3448. America’s Labor Crisis

By Marty Hart-Landsberg, Reports from the Economic Front, November 5, 2020

We face a multifacited labor crisis. One of the most important aspects of this crisis is the U.S. economy’s diminishing capacity to provide employment. This development is highlighted in the chart below, which shows the trend in civilian employment over the last thirty years.  Civilian employment includes all individuals who worked at least one hour for a wage or salary, or were self- employed, or were working at least 15 unpaid hours in a family business or on a family farm, during the week including the 12th of the month when surveys are taken.

As we can see, it took approximately 4 years to bring civilian employment back to its pre-crisis peak after the 2001 recession, and a much longer 6.5 years after the 2008 recession.  The number of years it will take to regain the pre-crisis peak employment level after the end of this recession (which remains ongoing) can be expected to be far greater, with some analysts predicting it could take a decade or more. And of course, new people will be entering the labor force over that decade, generating a serious unemployment problem.

The following chart, which shows the trend in the civilian labor force participation rate, offers additional evidence of the economy’s declining job creating potential. The civilian labor force participation rate is calculated by dividing the sum of all workers who are employed or actively seeking employment by the total noninstitutionalized, civilian working-age population.

As we can see, this measure has been in sharp decline for many years, including over the years of expansion that followed the 2008 recession.  With growing numbers of working-age people, including prime-age workers, forced to drop out of the labor force even during so-called “good times,” there is little reason to expect a significant improvement in employment opportunities in the years following the end of this recession.

These charts make clear that without a significant change in the workings of the economy, working people are facing a future of declining employment possibilities. And it certainly appears that there is no enthusiasm for major economic changes among the most powerful and wealthy in the United States.  According to a recent report, U.S. billionaires saw their fortunes soar by $434 billion during the nation’s lockdown between mid-March and mid-May. And Market Watch reported that the S&P 500 and Nasdaq just booked the best postelection day gains in history.  The reason:

Wall Street warmed to the possibility of a divided U.S. government and further political gridlock in Washington following a contentious election, potentially keeping Trump administration’s tax cuts in place no matter who sits in the White House.

In sum, if we want a meaningful economic recovery, one that serves majority needs, we will have to fight for it.  Among other things, this means finding new ways to strengthen labor-community coalitions and engage people in sustained conversation about the class-contradictory nature of our economic system.

 

3293. Courageous UAW Strike Ends With Few Gains

By David Jones, Socialist Action, November 10, 2019

Some 47,897 United Automobile Workers (UAW) ended their six-week strike against U.S. auto manufacturing giant General Motors on October 31. Fifty UAW-organized plants were closed across the country with the union demanding increased job security, a gateway for temporary workers to become permanent, better pay and to retain healthcare benefits. The contract was approved by a vote of 57 percent, more an indication that workers believed that the result was “the best that they could get,” rather than what they had fought for.

Noting that the central focus of the strikers was “equality,” that is, the abolition of the hated multiple-tier wage and classification system, long-term Labor Notes staff writer Jane Slaughter summed up the essentials: “The same tiers that existed in the old contract will exist in the new one. Some of today’s temps will be hired into the second tier—but new ones will be hired to take their place, at lower wages than before.”

Slaughter continued, “But this is the auto industry. Layoffs happen. I met workers who’d been laid off multiple times over the years, as temps—and each time, they would start over again at the hire-in wage of less than $16 an hour. The new proposal changes that—temps will no longer get any pay hikes at all. They will make the same $16.67 wage the entire time they remain in that status.” Slaughter continues with a sad listing of at least ten tiers in the new contract, each designed by GM, with UAW officials’ complicity, to extract ever new profits out of the hides of workers.

She concludes: “The tier system has left thousands of auto workers performing the same jobs union members did in the past for far less pay and with fewer, if any, benefits.”

Standing near a burn barrel outside Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Wednesday, Bruno, a worker who declined to state his name, said he would vote yes because “we’re not going to get any more out of them. It’s unfortunate we had to go out to get the same thing we got before.” Another Hamtramck worker, Worley, worried about the union’s future. “They say ‘we’ll get ’em next time,’” he said, “but there may not be a next time. We lost 30,000 jobs in the last 10 years.” The UAW now has just under 400,000 members, down from 1.5 million in 1979, and 540,000 in 2006. The decline in union membership at GM is matched by the same decline across the entire trade union movement, with today’s percentage of organized workers the lowest in more than a century. The statistics for the number of major strikes over the same period are similarly revealing.

From 1947 to 1981, strikes of all kinds involving at least 1,000 workers were all in the triple digits. From 1982 to 2019, no strikes of over 1,000 occurred, and during most of those years the total strikes of any duration was under 30, and only 5 in 2009 and 7 in 2017. The total number of workers involved was in the millions until 1980, sinking to 12,500 in 2009 and 25,300 in 2017, coinciding almost exactly with the beginning of the U.S. employers’ relentless offensive against organized labor.

At the same time, “foreign” automakers, such as Nissan, Volkswagen, Mercedes Benz, all with new billion-dollar manufacturing plants, generally employing in excess of 1,000 workers, (4,000 at the Vance, Alabama Mercedes Benz plant) flourish largely in the American South, where average hourly wages in non-union plants run between $23 and $25 an hour, according to the Center for Automotive Research (CAR). With the new contract today, organized UAW plants are increasingly “competitive” with non-union manufacturing, a boon to all employers and yet another monstrous concession by UAW tops who, on their knees, make the one percent ever richer to maintain union jobs.

Failed UAW strategy repeated

On day one of the strike, the UAW bureaucrats began with the failed strategy pioneered more than a half century ago by then-top UAW official Walter Reuther, who suggested that striking GM only, as opposed to striking simultaneously the Big Three automakers, would exert maximum pressure on a singe corporation. This “one-at-a-time strategy” might have been good for the Union Army in the Civil War, but in the modern automotive industry the Big Three or their modern-day auto titan corporations are well-prepared, if not grateful to the UAW. The non-struck corporations simply agree on private pacts with the “target company” that include “mutual financial aid” as a part of their unbreakable united front against the union. The unstruck corporations, who obviously sell more cars than expected, agree to share their otherwise unexpected boon with the struck company. No doubt they found a way to make their “contributions” qualify as tax deductible to boot!

After sufficiently extracting its pound of flesh from the UAW negotiators, GM sweetened its final offer with an $11,000 “signing bonus” for selected categories of workers. No doubt, this too is fully tax deductible—by GM, not by their employees.

The deadly routinism practiced during the strike by the UAW misleaders is captured well by a Labor Notes reporter. “Yes, production was shut down tight, with scabbing negligible, although at the Tech Center police escorted scab janitors through the lines with no hassle from picketers. Bank of America estimated that GM lost $2 billion in the strike’s first four weeks—though the strike was begun when dealers’ lots were full, and customers did not feel the impact. So timing was, shall we say, not well considered.”

Labor Notes continues: “UAW members’ role was confined to picketing and to volunteering for duties such as snack delivery. Before the strike, officials made no attempt to involve members in a contract campaign. Not a button was distributed in the plants. There was no survey of the membership, no contract action teams, no bargaining bulletins to keep members in the loop. No ‘practice picketing,’ no turn-down of overtime—some plants building popular models worked scads of overtime right up till the bell—no outreach to the public, no open bargaining. Members knew only what they read in the media. Although union statements referred to GM’s $35 billion in profits over the last three years, [following its unprecedented government bailout –Ed.] there was no attempt to rally the public against what could have been this year’s poster child for corporate greed. It almost seemed as if UAW officials didn’t want to be too rude to the counterparts with whom their usual relationship is ‘partnership.’”

The watchword of the UAW workers at the strike’s outset was “equality.” They struck to return their union to a single wage scale applicable to all GM workers and an end to the heinous multiple-tier system aimed at dividing workers in ever-increasing and humiliating ways. In the end, the lower-tier workers voted against the contract, while the more relatively secure higher-tier ranks, skeptical that more could be won, reluctantly voted approval.

UAW leadership corruption

Here we can only add to our critique of the failed class collaborationist “strategies” of the UAW misleaders their outright corruption. In August, IRS and FBI agents raided the home of Gary Jones, newly elected UAW president and just one of several targets in a multi-state raid. Although Jones has not been charged with any crime, twelve people have been charged in the corruption investigation, including Edward Robinson, a union official with ties to Jones. Jones has taken a leave of absence, apparently on the advice of the union’s executive board. Rory Gamble, UAW Vice President for Ford Motor Co., has been designated “Acting President.”

Former UAW official Joseph Ashton, who “retired” from the UAW in 2014, has been accused by federal prosecutors of demanding and accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks and improperly using his position to illegally benefit himself and others. An alleged scheme identified by federal prosecutors involved a nearly $4 million contract with the joint UAW-GM Center for Human Resources training facility for commemorative watches. According to the filing, Ashton demanded $250,000 from the vendor, which he had instructed to create a new company to produce the watches, which were never distributed to members.

Today, the $4 million order remains packed away in a warehouse near the Detroit River. Still, federal investigators say, the deal accomplished what it was intended to do. The UAW official who arranged it collected a $250,000 kickback. Two others split $95,000 disguised as payments for “furniture.” That still left well over $1 million in profit for the vendor — a Philadelphia chiropractor who got into the watch business solely to recoup a bad loan he had made to a friend of one of the union officials, according to Automotive News (August 18, 2019).

 Edward Robinson, a union official with ties to Jones, has been accused of conspiring with union leaders to “embezzle, steal, and unlawfully and willfully abstract” more than $1.5 million from the union for personal gain, according to a criminal filing.  

And there’s more to come. In the dinosaur days of the American labor movement, union leaders used to be busted for accumulating guns, bombs and other devices they felt would be useful for defense against scabs, thugs and cops. Now it’s commemorative watches. No doubt giant corporations like GM have little or no objections to corrupt union officials. In fact, the elite one percent literally write the laws that make their daily theft and extraction of wealth via a myriad of devices, “legal.” With regard to corrupt union officials, the boss class, with government spy agency assistance, is more than skilled at blackmailing union crooks in return for their “cooperation” at the bargaining table.

What union activists across the country witnessed for six long weeks was some 50,000 proud and courageous GM workers taking the field of action at a time when the employer offensive against the broad working class has reached fever pitch. A decisive victory for the GM strikes, and especially a victory based on workers uniting in a fight for equal pay and working conditions for all, would have represented an inspiring example. While workers fully demonstrated their capacity to endure great hardships toward this end, their sacrifice was fundamentally undermined by a hardened bureaucratic misleadership whose sole outlook is to maintain its “partnership” with the bosses and thus preserve, if not expand, corporate profits regardless of the cost to the ranks. The forging of a class struggle alternative leadership to these sellout bureaucrats will stand high on the agenda of serious union fighters in the period ahead.

3010. On Origins of the Labor Day

By Eugene E. Ruyle, Peace and Freedom Party, August 28, 2018

The first Labor Day observance in 1882 at Union Square in New York

As we enter the Labor Day weekend, many on the left will repeat the myth that Labor Day has no historical significance and is simply a “gift” from capitalist politicians to break up the international solidarity of American workers by providing an alternative to May Day. For many years, I accepted this myth, even while marching with my union comrades in the annual Labor Day Parades in Wilmington, California. Then I learned that the first Labor Day was in 1882, four years BEFORE Haymarket and eight years BEFORE the first international May Day in 1890. How, then, could it have originated as an alternative to May Day? A little historical research revealed a much different, and more complex, story.

Peter J. McGuire, father of Labor Day and May Day and founder of the International Brotherhood of Carpenters

This research showed that both Labor Day and May Day grew out of American labor struggles in the 1880s and, surprisingly, that the same man, Peter J. McGuire (1852-1906), who founded the International Brotherhood of Carpenters, is claimed as the “father” of both Labor Day and May Day! However, as the labor movement developed in the 1890s and into the 20th Century, different factions favored one rather than the other and began to pit the two against each other. But as Yale historian David Montgomery notes, “Little is gained by calling one holiday real and the other phony. We need to know what both have meant to workers.” Otherwise, an opportunity to educate the U.S. working class about its real history will be lost.

Let us, then, review the intertwined history of Labor Day and May Day within the general struggle for the emancipation of the working class.

The roots of Labor Day go back to the Middle Ages. During the French Revolution a special day in September was set aside as a labor holiday. In nineteenth-century North America, celebrations, picnics, parades, benefits, and demonstrations of various kinds were held to support shorter hours, to help strikers, and for other labor causes. There are reports of early Labor Day celebrations in Toronto, Canada, in 1872 and in Boston in 1878. The first Labor Day in Australia was celebrated in 1856. According to the research of Jonathan Grossman, however, the American Labor Day holiday grew out of the parade and picnic of the Central Labor Union of New York City on September 5, 1882:

The year 1882 was charged with excitement for organized workers in New York City. On January 30, thousands of workers packed Cooper Union in support of Irish tenants against their British landlords. Under such banners as "Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey/Where wealth accumulates, and men decay," union leaders expressed the unity of labor's cause throughout the world. Among the participants were Matthew Maguire, Secretary of the Committee on Arrangements, who read letters from labor unions from every part of America, and Peter J. McGuire, who "spoke eloquently for half an hour, retiring among continued applause,”

Maguire and McGuire, both members of the Socialist Labor Party Club of New York, had proposed the holiday to the Central Labor Union of New York. On Tuesday, Sept. 5, 1882, about ten thousand workers took an unpaid day off and marched around Union Square in support of the holiday and celebrating labor’s international cause. It became an annual event that spread to other cities and states as the movement for a national Labor Day grew. Over the next decade, thirty states recognized Labor Day as a legal holiday so that workers would not have to lose pay in order to celebrate their achievements.

Legal limitation of the working day was an important part of labor’s achievements. Even before the Civil War, the ten-hour day movement had made significant gains. With the rise of industrial capitalism after the Civil War, the eight hour day movement began in earnest. In his chapter on “The Working Day” in Capital, Marx wrote:

Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours’ agitation, that ran with the seven-leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California.

Marx continues to write that on August 16, 1866, the General Congress of labour at Baltimore (August 16th, 1866), “to free the labour of this country from capitalistic slavery,” as the Congress put it, called for a law limiting the working day to eight hours, A few weeks later, the Congress of the International Working Men’s Association at Geneva, passed a similar resolution. Thus, with the leadership of the American working class, the movement of the working-class on both sides of the Atlantic set itself to the struggle for an eight hour day. Marx concludes:

In place of the pompous catalogue of the “inalienable rights of man” comes the modest Magna Charta of a legally limited working-day, which shall make clear “when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins.”

Later, Lenin would describe the importance of the eight hour day movement as a time when the workers, as a class, confronted the state as an instrument of the capitalist class.

The demand for an eight-hour day . . . is the demand of the whole proletariat, presented, not to individual employers, but to the government as the representative of the whole of the present-day social and political system, to the capitalist class as a whole, the owners of all the means of production.

Responding to working class agitation, Congress passed an eight hour day law in 1868. Federal authorities did not enforce it, however, so labor activists such as McGuire and his friend, Samuel Gompers, realized that it would only be enforced by direct action from the workers themselves.

Poster from the 8-hour day struggle

In 1884, at McGuire’s urging, the national conference of the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, the organizational forerunner of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), passed a resolution establishing May 1, 1886, as the day on which the workers themselves would institute the eight-hour day. May Day was already a day with deep historical roots and rituals such as the May Pole dating back to the Middle Ages. It was a day when workers would make their demands. The modern May Day dates from this action by the American labor movement.

The first May Day was a huge success, According to one source, “In all, the May 1 actions involved 340,000 working people. Of these, 150,000 won shorter hours without striking; 190,000 struck, and 42,000 of the strikers improved their conditions.”

The largest of the May Day demonstrations was in Chicago, where 80,000 workers went on strike, with another 45,000 in New York and 32,000 in Cincinnati. One of the largest strikes was in Chicago at the McCormick Reaper Works, where Pinkerton agents and the police harassed and beat locked-out steelworkers as they picketed. On May 3, the police attacked, killing at least two workers and wounding many more. The next day, a rally was called for Haymarket Square in Chicago to support the strikers and oppose police brutality.

The rally itself was peaceful, attended by families with children and the Mayor of Chicago himself. But as the crowd was dispersing, the police attacked. A bomb was thrown—no one to this day knows who threw it—and police began to fire indiscriminately into the crowd, killing several civilians and wounding forty more. One officer was killed by the bomb and several more died from their own gun fire. The aftermath is described by a writer for the Industrial Workers of the World:

Aside from the bomb thrower, who was never identified, it was the police, not the anarchists, who perpetrated the violence. Eight anarchists - Albert Parsons, August Spies, Samuel Fielden, Oscar Neebe, Michael Schwab, George Engel, Adolph Fischer and Louis Lingg - were arrested and convicted of murder, though only three were even present at Haymarket and those three were in full view of all when the bombing occurred. The jury in their trial was comprised of business leaders in a gross mockery of justice similar to the Sacco-Vanzetti case thirty years later, or the trials of AIM and Black Panther members in the seventies. The entire world watched as these eight organizers were convicted, not for their actions, of which all were innocent, but for their political and social beliefs. On November 11, 1887, after many failed appeals, Parsons, Spies, Engel and Fisher were hung to death. Louis Lingg, in his final protest of the state's claim of authority and punishment, took his own life the night before with an explosive device in his mouth.

The remaining defendants were later pardoned by a new Governor of Illinois and declared innocent of any wrongdoing. A monument to the Haymarket Martyrs was dedicated in 1893, inscribed with the prophetic last words of August Spies: “There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”

Police repression had not killed May Day or the eight hour day movement,. In 1888, the AFL defiantly called for another national eight hour strike for May 1, 1890. When AFL leader Samuel Gompers learned that the International Workingmen's Congress would consider a similar eight-hour day resolution, he arranged for a representative, Hugh McGregor, to travel to the Congress and deliver a letter asking that they also adopt May 1, 1890 for their action. Inspired by the example of the American workers, the Paris Congress adopted the following resolution:

The Congress decides to organize a great international demonstration, so that in all countries and in all cities on one appointed day the toiling masses shall demand of the state authorities the legal reduction of the working day to eight hours, as well as the carrying out of other decisions of the Paris Congress. Since a similar demonstration has already been decided upon for May 1, 1890, by the American Federation of Labor at its Convention in St. Louis, December, 1888, this day is accepted for the international demonstration. The workers of the various countries must organize this demonstration according to conditions prevailing in each country.

The first International Workers Day on May 1, 1890 was a success, with demonstrations in all the major European cities, including London, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Brussels, Budapest, Berlin, Prague, Warsaw, Vienna, and Amsterdam, as well as in Cuba, Peru, and Chile, and in cities throughout the United States. In Chicago and New York, slogans included:

• Abolish Wage Slavery,
• No More Bosses—Wage Slavery Must Go.
• The 8-hour day is the next step in the Labor Movement, The Socialist CommonWealth is the Final Aim.

On May Day, 1890, in London, Frederick Engels was writing an introduction to a new edition of the Communist Manifesto, and included the following:

Today, as I write these lines, the European and American proletariat is reviewing its fighting forces, mobilized for the first time, mobilized as one army, under one flag, for one immediate aim: the standard eight-hour working day to be established by legal enactment, as proclaimed by the Geneva Congress of the International in 1866, and again by the Paris Workers’ Congress of 1889. And today’ s spectacle will open the eyes of the capitalists and landlords of all countries to the fact that today the proletarians of all countries are united indeed. If only Marx were still by my side to see this with his own eyes!

Across the ocean, Gompers (who probably actually deserves the honor of being called the “father” of May Day), noted with satisfaction in 1891:

May 1st of each year is now looked upon by the organized wage-workers and the observing public as a sort of new Independence Day upon which they will every year strike a blow for emancipation and steadily weaken the shackles of wage slavery.

Although originally proposed to be a one-time affair, May Day soon became an annual event. For over a century, every year on May Day, workers on every continent honor the Haymarket Square martyrs and labor’s continuing struggle for an eight hour day.

The struggle to set aside the September Labor Day as a legal holiday never subsided, however. The labor movement has never been a single-issue movement and has always exhibited tensions between different tendencies. By the early 1890s, thirty states and many cities recognized Labor Day as a legal holiday for workers.

Responding to the demands of the labor movement, Congress legalized Labor Day as a national holiday in 1894, after a watershed event in American labor history. On May 11, 1894, employees of the Pullman Palace Car Company in Chicago went on strike to protest wage cuts and the firing of union representatives. On June 26, the American Railroad Union, led by Eugene V. Debs, called for a boycott of all Pullman railway cars, crippling railroad traffic nationwide. To break the strike, the federal government dispatched troops to Chicago who violently suppressed the strike, killing thirty workers in the process.

In the wake of the ensuing massive unrest, Congress finally passed an act making Labor Day a legal holiday. No longer would workers have to take an unpaid day off to relax and celebrate their history. Like the weekend, Labor Day was brought to America by the organized action of the labor movement.

More than a dozen strikers were killed in the Pullman Strike of 1894

Both May Day and Labor Day are days of celebration for workers. Both grew out of the struggles of workers for the eight-hour day and better working conditions, and many of the same people and organizations were involved in the origin of both holidays. Unfortunately, conflicts between different tendencies within the labor movement have affected the history of these two labor holidays.

From the very beginning, the U.S. press has described the May Day demonstrators as “wild-eyed agitators” of the “European type,” “radicals, mostly socialists and anarchists,” with “accents and foreign mannerisms predominating.” The Labor Day parade, by contrast, is seen as “a demonstration of the honest American workingman,” “sober, clean quiet,” and “well-clothed and well-appearing men.”

The two workers’ holidays are indeed different. On Labor Day, workers can take a well-deserved day off and enjoy their achievements without having to fight the bosses and cops to do so. On May Day, workers themselves assert their power, without legal sanction, in defiance of the bosses, the state, and even union leaders if necessary.

Curiously, Labor Day was started by members of the Socialist Labor Party in 1882, but by the 20th Century, the SLP was denouncing it, saying that Labor Day “represents a gift handed to the workers free, gratis and for nothing by the capitalist politicians . . . meant as an antidote for labor's own May Day.” Conversely, May Day was started in 1886 by the American Federation of Labor, but by the 20th Century, the AFL would ignore May Day and its own role in starting it. Even today, the website of the national AFL-CIO does not mention its role in starting May Day, but many local AFL-CIO unions and federations do sponsor May Day events.

This is especially true since 2006, when May Day mobilizations in the United States made headlines for the first time in living memory. Millions of immigrant workers—documented and undocumented—took to the streets as Immigrant Rights groups and Latino organizations called a nation-wide one day strike and huge marches were staged across the country. Hundreds of thousands of workers marched in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland and throughout the nation and throughout the world.

For most workers around the world—and not only in the socialist countries—May Day is a legal holiday. Even the Catholic Church, in 1955, dedicated May Day to Saint Joseph The Worker, the patron saint of workers and craftsmen.

Labor Day, like the weekend, was brought to us by the labor movement. If Labor Day has become de-politicized, we need to re-politicize it. We can do so by honoring the 30 union strikers murdered by federal troops during the Pullman Strike of 1894. It is to them, not the capitalist politicians, that we owe this holiday.

As an example of how Labor Day can maintain a political message, the Los Angeles Long Beach Harbor Labor Coalition has organized an annual Labor Day Parade and Picnic since 1979, with up to 10,000 attendees representing over 100 unions. Each year a difference slogan is chosen, such as: “Protect the 8-Hour Workday” “Labor Produces Wealth,” “Unity Across the Border,” “Workers of the World Unite,” “The Labor Movement Gave Me the Weekend.” As I recall, free hot dogs and other snacks were handed out and there were speeches addressing the state of Labor, from its past to the coming future. No politicians, however, were allowed on the podium, if my memory serves me.

To conclude on a personal note: As a retired union member, my dues are still deducted from my pension check. Before I retired, however, I always marched with my union comrades at the annual Labor Day Parade in the harbor city of Wilmington and ate their free union hot dogs and beans at the Rally and Picnic. I also participated in the annual May Day rally and barbeque on the Cal State Long Beach campus put on by the CSULB Labor Coalition and paid a buck for their union hamburgers, chips, and a soda. Both workers’ holidays are important to me. The Los Angeles Long Beach Harbor Labor Coalition Parade and Picnic is possibly the best-organized and most radical Labor Day event in California, but other there are other events as well, which one can locate with a google search.

Labor Day and May Day—two holidays to honor the Haymarket Square martyrs, the union strikers shot down by federal troops during the Pullman Strike of 1894, and the thousands of workers continuing to be murdered by police violence. Labor Day and May Day are also two days to celebrate the achievements of the labor movement.

2882. “The Beating Heart of the Labor Movement”: Report on the 2018 Labor Notes Conference

By Guy Miller, Redline, April 15, 2018

by Guy Miller

“The beating heart of the labor movement.” That’s how the moderator of the Friday evening April 6th plenary session of the 2018 Labor Notes (LN) Conference introduced six West Virginia school teachers. The teachers were fresh from a historic victory in their unauthorized – and unexpected – strike. The same could be said about the conference itself: it represented the beating heart of American labor. The record 3,200 activists who attended the three-day Chicago conference were living, fighting proof of that

History of Labor Notes

Labor Notes was founded in 1979, just as the attack on the American working class was about to shift into high gear. The three founders – Jane Slaughter, Kim Moody and Jim West – were members of the International Socialists(1), one of several American groups tracing their roots back to Trotskyist origins. Slaughter, Moody and West realized that just creating a “front group” for the IS would result in a dead-end for their project, so they sought from the beginning  to create an organization that would support and encourage rank-and-file activity in the trade union movement.

1979 was the year that Paul Volcker, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, set the Fed’s interest rate to a record high, bringing on what is often called the Volcker Recession. The double dip recession that ensued saw the loss of over a half a million manufacturing jobs, at the same time bringing the number of strikes to a screeching halt. This was under the presidency of (Democrat) Jimmy Carter; things only got worse under the following (Republican) Reagan administration. In 1981 Reagan broke the national Air Traffic Controllers’ strike and smashed their union as well. Meanwhile, the leadership of the AFL-CIO – equivalent of the CTU in New Zealand – essentially sat and twiddled their collective thumbs. The long, slow Thermidor of American labor had begun.

The height of organized labor in the U.S. had been reached in 1954 when 35% of the workforce belonged to a union. The absolute number of union members, however, continued to grow, reaching 21 million in 1979. However, by 2017 the percentage of unionized workers fell to an abysmal 11.3%, with only 6.7% density in the private sector.

As the dog-days turned into decades, Labor Notes persevered. It held its first national conference in 1981 attended by 576 unionists. What started out as a newsletter called Labor Notes soon became a monthly magazine. LN saw its mission as transforming the labor movement through rank and file involvement. Its priority has never been to elect people to top union offices as an end in itself.

Labor Notes‘ current president, Mark Brenner, describes its goal as “promoting union reform as a strategy for revitalizing the labor movement, one of our biggest contributions, both theoretically, but also practically, helping generations of reformers think strategically.”

To make the practical part of this vision concrete,  LNpublishes books and pamphlets  aimed at grassroots organizers. Such titles as, “No Contract, No Peace” and “Secrets of a Successful Organizer” give a flavor of its orientation.

In recent years LN has begun holding  “Troublemaker”(2) seminars across the country. Organizers and speakers are sent out to hold day-long workshops. These how-to gatherings work with local activists, giving them advice and support.

This year’s conference

A surprising teacher upsurge began in West Virginia and soon spread to Kentucky, Oklahoma and Arizona, all states ostensibly in Trumpland. Forty years of capitalist austerity have hit these states particularly hard. In all four of them teacher salaries are among the lowest in the country. Young teachers, especially, are caught in the pincers between low wages on the one hand and student debt and spiralling health insurance costs on the other. When West Virginia Governor Jim Justice offered an insulting 1% wage increase, the fuse was lit.

Teachers from all four states affected by strike fever were present at the conference. Of the six from West Virginia, only two had even heard of Labor Notes until recently. One of the six has been a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) for several years.

The conference had over 200 sessions, with eleven of them devoted to teachers’ struggles. To give an idea of the breadth of the conference, I will name a cross section of session titles:  “Unions and the Veterans’ Fight Against V.A. (Veterans Administration; among other things it provides healthcare to veterans) Privatization”;  “Going on Offense to Defend Immigrant Members”; “Corbynism and the the Resurgence of the British Labour Movement”;  “Longshore Meeting”;  “Secrets of a Successful Organizer”; “The UAW at Volkswagen and Nissan: What Happened?”

To me one of the highlights of the conference is always the international participation. At the 2016 conference I had the chance to meet a fellow railroad worker from South Korea. He had been one of leaders of a major railroad strike there. I had my picture taken with him, and now it sits framed on top of my dresser.

This year there were over 200 international guests from 24 different countries.  The largest contingent was from Canada, followed by 29 Japanese sisters and brothers, and 17 from the United Kingdom. Congo and Liberia were also in the house. Perhaps most impressive of all was Imad Temiza, a member of the Palestinian Postal Service Workers Union.

My wife, Linda, a member of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees at Northeastern Illinois University co-convened a workshop for higher education workers. The overflow meeting had over 100 people from more than 30 campuses across the country, as well as Mexico and Canada. Not only did these university workers exchange experiences, an ongoing Facebook group emerged from the session. Such social media groups make sharing of information easy.

Politics

Although Labor Notes is not a political organization, in a sense politics is unavoidable at such a gathering. While many of our brothers and sisters still have – I think diminishing – delusions about the Democratic Party, the DP had no official presence this year. Two years ago Bernie Sanders supporters were very much in evidence.

The main hall outside the Grand Ballroom was filled with tables. Left groups were represented by the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Solidarity, Socialist Alternative (SAlt), the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and the IWW among others. I also noticed tables from Haymarket Publishing and the Illinois Labor History Society. The Single Payer was present. Folk singer Anne Feeney did a brisk business selling CDs at her table.

The hallway was festooned with banners and posters. It served as a marketplace of ideas and reflected the spirit of Labor Notes: Solidarity!

Footnotes
(1) The IS no longer exists. Many of its cadres are now members of Solidarity and the ISO.
(2) ‘Troublemakers’ has become the catch phrase of Labor Notes. A sling shot – the tool of that arch American troublemaker, Dennis the Menace – is the official logo of LN.

Redline has added photos to Guy’s report; the photos are all taken from the LN facebook page.

2416. Interview With Kim Moody: Busting the Myths of a Workerless Future (Part 1)

By Chris Brooks and Kim Moody, Labor Notes, July 26, 2016

Despite all the "gig economy" hype, Kim Moody argues, most workers are experiencing the rise of the crappy-job economy. But just-in-time production has created huge concentrations of workers—and vast potential for organizing. Photo: Nick Saltmarsh (CC BY 2.0)

Labor Notes: We read a lot about the “gig economy,” where workers cycle through multiple jobs using app-based companies like Uber, TaskRabbit [for everyday tasks such as cleaning or moving], and Mechanical Turk [for online tasks such as labeling images]. Is this really the future of work?

Kim Moody: One thing to notice is that, aside from outfits like Uber, most of these are not employers. They're digital platforms where you can find a job.

The apps are not determining the hours and pay, or even the technology used on the jobs. It’s still employers that are calling the shots. So if jobs are getting worse, it’s not because people can find them digitally as opposed to reading them in the newspaper.

Also, discussions of the gig economy often assume that suddenly there are all these people who are multiple job-holders. But the fact is that the proportion of the workforce who have more than one job hasn’t changed much in 40 years.

The vast majority of them are people with regular full-time jobs who are also moonlighting, which is a very old thing. There are a lot of multiple job-holders, but there have always been a lot of them.

There’s also been talk of the “1099 economy.” Are we really moving towards a future where 40 percent of workers will be freelancing?

The idea that freelancers can become 40 percent of the workforce is science fiction.

There are two kinds of self-employed. The greatest number are the “unincorporated self-employed,” or independent contractors. Their numbers have been dropping for years.

The other group, the incorporated ones, are people who run a small business. They have grown somewhat, but they are still just 4 percent of the workforce.

You argue that the “gig economy” and “precarious work” concepts miss the mark because they don’t get at the most concerning change: the rise of the crappy-job economy. Can you talk about what’s changed for workers and why?

The first change is work intensification. Work has gotten dramatically harder in the last 30 years or so, and continues to.

That’s happened through lean production, which reduces the amount of labor to produce the same or greater amount of product or service and is tied to just-in-time production. Lean production began in the automobile industry in the 1980s, but now it is everywhere. It’s in hospitals, it’s in schools.

Another aspect is electronic and biometric monitoring, measuring, and surveillance, which allow employers to see how to get more work literally out of each minute. Another aspect is that the amount of break time has fallen dramatically since the ’80s.

Whether you are working full-time or part-time, in a precarious job or not, chances are you are going to experience some of this.

The other side is income. Wages have been falling since the early 1970s. More and more people are actually working for less, in real terms, than they used to. This also impacts everybody, although part-time and precarious workers are likely to get paid even less than full-time people.

And if you look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics projections for the fastest-growing jobs, millions of new jobs over the next decade or so, 70 percent are projected to be low-skill, low-pay jobs.

In other words, we are not heading for some big high-tech economy. Instead we are heading for a low-paid workforce with crappy jobs. The end of good jobs is nigh.

While app-based “just-in-time” gigs have gotten lots of media attention, far less attention has been paid to “just-in-time” production. Can you talk about why massive logistics hubs have emerged, and what they mean for union organizing?

In order for globalization to be efficient, low pay isn’t necessarily enough, because you have to move products from one location to another. That required a change in the way products are moved—the “logistics revolution.”

The time it takes to deliver a product to the point of sale is an important factor in competition. Like production, transportation now operates on a just-in-time basis. Products move faster.

The speed of trucks, planes, and trains did not change. What did was the way things are processed. Goods don’t stay in warehouses very long. Products arrive on rail and are cross-docked and moved out by truck in a matter of hours. This process has really only taken shape in the 21st century.

In order to make it work, the industry has created logistics clusters. These are huge concentrations of warehouses where rail, truck, air, and water transportation meet and can be coordinated, usually electronically.

You might think, “Well, this is all very high-tech.” But it turns out that it still requires thousands and thousands of workers. In the U.S. there are 60 of these clusters, but three stand out: the Port of New York and New Jersey, the Los Angeles and Long Beach port area, and Chicago. Each of these employs, in a small geographic area, at least 100,000 people.

Now, the whole idea of outsourcing back in the 1980s was to break up the concentrations of workers in places like Detroit, Pittsburgh, or Gary. But what these companies have done now, inadvertently, is to recruit incredibly massive concentrations of manual laborers.

It has evolved in a way that might shoot these companies in the foot—because here you have the potential to organize vast numbers of poorly paid workers into unions. And there are attempts to do just that.

The other thing is that these clusters are tied together by just-in-time systems—which means you have hundreds, maybe thousands, of points in the transportation system that are highly vulnerable. If you stop work in one place, you are going to close down huge areas.

The vulnerability of “just-in-time” production was on display recently at General Motors.

Clark-Cutler-McDermott Co., which provides parts for almost every GM vehicle produced in North America, filed for bankruptcy in June.

But with no inventory on hand and no alternative source of supply, GM warned that a shutdown at this supplier would halt its vehicle production across the continent within a day—and every day the shutdown lasted, the company would lose millions of dollars.

GM scored a temporary restraining order, forcing Clark-Cutler-McDermott to continue production while the automaker sought out other suppliers.

Ford faced a similar issue in May when the all-temp workforce at its Detroit Chassis parts plant in Ohio threatened to strike, which could have halted production at a nearby Ford factory within a day. The employer quickly agreed to recognize their union.

—Chris Brooks

Media commentators and even presidential candidates blame the loss of millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs on trade and outsourcing. You’re skeptical. How do you explain it?

Outsourcing, if it is in the U.S.—which most of it has been—can break up the union, it can be very inconvenient to the people who lose their jobs, but it doesn’t necessarily eliminate jobs in the U.S. The jobs are just moved to a different, lower-paid group of workers.

Offshoring is another thing, but it’s not as widespread as people think. While moving production abroad has definitely impacted certain industries like steel, textile, and clothing, it cannot account for the loss of jobs we have seen. I estimate that between a million and 2 million jobs have been lost since the mid-’80s to imports and offshoring.

Manufacturing output, from the 1960s to just before the Great Recession in 2007, actually grew by 131 percent; the manufacturing sector more than doubled its output. If everything was going abroad, you couldn’t possibly have that kind of growth.

How can this be? I believe the answer lies in lean production and new technology, as we talked about earlier. Productivity literally doubled, and manufacturing jobs dropped by 50 percent or more. It’s the productivity increase that explains the loss of jobs.

It is very difficult for politicians to deal with this question, because it means attacking employers. It means saying, “You are taking too much out of your workforce.” And of course since most economists, politicians, and experts think that productivity growth is a wonderful thing, it’s beyond criticism.

There’s a lot of hand-wringing about the future of automation. Former Service Employees President Andy Stern has been making the media rounds claiming that driverless trucks are going to replace millions of drivers.

You can sell a lot of books with this pop futurology. It reminds me of the great automation scare of the 1950s. It was popular then to make predictions that there wouldn’t be any factory workers left.

And automation has reduced the number of factory workers, but there are still 8 or 9 million of them lingering around—despite all this technology, which is much greater than anything they predicted in the ’50s.

I have a shelf of books predicting “the end of work.” And yet we have millions more workers than we used to—the problem being that they are worse off than they used to be, not that they don’t exist.