Vol. 71/No. 15      April 16, 2007

“The union stole our money.”

Those were two common reactions at Thumann’s, a packing plant employing 200 workers in northern New Jersey organized by United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 1245.

They came the day we got news the fund our pensions come out of was in trouble.

Trouble how big? Capital “T.” Short by at least $7 million. And that’s just for workers and retirees at this company.

Add in other packing plants in the area that draw pensions from the same union-administered fund and the total missing is more than $85 million.

How did this happen? Who’s responsible?

Nine workers at the plant circulated a letter to the union asking for an answer. Written in Spanish, Polish, and English, it was signed by 146 coworkers. The letter was sent in by our shop steward. It asked the president to meet with us to explain—with translators—what had happened, and what the union was going to do about it.

Workers in the plant express a range of views about the “pension mess.”

Some say, “Not to worry.” If the fund goes down the tubes, the government will step in and guarantee the pensions. We might “lose a little,” though.

The union and union officials are to blame, many say. Some argue that a different union local might be better.

A few—including some with experience in other industries where pensions were cut, shrunk, or vanished—explain it is the company and the government that are fundamentally responsible.

It is the company that stopped funding the plan, they point out. It is the company that cares about profits, not our lives—either while we are working or after we retire. We have no real guarantees of any kind. That includes from the government, which has left itself plenty of loopholes for cutting pension benefits.

And don’t forget the timing, they say. The pension “news” comes on the eve of contract talks, scheduled for May. The company will try to use it to chop wages and benefits.

Readers of the Militant in the plant are part of these discussions. Our goal is to connect what begins as a deep personal concern with a grasp of the broader class and political forces that have risen up and smacked us.

The bosses are on the attack, we explain. Faced with fierce competition and shrinking profits, they make us work more hours (when it suits them), work faster, and work in conditions that are less and less safe.

At the same time the federal government wants to cut back as much as they can get away with. They go after Social Security. They say they can’t afford it. They see us as just parts of a machine. Parts that can be thrown out as we (inevitably) get injured, sick, or old. But we won Social Security—just like all other entitlements—through struggle. The fight to keep them is a fight for solidarity with all other workers.

To divide us, both the bosses and the government play up our differences.

They try to pit men against women, white against Black, skilled against helpers, U.S.-born against immigrants, Polish against Mexican, Mexican against Black, old against young.

You name it: if there is a shade of difference, they try to use it to drive us apart, to cut across our solidarity with each other.

They try to blame us for the crisis of their own capitalist economic system, but the reality is it is their system that is at fault.

We are paying the price, supporters of the Militant explain, for a deal made long ago, a deal many of us never even heard about.

Sixty years ago, after the big strikes that followed World War II, the leaders of our unions gave up the fight for universal, national, retirement pensions independent of what happened to a particular industry or factory—a social and political fight whose outcome was far from decided in the bosses’ favor.

We won the right to Social Security in the 1930s, as part of a broad social movement that built the industrial unions in this country.

That was the first step by us—by working people—to get lifetime protection.

It was part of the battle to establish all benefits, all medical care, all disability claims, all aid to dependent children as something working people—who produce the world’s wealth with our labor—are entitled to as a right, in addition to a wage.

Instead of continuing that fight, the top officials of our unions took a different course. They accepted tying pensions and other “benefits” to the profits of individual companies, which does not benefit working people.

This is the hole we—and millions of others—have to dig ourselves out of.

To achieve this social goal, we must build our unions and use union power, but we must do more than that. The labor movement must wage a political fight—one that organizes and mobilizes the working class as a whole against the capitalist government.

In doing so, we can draw strength from what millions of us have done over the past year by taking part in mass mobilizations to demand the legalization of all immigrants—actions that have strengthened and politicized the working class.

But we can’t accomplish any of these goals so long as the working class and our unions are hitched to the twin political parties of the employers, the Democrats and Republicans. We need to build a labor party, based on the unions, that fights in the interests of working people.

This is our job. Nobody is going to do it for us.

Michael Baumann is a meat packer at Thumann’s and a member of UFCW Local 1245.
 
 
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