Among those on the front lines are members of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 538 in Jefferson, Wisconsin, who launched a strike almost four months ago against Tyson Foods. Threats of Tyson-like takebacks have sparked a strike by Machinists in Waukesha, Wisconsin, rallies by General Electric workers, and organizing drives by catfish workers in Mississippi. Garment workers at Point Blank Body Armor in southern Florida—who waged a six-month strike for union recognition at one of the largest clothing plants there and returned to the job in February, forcing the company to rehire all dismissed employees—continue their struggle for a union contract. Coal miners from Appalachia to the country’s western slopes showed up in force at recent hearings to oppose attempts by the coal bosses and the government to institute higher coal-dust levels underground that will cost many more workers their health and lives. Many of these workers have also pitched on other social struggles.

A decade-long retreat of our class bottomed out at the end of the 1990s. We entered a period of renewed resistance by workers and farmers. The pace of the manifestations of this sea change in the class struggle, of course, goes through ebbs and flows. Resistance speeds up and broadens for a while, and then slows down. We are now on a slightly upward portion of this curve.

This is happening as the unions, the sole mass institutions of the American labor movement today, continue to weaken. The traditions promoted by the union officialdom—a product of their bourgeois outlook and values, and their petty-bourgeois conditions of life—leave them utterly unready for what can suddenly erupt under the current crisis-ridden conditions of world capitalism. Above all they are unprepared for the struggles building up underneath, not to mention frightened by that prospect. They, too, can never understand the capacities of the ranks.

There are variations to this picture, though, and there will be more down the road. UFCW Local 789 in St. Paul, Minnesota, for example, which meat packers at Dakota Premium Foods successfully voted as their union through a two-year-long fight, has set an example in organizing solidarity with their embattled brothers and sisters in Jefferson and other struggles in the Midwest.

What’s important for class-conscious workers across the United States is joining this labor resistance in its myriad manifestations, organizing to involve co-workers and other fellow toilers—on the job, at factory gates, in rural areas, and workers districts—and drawing in young people attracted to the working class, the only class that can change the world. Reporting on all these skirmishes in a timely manner for the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial, which enable thousands of workers to get the broader picture of the struggle, is part of this effort.

As more workers get integrated into the vanguard of our class through these battles, an increasing number will open up to figuring out what it takes to stand up not just to one company but the entire profit system. They will be more interested in discussing a revolutionary perspective and program, like that described in the editorial below.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home