“Unions are big business. Why should truck drivers and bottle washers be allowed to make big decisions affecting union policy? Would any corporation allow it?”
—David Beck, President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, 1952-1957, until his indictment on charges of embezzlement
More and more today, our struggle as the working class in the U.S. Empire is embodied in unionism. This is a return to something that had been long abandoned. The Bessemer and Long Island Amazon drives, Starbucks United, service unions, Railroad Workers United, the UPS-Teamsters dispute, the ILWU strike, the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes — these are merely the most visible of the recent upsurge in labor struggles. There’s a new generation of labor standing up to Capital. We’re becoming more and more conscious of our existence as the working classes: that we share common economic, political, and social demands. As this resurgence of class consciousness spreads and grows, we have to take stock, pause for a moment, and learn our history. The lessons of the last century are crying out to us: take heed! Unless we look back, we won’t be able to chart a course forward. We have to learn from our defeats, because the capitalists won’t forget them. In fact, they already learned from the past century and have been applying all their efforts to crush us.
Why did the working class movement abandon unionism as a strategy for organization?
Why do the unions, as they exist today, seem to be on the side of Capital?
Why can’t we seem to expel the cop unions from our international organizations? Why do our international organizations force contracts on us that we don’t want? Why, for instance, did the Teamsters Brotherhood International force the UPS workers to ratify a despised contract in 2018, in the face of the popular vote of the membership?
How can we organize in a way that isn’t undermined, diverted, and destroyed by the capitalists and their pet politicians?
Which Side Are You On?
You know it in your flesh and bones: when you go to work, you’re at the mercy of your boss. Your boss — probably a manager, someone employed by the owner of the company to monitor you and make sure they can get the most out of your work — can change your hours, change your job description, give you more work, ask you to work on weekends, even fire you for any reason or for no reason. If you say “no” enough times, they can fire you.
It’s so self-evident why this is the case that it seems almost trite to spell it out: the employer owns everything that you use to do your job. If they don’t want you there, they can call the police to get rid of you. The employer has a huge amount of money. If they don’t want to pay you, that’s it — you’re done. In contrast, individual employees have no leverage over the employer. If you get angry and quit, that doesn’t hurt the employer. They’ll find someone else to fill your place. You have no leverage. They have all the power.
Now, if you’re in a union, if you’re organized, that boss lacks this power. By combining, by agreeing to act together, you can take back some of the leverage the boss has. It makes no difference if one person quits or withholds their labor, but if many people do it simultaneously, it costs the boss money and worse, from the employer’s point of view, it proves that the workers can extract concessions by organizing and refusing to work.
This fundamental imbalance in power is part of capitalism. As long as capitalism persists, workers will have an incentive to organize collectively against the employer. At the end of the day, this threat of work-stoppage, of a strike, is the greatest weapon we have and is the final resort in a labor-management relationship when the employer tries to exercise their power over the workers.
That’s the theory behind unions, and how they’re supposed to work. So why, in the modern world, does that not seem to be the case? Why do we still see strikes being broken, unions being busted, and unionized workers accepting decreases in pay, concessions, and bad contracts?
There are some terms that would be helpful in answering this question. There are two overall shapes that unions can take: craft unionism, on the one hand, and industrial unionism on the other. Then, there are two philosophies that unions can adhere to: social unionism and its polar opposite, business unionism.
Craft unionism is the organization of a union on a narrow basis — everyone in a certain trade belongs to the same union. This divides workers at the same site into different unions and, as a result, capitalist employers can play the different groups of workers off one another and try to keep them divided.
Industrial unionism is the organization of everyone in a given industry into a single union, preserving solidarity and permitting the maximum amount of force to be concentrated against the employer.
Social unionism sees union organization as part of a broader social program to empower workers; this was the form unionism in the U.S. almost invariably took until the late 1930s.
Business unionism sees unions as a business and their membership as clients. The philosophy of the business union is to restrict union struggles to one narrow field of action: wages and benefits. Business unions openly admit that they believe that management has the “right” to make many decisions: hiring and firing, closing plants, etc. Business unionism has all but conquered every major union in the U.S. Empire. It is the professed and avowed philosophy of every one of the big “International” unions — the Teamsters, the AFL-CIO, AFSCME, etc.
This still doesn’t provide an answer to our questions, although you can begin to see the outlines of one. To get the full picture, first we have to look at how U.S. law has treated and shaped unions, and then we have to examine how business unionism has manifested within the movement.
The Enemy Without
The U.S. law has never been friendly to unionism. In the 19th century, unions were prosecuted as illegal conspiracies. Working people struggled against the government for formal recognition under the law and, after several major uprisings in the late 19th century — the 1877 mass uprising, which led to the short-lived St. Louis Commune, the 1886 Haymarket Massacre, the 1894 Pullman Strike, and others — labor organization finally won some legal protections — the bare minimum.
The law keeps working class organizations divided, makes it difficult (if not impossible) for new unions to be certified, and has been transformed to be a tool of the employers rather than a tool for unions.
The law that governs labor disputes and union certification is the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (the “NLRA”). The NLRA establishes an all-empire board of arbitrators, the National Labor Relations Board or NLRB, that oversees unions and labor complaints. The NLRA determines the form that unions have to follow to become certified, or recognized, at workplaces and gives labor protections against suppression by employers. Under the NLRA, employers can be enjoined from interfering with the exercise of their employees in seeking self-organization, forming unions, and engaging in collective bargaining. It also grants the Board jurisdiction over employers who try to dominate or interfere with unions, engage in discriminatory hiring to encourage or discourage union membership, fire employees because they filed charges or gave testimony under the NLRA or “refuse to bargain collectively.”
None of these rights are self-enforcing. That is, if an employer (or their managers) does one of these things, you have to file a labor complaint with the NLRB. The NLRB then investigates the complaint and determines whether it will take action on your behalf. In the meantime, if the company fired you, you stay fired. The remedies available to workers when their bosses commit these “unfair labor practices” are limited to back pay, being re-hired, and monetary damages. NLRA cases take years to prosecute. The average time for the NLRB to investigate and decide if it will take a case is 2 months. The average time it takes an NLRB case to resolve is around 650 days. That’s 650 days after they complete their investigation that you might get your job back.
The NLRA was amended by what’s called the Taft-Hartley Amendment in 1947. Taft-Hartley edited the law to make labor unions liable for unfair labor practices, just like employers. In addition, along with the Employment Act of 1990, it makes it an unfair labor practice for a union to engage in what’s called a “sympathy strike” — that is, to strike in support of another union. It also makes “secondary boycotts” illegal — that is, to boycott or strike a company that does business with a struck company.
For instance, let’s say you work at the countrywide grocery chain, Pause and Procure. The shipping company, Containers Inc., delivers supplies to the grocery stores. If the Containers Inc. union strikes against Containers Inc. for firing someone, and Containers Inc. management hires scabs to defeat the union strike, your union at Pause and Procure is legally prohibited from striking, boycotting, or picketing Pause and Procure for continuing to work with Containers, Inc. and their scab drivers.
How Did It Get That Way?
The process that culminated in these laws was ongoing through the 20th century. It accelerated when finance capital in the U.S. firmly and forever merged with industrial capital and the largest shareholders of major corporations became the banks and mutual funds. For instance, Vanguard, a mutual fund, owns the majority of shares in 330 of the top 500 companies in the U.S. That’s two-thirds of the world’s most important stocks according to Investor’s Business Daily. Their competitor, BlackRock, is the largest investor in another 38 of those top 500 companies. “Management” is no longer a person or even a particular corporation’s CEO — it’s a faceless multi-corporation conglomerate that demands unions be broken both on the shopfloor and in the government. Since 1970, these financial corporations have driven U.S. companies to attack unions in the courtroom and in the halls of Congress, and they have succeeded.
Why do they want to break unions? Well, let’s look at the source of profits for U.S. companies over time: in 1950, 3.4% of total profits made by U.S. companies came from operations abroad. In 1965, that number was 5.9%. In 1970, it was 9.4%. By 1980, it had gone up to 15.6%. In 2017, it was 44% of all profits made by U.S. companies. As the percentage of profit acquired overseas increased, the profitability of domestic investment decreased.
The rate of profit, the profitability of investment, in the U.S. was decreasing for two reasons: the increase in machinery costs, and the increase in labor costs. Both of these had increased, at least partially, due to concessions won by unions. Corporations don’t want to pay U.S. labor costs. When they are obligated to pay such costs, they fight tooth and nail to keep them as low as possible. This necessitates crushing workplace organizations, and any inkling of solidarity among the working classes.
In a 1970 congressional report, it was noted that “close to three-quarters of total U.S. exports and upwards of one-half of all imports [were] transactions between the domestic and foreign subsidiaries of the same multinational conglomerate corporations.” The post-war boom secured record profits at home, and was primarily built by the U.S. state securing its position as global hegemon, dominating global markets, and sending forth billions of dollars in the Marshall Plan to “rebuild” Europe,. That profitability declined in the 1960s and 1970s, leading to the domestic industrial slump and the consolidation of finance capital in every industry. In the face of declining profits, corporations began to squeeze the maximum surplus from workers, and claw back the previous decades’ labor victories.
Corporate Scheming
This is the world we live with today: a corporate America that is openly and brutally hostile to union organizing — as vicious as any boss of the early unionizing period, and as cruel as any of the men at Blair Mountain or the Coal Wars. They’ve learned new tricks, and now they have the NLRB to help them. We aren’t organizing and fighting for our unions under the same conditions as those late-19th and early-20th century pioneers. The bosses have cut their teeth, and now they have a whole new assortment of tricks and legal powers at their beck and call. If they don’t call armed Pinkertons to shoot up workers’ barracks anymore, it’s only because they no longer need to.
U.S. corporations have adopted tactics to indefinitely delay elections for union certification. Because these representation elections can’t be held while there are any unfair labor practice charges pending, management simply ensures there are always grievances from the employees. J.P. Stevens put off a union vote at its Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, plants for over 10 years using this method.
The number of unfair labor practice charges against employers has continued to grow over time. From 3,655 in 1957 to 20,311 in 1975, they exploded as employers fought against workers. By 2020, that number had stabilized around 20,000 a year. Employers consistently provoke unfair labor complaints by their actions; part of this is clearly intended to bog down the NLRB and prevent it from timely resolutions.
Corporations created lobbying bodies in the late 1960s and early 1970s that have carried on the fight against unionization behind closed doors, in the offices of Senators, Congresspeople, and Presidents. In 1972 trade associations contributed $8 million to elections. In 1984, business PACs contributed $23.6 million to Republican congressional candidates and $20.7 to Democratic candidates. In 1978, the Wall Street Journal noted that “Business PACs aren’t experiencing any difficulty in finding outstretched hands, and they seem to be getting their money’s worth from a growing contingent of Democrats.” Under Carter, the White House had an open door policy for businessmen to come and air their grievances. Not so for labor. While the Democrats have controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, labor has suffered some of its most stunning defeats. Since 1971, the only significant piece of labor-friendly legislation to pass while Democrats controlled congress was the Family Medical Leave Act in 1993.
The capitalists have reorganized themselves; they are marching together under one banner, and they’ve identified their enemy: us.
The Enemy Within
Yet we aren’t immediately able to confront the bourgeois state or the corporation as our enemy. There’s something that we have to deal with first, before we can get to them — the business union. We can trace the origin of business unionism to the American Federation of Labor — the AFL, now one half of the merged AFL-CIO — and its founders, men like Adolph Strasser, who said, “We have no ultimate ends. We are going on from day to day. We are fighting for immediate objects – objects that can be realized in a few years.” As George Meany, the AFL leader responsible for merging with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) put it in 1955, “We are dedicated to freedom… through a system of private enterprise. We believe in the American profit system.” John L. Lewis, a business unionist who was integral to founding the CIO said, “Trade unionism is a phenomenon of capitalism quite similar to the corporation. One is essentially a pooling of labor for the purpose of common action in production and sales. The other is a pooling of capital for exactly the same purpose. The economic aims of both are identical – gain.” Regardless of any concessions that these men won for the working class, their intent was never to actually triumph over the capitalist system. They were only ever reformers, who were content with the continuation of exploitative systems so long as their people got a slightly larger piece of the pie.
Union organizers like these men eventually recognized the profitability in what they were doing and decided that business unions were just that, businesses, and they should be run like businesses — from the top down. Business unions attempt to routinize and bureaucratize bargaining. The big umbrella unions — the “International Unions” — centralized all of their processes in the 1940s. Contracts were extended from one year to three, giving more power to the International Unions in bargaining. The Internationals developed bargaining patterns, centralized methods and norms of bargaining. They hired an explosion of administrative staff. Labor unions employ some 105,000 people in the U.S. Empire. This glut of administrators serves to bureaucratize and endlessly convolute labor bargaining.
As an example, United Auto Workers didn’t get any new union members from 1949 to 1970, but its administrative staff grew from 407 to 1,335. Sidney Lens, a labor leader, wrote that the representative from the central offices
develops a whole set of special attitudes. Since he is appointed by the regional directors or top officers rather than elected by the membership, he tends to lose a feeling of responsibility. His post is now a ‘job,’and he is no longer vitally concerned about pleasing his own sense of mission as in pleasing his regional director, or at least keeping clear of his lash. His own salary and benefits become progressively larger by comparison with the members who still work at the lathe, and his economic stake tends to make him moderate just as the secure doctor or lawyer tends in the same direction. He is now an ‘organization man.’
While the welfare state grew in Europe, in the U.S. Empire it was replaced by benefits-bargaining from the business unions. The immense wealth flowing into the U.S. from its conquest of the global markets gave domestic workers healthcare, paid time off, bonuses, child care assistance, life insurance, and pension plans. Rather than receive the traditional blessings of the welfare state from the government, which represents the collective arrangements and desires of the capitalists themselves, workers in the U.S. Empire must cajole these benefits from their individual employers. In 1951 fringe benefits accounted for 17% of the value of compensation of manual laborers. By 1981, that had risen to 30% on average, and firms covered by the former CIO unions were spending 50% of all their labor costs on these fringe benefits.
In the 1920s, only a handful of companies like Ford provided a limited number of benefits like company clinics or doctors. By the early 1980s, 75% of contracts had health care programs and 60% had major medical benefits. By 1980, over 130 million Americans were covered by employer or union health care plans.
Because strikes forced employers to provide benefits, strikes were tamed and controlled. The “contract strike,” the only kind that’s now legal thanks to the business unions’ development of the “no strike clause.” This has deprived unions of their most powerful weapon so long as a contract is in place. The NLRA doesn’t recognize spontaneous strikes, so-called wildcat strikes, and employers are permitted to fire strikers when they violate these clauses — that is, when they strike while their contracts are still in force. They remember their defeat by wildcat strikes such as the Flint Sit-Down Strike, which resulted in the unionization of the American automobile industry. Locals can no longer call strikes of their own; strikes must be authorized by leadership, and they are now run as a more or less passive affair with a few token pickets at the gate or on the street while the majority of members are told to stay home. Thus, strikes today are a sad mockery of those in the past. Even the aforementioned reformers staged dozens of spontaneous strikes that terrified the capitalist class.
Bargaining secrecy — that is the use of non-disclosure agreements and secret bargaining teams — has become the norm. That means the members don’t even know what the offers and counter-offers are being made between the union and the company. Just like the latest Teamster-UPS contract, members are left with nothing to do but wait for reports. As we’ve reported in the past, union leadership often claims that this kind of closed bargaining makes it easier to reach an agreement with management. In fact, it’s only “easier” because the labor bureaucrats can claim that they were outmaneuvered and that the contract they came out of the bargaining room with was as “good as they could get.”
This type of secret bargaining goes hand-in-hand with the business unions’ explicitly stated philosophy that they are in partnership with the managers — that, in fact, the goal of union organizing is to ensure the owners get enough money so they don’t close the factories or warehouses. The bankruptcy of this approach was revealed in its full, vile, form during the Chrysler bailout of 1979. To protect the rest of the domestic economy, the U.S. Congress approved a bailout plan to prevent Chrysler from collapse but the banks and the financial capitalists that run the show wanted concessions from the union as part of the plan. Chrysler was eventually given $1.5 billion in loans and credits but the United Auto Workers had to agree to wage freezes, the loss of $125 million in expected wage increases from nonunion staff, and, eventually, a $1.15-an-hour wage cut in UAW wages. Doug Fraser, then-president of UAW, was rewarded for his loyalty in pushing these horrific concessions with a seat on the Chrysler Board of Directors.
The UAW used this kind of back room bargaining to agree to a total of $203 million in wage and benefit concessions and $100 million in deferred pension funds payments. What was Fraser’s public position, so he could sell this to the thousands of Chrysler autoworkers? That “these actions make it clear that UAW has met its responsibilities in the broad effort to save Chrysler workers’ jobs and restore the company to stability.” Even before the vote was taken, Fraser and the UAW Vice President had gotten on a plane to meet with Chrysler exec Mark Stepp in Washington with Vice President Walter Mondale. The UAW’s monthly magazine Solidarity reported “We know how to strike, how to fight, and how to bargain. We don’t have to prove those things as much any more. What we do have to prove is that we can solve problems.”
During World War II, Communists, other tendencies of socialists, and various other militant groups formed organizations within their unions to debate policy and to vie for power. These debates were a source of union democracy. No matter how bureaucratic the authority the union leadership secured over the bargaining process, the top leaders still had to contend with opponents in their rank-and-file membership. Sadly, in each of the major unions, this opposition was systematically defeated. The internal democratic life of the union was crushed, and political pluralism was reduced to a mere anti-Communist crusade by the mid-1940s. Red-baiting, which had little traction during the ‘30s and the war, exploded into McCarthyism. The leaders who adhered to business unionism purged their ranks of Communists and other socialists. The 1946 CIO convention banned members of the Communist Party USA from membership. The question asked by leadership was, “Are you going to be loyal to the CIO or the Communist Party?”
The now well-known tactic of cutting local organizations off from one another became the standard in the unions. Rank-and-file workers lacked (and often still lack!) any means to communicate with their counterparts in other areas. The business unions became an entrenched, self-perpetuating clique of leaders at the top dictating all terms and making all important decisions.
It is only relatively recently that groups within the big unions have once again built up enough power to challenge this trend. Organizations like the Teamsters for a Democratic Union and UPS Teamsters United (to name a few within the Teamsters themselves) have begun the titanic effort to address business unionism by attacking the very structures that have historically been used to silence the voices of the workers.
So What Do We Do?
Lenin called the tendency of unions to pursue narrow economic gains trade-union consciousness. U.S. unions have a different term for the same thing: business unionism. One of the leading theorists of the tame labor struggles in the U.S. Empire, Gregory Mantsios, wrote in 1998 that unions
exist in order to address the immediate and practical concerns of unionized workers. The objective of unions is to protect their members economically, primarily by negotiating and enforcing the union contract. Unions are seen essentially as service organizations, whose task is to ensure fair wages, increase job security, protect against victimization, improve the conditions of work, and provide additional economic benefits… In the arena of politics, unions are concerned only with those issues that have a direct or indirect impact on unions, their members, and the industries in which they function.
When capitalists are not capable of actually making unionization illegal, this is what they dream that unions should be. When the ruling class isn’t actively union-busting, it has focused its efforts on restricting the activity of unions to narrow, trade-union consciousness — to business unionism. A business union will never challenge the capitalist status quo. It will never stand in solidarity with migrant laborers, or with Black workers who are excluded from the workplace. It will protect its members first and foremost, and do that by restricting access. Even unions that once acted broadly for the benefit of all workers have been corrupted by this tendency toward business unionism.
Nothing is easier than allowing this blinkered, narrow vision to predominate among union members; it is the natural, organic consciousness that develops out of the struggle of the workers in combination against the owning class. First becoming aware of their narrow, shared economic interests, unionized workers will tend to become closed-off, focused on protecting the jobs that exist now, for the workers who are members today. It is by funding, rewarding, and exaggerating this natural tendency that the capitalists have made their deepest inroads to disarm the threat posed by unionized labor in the U.S. Empire — but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Solidarity is the ethos of revolution.
The struggle against capitalism is not a narrowly economic struggle.
It’s not enough to merely join a union. Joining a union is joining an organization that long ago betrayed the working classes in an effort to come to an agreement with the bosses. Similarly, it’s not enough for new unions to be created if they will fall into this same tendency. Labor bureaucrats claim that business unionism gets the goods, but in fact it’s nothing more than begging for crumbs. When the bosses’ table is overflowing, the crumbs will come, but when it comes time to tighten their belts, the business unions will be first to go starving.
The business unions can’t act in solidarity. They’re scrupulously observant of labor laws (even when their leaders don’t seem to care at all about breaking criminal laws) and the labor laws were designed to break up solidarity. Solidarity is acting in support and defense of another person without knowing them; it’s supporting a stranger on their own terms. It is the fundamental ethic of the workers’ movement! It’s only in solidarity that we can overcome the competition that capitalists sow between workers.
Therefore, before unions can be the vessel of a mature workers’ movement, those unions must be won away from the business unionist model. We have to defeat the narrow parochialism of craft unionism and the entrenched leadership of business unionism. We must form organizations and fight within our unions, for solidarity between all oppressed peoples, sexes, and classes. The first stage of that fight is the fight against union leadership, to democratize the unions. Until this occurs, modern unions will continue to shamble along as undead husks of what they once were.
