After Four-Week Lockout in New York

Cuomo, Con Ed Strong-Arm Union into Concessions

On July 26, citing a forecast of severe weather for New York City, Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo intervened to end Consolidated Edison’s 26-day lockout of the 8,500 members of Utility Workers Union of America (UWUA) Local 1-2. Within hours of his announcement that 3,000 union workers would be back on the job for the anticipated storm, Cuomo emerged with Local 1-2 president Harry Farrell and Con Ed CEO Kevin Burke, a tentative contract in hand. The union leadership had pressed for Cuomo’s intervention, and Farrell heaped praise on and even hugged the governor for stepping in. Initial reports indicate that the deal, which union members still have to vote on, guts the pension for new hires and includes other givebacks.

The lockout, a brazen attack on labor, came amid all-sided assaults by capital against the unions, including attempts in various states to outlaw collective bargaining. If Local 1-2 had gone out on strike, instead of being locked out, the reaction from the city rulers and bosses’ state would have been furious and immediate: a hysterical outcry, anti-picket injunctions and the dispatch of squads of cops to Con Ed locations.

When the company threw down the gauntlet to the union, the bureaucrats responded not by mobilizing labor’s social power but rather by reaching out to capitalist Democratic Party politicians and government agencies, such as the Public Service Commission. As a result, Con Ed basically got what it wanted out of the lockout, namely further squeezing its workers to enhance its already enormous profit. Chief among the lessons to draw from the lockout is that if the working class is to struggle in its own interests it must be mobilized independently of the political parties and agencies of the class enemy.

The locked-out workers received widespread sympathy from other unions and wide swaths of the city. Con Ed is widely despised. A 2011 AARP study identified the company as a chief culprit among utilities who routinely cut off gas and electric service to poor and elderly customers—disproportionately black and Latino—who can’t pay their bills. In locking out the highly skilled and safety-conscious UWUA workers amid a deadly summer heat wave, the arrogant utility exposed the sick, the elderly and young children to possible heat stroke and death.

Delegations from other unions repeatedly visited the pickets at Con Ed’s Irving Place headquarters, and a New York State AFL-CIO-sponsored rally drew 4-5,000 people with official union contingents of transit, phone, health care, construction, electrical and government unions as well as groups of teachers and Teamsters. But the potential for some real labor solidarity—reinforcing the picket lines to stop scabs from working—was squandered.

Many workers expressed a determination to fight. At the Bensonhurst substation, where a picket line was set up to block delivery of a transformer, one picketer told WV, “I’ve worked here 30 years and they want to take my pension away? I’m not going down that easily.” A number of union members voiced anger at the company and at Burke, who rakes in $11 million in salary annually. One meter reader, a single mother who brought her child to the picket, adamantly stated of the company: “You have three billion in your pocket. Why can’t you pay me?” But at Bensonhurst and elsewhere throughout the system, the union tops kept the actions of pickets confined to what was considered acceptable to the bourgeois politicians and government officials they were courting.

The picket line is a physical expression of the class line between workers and bosses and a crucial weapon in the class struggle. But over the years the trade-union bureaucracy, which pledges its allegiance to U.S. capitalism and the Democratic Party, has done its level best to eviscerate the understanding that pickets are military formations to stop production and shut down plants. “Picket lines mean don’t cross” is one of the traditions that helped build the CIO industrial unions in this country. Local 1-2, which unites electric, gas and steam plant workers with clerical workers, traces its roots back to a CIO organizing committee in 1938.

At Con Ed, the UWUA tops reinforce the false notion that workers and bosses together constitute a “family.” The retirees, local contractors and others brought in from Alabama and Virginia to work during the lockout were readily denounced as strikebreakers by picketers. But many union members were reluctant to characterize the 5,000 managers as the scabs that they are. The fact is, whether a manager was hired straight out of college or worked his way up through the ranks and can still splice cable does not alter the reality that he now stands on the opposite side of the class line.

Throughout the lockout, utility workers were suspicious that Cuomo was in the pocket of Con Ed. Not only does the governor have close ties to its Board of Directors, but it also came to light that Con Ed had earlier contributed $250,000 to the Committee to Save New York, an anti-labor lash-up of Cuomo supporters. But almost uniformly, workers praised Cuomo’s predecessor, David Paterson, who brokered the 2008 settlement between Con Ed and the union. Then as now, the main issue was the company’s attempt to replace the pension with a 401(k)-like plan. But in 2008 Con Ed dropped the proposal to avoid a possible strike. That hardly makes Paterson a friend of labor. Indeed, he went on at the end of his term to cut the jobs and pensions of state workers, coerce unions into renegotiating contracts and foregoing pay raises, slash state services and jack up SUNY and CUNY tuition.

The Democratic Party is a party that represents the interests of the capitalist ruling class, which owns Con Ed and everything else worth having in this country. The working class needs to fight for a party of its own, one dedicated to eliminating capitalist rule and replacing it with a workers government. That government would replace capitalist production for private profit with socialized production for the benefit of society as a whole.