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Working Class Struggles in the US: Encouraging Signs

The US economy continues to struggle. The stock markets continue to slide. The corporate revenues and profits continue to fall. Policy makers and economists fear a second contraction in gross national product popularly referred to as the ‘second dip’. The media cries that the companies are suffering! They need help! So, another tax cut for the rich by the rich. After all it is the proudest democracy in the world and, so, one of the finest tenets of democracy has to be adhered to, more now than ever!

What about the people?

Amidst this public debate what is completely absent is the impact this recession has had on the people who are the engine of the economy, the working class. Of course, do not mistake that we have not heard all the rhetoric from the democratic representatives. The rhetoric, always, goes like this. We need to create jobs. The poor corporations need help to survive and create more jobs. Let us transfer some (really!) money from the people to the corporations. After all, it is a democracy. Providing welfare, i.e. corporate welfare, is integral to its existence. One of the most recent examples of corporate welfare was an aid (?) package of about $ 15 billion for the US airlines. The airlines responded to this ‘kind’ gesture by firing more than 100,000 people!

The working class has had to bear the pain of this recession more than any other section of the society. Millions of people have lost jobs and still more workers continue to lose jobs. Telecommunications giants such as Lucent Technologies have reduced their workforce from 123,000 to 35,000 in two years.

A big section of the labour aristocracy still dominates the labour movement in the USA. Unlike India, the labour unions do not have party affiliations, although, that does not preclude the labour aristocracy from hobnobbing with the parties of the ruling class. During election time major unions endorse candidates mostly from the Democratic Party, for crumbs in return. These union leaders act as the apologists and legitimisers of the ruling class parties and their anti-labour policies. The President of the International Association of Machinists (IAM), a trade union, said after 9-11 that the members “will be building F-15, F-16, F-18, and F-22s that will impose a new reality on those who have dared attack us. For it is not simply justice we seek. It is vengeance, pure and complete.”1 This patriotic posturing for peanuts has backfired in a big way. The airlines industry and airplane manufacturing industry, which has thousands of IAM members, has continued to cut jobs and benefits of employees. This ‘partnership’ of union leadership and management has resulted in the decline of unions in the US. In 2001, only 13.5 percent of the workers were unionised from a high of 33 percent in the mid-1950s.

The plummeting stock market has also hit the elderly, whose retirement savings have almost vanished. The people who are still employed are being denied raises, health benefits, not to mention a lot of workers have had to take pay cuts. While 1.5 million Americans have lost health insurance in 2001, the government continues to cut health care spending. The unemployment rate has doubled in the last two years. Amongst the African Americans and Latin Americans the unemployment rate is 9.6 % and 7.4 % respectively, much higher than for rest of the population. The labour aristocracy, which thrives on brokering deals for the workers, has not been able to deliver much this time. Discontented workers have now started to put pressure on the leadership and started to organize. There has been a surge in strikes and protests in the last few months.

The Struggles

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) is currently struggling against a move by the major retailers and Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), which is planning to introduce new technology to replace workers. ILWU has traditionally been one of the most militant and progressive unions that has struck work in solidarity with the Seattle protests against the WTO and shown solidarity with international workers from South Africa to El Salvador. The ILWU was negotiating with the PMA, an organisation that represents 79 dock operators on the West Coast, since July 1 on a new contract2. The PMA forced a lockout on the ILWU on September 29.

The lockout of 10, 500 dockworkers caused 29 docks on the western coast to shut down causing an estimated $ 2 billion loss per day to the US economy. About $ 300 billion of cargo, which is about 30 % of US gross domestic product, passes through these docks. On October 8, the US president invoked the Taft-Hartley Act, which forced the workers to get back to work. This 1947 anti-labour act has been used on 35 occasions in the past to break strikes. A new contract was negotiated as the government was making threats in the name of national security. The rank and file is unhappy not only with the contract but also with the union leadership’s tactic of containing the militancy of the workers.

A recent important struggle was the one waged by the janitors in Boston. The strike started on September 30, 2002 and went on for a month. The building cleaning contractors and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) were not able to agree on a new contract; this led to the 10, 000 janitors who clean more than 1000 office buildings to go on strike. Most of the janitors are women and 90 % of the janitors are immigrants. The janitors earn low wages and they work two or three jobs in order to make ends meet. As more than 75 % of them work part-time, they were not eligible for any health benefits. The janitors demanded better pay, full time work, and health benefits.

A few years ago, the SEIU local that represented the janitors was a corrupt and racist union. In the late 1990s, the local leadership had been accused of reducing wages and benefits without workers knowledge. A dissident group called Workers United was formed in late 90s to fight the union leadership. This led to the infusion of new blood and restructuring in the SEIU. A fiery organiser called Rosio Saenz, a 38-year-old woman from Mexico who moved to California in 1986, led the recent strike. She worked first as a private maid and then joined a garment workers union. She eventually became an SEIU organizer taking leadership roles in two Los Angeles janitors’ strikes in 1990 and 2000. The 2000 strike was hugely successful and it has become a model for contemporary labour action in the US3.

The SEIU, other unions, student groups and community groups were involved in several forms of resistance. They organised rallies, marches, and civil disobedience actions. Every night more than a thousand janitors marched in front of the office buildings where they work. Solidarity strikes took place in places like Chicago and Pittsburgh. There were rallies in downtown Boston where the activists, community leaders, religious leaders and students from several universities gathered in solidarity with the janitors. The four-week strike resulted in increase in wages and health care benefits for some janitors. Although the agreement fell short of the original demands, the emergence of leadership from the rank and file has had a positive effect on the janitors’ union.

In the recent past tens of thousands of workers have either threatened to go on strike or have gone on strike. This is because the corporations have tried to reduce the impact of the current economic crisis by either firing workers, reducing salaries, freezing raises, or reducing benefits. The traditional tactics of the trade union leadership to broker deals with the management and pacify the workers has not worked. The workers are now undertaking grassroots initiatives and leadership is emerging from the rank and file.

All these struggles are providing encouraging signs for the revival of the US trade union movement. The trade unions have “represented a transition from the disunity and helplessness of the workers to the rudiments of class organisation.”4 The absence of a revolutionary party of the proletariat has inhibited the advancement of the working class to any higher forms of class assertion. In the US, struggles by the rank and file are breaking out against the opportunist and social-chauvinist leaders. Hopefully, from these and other struggles a new leadership and organization of the working class will emerge that will take these struggles to a higher level.

- PB

1 Sustar, L. Employees Attack: Unions Blink, International Socialist Review, Sept. 2002.

2 Shepphard, B. O. From Lockout To Lockin, Znet Labor Watch, Oct. 15, 2002.

3 Jobs with Justice Bulletins, 2002.

4 Lenin, V.I. “Left-Wing” Communism, An Infantile Disorder, People’s Publishing.

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