Vol. 71/No. 14      April 9, 2007

The bill would amend the National Labor Relations Act to require the National Labor Relations Board to certify a union without an election if a majority in a workplace sign cards saying they want to be represented by that union.

The House vote “marks a momentous turning point,” AFL-CIO president John Sweeney said March 1. “In the past few decades, labor law has been so twisted by corporations and their union-busting hired guns that it is now virtually impossible to form a union against an employer’s wishes.”

An article in the March issue of Political Affairs, a magazine reflecting the views of the Communist Party USA, said, “Passage of this potentially landmark bill has been organized labor’s first priority.”

If the bill becomes law, however, it won’t reverse the deepening crisis of the unions. The weakening of the labor movement, including the membership decline and setbacks in organizing drives, is above all a product of the officialdom’s decades-long course of subordinating the interests of labor to those of the bosses.

With class-struggle leadership, workers can and do mobilize to win union representation elections and to counter employer efforts to victimize union supporters.  
 
For a secret-ballot vote
In fact, secret-ballot representation elections at a workplace—not card checks—are the most effective way for workers to express what they want regarding unionization. Winning such a vote in face of company intimidation efforts means the rank-and-file has become convinced, through its involvement in the struggle, of the need to organize.

This is not an onerous condition but rather a necessary approach in order to take on the bosses, not only for winning union recognition but for succeeding in the subsequent struggles for a contract and to enforce contract provisions on the job.

The union officialdom has lobbied for the card-check bill to pretend it is doing something to organize the unorganized, to cover up the fact it is not doing such a thing.

Union membership in the United States fell by another half a percentage point last year to 12 percent of the labor force. This is part of a long-term trend. The percentage of organized workers in this country has steadily declined since its high point of 25.5 percent in 1953.

Real wages have been on an overall downward curve for the last three decades, often without much resistance organized by the union officialdom. In recent years, for example, the top officials of unions in the airlines and auto industries have accepted bosses’ demands for concessions to “save our company”—with disastrous results for workers.

The decline of the labor movement has made it easier for the bosses and their political representatives in Washington—Democrats and Republicans—to erode wages, medical coverage, social security, and trade union rights.  
 
1930s labor radicalization
To understand what labor confronts today, a brief look at its rise in the 1930s is useful.

In 1934, despite the weakness of small craft-oriented unions and other adverse conditions at the time, three giant, militant working-class battles erupted: among trucking-industry workers in Minneapolis, auto workers in Toledo, and longshoremen in San Francisco. In Minneapolis especially, a class-struggle leadership was forged in battle from the ranks of labor, who were becoming radicalized and combative under the pressure of a severe capitalist crisis. These struggles began a historic turning point for labor, as union memberships began to swell and masses of workers gained confidence as they wrested concessions from the bosses.

It was under the impact of these and other struggles that in 1935 the Congress of Industrial Organizations was formed and the government passed the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act.

The class-collaborationist leadership of the social democrats and the Stalinist Communist Party, which dominated the labor movement, crippled and eventually broke the combat momentum of the insurgent masses. These misleaders managed to tie the new industrial union movement to the Democratic Party, beginning with the 1936 elections.

The unions were gradually brought under the domination of an officialdom ready to act in “partnership” with the employing class. Reliance on help from the Roosevelt administration was substituted for use of the unions’ full power.

The rank-and-file democracy established during the upsurge was undermined. As the Roosevelt government lined up the labor bureaucracy in support of war preparations, the boss class launched a witch-hunt against militants who resisted its foreign policy. This course prevailed throughout the Cold War period.

By the late 1970s, with the exhaustion of the postwar boom, the bosses escalated their offensive against the unions and the working class. Labor returned to the center stage of U.S. politics as working people put up resistance. But the labor officialdom’s course of class collaboration had become so entrenched that this did not reverse the overall decline of the trade unions.  
 
Politicization of working class
Recent examples of renewed working-class resistance and the politicization of the working class, however, point the way forward.

One important example today is the working-class struggle for the legalization of undocumented immigrants and against deportations. This was evident in last year’s mass immigrant rights actions, including the first political general strike in U.S. history on May 1.

Campaigning for the demand by millions to stop the raids, deportations, and for immediate unconditional legalization of undocumented immigrants should be the priority of the union movement, not lobbying Congress for a “card check” bill.

Furthermore, experiences over the last decade show that even under today’s adverse conditions workers can win union representation elections.

One illustration of this point was when workers at the Dakota Premium Foods slaughterhouse in South St. Paul, Minnesota, launched a union-organizing fight in June 2000 after holding a sit-down strike. They won the vote to be represented by United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 789 in July 2000 and a union contract in 2002.

Another example was that of workers at the Co-Op coal mine in Huntington, Utah, who launched a 10-month strike in September 2003 after they were all locked out for walking out to protest company harassment and a firing of union supporters there. The miners repeatedly defeated the company’s attempts to crush their fight, including a defamation lawsuit by the bosses against 16 miners involved in the union-organizing struggle and many of their supporters, as well as papers that reported on their struggle—including the Militant. These workers reached out for solidarity and won support in the West and beyond.

While the company never broke their morale, in the end most of the workers, in their majority Mexican immigrants, were fired on the basis that they lacked adequate documentation—one week prior to a union representation election, which they were poised to win. This underscores why it’s vital for the union movement to fight for legalization of all immigrant workers.  
 
‘Workers take ownership of struggle’
At a May 27, 2006, public meeting in St. Paul, Minnesota, Bernie Hesse, UFCW Local 789 legislative director at the time, noted that the Co-Op struggle, like the one at Dakota Premium Foods, was defined first and foremost by the fact that “the workers took ownership of their struggle” from the outset.

That’s at the heart of what’s needed for the revitalization of the labor movement today, showing how workers can develop the leadership they deserve.
 
 
Related articles:
On the Picket Line
 
 
 
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