Labor Tops Sell Out Militant Supermarket Workers
UFCW Strike and Class Struggle in America
Break with the Democrats! For a Workers Party!
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 821 and 822, 5 and 19 March 2004.
LOS ANGELES, March 2—After a five-month-long bitter struggle against the supermarket bosses (Vons/Safeway, Albertsons and Ralphs/Kroger), nearly 60,000 strikers in the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW) are returning to work with a new contract containing deep concessions. The new contract introduces a two-tier system of wages and benefits, a pernicious scheme to divide union members by pitting them against each other while setting up the existing workforce for victimization by management. One striker expressed a common worry among the majority of grocery workers who are not guaranteed full-time work: "We're going to start losing hours [to lower-paid new hires]." The Los Angeles Times (27 February) predicts, "new, lower-paid hires could be in the majority within a few years."
Workers hired under the new contract will receive lower wages and will have to pay for health care benefits. Those employed before this new contract may face a $5 to $15 per week payment in the third year of the contract. And co-payment will now be required of all workers for medical services. Moreover, "first tier" workers will be knocked down to "second tier" status if they transfer from one department to another, such as if a deli worker becomes a cashier. Additionally, wages are frozen for the duration of the new three-year contract, with workers getting only two paltry lump-sum payments. Workers are also outraged by the requirement that they each submit a grossly insulting "Request to Return to Work" form. Although scabs cannot be retained in place of striking workers, the implication behind this is the threat of layoffs. To add insult to injury, the supermarket chains are blaming the strike for "poor-performing locations" that may get closed down, resulting in potentially thousands being laid off.
The responsibility for this defeat lies squarely at the feet of the trade-union bureaucracy. The workers fought like hell, including several times defying the treachery of the bureaucrats. But as we wrote in "UFCW Strike: A Battle for All Labor" (WV No. 819, 6 February): "What is most importantly posed for the UFCW to succeed in its struggle against the supermarket bosses is the national extension of the strike." As a UFCW member at the Pasadena strike vote told Workers Vanguard, "It's like you said, we should have shut everything down and made it a national strike."
But with tens of thousands of UFCW members working under extended contracts that already expired and with the contracts of more than 280,000 grocery workers in eleven states expiring in coming months, the labor tops did everything in their power to isolate the Southern California workers by refusing to spread the strike. In Arizona, some 15,000 UFCW members were kept on the job by the bureaucracy under an indefinite contract extension. In Southern California, the 5,700 UFCW workers at 101 Food 4 Less stores (a Kroger subsidiary) should have been out from the beginning. Instead, even though their contract was set to expire February 28 and their health care benefits are determined by the master contract of the UFCW workers on strike, the union tops kept Food 4 Less workers on the job, extending their contract to April 4.
Faced with a long, drawn-out battle and a leadership opposed to doing what's needed to win, most UFCW members voted for the contract with bitter resignation. As one worker put it, "We're tired and broke." Nonetheless, some 14 percent voted no. It is beyond grotesque that having shafted the workers, the president of the UFCW International, Doug Dority, has the audacity to claim that this was "one of the most successful strikes in history." The reality was captured by a striker who explained, "Just when we're starting to hurt them, the union caves."
Despite the betrayals of their leadership, UFCW members can be proud that they stood their ground and remained unified on the picket lines, defiant and unbroken in the face of the grocery bosses' concerted attacks. The UFCW strike was a powerful display of the social power of the working class and it could have gone the other way. The strike was bolstered by a massive outpouring of labor support from other unions that raised money for the UFCW strike fund and joined in strike support rallies; on November 10, the ILWU longshore union shut down L.A.-area ports for eight hours in solidarity with the UFCW strike. In a huge display of labor power, some 20,000 workers turned out on January 31 for a strike rally in Inglewood. However, these numbers were not mobilized on the picket lines—where it counts—to shut down the stores and grocery distribution centers. As one striker told WV, "We could have shut down the distribution centers. The Teamsters didn't have to wait a month to back us. I can't understand why the picket lines were taken down from Ralphs."
Dozens of strike militants and their supporters were arrested on the picket lines. The union bureaucracy devised civil disobedience actions involving clergy and politicians as a diversion, but workers endeavored to turn these actions into real displays of union power to close the stores. In mid-January, 15 picketers were arrested at a Vons store in Garden Grove for defending their picket line during a protest rally that drew 1,200 strike supporters. More than three dozen protesters were arrested on February 19 for briefly blocking entrances at four Vons stores in Los Angeles, Santa Monica, San Pedro and Mission Viejo. Many arrested workers still face charges ranging from "trespassing" to allegations of attacks on scabs. The entire labor movement must join the UFCW to demand: Drop all the charges! No reprisals against strike militants!
UFCW Local 770 president Rick Icaza recently said, "I felt that by having that relationship...we had passed the era of a need for strikes. I thought those days were over." The union misleaders' entire strategy rests on a program of class collaboration, a purely electoral and legalistic strategy of lobbying for pro-labor legislation and herding votes for the Democrats. Dority described the strike as "successful" because it "sounded the alarm that the American health care system is ready to collapse"—i.e., the strike was a pressure tactic to "demand that every candidate for office commits to comprehensive, affordable health insurance for every working family" (UFCW press statement, 27 February).
It is important to underscore that the UFCW strikers are going back to work with their union still intact, having persevered against a vicious opponent and fighting with one hand tied behind their backs. But the outcome of this strike is a bitter setback—the labor tops going all the way up to the AFL-CIO leadership not only betrayed the UFCW workers, but all of labor. What is vital is for the working class to draw the lessons of the UFCW strike.
This strike—both the courageous determination of the workers and the venal treachery of the bureaucrats—underlined in the most stark terms the necessity of fighting for a new leadership in the unions. The unions are mass organizations of workers to defend their economic interests against the capitalists; but to consistently fulfill that role they must be led by a class-struggle, anti-capitalist leadership that understands that the interests of the workers and the capitalists are counterposed. We print below part one of a January 31 forum by Spartacist League speaker Steve Henderson. He explains that the road to victory lies in mobilizing labor's power independently of, and in opposition to, the Democratic and Republican parties. Working people need a party that fights for their class interests, a workers party committed to overturning this whole system of capitalist exploitation and racist oppression.
Part One
After 16 weeks on the picket lines in the longest strike in UFCW history, determined grocery workers are still hanging tough. And working people across the country are closely watching this labor showdown because they know the outcome will shape their future and that of their children. Millions are without health coverage and even more are one paycheck away from a family medical and financial catastrophe. The grocery bosses want to effectively eliminate medical benefits, slash wages and pensions, and smash the union. If they get away with it, it will set the standard for capitalist takebacks and union-busting efforts across the country. But if, on the other hand, the grocery workers win, it could be the springboard for union organizing and a labor offensive against America's arrogant capitalist rulers. The stakes are high and this strike can win. But it will take the mobilization of labor's power on a national scale.
Despite porous picket lines and the union bureaucrats' sabotage of efforts to shut down the distribution centers, the strike is having an economic impact on the grocery corporations' revenues in Southern California. But there must be a fight to spread the strike nationally and to shut down grocery operations in order to make a major dent in the grocery giants' overall profits. And in order for the strikers to hang on long enough to win, the labor movement has to immediately send money to replenish the strike fund—the strikers can't live on air. The main political obstacle to waging this kind of class-struggle fight and mobilizing the full resources of labor against the bosses is the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy, from the local level on up to the national AFL-CIO leadership of John Sweeney, Richard Trumka and the rest.
The outbreak of widespread and widely popular class struggle is a welcome change and the necessary response to the capitalists' "war on terror," which in fact is a war on workers and the oppressed here and internationally. Many here will remember the New Jersey teachers vilified as agents of the Taliban for daring to strike after September 11. But it was not just America's capitalist rulers and their politicians who used September 11 to push the lie of the bosses' "national unity." The top echelons of organized labor loudly added their voice to the government's patriotic propaganda barrage. Shortly after September 11, AFL-CIO president John Sweeney proclaimed: "We are solidly behind the president and our troops in the field and we will remain so until worldwide terrorism is eradicated" (speech to Florida Alliance for Retired Americans, AFL-CIO Web site, 16 October 2001).
Some local labor leaders, reflecting growing disaffection especially among black and minority unionists, opposed the war in Afghanistan and later Iraq. But they did not do so on a class-struggle basis. Instead, the liberal and reformist leaders of the short-lived antiwar movement proclaimed that "peace is patriotic," pushed illusions in UN-sanctioned imperialist intervention, and mainly sought to channel popular discontent into an anti-Bush campaign to benefit the Democratic Party of imperialism and war leading up to the 2004 elections. In the antiwar protests we put forward a perspective for working-class struggle against capitalism and its wars, and we told a basic truth: the only way to end imperialist wars is through international socialist revolution. We called for the defense of Afghanistan and Iraq against U.S. imperialist attack. And we called for class struggle against the U.S. capitalist rulers!
For socialists it is a given that those who embrace the aims of imperialist capitalism abroad are incapable of effectively defending the interests of labor and the oppressed at home. The bourgeois triumphalism and capitalist arrogance in the wake of U.S. imperialism's easy wins in Afghanistan and Iraq set the stage for the bosses today telling grocery workers to drop dead, the continuing attacks on immigrants, the L.A. cop and FBI raids on black housing projects and the police sweeps of downtown L.A. homeless encampments, the threats to shut down King/Drew hospital which serves South Central.
In the case of the grocery strike, the connection is direct: Safeway CEO Steven Burd was appointed by "Homeland Security" czar Tom Ridge to a high-level private sector advisory committee in December, while in the Bay Area, agents from the Contra Costa sheriff's homeland security detail recently visited a local union hall to intimidate labor officials planning protests near Burd's home. That the "war on terror" is a war on workers and the oppressed should be clear.
Pro-imperialist labor bureaucrats like John Sweeney argue that with a Democrat in the White House, there can be both guns and butter, imperialist war abroad and domestic prosperity at home. Well, with the Clinton administration there was the blockade of Iraq, the invasions of Haiti and Somalia, the terror bombing and destruction of Serbia—so there was plenty of imperialist war. Domestically, the Democrats abolished welfare, built more prisons and more fences on the Mexican-American border, strengthened the death penalty, and put more cops on the street. During the '90s economic boom, unions still declined, immigrants were used, abused and thrown out of the country, and the conditions for blacks in the ghettos became even more hellish. Sweeney's "America First" perspective of enlisting unions as minor beneficiaries of imperialist plunder is not only poisonous national chauvinism but a lie. The same capitalist rulers—Democrat and Republican—who are waging war abroad are waging war at home against immigrants, blacks and minorities, and the entire labor movement.
So this is the political context in which the strikes and lockouts are taking place. This talk focuses more on the continuing grocery strike, but our first article in Workers Vanguard on the strike wave here in Southern California was titled "L.A. Strike City" (WV No. 812, 24 October 2003). There is a reason why L.A. has over the past several years been called the strike capital of the U.S. It has a very large immigrant workforce and many come to this country with a higher level of political consciousness and more militant traditions of class struggle. Almost 40 percent of the workforce in greater L.A. is Latino, about two-thirds of whom are foreign born. Even with lower rates of unionization among recent arrivals, roughly 14 percent of union members here are Latino immigrants. Moreover, immigrants and ethnic minorities are concentrated in relatively low-wage jobs. These workers do not accept the current state of affairs in which the unions are increasingly job trusts resting on the gains of the past, but expect them to act as instruments of struggle to better their lives.
Back in October the maintenance workers in the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) shut down L.A. transit, striking to defend their medical benefits, and the bus drivers union, also in contract negotiations, was honoring their picket lines. SEIU Local 660—representing 50,000 L.A. and Orange County public workers —was working without a contract and health care benefits were again the main issue in dispute. There was the possibility here for key unions in Southern California to link up in strike action, which would have created a serious political problem for the bourgeoisie and could have forced favorable settlements for all the unions.
But the SEIU leadership refused to strike and instead made compromises over wages and health care benefits, avoiding a confrontation with the Democratic Party administrations running local government here. The ATU leadership followed the lead of so-called "friends of labor" Democrats like Antonio Villaraigosa, who simply wanted to diffuse a hot political situation. They scuttled the transit strike after one month and sent the membership back to work with no agreement on health care, leaving it to a pro-company "mediation" committee to decide the fate of the union's medical benefits. A favorable opportunity for class struggle was thus betrayed on behalf of the Democratic Party.
If unions are to start winning some strikes, a central lesson here is the need for the unconditional independence of labor from the bosses' government and the bosses' political parties—both Democratic and Republican. And this includes the bourgeois Green Party, as well. We need our own party, a revolutionary workers party that acts as a tribune of all the oppressed and mobilizes labor's power in class struggle against capitalism and for a socialist future.
Mobilize the Power of Labor!
Today, striking UFCW workers remain locked in a bitter struggle for the very survival of their union. They are faced with the reality that their enemy is at home in the form of bloodsucking and profit-hungry grocery bosses. However, the UFCW leaders have relied essentially on public sympathy for the strikers, along with Democratic Party-dominated rallies, to sway the bosses—which doesn't work. As far as these things go, the consumer boycott has been somewhat successful in Southern California, but even that was undermined when the UFCW took down the picket lines at Ralphs. More importantly, appealing to the general public is not a substitute for labor mobilizing its power to shut down production and distribution, and crucially, to spread the strike. Now the strike fund is almost depleted. Strike pay is down to $100-150 per week, many strikers have had their medical coverage lapse, and all are facing great personal hardship. Although scabbing by UFCW members is not widespread, some demoralized elements have returned to work.
Now Sweeney's AFL-CIO leadership has announced it's taking over "national strategy" for the strike. So what's happened and what is the way forward? Well, let's start by telling the truth so that workers can forge a leadership in the unions based on a Marxist understanding and class-struggle program.
According to a recent article in the Los Angeles Times (22 January), local union leaders said they were blindsided in the negotiations by the depth of the cuts demanded by the supermarket giants and that they subsequently underestimated the ability of the three chains to stay united against the workers. That they underestimated management's resolve is obvious, but this is largely self-justification and abdicating responsibility for their failed strategies and refusal to wage hard class struggle. A year before this strike began, the national UFCW leaders met with the corporate CEOs in preparation for the contract negotiations that would soon be taking place piecemeal by locals across the country. They walked away from this meeting knowing that the grocery bosses would demand massive concessions. Instead of mobilizing the combined national strength of the union, each region was left to negotiate separately.
When the strike dragged on here in Southern California, the local union tops offered $500 million in concessions, assuming such a huge giveback would end the strike. But the grocery bosses are out for blood and they rejected it. The basic underlying problem is that the union misleaders accept and defend the capitalist system. They routinely sign "compromise" contracts laden with concessions in order to keep class peace, and then are utterly disarmed when the bosses really decide to play hardball and demand total capitulation—it's been one-sided class war.
Many strikers are frustrated and angry with the leadership and the way it has run the strike. There is widespread bitterness that the pickets were taken down at Ralphs, which is sharing its windfall profits with the other chains in an act of capitalist solidarity. Union militants want a solid strike. That the regional food distribution centers, which are mainly organized by the Teamsters, were picketed at all is testament to the pressure from the Teamsters ranks against the resistance of their leadership. They understand that if the UFCW loses, they'll be targeted next year when their contract expires. But these efforts at union solidarity have been repeatedly sabotaged; the Teamsters tops have again sent their members back to work and the UFCW has dismantled the pickets at Teamsters warehouses. At the El Monte distribution center, where UFCW members worked as meat cutters, strikers have defiantly refused to take down their lines and Teamsters are still honoring them, but that is the exception.
So what are our political opponents on the left saying about all this? The Workers World Party has shamelessly supported the UFCW misleaders' every move, in particular their decision to take down the pickets at Ralphs. The International Socialist Organization (ISO) also alibis the bureaucrats, calling the decision a "strategic blunder." In an ISO article titled "How Can the UFCW Win?" (Socialist Worker online, 23 January), the author said he "respectfully" asked a UFCW official at a support meeting to "be willing to acknowledge a mistaken strategy and move on to shutting down the stores...." But the decision was not some error; it flowed from the bureaucracy's class-collaborationist program. And this is what the ISO avoids saying, because at bottom they seek to be "left" advisers to one or another "progressive" wing of the bureaucracy. The ISO even lavishes praise on pro-Democratic Party labor sellouts like Miguel Contreras, who brokered the deal between Antonio Villaraigosa and ATU president Neil Silver to scuttle the transit strike. One UFCW striker who read our paper, Workers Vanguard, and the ISO's Socialist Worker told us she liked the ISO because they are "less Marxist." Well, I'm sorry she doesn't agree with Marxism and I'd like to convince her otherwise, but she's certainly correct in her assessment of the ISO.
Now that the UFCW's back is up against the wall, the AFL-CIO national leadership has stepped in, with secretary-treasurer Richard Trumka running "national strategy." It's no accident that the AFL-CIO leadership was all over the FTAA protests in Florida, because that's where they can push their protectionist program in the guise of opposing sweatshops. Yet for months they completely ignored the class struggle at home with the UFCW strikes. The AFL-CIO tops want to blame foreign labor, but when American workers go on strike the bureaucrats have done virtually nothing.
This strike needs to squeeze the grocery chains' flow of profit, because Wall Street investors vote with their pocketbook, not their "conscience." The grocery giants are taking a hit in Southern California, but they have nationwide operations that give them a significant buffer. The AFL-CIO is planning a few informational pickets at some stores around the country, asking for a consumer boycott, rather than decisively spreading the strike to really hurt business operations nationally. The UFCW has already settled strikes in some regions. It should have been "one out, all out"—until everyone has a contract. But there are still many locals with contracts already expired or in negotiations (Arizona, Indianapolis and Seattle) or coming up in the next few months (Denver, Chicago, Washington, Las Vegas and Northern California). So spreading the strike is both necessary and still possible.
However, instead of class struggle Trumka is heading up a "corporate campaign" to embarrass and morally shame the CEOs, while also trying to convince pension funds with large stock investments in Safeway and the other chains to pressure management to settle. This is a diversion which has served to alibi the union tops after they've run a strike into the ground. Many strikers will see any action called by the labor movement as an opportunity to press their demands, which can sometimes go beyond what the leaders have in mind. What's clear is that the union tops are feeling a lot of pressure from the base to do something, and that unionists know the strike is not over and they want to fight to win. This provides Marxists with the opportunity to say what needs to be done and why the bureaucrats aren't doing it.
Without money the strikers will become increasingly hard pressed. A recent AFL-CIO strategy session resulted in an initial pledge, according to Trumka, of over $600,000. Compared to what's needed, that's chump change: do the math, $10 per striker. Millions of unionists across the country would gladly see their dues go to win this strike. Now the L.A. longshore locals alone have donated $155,000 and promise to raise $1 million for continued medical benefits, which is a good thing and should be the beginning of much more to come to aid the strikers. But this too is a political question. The national AFL-CIO already has umpteen millions sitting in PAC funds designated for lobbyists and Democratic Party politicians who represent the class enemy. $56 million went for Gore in 2000. Who knows how much is socked away this year for the Democratic candidate? In California alone, the state federation of labor dumped millions into former governor Gray Davis' anti-recall campaign. So the money is already there—but will it be used for class collaboration and capitalist electoral politics, or will it further the class struggle and help win this strike?
Militant tactics and even a broader national strike strategy are not a guarantee of victory, even if the grocery strike were led by class-struggle Marxists. But class struggle is the only way workers have won—or held on to—significant gains. The problem is that the present union leaders consciously restrict their aims, and therefore their tactics, to what is acceptable to the capitalists—even when they occasionally do win a strike. On the other side of this battle, the supermarket owners are totally committed to their class interests. And the issues in this grocery strike—health care, pensions and the attempt to force two-tier wage takebacks—have important implications for the rest of the bourgeoisie. They will quickly unite to demand strikebreaking intervention by their government if faced with hard working-class struggle. So workers need to be politically prepared for what they are up against.
The Class Nature of the Capitalist State
A BusinessWeek article a few years ago reported that the number of workers who would join a union if they could has doubled since 1984. If even half of those were unionized, organized labor would represent 35 percent of the workforce, the same share as its peak in 1945. This would cost employers hundreds of billions of dollars in increased wages and benefits. That's why union-busting is a billion-dollar industry and it's what the capitalists are looking to do in this grocery strike.
Trumka, who was one of the main advocates of the "corporate campaign" strategy during a string of losing strikes in the 1980s, said in a recent interview, "We have our work cut out for us, but I predict that three months from now, there will be a whole different attitude out there" (Los Angeles Times, 20 January). Well, the real question is: three months from now, what will have happened to the strikers out there? Workers and their allies need to understand the history and real treachery underlying the "corporate campaign." When Sweeney and Trumka took over the leadership of the AFL-CIO in 1995, they promised to bring back the "militancy" of labor's past. But in fact what they meant was not the powerful strike struggles that built the unions in the 1930s, but instead civil disobedience tactics and "corporate campaigns" appealing to the capitalists' "moral conscience"—mass rallies with preachers and Democrats instead of mass picket lines to shut down production, pacifist civil disobedience instead of sit-down strikes, consumer boycotts instead of secondary labor boycotts by transport workers who declare struck goods "hot cargo."
Epitomizing this layer of "corporate campaign" bureaucrats is AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer Richard Trumka, the former head of the United Mine Workers. What's his history? Trumka entered the UMW bureaucracy on the coattails of Arnold Miller, who was elected through a Labor Department-supervised election in 1972. As the government's and Democratic Party's man in the union, Arnold Miller later betrayed the historic 110-day miners strike of 1978. To distance himself from the despised Miller, who was forced to resign in 1979, Trumka went back to the mines, cultivated a machine, and was elected president of the UMWA in 1982. He went on to perfect the art of keeping his historically militant membership hogtied by bowing to every rule in the bosses' strikebreaking arsenal. With a lawyer's flair, he worked his way up the AFL-CIO bureaucracy by mouthing support for "civil disobedience" while calling off mine occupations, like at Pittston's Moss No. 3 Plant in 1989, and letting strike militants like Jerry Dale Lowe be jailed. (See "An Injury to One Is an Injury to All!" WV No. 814, 21 November 2003.) After two decades of such government-orchestrated "democracy," the Mine Workers are now a shadow of a once-powerful union.
"Corporate campaigns" have been the death knell for hard-fought strikes ranging from the Hormel strike of UFCW meatpackers in 1985-86 to the Detroit newspaper strike in 1995. One Detroit strike activist at the time pointedly asked: Why do strike leaders think it's OK to illegally sit in the roadway and get arrested but not to illegally build mass pickets and stop the scabs? (See WV No. 632, "Labor: Stop Playing by the Bosses' Rules!".) It's not about legality per se—there's a political reason the bureaucrats bow to the bosses' laws against effective strike tactics.
Civil disobedience is particularly suited to their aims because it is an impotent moral appeal to the capitalists and respectable "public opinion" which avoids any working-class threat to the capitalists' property rights and prerogatives. The pro-capitalist union bureaucrats do not want to unleash labor's social power, for fear that in the course of struggle the working class might challenge the framework of capitalism. For example, writing about the explosive sit-down strikes of the 1930s, the Bolshevik revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky noted in the 1938 Transitional Program: "Sit-down strikes...go beyond the limits of ‘normal' capitalist procedure. Independently of the demands of the strikers, the temporary seizure of factories deals a blow to the idol, capitalist property. Every sit-down strike poses in a practical manner the question of who is boss of the factory: the capitalist or the workers?" This is the question writ large that the trade-union bureaucrats, who now consider strikes passé, want to avoid. It's ultimately the question of capitalist reform vs. workers revolution.
The turn of the century American socialist and labor leader Daniel De Leon described the conservative trade-union leaders as the "labor lieutenants of capital." Their aim is not the elimination of capitalism, but to "make capitalism work"—which is a common liberal view in America. If certain capitalists just weren't so greedy, we could all get along. The capitalists are typically divided into "good" and "bad" actors: whether it's parasitic financiers vs. productive industrialists, or the 1980s version of Wall Street raiders vs. "warm-hearted" factory owners fighting off hostile takeovers, or the current "socially responsible" local companies vs. supposedly all-powerful international corporations beholden to no one. Or, in this strike, the "good" Kroger CEO vs. the "bad" Safeway CEO. In all these cases, the proponents of reforming capitalism make a qualitative distinction between different capitalists that doesn't really exist. Capitalism is based on a system of production in which maximizing profit, through the exploitation of labor, is the goal. Since profit is derived by paying workers less in wages than the value they add to a product or a service through their labor, with the "surplus value" being pocketed by the capitalist, the most basic way to increase profits is by lowering wages.
The trade-union tops demand a "fair" wage, but wages are not determined by fairness. Capitalists seek to drive wages toward the minimum amount needed to keep the workers physically and mentally able to do the work, as well as raise the next generation. Workers inevitably resist and seek better terms of exploitation, which is why they form unions. The terms of capitalist exploitation—also known as wages, benefits and working conditions—are ultimately determined by the class struggle, which is what today's union leaders wish to avoid.
Part Two
We print below the conclusion of a January 31 Spartacist League forum given in Los Angeles by Steve Henderson on the recently concluded strike of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union in Southern California; Part One of this talk appeared in Workers Vanguard No. 821 (5 March). The UFCW strikers waged a hard, determined class battle for five long months despite a series of betrayals by their trade-union tops. The workers returned to work in early March under a new contract that gave the supermarket bosses most of what they were gunning for, including the creation of a new two-tier system of wages and benefits. The responsibility for this defeat lies squarely at the feet of the trade-union bureaucracy. Although Henderson spoke before the outcome of the UFCW strike had been determined, he laid out the political lessons of the strike and proposed a way forward. Learning these lessons is crucial in order to prepare for and win future class battles, and particularly so for the 50,000 UFCW workers in Northern California whose contracts expire in July and September.
How, if not through class struggle, do the trade-union tops propose to get workers a supposedly "fair" wage? I've already mentioned the "corporate campaign" moral appeals to stockholders. But more fundamentally, they look to the American government to police the capitalists and limit corporate "excess," and at the same time call for protectionist measures to make "their" national capitalists more competitive internationally so they can get some of the "trickle-down." In the eyes of the bureaucracy of the trade-union movement, the chief task lies in "freeing" the government from the clutches of the capitalists and pulling it over to their side. And they try to do this by demonstrating to the "democratic" state that they are "reasonable" labor statesmen and by showing in word and deed just how reliable and indispensable they are in peacetime and especially in time of war.
In reality, the government is not some neutral institution—it is the administrative organ and executive committee which serves the capitalist class. It runs the capitalist state—the bosses' repressive apparatus made up at its core of the military, the cops, the courts and the prisons—all of which enforce capitalist rule.
Unlike our reformist and liberal political opponents, ranging from the fake socialists of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) to liberal trade-union bureaucrats, we Marxists are for the complete and unconditional independence of the trade unions in relation to the capitalist state. You can't successfully wage class struggle if the capitalist government is controlling your union.
The political expression of the reformists' reliance on the government is their support to pro-Democratic Party "lesser evilism." They argue that Bush and the Republicans represent "corporate greed" while the Democrats, while not perfect, can be pressured to represent workers, the oppressed and the poor. Much of the liberal mythology in America regarding the possibility of a caring capitalist government and a labor-friendly, "progressive" Democratic Party is based on self-serving lies about Roosevelt's New Deal administration, which is the liberals' model of social reform. AFL-CIO head Sweeney, for example, cites the New Deal as the example of fighting the good war abroad and lifting up working people out of poverty at home. So I want to briefly touch on what happened in the '30s and '40s.
New Deal: Labor's Coalition with Democrats, Dixiecrats
Roosevelt's paltry New Deal reforms were not enacted as return payment for the new CIO unions' electoral support, but to head off an extended period of increasing political radicalization and hard class struggle that brought millions of workers into organized labor. The major strikes of 1934 in Minneapolis, Toledo and San Francisco were all led by reds and paved the way for the later mass organizing drives of the 1930s. Roosevelt's labor laws were not a license to organize. Art Preis, a Trotskyist participant in those struggles, wrote:
"What followed the signing of the NRA [the New Deal's National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933] was not the recognition of labor's rights but the most ferocious assault on American labor in its history.... Hundreds of workers were killed, thousands wounded, tens of thousands arrested or otherwise victimized from 1933 to 1938."
— Art Preis, Labor's Giant Step (Pathfinder Press, 1972)
So how did this workers upsurge which formed mass, integrated industrial unions become chained to a capitalist party? Central responsibility lies with the American Communist Party (CP). Following the Stalinists' turn to "popular front" class collaboration in 1935, the Communist Party union militants who had helped organize the CIO in the 1930s used their considerable political authority to channel this groundswell of class struggle into the dead end of the Democratic Party. Newly radicalized workers had to ask themselves: well, if even the reds are for Roosevelt, how bad can the Democrats be? By 1935, the CP had broken from its revolutionary origins and become a reformist party, seeking to influence a supposedly "progressive" wing of U.S. imperialism. This eventually led them to support the U.S. in World War II, including supporting the internment of Japanese Americans in camps, the no-strike pledge, and dropping the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was the Trotskyists who continued the fight to build a revolutionary proletarian party in this country, but the much larger CP had more social weight in the working class and their reformist politics by and large prevailed. So despite the great militancy of the CIO unions and the political opening for the creation of a workers party, bourgeois ideology was in the end strengthened within the labor movement through the New Deal alliance with the Democratic Party. And what was the result?
Support to Roosevelt meant a renunciation of not only class struggle but all social struggle against America's racist rulers. In America, where capitalism rests on the racial oppression of black people, labor struggle and black struggle will either march forward together, or fall back separately. And support to the New Deal was a betrayal of both. The New Deal put labor in an unholy alliance with not only its liberal class enemies in the North, but with Southern Dixiecrats, to whom Roosevelt gave free rein to wage naked racist terror against blacks and unions. Roosevelt's vice president from 1933-40 was John Nance Garner, a hardline white-supremacist from Texas, an "open shop" state where the union movement scarcely existed.
The New Deal alliance resulted in the crippling of subsequent struggles. In one crucial example, the CIO in 1946 announced a major campaign to organize the South, called "Operation Dixie." The task of organizing the South would have run head-on into "Jim Crow" segregation and the racist oppression of black workers. The necessary fight for integrated unions would have aroused a vicious backlash from Dixiecrats and their fascist auxiliaries in the Ku Klux Klan, in the process blowing apart the New Deal coalition. And amid the witchhunting atmosphere of the anti-Soviet Cold War, the CIO leaders feared the spectre of black workers joining with Communist labor organizers and scuttled "Operation Dixie" after only two years.
Following WWII, American capitalism was the only major imperialist power with its industrial infrastructure left intact, and thus emerged as the unchallenged military and economic power of the capitalist world. The largest strike wave in American history broke out in 1946 by workers seething at the wartime austerity for workers and wartime profiteering for the capitalists. In response, the American bourgeoisie, facing no capitalist competitors internationally and rolling in profits, could afford for some time to placate workers with regular wage increases and the promise of an American Dream. Simultaneously, the government orchestrated the postwar witchhunts which purged the reds from the unions and installed the Cold War anti-communist sellouts whose political heirs still run the unions today. The anti-labor laws which ban effective strike tactics, like the Taft-Hartley Act, were also passed at this time. The Cold War labor leaders ritually denounced these as slave-labor acts, but of course they always complied with them.
During the 1950s and early '60s the treacherous nature of the trade unions' pro-capitalist leadership was partly masked by the fact that American capitalism was still strong enough to raise living standards for a majority of the working class while maintaining a high level of profits. American blacks, of course, never saw the short-lived American Dream—for them it was more the American nightmare. The courageous civil rights movement of the late '50s and early '60s finally defeated Jim Crow segregation in the South and eliminated formal legal inequality, but its liberal program could not overcome the racist oppression of blacks which is the bedrock of American capitalism North and South—the de facto discrimination in jobs, education, housing, health care, and the racist cop and Klan terror that enforces it. The trade-union bureaucracy was largely indifferent to the civil rights struggles in the South and actively hostile to the later black militancy which swept Northern cities, especially when it found expression among Detroit auto workers in the UAW. The bureaucracy's racist defense of the capitalist status quo further divided and weakened the American labor movement.
By the late 1960s—with its profits declining because of an aging industrial infrastructure, increased international competition and the inflationary effects of the Vietnam War—the American bourgeoisie no longer promised prosperity for anyone. The next decade brought stagnating wages followed by a major intensification of the rate of exploitation. Smashing the air traffic controllers union (PATCO) was the signal union-busting event of the 1980s Reagan years. The IAM machinists union, whose members serviced the airplanes, was uniquely situated to shut down the airports and defeat Reagan's frontal assault on the labor movement. But the head of the IAM, William Winpisinger, refused to pull the mechanics out.
It's no accident that, like John Sweeney today, Winpisinger was a prominent leader of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which is composed of pro-capitalist "socialists" operating within the Democratic Party. While such "labor statesmen" complained about Reagan's domestic policy, they fully shared his aims to foment capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. But the anti-Soviet war drive was necessarily combined with a war on labor and blacks at home. And the anti-communist union leaders routinely caved in the face of rampant union-busting. For the last several decades, the trade-union bureaucrats, continually acquiescing to what is "possible" and "practical" under capitalism, presided over the steady decline of organized labor and the increasing immiseration of workers and the oppressed.
For a Multiracial Revolutionary Workers Party!
I spoke of the labor movement's failure to organize the South back in 1946. Well, now the South is coming North after the unions. The grocery giants have all cited non-union Wal-Mart's low wages and benefits as the excuse to gut the UFCW. This is partly a negotiating ploy, since the "big box" stores are only projected to get 1 percent of the Southern California market share in retail food. But the fanatically anti-union corporations like the Arkansas-based Wal-Mart, now the world's largest retailer, are driving down wages and living standards everywhere. Labor needs to organize Wal-Mart workers, starting in those areas already unionized and extending the organizing drive to the South. Though today's union tops often speak at MLK Day assemblies and invoke racial equality, labor officialdom still disdains the hard class struggle it will take to organize integrated unions in the South, where "right to work" laws are backed up by racist Klan terror.
But it's not just in the South. When fascist skinheads attacked black and Latino grocery strikers last November, the union needed to organize picket defense guards, drawing in all of Southern California labor and the minorities and immigrants who bear the brunt of fascist terror. But the UFCW leadership did nothing. In the face of similar fascist provocations over the years in major cities, the SL and Partisan Defense Committee have initiated mass labor/black mobilizations—drawing on the social power of trade unions—to stop the KKK and Nazis. This is what a fighting labor movement led by a class-struggle workers party would do, championing the cause of all the oppressed, combatting every manifestation of anti-black racism and demanding full citizenship rights for all immigrants.
Organizing Wal-Mart will require the active defense of immigrant rights. Two weeks into the UFCW grocery strike, "Homeland Security" federal agents raided 60 Wal-Mart stores and rounded up more than 250 undocumented immigrant workers. We said: Free the rounded-up Wal-Mart workers! No deportations! But the UFCW leadership, which says it wants to organize Wal-Mart, has done nothing to mobilize the unions on their behalf. By rising to the defense of these immigrant workers, the UFCW would be mobilizing in defense of all Wal-Mart workers, undercutting the company's rabidly anti-union maneuvers and facilitating organizing efforts.
In 2000, the AFL-CIO finally dropped its opposition to a limited amnesty for immigrants, but it still demands government action to stop the flow of "illegals" and pushes protectionist poison, such as opposition to Mexican truckers, which ultimately targets foreign workers and immigrants. The UFCW, which has a relatively large immigrant membership concentrated in the food processing industry (much of which is located in the South), says it wants to organize all workers regardless of origin. But the union ludicrously wants the government's stamp of approval and complains: "Too often, it appears to workers that INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] is a partner, intentionally or not, with employers in the exploitation of immigrant labor and the suppression of workers rights. INS seems to show up more often during an organizing campaign or a strike situation" (UFCW Web site, "Where We Stand"). It doesn't just seem that way, it is that way. But the UFCW bureaucrats can't even say straight out that the INS is racist and anti-labor, because that would implicate every governmental enforcement agency that they rely on. And it would certainly expose the Sweeney bureaucracy's criminal policy of "organizing" the cops, prison guards and security guards who are paid to repress working people, immigrants and minorities.
Unfortunately, instead of union organizing, the bureaucracy's Wal-Mart campaign is based on poisonous appeals to protectionism. The labor misleaders blame cheap foreign labor and demand U.S. imperialist-enforced "labor standards" as a mechanism to invoke tariffs. In the case of Wal-Mart, the bureaucracy's tirades are directed mainly against mainland China. Wal-Mart is one of the largest buyers of China's growing export goods, which are largely produced in the Special Economic Zones (SEZs) by firms usually owned at least in part by outside capitalists. The AFL-CIO misleaders' anti-Communist China-bashing consciously serves the American bourgeoisie's counterrevolutionary crusade to fully open up China to capitalist exploitation and turn it into one giant sweatshop.
China is a bureaucratically deformed workers state where capitalism was overthrown as a result of the 1949 Revolution and whose core economy is still based on nationalized property. Just as workers defend their unions—despite sellout leadership—against the bosses, workers must defend China against imperialist-backed counterrevolution despite the Chinese bureaucracy's accommodation to capitalism. The American trade-union bureaucracy's hostility to China is based on visceral anti-Communism, with the added convenience of scapegoating a "foreign enemy" for the loss of American manufacturing jobs instead of fighting capitalism at home.
Most of the articles I've read on China's sweatshops are about foreign-owned factories in the SEZs. These private factories are deliberately conflated or confused with state-owned enterprises, with the assertion that China has gone capitalist or is heading to capitalism. But, in fact, China's fate has not yet been decided. The Chinese working class must sweep away the Stalinist bureaucracy, which has gravely weakened the system of nationalized property internally while conciliating imperialism at the international level. We stand for a proletarian political revolution—to defend and extend the gains of the workers state, i.e., the planned economy and collectivized property, while also placing political power directly in the hands of workers and peasants councils. This could inspire proletarian socialist revolution in the capitalist countries throughout Asia, including the industrial powerhouse of Japan.
A few of the more honest newspaper accounts tacitly concede that in fact collectivized property benefits China's workers and peasants. Here's a few quotes from a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, comparing workers in the private factories to those in state enterprises:
"They are more likely to work for private companies, often backed by foreign investment, with no socialist tradition of cradle-to-grave benefits."
And:
"In private factories where migrants often work, managers are primarily concerned about profit. By contrast, despite new market pressures, managers of state factories in China often resemble political leaders, responsible for the overall welfare of their workers."
—Washington Post, 13 May 2002
"Market reforms have undermined the socialist health care system that once covered 90 percent of China's population. In its place has emerged a jungle of a medical system in which many workers are receiving inferior care, at higher costs, with little or no insurance."
— Washington Post, 4 August 2002
What the pro-capitalist union bureaucrats and their reformist apologists can't stand is that a collectivized economy with centralized planning—in which production is for human need, not for profit—is the real solution for the world's working people. Such an economy must be established on an international scale, particularly tapping the vast productive resources of the United States, Western Europe and Japan. Tiny Cuba, despite a decades-old U.S. embargo, has been able to provide decent health care to its population, resulting in an infant mortality rate on a par with that of the U.S. and Canada. In America, with its vast wealth and medical technology firmly in the grip of the capitalists, health care has become a crisis of epidemic proportions. As the rates of poverty and unemployment rise, the number of those without health insurance has grown to some 40-45 million nationally. At the same time, Medicare payments are being slashed and millions driven off the welfare rolls. Those not lucky enough to find job-based health insurance are one medical crisis away from a major family catastrophe. And with medical insurance premiums rising at a double-digit pace, this is the first thing employers want to cut.
The irrationality of capitalism is such that the basic needs of life are held hostage to profit. Medical care is denied to improve the capitalists' bottom line. Safeway/Vons CEO Steven Burd declared that the grocers' hardline stance slashing medical benefits and labor costs "is an investment in our future" (Los Angeles Times, 17 October 2003). Well, working people need to fight for a future without capitalism. The only way that immigrants, blacks and all working people can be assured of free, quality medical care is to rip the means of production out of the hands of the capitalist class and put it in the hands of those whose labor builds this society.
That's why we need a revolutionary workers party. As Lenin explained in What Is To Be Done?: "The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness," a form of bourgeois consciousness which accepts the framework of capitalism and limits the struggles of the proletariat to questions of wages and working conditions. The labor bureaucracy is also the medium for the transmission of the social and political prejudices of the more backward layers of the working class. Socialist consciousness can only be brought to the working class from without, through the intervention of a Leninist party, a fusion of intellectual and proletarian elements, which aims to imbue the working class with a Marxist understanding of its historic mission of abolishing capitalism.
The trade-union bureaucracy is the chief obstacle to class struggle in the U.S. Through the instrument of the Democratic Party, they chain the workers to the capitalists and their state. In times of sharp class struggle or imperialist war, the labor bureaucrats become the open political police of the bourgeoisie in the labor movement. It is the task of the revolutionary party to educate the workers so that they can politically oust these misleaders and set the unions on the path of class struggle against the capitalists and their system. In fighting for a victory to the grocery workers strike, we hope you'll also draw the broader lessons of this struggle and join us in the task of building a workers party that fights for socialist revolution.