Report at the Party’s International General Meeting on January 2025

Year in retrospect

The North American section of the Party began its work within the trade unions in a thoroughgoing way almost two years ago. As guided by the international trade union center, it has been the section’s priority to both study the history of the US workers movement, and to begin to gain direct experience within the existing unions. A primary priority for us has been to elevate our Party’s knowledge of the character of the various unions in the United States. To determine which are totally dominated by the capitalist regime and where communist proselytization within them is impossible, or to establish if and how communist influence can be extended to advance combative class forces.

As has been long established, because of the complicated and diverse history of the workers movement in various countries, the particular ways in which our Party relates to the unions in each national area must be developed through a systematic study, not totally founded upon a priori knowledge transferred from experiences in other national areas. Instead, knowledge must be gained from joint historic study alongside direct experience of Party militants attempting to intervene in these spaces. As the number of worker militants within unionized sectors who have approached the Party grew, work in this area became possible in the United States in a more expanded way.

Strikes and Interventions

In 2024 in the US there were approximately 334 labor actions across 515 locations. Statistics show, California had the largest number of strikes followed by New York, Oregon, Illinois, and Washington state. Cities with the largest amount of strike actions included: 1. Los Angeles 2. San Francisco 3. New York City 4. Portland 5. Chicago 6. Seattle. We currently have comrades intervening in 3:6 cities with the largest amount of strike activity in the US.

Over the last twelve months, Party comrades in the US have militated within the rail, education, mental health, grocery, service work, tech and distribution industries. Through the Party and the Class Struggle Action Network, we have worked within; International Brotherhood of Electric workers, National Educators Association, United Food and Commercial Workers, American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, and the Service Employees International Union. Comrades have been involved in three worker coordinations for education workers, rail workers and service industry workers, where small groups of workers have been organized around programs of class unionism as alternative visions for the union from leadership. Likewise, we supported workers organizing new unionization efforts in several other workplaces. A comrade was elected president of his very small rail union local and another made it onto the Executive Board of his local of the National Education Associations, both found them later to be mostly toothless positions. Our Party militants Intervened on the picket lines of well over a dozen strikes, led at least five worker direct actions and were present across five states on picket lines for the most recent national strike. Three comrades lost work and are having to look for new employment due to retaliation by the companies for agitating and organizing within their workplaces.

Through our experience, we have gained knowledge of the workings of many of the established unions. Their organizational structures both formal and informal, the legal regulations which restrict action, the methods in which the boss-linked and opportunist leadership rally around the more well-off and established sections of workers to council moderation to counter our propaganda and influence, as well as the general willingness and motivation of workers to enter into conflict with the boss and existing union leadership at different levels and in the different sections of workers. Because of prevailing economic conditions, the overwhelming corrosive influence of the bourgeoisie and it’s agents over the class, and the still minuscule number of Party militants and contacts we have within the class, at this current historic juncture the capacity of the workers for serious class struggle remains relatively low in comparison to other eras of heightened proletarian combatively.

Positions Within the Unions

Those established unions that have so far been more permeable to Party militants working within them on an official basis, have been those that have a relatively more democratic and decentralized official organizational structure, or where the unions local is so small, no organized opposition or leadership existed. The more dictatorial regime unions tend to represent the more poor propertyless proletarians, as in the case of the UFCW. These unions have shown themselves to more viciously persecute our militants hand in hand with the boss and get them fired from their jobs, unsurprisingly.

While conducting propaganda work for the Party within many of these unions is certainly still possible, their foundation as institutions within the restrictive National Labor Relations Board legal regulatory apparatus means that obtaining an actual position, often comes with the expectation that various bureaucratic work will be done, which comes with an implicit recognition of management rights and recognition of the legitimacy of the bourgeois legal order in ways that are against communist principles. So, any election to an official role must implicitly come with a complete rejection and refusal to comply or perform any/all of the established rules and practices at odds with communist principles. In most/many cases this means an abdication of the roles duties and responsibilities as outlined in the established unions constitutions and by-laws. In essence, a type of principled abstentionism should be practiced within the unions where established rules mandate compliance with these types of duties. In most places, the existing union structures merely acculturate workers to a defeatist acceptance of their plight and a narrow idea of the possibilities granted to them under the miserable bourgeois legal order.

All that said, we have found that in times of mobilization and potential strike action, we are able to most extend our influence while we have worked within the unions, gaining positions within strike and organizing committees have allowed us to advance more combative action on the part of some locals. We feel that the call for the establishment of territorial assemblies and associations of workers, the creation of strike committees etc, to be some of the most important initiatives for us to reassert in our propaganda to workers in the United States at this time.

State of the Established Unions

In the case of the United States, the proletariat, who exists within the still relatively fat American imperialist order, the existing unions continue to represent only the narrow interests of a small section of relatively well-off workers, promising only petty-bourgeois aspirations in exchange for surrendering true class combatively. Across the unions, an almost universal truth is that they continue to conform to the traditional trade union structures, divided up between parochial and microscopic localist formations set with grudges and rivalries between local chieftains, making unified joint action an extreme difficulty in all but the largest, most powerful and centralized regime trade unions.

Short of a dedicated base organized around a class-unionist program, that thoroughly understands a vision of unionism at odds with the established NLRB regime union and boss-linked leadership’s methods, capture of any official position will be tenuous at best. While these positions can be used to some extent to continue to propagandize our positions, only a full proverbial revolution within the established unions themselves that completely topples and throws out the existing methods, rules and norms, will move most of these organizations into a terrain of thoroughgoing class struggle; likewise, the creation of such a militant base of class unionist forces within the established unions, which in many cases represent the most well off sections of workers, is not always possible as grounds for agitation and organization are not always there, and the logic of compliance with the existing bourgeois legal order and its collaborationist methods continues to be all pervasive in most unions where workers have been instilled with this idea of what a union is often for generations.

Independent Unions and the Labor Left

We have found that in many cases the labor left currents, represented by elements of Labor Notes and the Democratic Socialists America, have increased their influence in many unions, representing a larger union reform current that embraces strike action, union democratization and the like; however, these currents obviously stop short of a true class combatively by accepting and defending the overall class collaborationist order of the NLRB, inoculating workers with the need to carefully play by the established rules of order in most cases. Our interventions within the national Labor Notes conference expanded our knowledge of the ways the labor left, the left wing of capital, and the Democratic Party cooperate within the existing labor movement to present a radical front, to corral workers back into the field of class collaboration.

We have also seen the continual rise of independent unions who have emerged as a result of National Labor Relations Board elections, such as the Amazon Labor Union, only later to get swallowed up by large regime unions such as the Teamsters, or in the case of unions such as the grocery workers’ New Seasons Labor Union in Oregon unable to effect concessions from their employer who is in reality a multinational corporation which itself owns many varied businesses. Thus for the vast majority of proletarians who remain dis-organized neither the established regime unions now, smaller independent local unions founded on bourgeois legal guarantees are the answer. Only a general class union willing and morally able to operate outside the NLRB trap, uniting workers across sectors and industries can adequately defend workers economic interests. In the United States, scant few if any defensive organs exist which operate on class grounds and very few who are able to effectively organize the masses of unskilled laborers in industries with large turnover rates.

Our experiences in the unions reassert the vital need for the intervention of the class political party to wage a battle on the subjective level within the unions to marshal workers back to fighting along class lines and away from the short sighted complacent program of class collaboration.