As conditions for working and poor people have stagnated and degraded throughout the territorial U.S. Empire, a rising tide of class consciousness has spread throughout the working classes. The long-delayed struggle to raise the federal minimum wage has polarized the divided strata of the working classes; the turn-coat labor aristocracy, those for whom the conditions are already “good enough,” have abandoned the common workers and allied themselves with the capitalist bosses in belittling the struggle for livable working-class incomes. (“Why should you make $60k a year flipping burgers, when I do so and so?”). All over the country, the brutal conditions suffered by workers, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, have been exposed and brought to light: the momentous increase in Amazon’s infrastructure, the proliferation of snooping Ring-camera technology to monitor package deliveries, the mass social murder of workers by exposing them over and over to the COVID threat, and on and on. These legitimate grievances have fueled the resurgence of a growing labor movement, and instilled in large sections of the U.S. proletariat a trade-union consciousness that spurs the organization of laborers into new union formations, through which they can confront their bosses — and not only confront them, but confront them and win.
We’ve seen this trend in Amazon warehouses and Starbucks storefronts across the country. It should come as no surprise that the labor movement within the U.S. Empire, the political and economic center of world-imperialism, would first rise in the unorganized service industries that support the lifestyle of the labor aristocracy. For nearly one hundred years, the capitalist masters of the U.S. Empire have staved off revolution by doling out handfuls of scraps to the working classes. Fast coffee and speedy delivery of any commodity imaginable is the price the monopoly capitalists pay the suburban labor aristocrats and small-business owners haunting the colonial-estate suburbs of the imperialist metropole in exchange for their loyalty. The adherence of all those doctors, well paid tech workers, and small-business tyrants to the parties of the big capitalists has its costs.
This trend has entered Connecticut through Starbucks, calling Starbucks workers across the state to take action and get organized. Connecticut has long been a preserve of the ruling elite. New England boarding schools train the children of the ruling class. New England colleges like Yale prepare them for the management of the imperialist system. The state is the seat of the eastern seaboard’s defense contractors. The financial hub of New York is a mere two hours away and the protected, walled gardens of its monopolist elite can be found all along the southern Connecticut coast — comfortably far from the “danger” of the urbanized city where the finance market sits.
In Connecticut, the trade-union consciousness has surfaced most intensely through the union drive at two Starbucks stores — one in Corbin’s Corner, West Hartford, and the other in Vernon. These stores voted to unionize over the last six months and now stand as the latest outposts of a campaign for Starbucks unionizations sweeping the country. While the Corbin’s Corner store has not yet seen aggressive intensifications of class conflict (to our knowledge), the Vernon store has been subject to the worst kinds of retaliation — unjust firings, refusal to bargain, and other anti-union tactics.
Generally, across all Starbucks stores in the U.S. Empire, the returning CEO Howard Schultz has waged what’s been called a “scorched earth” anti-union campaign. More than 325 unfair labor complaints have been filed against Starbucks since the first drive began. These complaints include one-on-one meetings between managers and workers to threaten them, captive-audience meetings with entire stores to give them anti-union rhetoric, and the roll-out of added benefits only in non-union stores. These are classic anti-union tactics that our forebears in the labor movement fought and bled to expose and defeat.
Here in Vernon, a local union leader was fired under the ginned-up pretense that a safe had been discovered unlocked during her shift. No money was stolen and no evidence presented that the union organizer in question was at fault, but she was summarily fired and given no opportunity to contest management’s decision. This kind of immediate firing using suspicious or outright fabricated reasons isn’t uncommon in non-union workplaces; managers, acting to protect the interests of the firm’s owners and shareholders, have near-dictatorial power over the workplace, and are encouraged by the capitalist bosses to fire “unruly” workers at will. In this case, the union organizer’s co-workers immediately suspected that she had been fired in retaliation for union organizing — which, even in the fascist U.S. Empire, is nominally illegal, if it can be proved — and have set up a Go-Fund-Me to help support her while her case is pending before the Connecticut National Labor Relations Board, the adjudicatory body that rules on labor practices on behalf of the capitalist dictatorship. (The semi-official representation of the Vernon Starbucks workers, Twitter account @VernonSBWU, did not respond to a request for comment.) Throughout the U.S. Empire, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and his anti-union mercenaries have summarily and illegally fired over 100 local and regional union leaders in their effort to crush the unionization campaign.
At the Vernon store, management just recently refused to negotiate with the nascent union so long as they used a “hybrid meeting” model, meaning, so long as they insisted on the right of their members to attend the meetings with management using COVID-safe methods like Zoom, in addition to in-person meetings. This is a transparent effort to shut down negotiations between labor and management with red tape justifications, so that Starbucks can throw up its hands, while blaming the organized workers for their “unreasonable” ground rules.
The capitalist class is already scrambling to get ahead of this surge in trade-union activity and organization here in Connecticut. Amazon, which over the last two years has engaged in various union-suppression tactics to maintain “order” in their notoriously inhumane warehouses, is giving piecemeal raises to its Connecticut warehouse workers. These raises come just as, over the border in New York, the organizers driving the unionization effort have fought tooth and nail to organize Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse. This is a desperate retrenchment by Amazon, a pathetic, last-ditch tactic to prevent the “contagion” of trade-union consciousness from reaching Connecticut. But miniscule, last-minute bribes will not placate an outraged employee body that has suffered, for years, some of the most depraved working conditions in the U.S. Empire.
Although the growth of unions and their increasing levels of militance signals the rising consciousness of the workers in these industries, it’s not, in itself, enough to bring about revolutionary change. It is a sign that we are increasingly prepared to become revolutionary, but not the way in which we will fight to win.
Why can’t the unions themselves lead us toward liberation? The fact of the matter is that most of these unions are “captured.” Their leadership serves as little more than puppets of the capitalists. These are the AFL-CIO unions, the AFSCME unions. Like the old revisionist parties of the Western capitalist world, the revolutionary potential of the unions was long ago surrendered to the business interests.
This does not mean we should oppose further unionization. Far from it! But we must be clear: the business unions are given to cowardly capitulation to management, to vile back-room deals with the ruling class, and to opportunist, labor-aristocratic, petit-bourgeois, now-progress, now-reactionary positions. That is, through local organization, the membership of the big unions can be radicalized and those local organizations can be developed into real workplace councils; unless and until it is these final steps are taken, to move from unionization to revolutionary organization, the unions, even those being organized under oppressive capitalist resistance, will remain little more than a foil to be manipulated by the capitalists, to be dangled in front of the workers as a promise of class collaboration.
Unionize! Fight for your unions. But don’t stop there. Push them forward to new heights; bring them deeper into the struggle, even when they don’t want to march forward. The unions are useful only insofar as they serve you to confront the enemy state, only so far as they serve you to stand up to the capitalist and the warmonger, the imperialist and the slick politicians in his pocket. Join your unions and force them to confront reaction — if you’re in a unionized workplace, go into the union and attend meetings. This is a place to advance the front, to win allies, and to do battle with the enemy.
What is a workplace council? It is the self-acting organization of the workers in a given workplace. It is like a union, and a union can easily form the shell of a workplace council. A workplace council is a deliberative body in which everyone who contributes labor to a workplace has a say, has a vote, on what goes on in that workplace; on who “manages” that workplace; ultimately, on whether that workplace continues politely working for capital’s starvation wage, or takes up arms against the rulers. Workplace councils represent workplace democracy in its most refined form. Unions are the crib, the training grounds, of workplace democracy, but it is the workplace council that represents its mature form, a form prepared to assert its demands, to heighten the struggle, and eventually to overthrow the system that made it necessary. Like a union, workplace councils can fight collectively for the rights of their workers. Unlike a union, they are not enslaved to the capitalist system, and are bound by no law. When the time comes, it will be the councils from which our power, the people’s power, springs.
We do not want class peace! We want victory in the class war!
