NAME: Ira Grupper
EMAIL: irag@iglou.com
DATE: 07/03/2008

TITLE: Work, Workers and Building a Progressive
Movement in 2008

LABOR PAEANS—June 2008
by Ira Grupper
(published by FORsooth, newspaper of Louisville, Kentucky chapter of F.O.R. [Fellowship of Reconciliation] )

Work, Workers and Building a Progressive Movement in 2008

Following are remarks delivered June 5, 2008 by your columnist to a conference sponsored by the Working Class Studies Association, and the Center for the Study of Working Class Life at the State University of New York (SUNY Stony Brook).

When I moved to Louisville, Kentucky, almost forty years ago, it was mostly a blue-collar city. The second-largest GE plant in the world was in Louisville. That workplace, employing over 23,000 hourly workers, now employs less than 5,000. A few weeks ago we learned that GE will sell its Louisville facilities entirely.

Brown and Williamson Tobacco employed 5,000 workers in Louisville. It moved away. Philip Morris had 4,200 workers. Moved out about eight years ago. P. Lorillard—1,200 workers. Gone.

Fawcett-Haynes Printing, with 3,400 workers—moved away. International Harvester—7,500 workers. Gone. Same with American Standard.

DuPont is closing. Ford Motor Company has two plants in Louisville. It will be eliminating third shift at one of them—800-1,000 fewer jobs. There is uncertainty at the second factory. And, now, Ford will downsize nationally.

Across the Ohio River, in Indiana, Colgate-Palmolive is moving.

We are a union town. The strength of the United Mine Workers, over many decades, elsewhere in Kentucky, has made us the only state in the South that is not a right-to-work state. The industrial proletariat in Louisville was, percentage-wise, among the most unionized in the U.S.

City officials in Louisville, seeing this economic devastation coming, in the 1970’s and 1980’s, moved to attract other types of employers. They were somewhat successful.

Humana, the for-profit healthcare vulture, is headquartered in Louisville now. So is Yum! Brands, which owns Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Taco Bell, and more. The Presbyterian Church USA was lured to Louisville. The city has been trying to attract bio-tech companies, so far without much success.

UPS, with a huge hub in Louisville, has provided a large number of new jobs, some high paying pilots, many part-time package handlers, many other jobs as well.

As a result of relative job stability, union strength, and plentiful jobs, over many years, a stable African American middle class grew. But now, with thousands and thousands of assembly-line and other jobs being eliminated, what will become of this large group of Louisville wage-earners?

In Louisville, and nationally, sad to say, racism is still a dividing line in the working class. To its credit, the labor movement participated in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s. The wife of a Teamsters Union official was murdered in Selma, Alabama.

Starting in the 1980’s, with Ronald Reagan, the limited ruling class concessions wrested by the Civil Rights Movement, with assistance from organized labor, began to get watered down. The labor movement must now take up the cause of making effective the almost dysfunctional EEOC, and state and municipal human rights and human relations commissions. Claims of job bias, mostly based on race, gender, and retaliation, rose nine percent last year at the EEOC. And labor must clean up its own in-house racism as well.

Additionally, we must reach out to youth. I was recently privileged to tour campuses with a number of my sister and brother veterans of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a pioneering civil rights group in the 1960’s.

We spoke to large audiences, for example, in North Carolina. The students made good points, asked probing questions, yet it was obvious they were taught precious little about organized labor. What a shame.

What happens to a city, to a country, that is losing its industrial base? Are info-tech, service jobs and the underground economy enough to compensate?

Even law firms are not immune from the bust cycle of capitalism. The Chicago law firm Sonnenschein, Nath and Rosenthal recently laid off 124 employees, including 37 attorneys, six of whom are partners.

Where is the class struggle unionism so needed in this period? What happens when you are the only labor movement in the world that does not have a political party?

I support Barack Obama’s presidential run. Yet, in a different vein, I wonder what happens to a labor movement that accepts the notion that there is no place to go except the Democratic Party. What happens to a labor movement that seems to feel what’s good for business is good for labor?

Steve Beshear, a Democrat, won election for Kentucky governor against the Republican incumbent. Beshear, when he was running for office, knew the Republican incumbent left the cash register empty, yet he said not one word about it during the campaign.

Beshear will oppose right-to-work legislation and will support prevailing wage, crucial to labor’s growth. So organized labor uncritically backed Beshear to the hilt. Yet the only union official in his administration is the Labor Secretary. This seems to be the case in so many states.

In another area, American Labor has not understood fully the need to organize internationally. The UE was the first union in the U.S. to systematically analyze the need to organize internationally. How might the Working Class Studies Association, and others, assist this pioneering approach?

With our economy in recession, workers need AFDC and welfare; thanks to a Democrat, Bill Clinton, it is no longer there. Is there a union push against the corporations? Will Toyota be paying more than the Big Three—say, $12-$14/hour? Is union leadership accepting this? Will unions allow, for example, pilots to earn $25,000 or $30,000 a year on commuter airlines?

Will U.S. labor look to Great Britain, France, and Scandinavia or, God forbid, Cuba and Venezuela, for ideas on building class-struggle unionism? Or, should we look at labor’s not mobilizing our members for single-payer as an omen? Should we little more than lament Congressional filibustering of labor law reform?

Organizationally, a problem emerged as a result of the decreasing number of union members in the U.S. The AFL-CIO was not aggressively organizing the unorganized. It feared losing gains already won, so it focused on legislation.

A number of unions left the AFL-CIO to create Change To Win. Unfortunately, CTW is not like the CIO of the 1930’s and 1940’s. It is organized from the top down. There is no such a thing as a local Change To Win local office anywhere, to my knowledge.

CTW did succeed in shaking up the AFL-CIO, which was not of itself a bad thing. CTW, representing many more service workers, while the AFL-CIO was bargaining mostly for industrial workers, has pushed the AFL to step up its organizing efforts, or at least intentions. How will this progress, given the AFL’s hiring freeze?

Yet, too much of CTW smacks of “business unionism,” trying to be partners with nursing homes, trying to get government funding for projects. But NNOC, CNA’s arm, has its own troubles. Some claim that its representation at one Chicago hospital is so lacking that a rumored planned raid by SEIU may well succeed.

Both union groupings have good and bad points. Watch out that either or both don’t lower collective bargaining agreements to please employers. Ironically, SEIU portrayed itself for a while as the most left-wing. Many now think it is the most right-wing.

As people involved in studying the building of workingclass power, we must know that the basis of workingclass power has been among those who make stuff. Service, intellectual workers, bureaucrats, the informal economy—all go to the creation and marketing of stuff. If the auto industry stopped, in times past, everything would stop. This is no longer true in today’s economy.

Marx envisioned that once the final stage was achieved manufacturing would take people into account—its labor value would be shared by everybody…Back to the present.

There is hardly any steel being produced in the U.S. Two exceptions: a Russian-owned mill, as I understand it, where U.S. Steel once produced in Maryland, and an Indian-owned plant soon to open in the Iron Range of Minnesota.

Let’s assume SEIU and AFSCME together organized every municipal hospital worker, and they went out on strike. What power would that have—since most are public workers? Where is the threat?

Please understand: I am not undermining the importance of organizing service workers. It is the fastest growing sector, and we need to study where it fits into a Left political economy.

There must be a connection between manufacturing, service, and info sectors to have an effect. It used to be the ruling classes of the world were confined to one location at a time. Moving cost a lot. Now, because of computerization, capital accumulators can set up a new factory quickly.

Now, one can send capital (money) anywhere by computer. The internet was created because of a need for it—to be able to transfer info and capital quickly.

If a young person, newly radicalized, asks where to go to work to be most effective—what shall we answer? This paper cannot cover the broad impact of immigration, the role of U.S. agricultural monopolies, for example, in driving farmers off their land in other countries, in forcing them into the U.S. Nor can we examine the role of racism, sexism, age-ism, disability discrimination, and xenophobia in dividing the proletariat, upholding privilege, and facilitating accumulation.

It is the productive forces, which give rise to productive relations, the class nature of an exploitative socio-economic system. Prior to slavery, there was a primitive communal system. No class structure.

How did humankind move from the communal to a slave system without a class struggle? The Marxist logic is: the productive forces changed over time, which made it practical to practice exploitation, from which emerged a class society.

Today we must likewise study how forces and relations of production interrelate. What do we know about the changing nature of the productive forces of contemporary capitalism: the explosion of electronic communications, enabling capital to flow around the world with the speed of light? Or, to seek out cheap labor, also at the speed of light? Or the productive forces, i.e. science, which creates capitalism’s military superiority?

As the ruling class sees it, it is for global domination, not just to exploit, but also contain other national capitalist competition. All these and more should be considered within the context of the IMF and globalization.

There are hopeful signs labor is on the class-struggle move. ILWU (International Longshore and Warehouse Union) led a one-day work stoppage to protest the war in Iraq. U. S. Labor Against the War has been active for many years.

The UE relationship with F.A.T. (Frente Aut?nomo de Trabajadores) has been long-standing. And Hugo Chávez’s ALBA set up a branch in Havana. This may well provide potential for educational ties with U.S. labor activists.

SMART, SEIU Member Activists for Reform Today, has members in 12 states and Canada. Sal Roselli, who comes out of the Catholic Worker Movement, is the union leader in California battling the Andy Stern business unions.

A big push, coming from labor and our allies, must be for a massive government jobs program, a la the WPA and other programs of FDR’s New Deal. Roosevelt was not a leftist; he was a capitalist. But he was a smart capitalist.

His administration built dams, bridges, railroad stations, and in the end designed murals and other public art. We must do no less today.

Capital has a remarkable ability to adapt to changed circumstances. All of us who want a new world must research, understand and combat capital’s new exploitative mechanisms. And then we will sing out as did the Wobblies of yore, and which I will make gender neutral:

…we have a glowing dream
Of how fair the world will seem
When men and women live their lives
secure and free.
When the earth is owned by labor, and there’s
joy and peace for all,
In that Commonwealth of Toil that is to be.

Contact Ira Grupper: irag@iglou.com


April, 2008 Newspaper
http://www.ccds.org/newsletters/labor_paeans_Apr08.html

March, 2007 Newspaper
http://www.ccds.org/newsletters/labor_paeans_Mar08.html

February, 2007 Newspaper
http://www.ccds.org/newsletters/labor_paeans_Feb08.html