Workers, farmers, young people, and all defenders of workers’ rights should fight this latest attack by the U.S. rulers on the use of union power.

Under the banner of “fighting terrorism,” the government at all levels and the two main parties that serve the interests of finance capital—the Democrats and Republicans—are probing to see how far they can go in eroding the ability of the unions to defend workers’ interests and pushing to minimize the proportion of those organized.

The ruling class is getting help in this anti-union campaign from the labor officialdom. The lawsuit union officials filed against the new restrictions will be ineffective at best. Their arguments to back up the action are even worse. “To introduce a highly speculative overhaul of the government’s stable personnel structure at this time—to put that agency through unnecessary turmoil when our nation is at war—is simply dangerous,” said AFL-CIO president John Sweeney. “The civil servants at Homeland Security represent the best of the best doing the toughest job in the world. We need programs and structures that respect the work they’re doing—not ones that hurt morale and leave their pay to the whims of their employers.”

This line of reasoning buys lock, stock, and barrel into the American patriotism that serves the interests of the bosses. The U.S. rulers will continue pressing for civilian employees of the armed forces and related “homeland security” agencies to be increasingly nonunion and without civil service protections.

In any imperialist military and related “security” structures, nonunion civilian employees are simply more trustworthy, more reliable for the government. Only union bureaucrats pretend otherwise. Union-conscious workers in military or “homeland security” jobs are less likely to sacrifice for the “common good,” even if they’re still taken in to one degree or another by bourgeois patriotism. A worker doesn’t need to be a communist to recognize that appeals for “patriotic sacrifice” serve the interests of the employing class, providing a pretext to degrade working conditions and weaken the labor movement.

Equally misleading is the recent statement by AFL-CIO spokeswoman Sarah Massey that “good jobs are still disappearing.” She said this to justify the inability of AFL-CIO tops to reverse the decline in the proportion of organized labor. Massey’s dictum takes bourgeois thought to the hoop! “Good jobs,” with livable wages and benefits, are not “disappearing.”

The bosses have been driving for the last 25 years—industry by industry and factory by factory—to lower wages and worsen working conditions. And they are getting away with it because the labor officialdom in most cases feels the pain of “our company” and misguides workers with the line that their enemy is not their employers and the entire boss class in the United States, but imports from China and lack of protectionist laws. Under such conditions, for example, the meatpacking bosses have gutted wages and turned meat cutting and processing into the most dangerous factory occupation in the country.

This class-collaborationist course of the labor officialdom—promoting the fallacy that workers and employers have common interests—in face of the bosses’ profit drive translates into the ongoing weakening of the labor movement. At the same time, workers today who take the lead in reaching for and using union power, and join with others to resist the bosses’ antilabor offensive as the social consequences of the capitalist crisis grow, are planting the only viable seeds for the different kind of labor movement that’s sorely needed.
 
 
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