that Buchanan's momentum had been checked, did one
* USA way labor-management cooperation efforts embraced by the UAW for the past decade contributed to the International's indecisiveness in this prolonged conflict.
For whatever reason, it is clear that from the start that the UAW was never willing to take off the gloves in what management saw as a bare-knuckle fight from day one.
The first strike from November 1991
The renewal of the strike in June 1994 was an inadvertent admission that the union's in-plant strategy hadn't worked While the renewed strike targeted most of CAT's operations, there was little innovation or creativity in the union's strike tactics. If the line-crossing was large, it was at least in part due to the confused messages the International had sent over the last several years. ON THE PROWL
Caterpillar management is becoming the guru of work-place reorganization and
The Rise and Fall (?) of Pat Buchanan through April 1992 seemed designed to avoid angering management. It began when the company had nine months of inventory about corporate greed, falling
[stocks]. Bill Casstevens, who was in wages and downsizing charge for the International UAW, actually
Roughly speaking, Buchanan negotiated with the company to let them produce parts, thus building up inventory features of Canada's Reform even more.
Party chief Preston Manning
Casstevens was so in love with his with the ethos of France's former bargaining partner he tried to "kill
Jean-Marie Le Pen and
"em with kindness," says Larry Solomon.
Russia's Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
His political project is to bring
The company, of course, greeted this together the grievances of weakness with the announcement it would working-class victims of ecohire permanent replacements. The nomic globalization with the
International collapsed before this threat religious right and elements of and ordered members back to work.
the "Patriot" (militia and whitesupremacist movements. In
PUBLIC RELATIONS this sense he accurately ret-
The in-plant campaign that followed the lects the political excrescence first strike was an on-again-off-again affair.
of the past decade: the rise of
Most big actions were directed from UAW right-wing ideology and the headquarters in Detroit. Jerry Tucker, a decay of the labor movement.
former UAW regional director who
Nonetheless, these elements pioneered the inside strategy in the 1980s, are an uneasy amalgamation.
explained why the Caterpillar campaign didn't work. "You can't run an in-plant ions with anti-semitism make strategy by remote control," he said. "It has him highly attractive to eleto depend on the workers' own selfments on the fringes of neoorganization and creativity. And it must be nazism and the Ku Klux Klan.
meant to hurt." Many Caterpillar workers demonstrated such creativity, when given hidden from the evangelical
Christian right, which for its their head. But the overall conduct of the own messianic reasons is fight was confused.
fanatically pro-Zionist. And
In the midst of this would-be campaign, while appealing to working the International hired Greer, Margolis, class concerns, Buchanan
Mitchell, Burns & Associates (GMMB&A)
must try to conceal his longto advise them on strategy. This Public time hostility to unions.
Relations firm, which masterminded Bill
These contradictions partially
Clinton's 1992 media campaign, has explain the fanatical zeal with worked for other unions. But it is still a PR which Buchanan attacks firm, not a consultant in strike strategy.
abortion rights and gays:
GMMB&A advised the union to drop its convenient targets for funda-
"war zone" rhetoric and appeal to the mentalists and Aryan Nations general public - as though CAT, which types alike. Yet the Repubdoesn't sell much to the general public, lican elites understand that would be impressed. Playing on the theme such a frontal attack on of bargaining versus conflict, the firm told abortion is the sure road to the UAW that its strategy is not designed national electoral defeat.
to help bring the company to its knees; it is
This made it all the more designed to bring it to its senses."
important for the Republican
Caterpillar's business sense, however, leadership to defeat Buchanan told them to ignore such appeals and go for first. Thus, only after on March its the cost-cutting reorganization
6, after it had become clear competitors like Komatsu were pursuing. In any case, PR could not beat raw power.
32 International Viewpoint April 1996 by David Finkel By March 7 the contest was over: Senator Bob Dole will be the Republican nominee to face Bill Clinton in the November presidential election. To be sure, there remain numerous state primary elections and the party conventions to come - the United States is probably the only country with a presidential campaign lasting longer than the Stanley The real story of the Republican primary season, however, isn't Dole's victory but the ascendance of one of his defeated rivals, Patrick Buchanan. Buchanan, long-time conservative columnist, television personality and a speechwriter for the Nixon and Reagan administrations, for several weeks terrorized the Republican party elites with the specter of winning enough delegates to force a multiballot or brokered convention. While it's now clear that this won't happen, Buchanan still might win enough delegates to force floor fights over abortion or immigration, or to gain prime-time coverage as he did in 1992 for his speech demanding "cultural war" against homosexuals and non-European Christian values. In a rare display of ruling class anxiety, the March 4 issue of Time was largely devoted to a Buchanan-bashing spread, exposing the dangers of his opposition to free trade and his crude brand of racism. The reactionary prejudices to which Buchanan appeals are profoundly useful to bourgeois political elites, of course, so long as they are kept in the shadows and delivered in code. Not when they are starkly presented, and linked to a quasi-populist rhetoric leading Republican ideologue, Jack Kemp, come out in support of another of Dole's rivals, pting to revive Reagan-era "supply-side" economics and a "flat tax" that would give hund reds of billions of dollars in tax relief to wealthy Americans. Kemp would not have made such an endorsement at a time when it might have fatally weakened Dole and opened the door for Buchanan. For their part, Democratic mined to ignore the lessons and the warning that Buchanan's appeal holds. No one primaries, aside from the Winnipeg professor who briefly campaigned in New Hampshire. The issues of massive layoffs in the face of rising corporate profits, of living standards - issues that normally and naturally belong effectively hijacked by a crypto-fascist because the left remained silent about them. Rallying around Clinton, the Democrats will probably hold the White House against a lackluster and vacuous Bob Dole in November. In any case, the differences between these candidates will be the smallest since the Carter-Ford contest in 1976. Yet the politics of Buchanan, amalgamating racism, misogyny and false promises to the working class, are likely to continue gaining groundjust as they are in Canada, in Europe, the former USSR and elsewhere, and for the same fundamental reasons. * The author is a leading member of the US organization Solidarity
union humiliation. Following the end of the first strike in 1992, the "Wall Street Journal" reported, CAT called together a meeting of managers from other construction, farm implement, and auto companies. The topic was breaking pattern
Today, in the wake of its victory Caterpillar appears to be on the prowl again. One of its executives showed up at the Three Rivers, Michigan plant of American Gear & Axle, an operation that General Motors sold to private investors in 1994.