News and interventions of the class struggle
 
Class Union or One Big Union?

The ICP argues for a class union dedicated to protecting the economic interests of the entire working class. The class union organizes workers across employers, industries, and national boundaries. It encompasses all occupations no matter if “skilled” and “unskilled”, “blue-collar” and “white-collar”. It promotes the unity of action of the entire working class. It maintains a completely combative position against the bosses, never collaborating or cooperating with them under any circumstances. It pays no respect to the laws that protect the bourgeoisie, especially those that limit the workers’ right to strike.

The class union should be as widelybased as possible. In this respect it differs from party-unions and parties in place of unions, which are both promoted by the various opportunist factions. This is not to say that it should be apolitical. Not every worker is willing or able to join the communist party at any given time. Even so, they can still be of great help in workers’ struggles.

The IWW

For the most part, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) is mired in the anarchist and ”libertarian socialist” ideologies which failed so badly in the post World War One revolutions and, more importantly, the Spanish Civil War. The concept of “autonomy” of local unions, individual workplaces, etc was alien to the classic IWW. IWW in the 1970s abandoned the industrial outlook of the OG IWW. So they “unionize” individual workplaces, which no longer seek unity with even other workplaces in identical industries.

The ideology of autonomy means the IWW currently lacks the ability to capitalize on its strengths. For example, its membership amongst workers in Education is not insignificant – 1300 across the US. Members in the “Educational Workers Industrial Union #620” – were leaders in the 2018 West Virginia School Strike. But there is no strategy for turning isolated groups of IWW militants into an organization fighting for the unity of all workers and unions. As long as it holds onto localist autonomy it cannot become the power it should be. Instead of unity of actions, there are small handfuls of Educational workers working on their own individual and local agendas.

“Local Autonomy” also encourages IWW projects like the “Burgerville Workers Union” – a union of fast food restaurant workers in Portland, Oregon in one business. It encourages them to think it is ok to negotiate a No Strike Clause in their contract with employers, even though such a clause is in direct contradiction to the IWW’s constitution. Instead of attempting to spread their occasional successes to other restaurants, the duplicate autonomous unions for every workplace – a different burger chain is a separate and isolated union. One donut shop in a business of 10 shops (Voodoo Doughnuts Workers Union). As well as a bar going out of business! Each union is a little more tenuous and isolated for the collective power of workers to be effective.

The failures outlined above don’t mean that the IWW should be written off. It still does many good works despite the above weaknesses. For example, it’s organized militants within a number of major Canadian unions encouraging workplace actions which have won significant workplace improvements in a very hostile political environment.

 

 

 

Strike at John Deere

10,000 workers at John Deere have been on strike since October 14. It is a massive strike by U.S. standards, and the first to hit the agricultural machinery manufacturer since 1986. It occurs against the wishes of the regime union, the United Auto Workers (UAW), which claims to represent the workers.

The factories involved in the strike are in small cities and towns in Iowa, Illinois, and Kansas. This part of the world is reviled by what passes for the “left” in the U.S. To the progressives, the workers now in revolt are “flyover men” – ignorant and insignificant people who are out of touch with the culture of polite society (and what a grand culture it is!). The “radical left”, who are mostly petty-bourgeois kids playing make-believe, do not care about the John Deere strike because there is nothing romantic about building tractors. And besides, class struggle is so old-fashioned!

It is understandable why workers in those places are fighting back now. The locations of the John Deere strike are generally minor cities and towns that exist to serve farming activity in the surrounding rural areas. They were hit hard by the wave of deindustrialization in the U.S. in the later years of the 20th century, and by the general impoverishment of small cities and towns in the same period. Manufacturers started to show a renewed interest in those places in the past two decades, as a way of escaping the complications of outsourced manufacturing and the higher wages in urban areas. This occurred at a time of acute labor weakness. At the same time, agriculture became more industrialized, and thus agricultural laborers became proletarianized. The result was a renewed level of industry and a greater number of immiserated workers.

This history, which is really the bosses’ strategy, is clearly visible at John Deere. One of the reasons for the strike was the company and the UAW’s plan to eliminate pensions for new hires. The company and its union already gutted pensions for newer workers in the past, so this would introduce a third, even lower tier to the workforce. In the past, the bosses could buy off the more senior workers in exchange for selling out their newer comrades. This does not work anymore. It is now clear to the whole working class that economic opportunities for younger workers have disappeared. This has been going on for such a long time that these workers are not so young anymore, and they are now quite numerous. Even retirees understand that there will be no future for their class unless they act.

In this whole story, it is clear that the UAW acts as an instrument for John Deere and other employers like it. Our party stated decades ago that the regime unions are “a special police force deployed against the workers” (Towards the Rebirth of the Working Class Trade Union, 1992). The UAW does everything in its power to collaborate with employers and sabotage the workers’ struggle. It holds meetings in secret with the bosses, it prevents workers from seeing the contracts it has negotiated, it issues joint statements with the bosses, it intimidates militant workers, and it cozies up to bourgeois politicians. Union bureaucrats at other UAW companies have taken bribes from those companies to the tune of millions of dollars. The UAW bureaucracy pressured the workers at John Deere to accept the latest contract, which ceded their interests to those of the bourgeoisie. 90% of workers who voted on the contract rejected it, choosing instead to fight for their class interests in a strike. The strike is therefore an action against the regime unions as much as it is against John Deere.

The workers at John Deere, and at so many other companies, show us that there is a class opposition within the regime unions. The next step in the struggle is for this class opposition to coordinate its activities in different unions across and between industries, while also coordinating with militant workers who are not yet unionized. This coordination is the precursor to the class union, which mobilizes all workers to fight for the interests of our class.