The Fall of the Trade Union Movement

The Fall of the Trade Union Movement

The US ruling class is skilled in flattering and cultivating ‘leaders’. It presses its own image on them and finally, from imitation of manners, dress and style of living, a deeper strain of corruption develops. This kind of union leader acquires the boss’s contempt for the ordinary worker. He is often more at home with the employers than he is among his own people. His language changes, his location changes, his income changes, and ultimately he changes from a workers’ representative to the boss into the employer’s representative to the workers. The tragedy has happened so often that these union ‘leaders’ now acknowledge that they are ‘in partnership’ with the boss/ruling class. — Paraphrase of Martin Luther King’s 1967 speech The Black Power Defined.

When I first wrote about my observations, as a union official, in the 2001 essay, The State of Today’s Trade Union Movement, I was hoping that I was wrong about the assumptions that I had made about the present State of the trade unions, at that time.

Unfortunately, what I had written, about the direction of the trends in the trade unions, have been confirmed by events since I first wrote the essay.

The last labor upsurge (Post World War II Labor Upsurge) in the United States occurred over 50 years ago in the late 1940s, The workers were victorious in their struggles to regaining their standard of living that was lost during the war and its ‘wage price freeze’. (Which was supported by the Communist Party as part of their defense of Stalin’s policy of subordination of the class struggle to the ‘Defense of the Soviet Union’.)

The response of the ruling class was to amend the National Labor Relations Act, with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, (”The Slave Labor Act”) to give the employers a “level playing field” in their relations with labor. The right wing of the labor bureaucracy, taking advantage of the class collaborationist policies of the Communist Party, used this law to expel any opposition, to their class collaboration policies, from the leadership of the trade union movement.

In the process, they consolidated their power, which has continued to the present time.  Trotsky in his essay, Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay, (Which can  be found at www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1940/1940-tu.htm) wrote that: “The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination and disciplining of workers and for obstructing the revolution, or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat.” He observed this trend when he stated : “In the United States the Department of Labor with its leftist bureaucracy has as its task the subordination of the trade union movement to the democratic state and it must be said that this task has up to now been solved with some success.”

In today’s world. Every union has adopted and implemented the slogan of a “partnership with the boss.” (When I was working the worst epithet that one could say about a union official was that he/she “was in bed with the boss.” Now it is their slogan! And they are doing their best to stay in the boss’s bed as the boss threatens to toss them out to cut costs.) 

In essence, today’s unions have adopted the slogan of what is good for the boss is good for the union, or as Charles E. Wilson, the former head of General Motors and Secretary of Defense under President Dwight Eisenhower infamously stated to a congress committee: “What is good for the country is good for General Motors, and what’s good for General Motors is good for the country .”

To add insult to injury, this policy has gotten so bad, that “my” International Union President, of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT.com), has sent out a DVD to every member, at considerable expense, to inform my brothers and sisters, by their own admission, that the union will sound and act like a boss!

Union Painters who may be late to work, abuse coffee break, take too much time for lunch, or (God Forbid!) leave work early, will face the wrath, not of the boss but of the Union’s “Three Strikes and You’re Out Policy”! If you are caught three times in violation of these rules, then these painters are not only out of a job but out of the union!

The recent bipartisan changes in the bankruptcy laws and the accounting laws, under both President Clinton and President Bush, have allowed companies like United Airlines, Delphi, etc., to tear up and rewrite union contracts and cut pensions at will and with the support of this pathetic Trade Union Bureaucracy.

An example the Trade Union Bureaucracy’s bankruptcy are the “buyouts” at Delphi Corporation, under the threat of “bankruptcy” brokered by the United Auto Workers officialdom. The UAW bureaucrats are indicative of the current trend of the “leadership” of the trade union movement. This “leadership” is protected and encouraged by the government and has allowed Delphi to offshore 185,000 jobs to the detriment of the 50,000 Delphi jobs that had remained in the United States, prior to the buyouts. Now the workers that remain earn less as Delphi profits more.

Out of the Delphi struggle, a new union formation was born — Soldiers of Solidarity (SOS) — to combat the treachery of the UAW officialdom. It is an example of how workers will form new organizations independent of the bureaucracy.    January 2008