Vol. 75/No. 27      July 25, 2011

“We can’t afford to have a work stoppage every three years,” complained a Boeing executive, in explaining why the company built the factory in South Carolina. The state has one of the lowest unionization rates, 3.5 percent.

In June Judge Clifford Anderson ruled it was too early in the hearings process to grant Boeing’s motion to dismiss the suit. Top union officials are celebrating.

But does this move against Boeing by an agency of the capitalist government strengthen workers in our fight against the bosses? Does it put us in a better position to fight for higher wages and safety on the job?

To the contrary, holding up the NLRB suit as a step forward not only gives Boeing a handle in its drive to divide workers and further weaken the union. Above all, it throws in the towel on any fighting perspective to organize the workers at the South Carolina plant.

Both unionization and average wages are substantially lower in the South than the North. In South Carolina the average weekly wage is $713 versus $953 in Washington. The capitalist class has for decades profited from the relatively cheaper labor in the South and used this disparity as a club to depress wages and push down job conditions nationwide.  
 
Organizing the South
In the 1930s a rise of workers’ struggles—under the impetus of victorious strikes in Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Toledo, Ohio, in 1934, followed by hard-fought organizing battles in steel, auto, and other industries the next few years—led to the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). By the 1940s more than one-third of U.S. workers were union members.

When the U.S. capitalist rulers plunged our class into the bloodbath of World War II, the CIO leadership backed off plans to organize workers in the South, sacrificing the interests of labor on the altar of support for Washington’s imperialist war aims.

In 1946, after the war, the CIO officialdom announced “Operation Dixie,” with the stated aim of organizing millions of workers in the South. To do that, however, would have meant taking on not just the bosses but Jim Crow segregation, challenging the Democratic Party—the political bastion of that racist system in state and local governments. Unionizing the South required a political break by labor officials from the Democrats, who counted on segregationist party bosses to deliver votes.

By 1948 top union officials had already let “Operation Dixie” die on the vine, despite pledges to revive it a few years later when the CIO reunited with the American Federation of Labor to form the AFL-CIO in 1955. Ever since, the officialdom has refused to commit resources and support to a serious campaign by workers to organize the South, just as it failed to throw the power of organized labor into the mass civil rights struggles that brought down Jim Crow in the 1950s and ’60s.

Today less than 7 percent of private-sector workers in the United States are union members—and the figure is still declining. Competition among workers for jobs is intensifying as working people face high unemployment, rising prices, and government moves to undermine constitutional protections and space for workers to organize resistance.

Instead of aiming at the “emancipation of the downtrodden millions”—the task set for trade unions in an 1866 resolution drafted by Karl Marx for the International Working Men’s Association—procapitalist labor officials take refuge in maintaining their dues base in the small and shrinking number of union “strongholds,” largely in the North.

Instead of placing unions at the head of a social and political movement to fight for health care, retirement benefits, disability compensation, and other needed protections for the class as a whole, labor officials have tried to wangle “good” contracts, with “fringe benefits,” dependent more and more on the bosses’ profits.

Putting the interests of a declining number of organized workers ahead of those who are worse off has hamstrung the unions as fighting instruments. It has brought the working class, including many lulled for decades into the illusion “we have it good,” to the economic and social conditions our class faces today.  
 
NLRB is ‘costly to workers’
The NLRB was established in 1935. In his book Teamster Politics, Farrell Dobbs—a leader of the 1930s battles that built the Teamsters union across much of the United States, and later national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party—noted that the board’s “key purpose was to mediate industrial conflicts … in tricky ways that proved costly to the workers.” Such it remains today.

Commenting on the Boeing suit and other NLRB actions, Lynn Rhinehart, the AFL-CIO’s top lawyer, told the New York Times in April he wishes the board “would do far more.” But workers have only our own strength and common action to rely on—independent of the Democrats and Republicans, the two parties that serve the class interests of the capitalists who exploit our labor.

Class-conscious workers don’t concern ourselves with telling bosses where to build their factories, mines, and mills. Not only are such efforts ultimately futile—the employers act to maximize their profits. Above all, doing so erects barriers to advancing the unity and fighting capacity of our class. Let’s organize alongside fellow workers to defend our interests everywhere! In the North, the South, beyond the U.S. borders!

Central to such a fight is using union power today to extend class solidarity to every economic, social, or political battle by workers and the oppressed, no matter how large or small.  
 
 
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