Unionize Low-Wage Workers!

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU)-initiated Fight for $15 campaign held its first national convention on August 12-13 in Richmond, Virginia. Several thousand young and overwhelmingly black and Latino workers from some 20 industries across the country, including fast food, home health care and airport operations, were bused in for the occasion. Packing the meeting hall and filling the streets in a follow-up march, the boisterous workers expressly wanted to engage in a fight to achieve union representation and end the poverty wages and tenuous employment that are increasingly common for workers—black, white and Latino—in capitalist America. Winning such gains will take serious class battles. But the SEIU bureaucracy, long wedded to the illusion of a partnership of labor and capital, is committed to the opposite course: the lie that the way to advance workers’ interests (here a still-paltry $15 minimum wage) is to lobby capitalist Democratic Party politicians.

Union officials set up the weekend as one big pre-election photo-op for the Democrats, who no less than the Republicans are a party of the capitalist class enemy. In her headline speech, SEIU honcho Mary Kay Henry contended that labor unity “is especially important this year, with this election. We all know that one of the candidates for president is trying to divide us in dangerous and sometimes frightening ways.” Donald Trump is certainly frightening, but Hillary Clinton—the favorite of Wall Street—is no “friend of labor.” Notably, several black workers told Workers Vanguard that they were not voting for any candidate.

The “Richmond Resolution” passed at the convention called for pushing the right candidates for president, Senate and other elected offices, which alongside other activities would supposedly “balance the power that the richest Americans have in our government.” No amount of voting for, or pressuring, the Democrats will change the reality that the government rules on behalf of the capitalist masters of this class-divided society, in which the handful who own the banks and industry amass profits by exploiting the laboring masses. There can be no “balanced power” between the exploiters and the exploited in the capitalist government. The only way for workers to throw off their chains is to wrest the productive wealth from the hands of the capitalists in a socialist revolution and establish a workers government.

The Fight for $15’s upcoming September 12 national day of action planned for state capitols across the country is more of the same—another attempt by the union tops to divert into legalistic channels the evident fighting spirit of the low-wage workers, who are frustrated by the campaign’s four years of incessant begging with little to show for it. Truth is, an entirely different kind of mobilization is needed to win increased pay and union recognition from the bosses: strike action at the workplace. By withholding their labor and cutting off the flow of profits, workers have the potential to wrest better wages and working conditions from the employers and to organize the unorganized. Unions are forged in class struggle. With low-wage workers often atomized and easily replaced, crucially important to victory are concrete acts of labor solidarity by existing unionized workforces in related industries, such as the transportation and warehouse supply chain in the case of fast food.

Campaign organizers said they selected Richmond, the seat of the former Confederacy, as the convention site in order to draw the link between the country’s racist history and low wages. (Conveniently for the union bureaucrats, the city is also the home base of Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine.) This link was hardly news to the many black workers in attendance. Chants of “Black lives matter!” erupted throughout the weekend’s events in protest against the rampant cop terror endemic to this viciously racist society, where the black population is confronted every day by the legacy of chattel slavery.

With anti-black racism wielded by the bosses to pit black and white workers against one another, what is urgently needed is for the working class as a whole to champion black liberation. Especially in the South, any serious effort to unionize will have to directly confront the deep racial divide that has crippled past organizing drives. The labor fakers, who do their level best to avoid struggle even to defend and expand their own organizations, must go, to be replaced by a new union leadership willing to fight it out class against class.

After the march through the streets of Richmond ended at a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, pockets of workers cried out: “Tear it down!” Like chattel slavery before it, the system of wage slavery deserves to perish. To those who want to make a fight of it instead of begging the Democrats for crumbs, we offer the perspective of building a multiracial workers party in which black workers will be within the front ranks. Such a party will be dedicated to shattering the capitalist order once and for all and ushering in an egalitarian socialist society.