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	Workers Vanguard No. 1008	14 September 2012

Bitter Defeat of Illinois Caterpillar Strike

Bosses Declare Class War, Union Tops Fold

In a bitter and ominous defeat for labor, on August 17 a 15-week-long strike against the Caterpillar corporation by 780 members of International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) Local Lodge 851 in Joliet, Illinois, ended when workers narrowly voted to accept a draconian contract. With profits at an all-time high, and growing, the construction and mining equipment giant demanded blood, and got almost every drop. Workers hired at the plant before May 2005 will have their wages frozen, while workers hired after that will receive a minuscule one-time 3 percent raise in the six years of the contract. Health care premiums will double, the defined-benefit pension plan will be eliminated, and seniority rights will be weakened. At an August 19 union meeting, several workers told Workers Vanguard salesmen that they were angry about the level of scabbing during the strike. Many have criticized their union representatives for negotiating a rotten contract.

Compounding a decades-long war on labor, resulting in a decline in both the incomes and general well-being of working people, the magnitude and scope of contract concessions demanded by the bosses have accelerated since the beginning of the Great Recession. Strikes have been infrequent (there were only 19 major walkouts in 2011), and those that did not suffer outright defeat served, with rare exception, only to mitigate the extent of the damage. Routs such as the one at Caterpillar are increasingly the rule. Robert Bruno, a professor at the University of Illinois, pointed out that Caterpillar broke the link between a company’s profit and what it pays its workers. He predicted, “Other companies now will follow suit” (Chicago Tribune, 18 August).

The labor movement has been crippled by union leaders who, parroting the bosses, have told their members that sacrifice is needed to assure the continued existence of American industry against foreign competition. This chauvinist appeal has been used to sell givebacks in health insurance coverage, work rules, seniority rights and wage scales. In the 1980s, the corporations mounted an assault on the wages of younger union members by introducing a lower entry-level tier. Wages have since been reduced to near Walmart levels by the infamous “two-tier” system, leading many embittered younger members to call into question the value of unions at all. Caterpillar in 2006 was among the first in major industry to introduce a two-tier wage system that permanently relegates a section of the workforce to the bottom. However, it was the 2008 auto contracts forced upon workers at GM, Ford and Chrysler by UAW top Ron Gettelfinger and the newly elected president Barack Obama—part of the bailout of the auto bosses—that opened the floodgates for two-tier agreements in other union contracts throughout this country.

It used to be commonplace to reassure angry workers that when things got better their sacrifice would be rewarded. That was then. Alongside large-scale and long-term unemployment, corporate profits have, on the average, risen at an annual rate of 4.8 percent over the past three years. Caterpillar is simply rolling in dough, amassing a record $4.9 billion in profits last year, and it topped that rate with a cool $1.7 billion in profits during the second quarter of this year. This is coming right out of the hides of the workers. In the midst of the strike, the Joliet plant manager, Carlos Revilla, claimed that the top-tier workers were paid 34 percent above “market level” and declared: “Paying wages well above market levels makes Joliet uncompetitive” (New York Times, 22 July). In brief, the bosses are aiming for one tier—the lowest wage they can get away with paying.

So much for the fabled goose that lays eggs of gold. As Karl Marx pointed out, the growth of wealth and profits at one pole of the capitalist system (the owners of the means of production) necessitates the growth of misery and want at its other pole (the working class). The left-leaning British Guardian (27 July) offers this grim assessment of the plight of workers: “Human agency consists of two choices: take it or leave it. To want more say in what you do for a living, for how much and under which conditions, and to want the same for others, is crazy.” With considerably less empathy, the Wall Street Journal (17 August) article on the Caterpillar contract said it straight out: “The vote to return to work is the latest sign that unionized employees have little power to buck employers’ demands for concessions.”

Such obituaries were common in the years prior to and at the onset of the Great Depression. In the early 1930s—as now—there were legions of the unemployed supposedly eager to snatch up the jobs of the employed if these dared to resist the bosses’ demands. The labor statesmen of those days agreed to concession after concession and union membership plummeted. But in grinding down those they exploit, the capitalists sow the seeds of class struggle. Seemingly out of nowhere in 1934, massive citywide strikes in Toledo, Minneapolis and San Francisco—all led by reds—erupted. In the years that followed leading up to World War II, there were thousands of strikes and the giant industrial unions of the CIO were forged. Social Security and unemployment benefits, designed to placate the workers, did little to quench the fires of labor militancy.

By 1934 the ferocity of the Depression had abated little. Although there was an uptick in hiring, unemployment continued at record levels. Nevertheless, workers increasingly looked for union organization to end their atomization and desperate circumstances, in the process gravitating toward those with experience in the class struggle for guidance. The historic 1934 Minneapolis truckers strike, which led the way for nationwide expansion of the Teamsters union, was centrally led by Trotskyist militants. As James P. Cannon recounted in The History of American Trotskyism (1944):

“Trotskyism introduced into all the plans and preparations of the union and the strike, from beginning to end, the class line of militancy; not as a subjective reaction—that is seen in every strike—but as a deliberate policy based on the theory of class struggle, that you can’t win anything from the bosses unless you have the will to fight for it and the strength to take it.”

The essence of this message resonated throughout the country. Using the means at their disposal—from facing down the scabs and their armed guardians, the police, to seizing the plants—the workers shut down production. Nothing came out of the struck factories and no one went in to replace the strikers. For the most part, the bosses were forced to accede to the workers’ main demands. Throughout this tumultuous period, the union tops, with few exceptions, maintained their ties and allegiance to the Democratic Party, which no less than the Republicans is a party of the capitalist class. But the workers’ increasing militancy challenged labor’s ties to the Democrats, with many considering moving to form some sort of labor party.

The reformist Communist Party, which led thousands of the most militant workers and influenced a number of unions, sidetracked that impulse by all but explicitly throwing its support to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1936 presidential election. This was the American version of the Stalinist “popular front” policy, which sought to find allies for the Soviet Union among the “good” imperialists. Within five years, U.S. workers were drawn into the interimperialist World War II, killing their class brothers on the battlefields of Europe and Asia, just as two and a half decades before their fathers and uncles were mobilized through patriotic calls to join in the fratricidal carnage of WWI.

At the end of World War II, the victorious U.S. imperialists launched the Cold War against the USSR, the homeland of proletarian revolution. Simultaneously they employed their “America first” supporters in the trade-union bureaucracy to drive the reds out of the union movement. That helped set off, from the mid 1950s to today, a fairly steady decline in membership to the current dismal levels.

The grinding exploitation of the profit-driven capitalist system will again goad the workers into action. To end capitalism’s depredations, such militancy requires a class-struggle leadership to forge a revolutionary proletarian party to overturn through socialist revolution the American imperialist behemoth, the main enemy of all the world’s working and oppressed people.