Defend the Unions Through Class Struggle!

Indiana: Battle Against “Right to Work” Hitched to Democrats

JANUARY 16—More than 17,000 unionists and their supporters have rallied in Indianapolis over the last two weeks to protest an anti-union “right to work” bill making its way through the state legislature. On January 10, protesters packed the statehouse during the “State of the State” address by Republican governor Mitch Daniels, a notorious union-buster who on his first day in office in 2005 abolished collective bargaining for 25,000 state employees. As of 2011, dues-paying union membership plummeted 90 percent among these workers. Now aiming his fire at all unions, Daniels has taken up the “right to work” crusade to outlaw the union shop in Indiana, which lies in the middle of the manufacturing belt stretching across the Great Lakes region.

The entire purpose of the legislation, which is disguised as a job-creation measure, is to financially and otherwise cripple unions by making union dues payments optional. States with the lowest levels of unionization are overwhelmingly concentrated in the 22 with “right to work” laws. These include practically the entire South and a number of Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states. The average income for workers in such states is $1,500 a year less than in other states, to say nothing of the lower percentage of workers who have health coverage and pensions. All this represents billions of dollars in additional profits annually for the capitalists. In advance of next month’s Super Bowl in Indianapolis, the NFL Players Association issued a statement denouncing the Indiana bill as a “political ploy designed to destroy basic workers’ rights.”

The 2005 decertification of the Indiana state employee unions was a template for attacks on public workers in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere last year, as state governments nationwide pled poverty amid the capitalist economic downturn. Feeling wind in their sails, “right to work” forces are gunning for the private-sector unions as well in Indiana, a historic center of industrial unionism. In the face of this offensive, Indiana labor bureaucrats are following the same losing playbook as their counterparts did in Wisconsin last year: channeling workers’ anger over union-busting into the dead end of support to the “lesser evil” capitalist Democratic Party. In Wisconsin, tens of thousands of working people repeatedly turned out at the state capitol to fight a massive anti-labor assault on public workers by the Republican-led state government. But union officials were dead set against using labor’s strike weapon, diverting workers’ militancy into a campaign to recall Republican officeholders. As a result, the public employees unions were clobbered.

When the Indiana “right to work” bill was on the floor last February, state Democrats followed the example of their Wisconsin colleagues by fleeing to Illinois to prevent a quorum for a vote. “They knocked out right to work,” pronounced AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka at the time. Trumka to the contrary, the bill is now advancing in the legislature. In response, the labor tops have joined hands with the Democrats in pleading that this measure be made a statewide referendum on election day in November, putting the unions’ existence at the mercy of voters. While a referendum in Ohio last year succeeded in overturning a newly enacted law limiting collective bargaining for public workers, union officials used the campaign to further tie labor to the Democrats.

No less than the Republicans, the Democratic Party is a party of the capitalist class enemy and will not hesitate to savage workers and their organizations. Following a record effort by the union tops to put him into the White House, Barack Obama spearheaded the gutting of the United Auto Workers (UAW), with the obliging help of the UAW bureaucracy, as part of bailing out the auto companies. He also launched a war against teachers unions and imposed a two-year wage freeze on federal employees. Just last October, Obama banned a potential strike by tens of thousands of freight rail workers. Meanwhile, Democratic governors have wrenched massive concessions from public workers in New York and California.

Posturing as “friends of labor,” the Democrats may not favor getting rid of unions altogether, preferring instead to keep them docile through the agency of the union officialdom, which provides them with union money and manpower for election campaigns. Much of the labor bureaucracy is itself a component part of the Democratic Party. In Republican-dominated Indiana, since 2005 AFL-CIO affiliates have contributed more than $1.2 million to capitalist politicians, almost all Democrats, while the SEIU has spent $2.7 million.

The labor bureaucrats long ago abandoned the class-struggle methods that built the unions—mass pickets, sit-down strikes, secondary boycotts—in favor of reliance on the capitalist government and its political parties. Their class-collaborationist policies have sapped the fighting strength of the unions and demoralized workers, setting the stage for the current anti-labor assault. Indiana is a case in point. The state was the site of countless pitched labor battles that made it a stronghold of the Steelworkers, the UAW and other unions. But in recent decades Indiana has seen a steep decline in union membership, to 10.9 percent of the workforce in 2010. Despite the ongoing deindustrialization of the Rust Belt, there remains a concentration of manufacturing in the state. But increasingly these jobs are non-union, including at auto plants owned by Toyota, Honda and Subaru. Barely paying lip service to the need to organize the unorganized, the prostrate union officialdom has only further whetted the appetites of those trying to drive unions out of the state.

Providing cover for the labor tops is the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO), whose January 4 article on Indiana on its Web site raised not even a perfunctory word of caution against reliance on the Democrats. At the time of the showdown in Wisconsin, the ISO disparaged the call for a statewide strike as “unlikely to get very far.” Indeed, for the ISO and its ilk the purpose of labor protest is to pressure the Democratic Party representatives of capital to “fight” for a few more crumbs for working people.

In its Indiana article, the ISO praises such New Deal legislation as the 1935 Wagner Act, which supposedly “codified the legal rights of workers to organize for unionization and challenge the often-violent resistance of employers.” In fact, the Wagner Act was passed to head off and regulate the unions in the aftermath of victorious general strikes in Minneapolis, San Francisco and Toledo in 1934, all of which were led by reds. Those strikes paved the way for the founding of the CIO industrial unions. Along with other laws, the Wagner Act was designed to wrest control of organizing drives from union militants and to set up a government mechanism for putting the unions under the thumb of the capitalist state.

To cover its tracks, the ISO offers that “legislation on its own has never built the labor movement.” In fact, all of labor history shows that no decisive gain for the working class has ever been won through Congress, the courts, government agencies or the ballot box. It has taken hard and bitter class struggle to wrest anything of value from the capitalist exploiters. For the ISO to warn against relying on legislation is sheer hypocrisy. For years, this outfit promoted the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), which helped shackle that union’s power by, for example, using the courts to bring the government into the union’s internal affairs. The TDU did so under the Landrum-Griffin Act, a legal sledgehammer against unions that the ISO conveniently disappears in its narrative.

The Wagner Act was amended in 1947 by the union-busting Taft-Hartley Act, which outlawed labor solidarity actions like secondary boycotts and sympathy strikes. Enacted following the post-World War II strike wave, the largest in U.S. history, Taft-Hartley passed Congress with the support of a majority of Democrats. Its provisions demanding loyalty oaths from union officials were used to purge all manner of reds from the unions, consolidating the hold of the anti-Communist labor bureaucracy. Now, taking a page from the Cold War, when anti-Communism was wielded to bash the unions, a lurid full-page ad in the New York Times (5 January) equates unions with North Korea’s Stalinist regime on the grounds that workers in union shops are not given the option to stop paying dues. The ad was paid for by lobbyist Richard Berman’s “Center for Union Facts,” a shadowy outfit funded by corporate money committed to pushing “right to work” laws and otherwise attacking labor.

Taft-Hartley also banned closed shop contracts, which prohibit companies from employing non-union workers, and empowered states to pass “right to work” laws. Most of those statutes were adopted shortly after Taft-Hartley was enacted, overwhelmingly in the Jim Crow South, where the color bar had long served to divide workers and keep unions out. They were supplemented by “anti-violence” bills aimed at curbing picketing. The Indiana Chamber of Commerce’s first “right to work” campaign got its start in 1955 after scabs opened fire on striking UAW workers at a piston ring plant in New Castle, sparking an armed confrontation that left several wounded.

Two years later, Indiana became the first Northern industrial state to join the “right to work” fold. A bastion of racist bigotry, the state was a natural fit for organizations that combined vicious anti-unionism with virulent racism in pushing for these laws. In the 1920s, Indiana was a center of Ku Klux Klan terror and murder. By the middle of that decade, over half the General Assembly, the governor and other high-ranking government officials were Klansmen. In 1965, amid the social ferment of the civil rights movement, the “right to work” statute was repealed, after struggles in defense of the union shop by the UAW and other unions had largely rendered it a dead letter.

With vicious racism a fault line in the U.S. to this day, black rights and union rights will either go forward together or fall back separately. It is crucial for the working class to defend every gain it has won, beginning with the very existence of the unions. Turning back the ruling-class war against labor, black people and other minorities requires breaking the labor movement from its political subservience to the Democrats. The fight for a class-struggle leadership of the unions is an integral part of forging a revolutionary workers party, the necessary instrument to lead all the exploited and the oppressed in overthrowing the decaying capitalist system and replacing it with a planned economy under a workers government.