UNITED STATES
injunctions.
In the coming months there should be many discussions in the public workers unions. The most important questions are what attitude to take toward the courts and the policy of pinpoint strikes.
The Socialistiese Arbejders Partij (Socialist Workers Party - SAP), Dutch section of the Fourth International publicized its ideas on these questions during the strikes through large-scale leaflet distributions.
Where possible, the SAP members played an active role in the action committees and worked in particular to build solidarity between the public and private sectors. In Amsterdam, for example, this led to the issuing of joint leaflets by leading unionists in various unions and to a common demonstration. The SAP's proposals for working toward a general strike of the public sector were generally well received.
This wave of strikes is the second big confrontation between the Lubbers' government and the opposition. The first, the fight against the Cruise missiles, is not yet decided. In the second, the government won a material victory but one Technology has come a long way since Charlie Chaplin started! (DR) that looks likely to prove politically a pyrrhic one.
Opposition to austerity is now widespread in the union movement. A whole sector that had been quiet has now gone through an important experience in action. And in large sections of the workers
The "big change"
movement, there is a climate of strong to the Lubbers' political opposition government, even in the Christian unions.
for skilled workers -
This does not mean that things are going to be easy in the union movement.
new conditions and
This government is determined to push austerity, and so it is prepared for hard new consciousness confrontations.
In June 1984 we will face the final the Cruise missiles and a decision on first phase of a new offensive against social spending.
The need is more and more
By all accounts, 1983 was a good year for the bankers and business clearly posed for ousting this government people, and not so good for workers and minority groups.
and replacing it with a Social Demo-
Despite the high rate of small-business bankruptcies and the constant crat government not tied to right-wing about insecure foreign investments, the US coalition partners.
Many thousands of people in the of the recession that began in July 1981.
unions are beginning to see this. At the same time, we are seeing a process of differentiation among various unions and in various unions between different layers of
The most apparatus.
the right-wing leadership, the one in the FNV Industriebond is now facing opposition in its own apparatus.
Similar processes are going on in other unions.
In the coming six months, we should see important political developments in the Dutch labor movement.
Discussion should begin on the most important labor contracts in industry, which will run out on January 1, 1985.
There is every indication that the political stagnation that has reigned in the labor movement since the onset of the crisis in 1980 can be broken.
The task of the revolutionary socialists is to help to advance class-struggle answers and to promote the development of a militant left current.
International Viewpoint 30 January 1984 queasiness in banking circles ruling class has been celebrating Jack MARSH
Corporate profits rose a whopping 40 percent in 1983 to an annual total of 227.2 billion dollars and that's good reason for cheering among those who get the benefits.
Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldridge has said that the corporate profits picture "reflects the vigorous pace of economic growth combined with stepped-up gains in productivity and moderate increases in wage rates."
This is the pattern that the employers and their political representatives want to see - rising productivity and low wages. But the government economists admit some dark spots, cautioning that the future remains (as always) uncertain. The classical recovery" from the depths big trouble ahead, they say, is growing inflation, rising interest rates, a federal budget deficit for the current fiscal year in excess of 200 billion dollars, an increasingly unfavorable foreign-trade balance, a steady flow at year's end of new unemployment claims, and a constant lengthening of the average workweek.
For the employers themselves, who are notoriously short sighted, the last two items in this list - mass unemployment and a longer workweek - are hardly a cause for worry. In fact, this is music to their ears - exactly the tune they are calling.
But long-term unemployment for an estimated 7 to 9 million workers, combined with a longer workweek and speedups on the job, spells trouble for the economy and greater social unrest in the
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near future. This is a potentially explosive issue in the 1984 national elections.
Working people and minorities (including women, who are becoming actively aware of the economic exploitation and discrimination they suffer) will not look back on 1983 with the same glee as their employers.
The workers have not prospered. For recovery have more to live today than a year ago. Millions have used up their unemployment insurance and are subsisting on meager welfare checks and food stamps. who in better times acquired homes have been dispossessed. of unemployed remains over 10 million.
In the 100-million-strong workforce, there is hardly anyone who does not have a friend, former shopmate or relative currently out of work, and in a lot of cases they have been jobless for long without any prospect of
In some regions, such as the iron range in Minnesota, the coal-mining areas of the gory of computer operators has been created for the fully automated processes.
Many aspects of this have been written about in the general press and economic publications. But there have been few reports about the concrete effects on the workers themselves of this transformation of industrial production. That is what I propose to do here.
Millions of workers are now being retrained under these new conditions of work, and they are beginning to gain a new understanding of their relationship to production. This represents a new stage in the education of the industrial
Taken in its entirety, this question is a very big one. from from the standpoint of my experience as a worker in the Chicago area who ficialdom did not understand what was happening, and were incapable of doing anything to prevent the ruin of the old industrial plant. They saw no way to create or protect jobs except by trying to keep the corporations profitable and competitive. All the major industrial unions have agreed to wage concessions and are negotiating so-called tradeoffs with respect to craft jurisdictions.
Why these agreements are called "tradeoffs" remains a mystery, because the union negotiators are agreeing to combine several crafts under new classifications, and to accept the resulting reduction in the workforce. For this, they are getting nothing in return - except perhaps vague promises that the outdated operations will not immediately be closed down entirely and forever.
Appalachian towns in Pennsylvania, half the workforce NO VACANCIES is unemployed.
This does not mean that there have not been countervailing changes, or that many of the workers let go when auto plants and steel mills closed have not found other work. Some workers have been called back in auto and in steel, although fewer in the second case.
General Motors, for example, has recalled 75,000 laid-off workers. corporation now boasts of a big gain in profits, and has announced that American auto industry remains competitive and able to provide secure, good-pay-
But the company has not said anything about the ratio of jobs to the projected increases in production. The drive for competivity
One of the ways the auto industry plans to remain competitive is through "joint ventures and import agreements" with Japanese and other foreign producers. GM has nearly completed a 300-million-dollar manufacturing venture with the Toyota Motor Corporation, and it plans to reopen its Fremont, California, plant under the new joint management.
At the same time, in December GM announced that 50,000 former employees remain on indefinite layoff. GM's robotized plants are in full operation, the number of cars produced is expected to break all records, and the number of laid-off workers
Workers returning to work this year after long layoffs will find that the new jobs they are called on to do will be very different from the ones they left when their plants shut down. The old jobs are gone forever, as are many of the old plants themselves.
The new jobs are combinations of the old skilled trades. They tend to involve monitoring and adjusting the new automated assembly lines. And a new cate20 an apprenticeship as a millwright at U.S. Steel's South Workers, and after six years on the job, was laid off when the mill cooled its furnaces.
A look around the industrial scene in Chicago shows that South Works is only one of the many idle plants. In fact, the industrial wasteland extends into northwest Indiana. Journalists and commentators now refer to this area as the "Rust Bowl of the 1980s."
These once productive industrial facilities were alive not long ago with hundreds of thousands of "gainfully employed workers," as we used to say. These workers were mostly members of District 31 of the United Steelworkers of America. Few of them ever thought there would come a time when the mills would stand cold and empty. They thought they were fixed for life. Not well fixed, of course, but people in the skilled trades often had the illusion that once they their apprenticeship they "had it made." Reorganizing the work force
Such illusions are now shattered, along with the old brick shells of the factories. With the massive unemployment - especially the layoffs in the skilled trades in heavy industry, in auto, steel, rail, mining and oil - the prospect of going back to work or looking for another job is a nightmare for workers. It is an "employers' market" for the corporations and the shoestring operators alike.
The story of what effect this process has had on the unions has been told many times, and is well known. The union of-
How this affects the work at the point of production has not been much writen about, but it is the subject of almost constant discussion on the job.
Formerly, in the industrial unions (in particular the Steelworkers), every craft was separate and distinct, and there was a clear definition of the work that came within its jurisdiction. The lines of craft strictly limited. There was no crossing of
The theme song of skilled workers was "that's not my job." Everyone understood what that meant, and most workers adhered to the established definition of each particular task. For example, a millwright would refuse to do the job of a pipefitter regardless of how small the task
The foremen would almost always call for another worker in the proper trade classification to help when something developed that required a different skill than those included in the classifications of the workers already on
This long-established practice has now been almost completely abandoned. The reason is the drastic transformation of the productive process. This, in turn, is largely a result of the economic crisis that set in during the 1970s as a consequence of overproduction on a world scale.
Competition in the world market has since forced the modernization and reorganization of US industry. And the shake-out effect of this has been a further reduction and downgrading of skilled workers in the mass production industries.
International Viewpoint 30 January 1984
The employers are demanding and get- By teaching each other and learning perform in these new "supercraft" jobs. leadership in this country.
Without being aware of the process that has overtaken them, the union bureaucrats have succembed to its pressures.
The Rubber Workers union, for example, has negotiated national contracts that establish five trades in plants where there used to be fifteen.
Rail unions have agreed to eliminate firemen, conductors and in general reduce crew sizes, while extending the length of trips workers are called on to
The Steelworkers union has signed major mills that establish "super crafts," and which create a new category called "operating technicians." These jobs require workers to perform both skilled electrical and mechanical The new "super crafts"
In the steel industry, this has taken the
"circle crafts." skilled worker has to pass tests in six to eight crafts, involving both physical and mental capacities. In this way, employers can eliminate older workers with high seniority, who are less likely to be able to meet the physical tests. Moreover, those workers who manage to pass will have to do multiple jobs.
The employers gain both by circumventing seniority rights and merging crafts. The smaller workforce also becomes more efficient and more productive. Productivity rises, profits increase.
When a laid-off or displaced industrial worker begins to look for a new job in the present "employers' market," he or she has to be prepared to top a whole
A worker applying for a skilled these days has to be a welder, pipefitter, plumber and a heating technician. she has to be able to do electrical circuit to assemble and disassemble machinery and equipment, to operate ting more work and more careful attention to the quality of the product from workers re-entering the job market after long periods of unemployment and layoff.
Both union and non-union shops make these demands and screen all new hires at the employment office and on the job. Applicants have to produce proof of experience and recent training as skilled workers, and after being hired they have to perform. Otherwise the gate opens, and another statistic is recorded in the unemployed column.
With workers in the mechanical or electrical trades being required to do all sorts of tasks in order to hold their jobs, the only way to survive is to study, to try to learn new techniques, to go to school to acquire more skills, to recommendations from every possible
You need all this to get past the employment desk. elementary understanding of the multiple crafts and give the impression that you know the work backwards and forwards. But the real test is on the job.
A new worker (who may be middle aged and highly skilled in any one of the old crafts) has to pay close attention to how all the other sorts of jobs are done, otherwise you can easily get disoriented and find yourself unable to complete a job assignment. But there is another side
Today all the old skills trades are being combined under the conditions of a brutal speedup. Workers on ships in the Great Lakes, on the railroads, in the steel mills, mines and auto plants are all coming into the same labor market.
No one can be a master of all trades, as all workers pretty much recognize. So, in general, they know that they are all in the same boat at this stage of what they realize is the "big change," and only from each other on the job, they overcome feelings of inadequacy and acquire a new sense of solidarity.
moment, the bosses are getSome of them are less tangible but more valuable than the latest
This assemblage of workers from various industries, many of them with years of experience, the employers gain a highly skilled workforce, without any need for special on-the-job training or appren-
This is a workforce that is reliable (free from absenteeism or chronic lateness), and which meets all production standards, however grudgingly.
These early years of the 1980s are a time of great insecurity for most workers
It is a time of Most workers have no realistic perspective of early retirement, no confidence that they will have a job for the of their working life, no way of knowing whether this new factory or shop will close or whether they will be
The attitude of most workers today is dominated by their most vivid recent experiences, the shock of suddenly finding themselves out of work without a job in
This is another side to the new contancy at this juncture but rather inspires
In part, this accounts for the failure of the union movement to organize any large-scale fightback against the offensive of the government and employers over the past several years to undermine the unions and drive down wages.
The decisive factor in the failure of the union movement to defend the interests of the working class, however, is the incapacity of the present union leaders. They have kept the workers trapped in the political maze of the capitalist lathes, lay brick perform other masonry work, to do rigging and all the troubleshooting required in these trades. That is what you have to be able to do to get and hold mechanical and main- skilled workers have had to will find effective means for tackling the acknowledge their limitations, many of problems of jobs and rising prices.
For electrical maintenance jobs, workers have to be qualified electricians, motor inspectors, instrument-repair experts, armature winders, lathe operators, welders and sometimes riggers.
The employers gain in a number of ways, and two in particular. job classifications are generally coupled with lower pay rates, even though greater more work are Secondly, the old "down time" that the other workers got while they waited for workers with the required skills to handle a particular job has now been eliminated.
Today, the trial periods for qualifying for a job are much longer. And screening of applicants and work records is more
The economic insecurity created by high unemployment among skilled workers promotes a grinding intensification of labor - a pyramiding of tasks, as well as a speedup - on the better paying maintenance jobs. International Viewpoint 30 January 1984
Cooperation, productivity and caution them for the first time. new willingness among these workers to help each other. A new sense of cooperation is developing. It is necessary for survival from the workers' standpoint, and it also contributes to greater productivity and higher profits for the boss.
When workers from different industries, backgrounds and work experience are thrown together, they learn quickly and easily from each other. process of selection occurs, not according to acquired skills but according to helpful character traits and the ability to
This is not a matter of "all fellows get together." It is essential to learn from each other and to be mutally helpful.
The attitudes of workers of widely different ages and backgrounds change. They quickly recognize the limitations of their past experience when they have to two-party system.
Until the workers find new leaderships who can find their way out of this trap, there is little likelihood that the unions
What is happening to the rather narrow stratum of semi-skilled workers, as I have described here, is far from telling the whole story about the situation today in the very stratified American working class.
But most workers now face the same
Almost all of them recognize now that these are times of big change, and hardly any see a change for the better.
Almost every job is new today and requires more cooperation among workers. This applies as well to jobs now opening up in the new computerized operations, even in the highly robotized plants.
These sweeping changes in working conditions are creating a new sense of working-class solidarity. It is a higher form of class consciousness that will contribute in an important way to the development of a working-class political