What happened to the unions in 1984
It was not a good year. From the start the employers appeared to have the advantage and kept pushing for more wage cuts and fringe takebacks
In December 1983, after a six-week strike in which the rank and file fought hard and well, the Greyhound bus drivers accepted deep pay cuts and a two-tier wage structure, dictated by the company and agreed to by top officials of the Amalgamated Transit Union.
dracoit erns of the empaye and the genes of povement ivored picket was killed, run down by a scab driver.
USA than the year before.
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The brutality and in this strike were thought by many workers to be signs of things to come, foreshadowing the new year. Frank LOVELL
The Phelps-Dodge copper miners in Arizona, threatened with drastic wage cuts and continuous lay-offs, were forced to strike in July 1983. Almost immediately the company tried to bring in scabs. At the start of 1984 these strikers were still out. By mid-year they were being driven from their company-owned homes by state police - facing riot sticks, gunfire, and tear gas.
They were told by officials of the United Steelworkers that mass picketing and demonstrations could not stop the scabs, and would imperil the successful outcome of the strike. The "union strategists" urged reliance on the good offices of Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt, a liberal Democrat reelected in 1982 AFL-CIO endorsement. It was Babbitt's Department of Public Safety that clubbed pickets, shot them with wooden bullets, children demon-
As 1984 closed the copper strikers were still holding out, and their union representatives had devised "new strategy" - a threat to withdraw USWA deposits from banks and insurance companies that continue to lend money to Phelps-Dodge. But by this time the company was closing its mines, cooling the smelter furnaces, and furloughing the scabs who had been hired at cheap wages to keep the whole unprofitable operation going
The copper industry was not typical of US industry in 1984. Employment and industrial production rose during the year, The temporary economic recovery failed. however, to bring back jobs in heavy industry (steel, coal, and auto) that were lost in the 1979-82 depression. Auto, for example, profited dramatically, boosting investor dividends and executive salaries to new highs and producing a near-record output of motor cars and other vehicles. But the number of auto 22 workers employed in 1984 remained at more than 100,000 below peak-employment years. This resulted from automation and new production processes, a transformation that has occurred over the past decade with devastating results workers and their unions in creasing number of organized industries. No lack of rank and file militancy
The cumulative effects of automation in industry, combined with the steady rightward shift in ruling class politics, began to disturb the complacency of the union bureaucracy. Union membership continued to decline steadily if not drastically in absolute numbers (it remains around 19 million), but in relation to the population it has slipped to no more than 17 percent from a high of 25 percent 30 years ago. Union organizing drives in 1984 failed to meet expectations. The anti-union offensive of the employers continued to press decertification elections. There were few outright union victories, and it began to seem as if more strikes were lost than won. AFLCIO president Lane Kirkland blamed the NLRB (1), and other top union officials hinted they might support repeal of the National Labour Relations Act. It began to dawn, however dimly, that the capitalist government is not a friend of labor and labor legislation was never intended to encourage the growth of unionism. Some even said that the new anti-labor policy of the most powerful employers, embraced by the Reagan administration, was skillfully designed to destroy the union movement. Given this economic and political climate the best survival strategy the union bureaucracy could devise was to concentrate on organizing public and clerical workers where there were signs of success, and try to defeat the Reagan administration in the general election.
Friendly fire ? (DR)
The prospects for the union movement were not so bleak as the union bureaucracy thought or pretended to think. There was no lack of rank-and-file militancy in every major strike during the year, beginning with the Greyhound drivers and the copper miners and including the hotel and restaurant workers in Las Vegas, the UAW strikers at the AP Parts plant in Toledo, the hospital workers in New York, the clerical workers at Yale University, and the Chicago teachers
The two major wage settlements in pected to develop and did not were in auto and coal. In both industries the workers looked for a more favorable outcome, and were prepared to conduct a determined struggle if properly represented. The employers held the initiative from the beginning, and they convinced the UAW and the United Mine Workers negotiators that it would be mutally beneficial for the unions and the employers to settle on the existing terms, with neither side making concessions, exchange for a period of "labor ation.» nd union/management collabor- bility
This turn of events seemed to contradict the popular perception, encouraged by the earlier statements of Kirland and others in the AFL-CIO hierarchy, that the employers are out to destroy the union movement, seeking unconditional surrender in a war of extermination. The truth is that the employers are not opposed to unions that do not fight very hard for the needs of their members and that provide a more stable industrial workforce than would other-
NLRB - National Labour Relations Board which administers US labour legislation.
International Viewpoint 25 February 1985
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wise be available. The employers prefer no union or company unions, reasonable approximation will do for the
At year's end it must be recognized destroyed despite the dire predictions about Reagan's reelection. Nineteen million organized workers remain a potentially powerful social and political force.
During the year the question of labor's future was raised in many circles, including academia, the government (both the constituted branches and departments groups), the officialdom, and the radical political parties and others in and around the union movement. This was prompted by the open anti-labor stance of the Reagan administration and by the hesitation and uncertainty of the union leadership. The wide range of interest in this question produced a large body books articles, lectures, letters, etc. Most of those on the employer side hailed the demise of the unions, but the more sober from this quarter saw the "social
Those around the union bureaucracy recognized the need for a "revitalized labor movement." Leo Perlis, a retainer to the union bureaucracy who served from 1955 to 1980 as AFL-CIO director of community services, thought unions at their "weakest point in 50 years" and urged organizing the unorganized, educating the organized, developing a participatory rather than an adversary approach to business, and greater involvement in community affairs." In words, Perlis urged the union bureaucracy to do what he had failed to 73 Dead:
do for 25 years when he was hired to win political friends for the union movement among Blacks, women, small business people, dirt farmers, and other potential
He forgot to mention how this should be done and to examine why he had failed.
The common theme in nearly all analyses of the present ills of labor, whether friendly or hostile, was the primacy of the so-called free enterprise system. Employers provide jobs. Workers need jobs to enjoy the good life. Therefore, labor and management must collaborate in the development and expansion of privately industry. But there were some mostly among radicals who recognize that the troubles of the union movement as presently constituted are but a small part of the crisis of the capDebate over how to bring the unions into fighting shape
Within the radical movement a debate began to crystalize in 1984 over the perenial question of how a new socially conscious radical leadership will develop in the mass movement of the working class, and how the present unions will be transformed from working class institutions the capitalist structure organizations of class struggle against the inequality and injustice of capitalism. One side of this debate was stated in a way by Steve Early, a labor contended in "A New Generation of Labor Lefts" (The Nation, May 5) that not much will happen in the unions without conscious leadership. "It took conscious action and in many cases Leftists to enter the ranks of labor and play the role they have," he said. "It will take additional bold initiatives to expand their following and political influence in the years to come."
The other side of the argument was advanced rather accidentally by Norma Best, a former AFL-CIO union official and teacher of labor history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in a critical letter on workers and state power
September). wrote: "Before US trade unionists can regain the power of the 1930s, they must regain the ideological independence of production-for-use concepts and laws to increase people's influence in the capitalist state were a part of everyday political dialogue." This succinctly expresses the belief that social pressures must produce a new mass radicalization within the union movement, failing to recognize that struggles within the unions are a necessary part of the mass radical-
These are not isolated examples. The only beginning and not yet clearly defined, continues to grow in the radical press. The left social democrats (Democratic Socialists of America), the Stalinists (Communist Party), and some other radicals who are or seek to become active in the unions subscribe to the view that a conscious left wing leadership can find support and begin to develop under present conditions in the unions, leaving aside the question of how this will be accomplished.
The Socialist Workers Party, most radical sectarian groups, and others who criticize and oppose the evils of capitalism on moral or religious grounds take the opposite view that the unions will be drawn into the vortex of social
Mine Coal
Safely or
UMWA:
Safety
Not at All or Else
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KILLING ternational Viewpoint 25 February 1985 struggle by outside forces. Then, and only then, they say, will a new leadership emerge.
A correct analysis must understand the connection between the objective forces that will move the masses, and the development of a vanguard which can help to organize and give direction to that motion. It is true that the present antibound to collide with the self-interest of millions of workers, and that the workers will become convinced in this way as no amount of preaching can convince them that there is no way out but to fight. Under such conditions the prospect of big class battles is most likely, and the unions will undergo great change. But that does not negate the need for radicals who anticipate these battles to begin arming themselves and others in union movement for the coming struggle, as many are trying to do. In fact, emerging debate over how the movement will be brought into fighting shape, and related questions, is only one manifestation of the new interest and activity in the unions.
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Uregei, a political bureau member of the Kanak Socialist National Liberation Front, spoke on behalf of the provisional government of independent Kanaky.
The French government could be expected to propose some sort of neocolonial solution which would preserve French interests in the region, said