10 March 2011

What's left of the labor movement

It's hard to read recent labor news with any optimism. Further it's hard to put any more credibility in a US labor movement as workers get assaulted and trades-unions seem to capitulate.

What it will mean in a few years to have a labor-union is a depressing thought.

The state of Wisconsin has just rammed through a measure which strips its public-employee unions of collective-bargaining rights. Indiana followed suit. Ohio was next in what proves to be, given the neoliberal climate, a very long chain of brutal assaults on workers.

Like a vicious wildfire, this menace to working people moves virtually unchecked.

Yes, some state legislators have gone into hiding to prevent the Wisconsin bill from passing. Yes, there's a lot of wailing at the wall from progressive lawmakers. Yes, the protests have been loud and numerous against this assault.

But my pessimism tells me this will ultimately have as much affect on this neoliberal attack as ... the millions who oppose the US war in the Middle East (this holds true for the populations of Western Europe, who differ sharply from their political masters, so we are approaching a 10 Years' War).

The trades-union movement, if we can call it that anymore, has for so long implicated itself with the neoliberal model its meaning was eroded a long time ago.

Observe to some of these union chiefs:

On the federal level, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) gears up for a union vote of its officers. Bush II denied TSA officers collective-bargaining rights when he established the agency, rights afforded to every other federal agency.

So this vote would seem to be a victory after hard-fought efforts by officers, and the two unions vying for officer support.

But, like recent anti-labor moves, TSA chief, John Pistole, has effectively negotiated the contract unilaterally.

In a recent NPR interview, National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) president, Colleen Kelley, responded to TSA's Pistole Wisconsinesque maneuver to take security issues, wages, discipline policies, testing, qualifications off the bargaining table as non-negotiable.

 Kelley said her union can assist TSA officers with transfers to other airports and work schedules. But the competing union, American Federation of Government Employees [AFGE], can do little more.

Closer to my home, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has authorized over 5,000 lay off notices.

According the LA Times, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) union president, AJ Duffy, responded with "This large number of proposed layoffs shows that LAUSD has clearly abandoned its all-too-frequent, and hollow, promise to 'keep cuts away from the classroom."

Acceding to the promise that jobs cuts be kept away from teachers and, implicitly, other workers is problematic. It really seems to come not from a union leader, who should know better, but rather the rest of the population who are kept ignorant of the vital role of non teaching staff in public schools. So when that non teaching staff disappears, the general public don't notice and are therefore unlikely to agitate.

A union head of teachers should know that the various staff members at a school - counselors, office staff, even maintenance workers and janitors - are extremely vital to the community of a school. And he should also know, as the saying goes: an injury to one really is an injury to all.

But this is exactly what generations of concessions have won trades-unionists: no power, one layoff after another, being taken for granted numerous times by "their friends in Congress".

You can hear a pin drop to their official challenges to an overall corrupt system. The all-things-on-the-table war - to limit it to my life time - should have been declared in the early 1980's.

When Pres. Ronald Reagan (himself a former union chief!) fired the air-traffic controllers: that should have been the next chapter in a class war.

Instead, Reagan's move was a class purge.

[Question: just how many workers have to be laid off and left with no means of support before "you" put all options rhetorically back on the table? - just a thought.]

As modern, collaborating unions concede to neoliberal doctrine, union bosses' best defense for its existence is pedestrian.

We hear how breaking up unions is shrinking the middle class; that it was the union movement that swelled the ranks of good wage-earners, but this defense is also problematic.

On wages.

The fetish for good wages in a corrupted system leads to the very social and economic inequalities we see today and have always seen, notably, in the global South where trades-unionism was not tolerated by Uncle Sam. It seems now Uncle Sam won't tolerate unionism within its own borders.

Making wages a central issue is a co-conspirator defense to essentially partner with a neoliberal system, inherently corrupt, to take a cut of the spoils. It is also not the sum of what it means to be a trades-union activist.

To reduce the union movement to wages not only dismisses a long and militant history that brought us our cherished labor rights - in and outside the union [i.e., the eight-hour workday benefits all workers] but also misses issues around the legitimacy of private ownership, management, and what makes for an ideal society.

In other words, today, a harsh wage[-slave] system is defended, just as chattel slavery was, by putting the very reward central to the argument. The union movement has conceded the argument.

And on management.
A major issue is management. When I state point-blank that we should get rid of management, I am often asked "then who will manage?", which implies laborers, like chattel slaves, as being too untrustworthy to be let loose without the ever-present overseer with his whip.

In most workplaces the workers know and often articulate that they themselves can make better decisions in running affairs than the ones being made by their overseers, but this conflicts with what the ghosts of the Federalist Papers have taught us about democracy: it's not a good thing.

Democratic workplaces, worker self-management will not survive a neoliberal paradigm. Profit is key. Wall Street is key. And the more immediate that profit the better. 

The role of management is to keep the workers from benefiting one another, the workplace, and the community. Their role is to preserve at all costs the central importance of Wall Street [erroneously called "The Economy"].

More importantly management is vital to preserve a governance system which demands, not competence, but rather obedience from workers. It is there to remind us to know "our" place.

This is what traditional trades-unionism resisted. Modern unions may find my thinking from Mars.

By why this refusal to fight back by trades-unions, why this acquiescence to the dominant neoliberal paradigm that welcomes with open arms wage-slavery, why concede an inch to management?

This government waged a vicious hot and cold war against the early labor movement: mass deportations with the Palmer Raids, assassinations, imprisonments, of anti-war activists, leftists, communists, and anarchists. Then to cap it off Congress prohibited the inclusion of anarchists and communists from US labor unions with the 1947 Taft-Hatley Act, which encoded into law attacks against "militants", weakening labor unions, and establishing right-to-work states, where unions are prohibited. The air was sucked right out of a militant movement and it has left us today gasping.

Those who survived that historic assault must have very small lungs and weak voices.