership raised two slogans: “wage increases without price increases,” and “open the books.” Both were designed to win public sympathy for the strike and embarrass the world’s richest corporation that had grown richer from war profits. The first slogan conformed to the avowed aim of the Truman administration to “hold the line on prices.” The second was an adaptation of the demand raised by the influential Trotskyist fraction in the UAW. But as raised by Waiter Reuther who controlled the strike committee, “open the books” was converted from a strike demand into a propaganda slogan. As a demand it could have been used to expose the war profiteering of the auto corporations, and urge nationalization of the industry under workers’ control.
Reuther’s “open the books” slogan served to scandalize GM and expose the company’s false claim that it could not afford to raise wages without jacking up prices. GM never opened its books. In the end a wage increase of little more than half of what was asked came down, and the price of cars went up. This became the standard formula for all future wage negotiations in the auto industry. Henceforth wages were geared to prices. And capitalist propaganda pictured wage increases as the cause of inflation.
In union negotiations for most of the postwar years it became a standard union ploy to demand to see the employers’ books whenever company negotiators claimed poverty. Sometimes the employers gladly brought out a set of books to “prove” that they absolutely could not afford to operate if the workers insisted on higher wages. They promised, of course, to raise wages when times got better or if business picked up. But meantime union/management cooperation depended on poverty-level wages. In such instances the union negotiators usually opted for a signed contract, telling the workers that they had to “save the union.”
These are extreme examples of how a useful class struggle demand, stripped of its transitional character, can be distorted by the union bureaucracy to serve the needs of the employers. This does not mean that this particular demand, “open the books” can never be infused with genuine revolutionary potential as originally intended. But this requires its use when circumstances indicate by a knowledgeable union leadership that understands (or has a class instinct for) the irreconcilable conflict between labor and capital.
In the Transitional Program, Trotsky wrote about the need to expose the secrets of capitalist exploitation and profit. He put this under the general heading, “Business secrets” and workers’ control of industry. Here he explained two central issues, one that workers have a right to know and the other that they have a need to know. On the first he wrote in part as follows:
Workers no less than capitalists have the right to know the “secrets” of the factory, of the trust, of the whole branch of industry, of the national economy as a whole. First and foremost, banks, heavy industry, and centralized transport should be placed under an observation glass.
As for the need:
The working out of even the most elementary economic plan – from the point of view of the exploited, not the exploiters – is impossible without workers’ control that is, without the penetration of the workers’ eye into all open and concealed springs of capitalist economy. Committees representing individual business enterprises should meet at conferences to choose corresponding committees of trusts, whole branches of industry, economic regions and finally, of national industry as a whole. Thus, workers’ control becomes a school for planned economy. On the basis of the experience of control, the proletariat will prepare itself for direct management of nationalized industry when the hour for the eventuality strikes.
These brief paragraphs demonstrate that Trotsky had something more in mind than how to negotiate a union contract or win a strike. He was interested in the process through which education and self-confidence of the working class develops in constant struggle, at all levels of capitalist production, to the point where the working class is prepared and ready to take over the administration of government in the best interests of the majority of people.
In a section of the Transitional Program, “the alliance of the workers and farmers,” Trotsky addressed the question of price controls:
By falsely citing the “excessive” demands of the workers, the big bourgeoisie skillfully transform the question of commodity prices into a wedge to be driven between the workers and farmers and between the workers and petty bourgeoisie of the cities. The peasant, artisan, small merchant, unlike the industrial worker, office and civil service employee, cannot demand a wage increase corresponding to the increase in prices. The official struggle of the government with high prices is only a deception of the masses. But the farmers, artisans, merchants, in their capacity of consumers, can step into the politics of price-fixing shoulder to shoulder with the workers. To the capitalist’s lamentations about costs of production, of transport and trade, the consumers answer: “Show us your books; we demand control over the fixing of prices.” The organs of this control should be the committees on prices, made up of delegates from the factories, trade unions, cooperatives, farmers’ organizations, the “little man” of the city, housewives, etc. By this means the workers will be able to prove to the farmers that the real reason for high prices is not high wages but the exorbitant profits of the capitalists and the overhead expenses of capitalist anarchy.
Recent experiences teach that workers must be prepared to defend themselves on all fronts, and when possible to take the offensive by exposing the antisocial decisions and self-serving actions of the employers. Nowhere is this more blatant than in the recent rounds of picket line bashing by strikebreakers, company thugs, city police, and state militia. In most such brutal and unprovoked attacks the workers are unprepared to defend themselves. What is happening now is like a rerun of strike battles in the 1920s. Police scatter pickets, beat up and detain strikers; some strikers are arrested, held in contempt of court, fined. Replacement workers and management personnel (strikebreakers) operate the plant under police protection. Strikers are fired and union activity is outlawed under terms of “yellow dog” contracts signed individually by all employees (in modern parlance this is called “decertification” under supervision of the National Labor Relations Board).
In the early 1930s strikers began to develop new defense techniques. One was the sit-down strike which came into general use after its success in the 1937 GM strike in Flint, Michigan. But they also refined and put to good use some traditional practices, the creation of roving pickets and union defense guards. These were special units prepared to discourage scabs and defend in every way possible the mass picket lines.
A strike leadership that is able to deal reasonably with the employers and succeeds in exposing their crude (illegal, antisocial) schemes will not hesitate to call upon the union ranks to defend themselves against physical attacks. In this climate union defense guards are sorted out among the strikers by natural selection and begin to function effectively as special units.
The responsibility of the strike leadership is to explain the need, the complete justification, and the legality of these special defense units. Workers have no need to violate the basic principles of the Bill of Rights, but they must challenge those special anti-labor laws that are unjust, discriminatory, and violations of human rights. The best and most effective place to challenge such laws (and court injunctions based on them) is on the picket line. Preparations must be made to defend in the courts all workers who are arrested for exercising their constitutional rights.
Trotsky recognized that improved defense methods by the workers bring countermeasures from the employers. In times of economic crisis and social instability they call out organized right-wing hoodlums and fascist bands. He said, “Scabs and private gunmen in factory plants are the basic nuclei of the fascist army. Strike pickets are the basic nuclei of the proletarian army. This is our point of departure. In connection with every strike and street demonstration, it is imperative to propagate the necessity of creating workers’ groups for self-defense. It is necessary to write this slogan into the program of the revolutionary wing of the trade unions. It is imperative wherever possible, beginning with the youth groups, to organize groups for self-defense, to drill and acquaint them with the use of arms.”
In saying this Trotsky sounded the alarm against further repressive measures by the employers, culminating in fascism. As the economic crisis becomes more acute and workers demand rational production of socially necessary goods through the creation of nonprofit public works projects, and employ other means to meet their most basic needs, the employing class will resort to armed suppression of the unions and other working class organizations. This is in the preparatory stage today in the U.S. in the form of fascist-type organizations and caches of arms taken (in some cases) from U.S. army arsenals. Most recently the hooded Ku Klux Klan marched through the streets of Greensboro, North Carolina. Such demonstrations are omens of the coming struggle. The preparation of the working class for future battles in defense of democratic rights begins with the organization of union defense guards.
The struggle against imperialist war is the only form of mass action in which working class internationalism is being expressed in this country today. Opposition to U.S. intervention in Nicaragua and elsewhere in Central America, and hatred of apartheid in South Africa (in which U.S. imperialism is complicit) are expressed in many ways by millions throughout the world. These issues touch large sectors of the U.S. working class. The government is perceived as engaged in immoral pursuits. Also the bloated military budget is hurting the economy. These considerations impelled influential sections of the established churches and embattled unions to call antiwar demonstrations earlier this year, on April 25, in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco. An estimated 200 thousand people responded, including many union members.
The purpose of these demonstrations was to influence the government to change its militaristic policies and to weaken the Reagan administration. The radical movement helped build them and for the most part endorsed both the stated and implied aims.
Working class internationalism goes beyond these kinds of mass actions. It entails the conscious recognition that workers and poor peoples of all countries are victimized by the world system of capitalism, that they must unite to free themselves from this oppressive and destructive system.
The socially valuable accomplishments of these recent antiwar demonstrations are recorded in the rising level of political consciousness that they help generate. A higher percentage of workers and union members participated last April than previously, and this serves to give these workers a better sense of the potential power of their unions. The left wing in the union movement is strengthened as a result.
This emerging left wing will build its forces by challenging the chauvinistic policies of the union bureaucracy (especially its “Buy America” campaign), and by developing its program to meet the immediate needs of the working people in this country. More antiwar demonstrations, if success fully organized to bring out masses of people as was done last April, will help advance the cause of the working class here and throughout the world.
The struggle against the impending global war, as envisioned by Trotsky (in 1938 World War II was imminent), would be a training ground for working class control of society. In the section on “the struggle against imperialism and war” in the Transitional Program, he listed several demands that develop self-confidence, help safeguard the political independence of the working class, and prepare it to assume the responsibilities of government.
These demands are quoted verbatim from the Transitional Program. They derive from the political experience and lessons of the class struggle from the beginning of the 20th century, including the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and the tragic ascendancy of fascism in Germany and Spain in the 1930s.
This set of demands does not constitute appropriate slogans for antiwar demonstrators today. Nor is it a list of strategic goals that ought to be adopted by the antiwar movement in this or any other country. It is, to the contrary, a programmatic statement of working class internationalism. It states, succinctly, the only protective course of working class action under the most divisive national and international circumstances, i.e., war among nations. Trotsky’s transitional demands for the struggle against imperialist war are a restatement of the political course followed by the Russian Bolsheviks in World War I which hastened the end of the 1914-18 imperialist slaughter and created the first viable working class state.
1) This short introduction to the Transitional Program is limited to that part which seems most obviously useful to activists in the unions and other arenas of the class struggle in the U.S. today. Beyond this the 1938 Transitional Program includes sections on the struggle against imperialism in colonial and semi-colonial countries, and in countries then under fascist rule (Germany and Italy) or controlled by military dictators and warlords (China).
Another section describes the conditions of struggle against the dictatorial Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union, the economic problems and social stratification, the extent and instability of the bureaucracy; and the revolutionary struggle against the bureaucracy for the restoration of soviet democracy. This is useful for an understanding of contemporary events in the Soviet Union.
The central thesis of the Transitional Program and the transitional method (which it embodies) is the international character of capitalist exploitation and the need for workers of all countries to unite in the common cause of self-liberation. In all essential respects this is a restatement of the Communist Manifesto, related to the specific and special needs of the world’s toilers trying to survive under capitalism in the throes of its death agony.
2) The Transitional Program does not completely answer the problems of the U.S. working class. Even though these problems are beginning to be identified and working class demands are now more sharply formulated than in the recent past, the question still remains: How will the needs of the great majority of people be satisfied and how will the demands of the class conscious workers in the union movement be won? Trotsky maintained that the program creates the necessary organization for its fulfillment. That is, appropriate organizational forms are developed to serve specific goals and purposes.
He envisioned the formation of a labor party in the United States and explained it as part of the political process of introducing and applying the transitional program in the class struggle. This closely related question – the labor party question – is presently under discussion within class struggle currents in the union movement. It will be dealt with in future issues of the Bulletin IDOM.
3) Another question that demands further discussion and clarification is the “vanguard party” concept. Will the working class spontaneously create Its own organizations of struggle and in the process develop its own political program to wrest control from the employing class and eventually eliminate class exploitation and oppression? Or must the most advanced and thoughtful sector of the working class create a vanguard party within the political structure of bourgeois society to organize the struggles for emancipation?
One of the propaganda weapons of the rulers in this country is the stereotyped lies used to characterize what they call “Marxism.” In the false picture that they project the vanguard party appears as a secret society of elitist self-seekers trained to trick the working class and use the power of the mass movement to transform society from “democratic” capitalism into “bureaucratic” socialism.
To avoid misunderstanding on this decisive question, the editors of the Bulletin IDOM assert complete agreement with the “vanguard party” concept, essential to the transitional program of the Fourth International. We introduce and recommend this program because it provides the world view and scientific method needed for labor’s answer to the problems of modern society.
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Last updated on 28.12.2002