Defend the labor movement from the continuing offensive by the employers and their twin parties of capitalism—the Democrats and Republicans!

These demands are at the center of the Socialist Workers Party campaign—in this year’s elections and beyond. They need to be championed by all working people.

The centrality of the fight to organize unions is underscored by the spreading resistance to the employers’ assaults by workers across the United States. Some of the strong points of this resistance today include Utah, the Upper Midwest, and South Florida.

Layers of militant workers in these areas and elsewhere are more and more rejecting the employers’ attempts to freeze pay, speed up production, and combine jobs; their callous disregard for job safety; and the lengthening of the workday, workweek, and work life, while millions are unemployed or working part-time.

As they begin to make breakthroughs or score victories in their battles to organize and consolidate unions to defend themselves—from the Co-Op coal mine in Utah to the Dakota Premium Foods meatpacking plant in South St. Paul, Minnesota, to the Point Blank Body Armor garment factory in Oakland Park, Florida—these workers will also help lead expanding union-organizing efforts that inspire others with the confidence that they can fight the bosses effectively and win.

In all such struggles, immediate action is focused on workers’ urgent material needs—increasing wages, improving job conditions, obtaining health care—and the defense of their democratic rights. To be effective, the fight must be attuned to the existing level of consciousness among the union membership or those organizing a union.

If significant forces are set into motion through this approach, several things can take place. Rank-and-file militancy can rise. Increasingly sharp clashes with the bosses can result, during which workers begin to shed illusions in class collaboration—the idea that they have common, rather than contending and irreconcilable, interests with their bosses and with the entire employers’ class—and acquire class-struggle concepts. Lessons thus learned during industrial conflicts can prepare the union ranks for an advance toward action on a political plane. In short, a foundation can be laid from which, over time, it will be possible to initiate the transformation of the trade unions themselves into instruments capable of developing far-reaching revolutionary perspectives.

If, during the course of their experiences in struggle, the labor militants are helped by other class-conscious workers to analyze the causes of the social and economic ills facing them, if they are aided in perceiving the essence of an outlived capitalism—they will learn that their existing problems are not incidental or episodic at all, but the consequence of a deep structural crisis of the system they live under. They will then see why governmental control must be taken away from the capitalists by labor and its allies on the land.

In “Trade Unions: Their Past, Present, and Future,” Karl Marx, one of the founders of scientific socialism, points out that the unions originally sprang up from the spontaneous attempts of working people to remove, or at least to minimize, the unavoidable competition among workers themselves imposed on them by the profit system.

If the unions, as the basic defensive organizations of the working class, are necessary for the recurring guerrilla fights between capital and labor, Marx says, they are still more important as organizing agencies for superseding the very system of wage slavery and capitalist rule.

Apart from their original purposes, the unions must learn to act deliberately as organizing centers of the working class in the broad interest of its complete liberation, Marx continues. They cannot fail to enlist the unorganized into their ranks. “They must look carefully after the interests of the worst-paid trades, such as the agricultural laborers, rendered powerless by exceptional circumstances. They must convince the world at large that their efforts, far from being narrow and selfish, aim at the emancipation of the downtrodden millions.”

The seeds of this future for the trade unions can be found in today’s militant working-class resistance.
 
 
Related article:
Miami truckers end strike after back-to-work order by judge
Maytag workers end three-week strike
Storm Lake, Iowa, meat packers file for union recognition  
 
 
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