~~ recommended by emil karpo ~~
Below are five things that the UAW and rank-and-file union members everywhere could fight for to build the independent power we need to defeat both the Far Right and the boss.
August 20, 2024
A lot has changed since Shawn Fain took to the stage of the UAW CAP conference in January to announce the union’s endorsement of Joe Biden for president. Hot off the heels of a successful strike against the Big Three, the UAW’s high-profile endorsement was interpreted as a major victory for the President in an election year when both parties are hypocritically attempting to sell themselves as the “true” representatives of the working class. But it was also seen as a victory for the UAW and its new leadership, who were betting that the endorsement would provide them with unprecedented access to the next administration and a potential pathway for union-friendly legislation. That all changed, however, after Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump in June and his historic withdrawal from the race just a little more than a week after a would-be assassin’s bullet made Trump a living martyr for the Far Right. Following the President’s lead, and the lead of several other major unions, Fain wasted little time changing the union’s endorsement in order to signal its full support for Vice President Kamala Harris. At the same time, the UAW began to use its influence to push the Harris campaign to pick Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear or Minnesota Governor Tim Walz for her running mate, arguing that both Democrats had been friends to labor. While many were surprised by the Harris campaign’s choice of Walz over Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, the decision only shows, again, the power of the working class in the present conjuncture and the degree to which the Democrats are desperate to sell themselves as pro-worker and pro-union at a time when working people are suffering from decades of bipartisan neoliberal policies and attacks on basic democratic liberties that have deeply polarized the electorate.
On Monday evening, Fain doubled down on this support for Harris and the Democratic Party in a raucous ten-minute speech at the Democratic National Convention, in which he said he was “honored” to endorse Harris on behalf of the UAW. Fain claimed that Harris and Walz had “stood shoulder to shoulder with the working class,” and referred to Trump and Vance as “lap dogs for the billionaire class who only serve themselves.” Dressed in a Red UAW T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase: “Trump is a Scab: Vote Harris,” Fain went on to say that “the American working class is fired up and fed up,” and blamed Trump for pushing racist, anti-LGBTQ, and anti-immigrant policies in order to divide working people. But Fain was not the only labor leader to endorse Harris that evening. Presidents from six of the biggest unions in the country, representing millions of workers, including the SEIU, the CWA, and the AFL-CIO, also expressed full-throated support for Harris and Walz, selling the old lie that the Democrats are the party of working people and labor, a move that is calculated to draw disaffected working people back into the fold of the Democratic Party, where, as the old saying has it, social movements go to die.
Regardless of who wins the next presidential election, however, the UAW’s endorsement and support for the Harris campaign will do nothing to ameliorate the suffering of the working class or to strengthen the real power of labor. Shawn Fain claims that “Harris stands with the working class” and that “Donald Trump stands with the Billionaire class and the corporate class,” but when we put aside the personalities of the individual candidates, it’s clear that both parties represent the interests of U.S. capital, and that neither is capable of solving the myriad problems faced by the majority of working people in the country, precisely because those problems are inherent to the very system that both parties support and defend. Fain talked a good talk at the DNC, and he had a lot to say about “attacking corporate greed,” but rather than calling on workers to organize themselves for this struggle, he called on them to instead “stand up and speak up” for Harris and Walz. But, as history has shown repeatedly, support for the Democratic Party and bourgeois politicians like Harris only hinders the power of labor by tying it even further to the interests and political horizons of the capitalist state. For almost a century now, U.S. labor has made its bed with the Democratic Party and in return has been rewarded with nothing but increasing levels of inequality, falling wages, declining unionization rates, an emboldened Far Right, and ongoing economic, political, and ecological chaos and instability. While a second Trump Presidency is a real threat to the safety and democratic rights of people across the globe, the Democrats have already proven that they cannot stop the Far Right. On the contrary, it was Democratic support for decades of capitalist and neo-liberal policies that produced the conditions for the growth of the Far Right.
If the UAW (and organized labor more broadly) are serious about increasing the political power of working people and actually defeating Trump and the Far Right, they will have to finally break with the Democrats and begin to build and encourage the independent organization of the working class both within and outside of organized labor. And if labor leaders like Fain are not willing to do that, we will have to force them to do so.
Below are five things that the UAW and rank-and-file union members everywhere could fight for to begin to build the independent power we need to defeat both the Far Right and the boss.
1: Build the Fight Against the Far Right
It is a fool’s errand to believe that we can defeat the nationalist, misogynist, xenophobic, racist, and anti-queer politics of the Far Right by voting. As the recent anti-immigrant riots in the UK reveal, the economic and political crises of the last two decades have given rise to a whole sector of people across the developed world — often downwardly-mobile white men — who are looking for an explanation for the problems that plague them and their communities. The Tories may have been temporarily defeated, but their attempts to pin the failures of capitalism on immigrants and “cultural Marxism” have successfully divided the working class and emboldened the Far Right to take to the streets, where it is gaining power among whole new sectors of disaffected working people and youth. Likewise, in the United States, the Far Right has continued to grow and evolve despite the defeat of Trump in 2020 and the debacle of January 6.
But the UK riots also show the power of working people to stand up to and stop the Far Right in the streets. Even as anti-immigrant protesters continued to march, tens of thousands of working class people and union members took to the streets across the UK in counter protests that far outnumbered and often directly confronted the reactionary rioters, defending mosques and immigrant shelters against attack.
Likewise, the UAW and the rest of organized labor has the power to organize hundreds of thousands of union members and working people across the country to build movements to defend the democratic rights of oppressed people and immigrants against attacks from the Far Right. Whether it’s bans on abortion or transgender care, attacks on voting rights, racist police violence, or the continued deportation of immigrants and asylum seekers at the border, the UAW must be prepared to mobilize with the rest of the working class to confront these attacks directly, both on the streets in order to defend those under attack by the Right, and in the workplaces where we can directly disrupt the functioning of the state and use our labor power to demand change. Imagine, for instance, how different the terrain of struggle would have been if the UAW and other unions had walked off the job to support the Black Lives Matter Movement in the streets or to protest the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
2: Take the Struggle for a Free Palestine into the Workplaces
Since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza last October, the UAW and several other major unions have slowly changed their position on the conflict, moving from a call for a ceasefire in December to demanding an immediate end to military aid to Israel in July. This shift, from a ceasefire to an end to military aid, was followed by a very high profile series of political strikes led by UAW local 4811 across the University of California (UC) against the administration’s repression of Pro-Palestinian campus protesters — a strike that was eventually crushed by the courts with the consent of the union bureaucracy. These are all very positive developments, that reveal the degree to which the genocide in Gaza has mobilized the working class. But there is much more that the UAW and organized labor could do to bring an end to the genocide in Gaza; a demand which must logically also be tied to a larger vision for an end to the Zionist apartheid state and the liberation of Palestine.
Statements calling for a ceasefire or an end to military aid are all fine and good, but unless they are backed up with real power they mean very little. Worse, they run the risk of placating and pacifying union members who want to see their organizations take some kind of action. If the UAW and the rest of organized labor are serious about ending the occupation and the genocide in Gaza, they need to call and begin to build for mass demonstrations and national strikes with other unions and working people across the country to demand an immediate and total ban on all aid and weapons shipments to Israel. Further these demonstrations and strikes must be prepared to defend and support blockades and strikes to directly stop the production and shipment of weapons and other items that could be used to aid the genocide. While such strikes would certainly be illegal, the best way to change such laws that limit the power of the working class is always to break them.
3: Take Seriously the Fight for a 32-Hour Work Week and Other Progressive Demands
During the UAW strike last year, Shawn Fain raised the demand for a 32-hour work week, explaining quite elegantly that a human being’s most precious resource is time and that working people had been forced for too long to give up too much of that time to the boss. Like the fight for an eight hour workday, the demand for a 32-hour work week without a loss in pay actually makes perfect sense. One need only look at the massive gap between worker productivity and wage growth since the 1980s to see that working people have largely been excluded from the benefits of technology. While productivity increased more than 61 percent from 1980 to 2022, wages increased only 16 percent when adjusted for inflation.
Unfortunately, the fight for a 32-hour work week, though perfectly reasonable, was never taken seriously by Fain or the UAW negotiating team, which quickly abandoned the demand in their negotiations with the Big Three last year. While Fain has continued to champion the idea, the union has done little to actually fight for it the way that unions and working people’s organizations fought for and won an eight hour work day long before the Fair Labor Standards Act made it law in the U.S. in 1937. While it is laudable that Fain continues to talk about a 32-hour work week, the idea that working people will be able to win such gains by lobbying congress or endorsing candidates is a mistake that we cannot afford to make. The only way we will ever come close to winning a 32-hour work week, universal public healthcare, free public higher education, or a just transition to a zero-emissions economy is through independent class struggle the same way we won the eight-hour work day.
4: Bring Back the Political Strike and Dismantle Taft-Hartley
The UAW 4811 strike at the University of California, though ultimately crushed by the courts, was one of the most inspiring and arguably one of the most important labor actions in decades. The union may have failed to win its demands, but, as a response to the UC administration’s draconian repression of campus protests, they nonetheless managed to successfully break the Taft-Hartley ban on political strikes, setting a potential precedent for other labor unions to follow, particularly those in higher education. While the leaders of UAW 4811 were careful to frame their strike as a response to unfair labor practices, every member who participated knew that their strike was part of the larger movement for Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza and they knew that they were using the power of their labor to support that struggle.
But Taft-Hartley bans much more than just political strikes. Introduced in 1947 as an amendment to the National Labor Relations Act and passed with wide support from both parties, the Taft Hartley Act, called the “slave-labor bill” by labor activists at the time, greatly limited the ability of organized labor to do anything other than peacefully bargain for wages and benefits. It not only requires labor unions to provide 80 days notice of contract strike, it strictly prohibits such basic methods of labor struggle as jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity strikes, and secondary boycotts, effectively undermining the ability of working people to organize collectively across unions or to support each other in union struggles. The Taft Hartley Act also gave employers the right to argue against unions in their workplaces and codified the right of states to pass Orwellian-named right-to-
But why shouldn’t nurses and teachers, for instance, be able to go on strike to support their brothers and sisters who drive the buses and trains, and why shouldn’t working people be able to strike collectively to demand basic human rights like access to healthcare, higher education, child care, and pensions? If the labor movement is ever going to be able to reassert itself, it will have to learn again to openly challenge the rules that bind it by organizing to collectively break them. The UAW’s current proposal, floated by Fain, to collectively settle contracts so that they all expire on May 1, 2028 is a good first step, but we cannot postpone such collective action for four years. We need to start building now toward the kind of mass strikes that have the potential to redefine the U.S. labor movement.
5. Break from the Two Parties of Capital and Build a Class Independent Union Movement
But more than anything else, the first and most important step that the UAW and every union in the country could take right now to strengthen its membership and prepare for the struggles ahead is to finally break with the two parties of capital once and for all. This means declaring their independence from and ending all endorsements and political support to all candidates from either party. In contrast, unions must turn their attention to the self-organization of the working class within, across, and outside the unions in order to build a united front of working people, immigrants, and the oppressed capable of winning real gains both from the state and the bosses. Such a move, however, should not be construed as a retreat from politics. On the contrary, we must politicize our unions in order to broaden the horizons of what is possible and begin to have the kinds of conversations necessary for the construction of a truly independent national working class party capable of taking on the capitalist state once and for all. While it is almost certain that the bureaucrats like Shawn Fain and Sean O’Brien who lead our unions will balk at such suggestions, it is the duty of rank-and-file union workers everywhere and their allies to take up these tasks now and to build the kinds of democratic and political structures needed to take over and remake our unions.
No comments:
Post a Comment