The victory by chocolate workers at Hershey Foods has struck a blow at employer efforts to place more of the cost of health coverage on the backs of working people. The antiunion drive led by chief executive officer Richard Lenny backfired as workers faced down threats from the bosses and the company’s decision to hire replacement workers to run the plants.

Lenny is known for his anti-worker cost-cutting measures at Kraft Foods before becoming head of Hershey last year. We’re sure workers at Kraft are giving a big thumbs-up to the chocolate workers right now. The strikers showed what a union can do.

Working people identified with the strike because nearly all of them have had to confront bosses that try to cut back medical coverage or deny it outright. Some workers at nonunion plants, like those at the Hershey-owned Reese’s factory who offered solidarity to the strikers, are more interested in fighting for a union under the impact of the victory.

In order to prop up its declining rate of profit, big business is forced to take on the conquests won by the trade unions following the labor upsurges in the 1930s and 1940s. The bosses need to convince unionists that health care, seniority rights, pensions, and other gains are "perks" and privileges that are okay in times of prosperity, but that have to be curtailed in times of economic uncertainty. The employers’ broader assault on labor dovetails with their cuts in public programs that provide unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, and health care insurance, such as Medicare and Medicaid. They cover up the fact that labor’s transformation of nature is the source of all wealth. The real problem for the capitalists is that they are forced to give back a tiny portion of the surplus value they extract from workers who produce for them.

A growing number of strikes, organizing drives, and other labor fights revolve around social questions like health care, the lengthening if the workweek, and the increasing use of temporary labor. Millions face the same cuts confronted by the Hershey workers. That is why the strike received such broad support. Working people sensed that a setback to the Hershey workers’ rights to medical benefits would embolden other employers to try to make similar inroads.

Far from being isolated and pushed aside, the Hershey strikers stayed 100 percent strong and won support from union and nonunion workers alike. The strike victory demonstrates the problem that bosses confront today. Workers will not simply accept being trampled on. They are more and more standing up to company assaults. In some cases, they are holding off new concessions the bosses try to impose. Unionists can draw on this recent victory in the next rounds of attacks by big business that will inevitably come.

A feature of many struggles today is that they continue after a strike is over because the bosses continue their efforts to turn back the clock. Workers at Hershey go back stronger to take on the next assaults by Lenny and to respond to the struggles of other working people.
 
 
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Strikers at Hershey block hike in payments for medical plan  
 
 
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