From Fraser to Appelbaum
Union Officials Complain about Class
Struggle
by Charles Walker
This article is from the web site Labor
Tuesday for May 27, 2003. It has been edited for Labor Standard.
When many labor officials speak about class
struggle in the U.S., they don’t give out a full-throated cry, hoping to
inspire their ranks to greater militancy. Rather they merely lambaste the
bosses for the sacrifices union members pay to nourish the bosses’ “greed.” Then
they go about their job of “servicing,” as they say, the remaining ranks.
The president of the Retail Workers Union,
Stuart Appelbaum, writes in the Los Angeles Times (May 9) that more than
450 workers at a Nestle chocolate plant in Fulton, N.Y. recently lost their
jobs. “Did the workers in Fulton,” Appelbaum rhetorically asks, “lose their
jobs because they weren’t productive enough to cut it in the global economy?
Hardly. The Fulton workers had the lowest absentee rate, the best safety record
and the highest efficiency rate within their division. The plant was a
money-maker for the company.”
“When companies close factories,” the union
leader notes, “corporate public relations flacks usually say it was an
unavoidable response to the demands of the marketplace. In some instances that
may be true. But the only demand Nestle was responding to when it shut down the
Fulton plant was its own insatiable hunger for profit, regardless of its human
cost.”
Appelbaum’s remarks may be news to a few readers
of the Los Angeles Times, but his message can’t be news to the bulk of
American workers. What Appelbaum calls the hunger for “insatiable profit” is
the motor force that drives capitalism, and not incidentally, is also the prime
reason why workers long ago formed self-defense organizations, unions, to
protect themselves from their bosses’ insatiable hunger for profit, which has
not grown weaker or less dangerous over time, as just about any worker can
confirm.
Appelbaum does use the terms “class warfare” in
his op-ed piece, but not to encourage workers to fight for their class
interests. He says: “[D]iscussing the effect of corporate greed on the nation
isn’t promoting class warfare. To the contrary, it is essential we speak out
against it to prevent more communities from becoming its casualties.”
What Appelbaum wants his readers to do is to
rightly oppose the “effect of corporate greed” on their lives, but he doesn’t
want them to understand that class warfare comes with the capitalist territory
and that it can’t be avoided. Class struggle or warfare means simply the fight
between workers and bosses (aided by the government) over the fruits of
workers’ labor power. That was clearly understood by the founders of the
organized labor movement. The preambles of their unions’ constitutions spoke
clearly of the battle to wrest from their bosses the full product of their
labor, stolen daily under the wage scheme.
Such language was eventually dropped as unions
became increasingly bureaucratized, their members increasingly marginalized. In
1955 the AFL kept its class struggle lingo out of its new constitution, as it
merged with the CIO.
At one time most U.S. union officials thought
they had figured out a way around the class struggle. They thought they had an
unwritten social pact of sorts worked out with the higher echelons of Corporate
America. In return for their collaboration with the bosses, they expected the
bosses to provide at least enough concessions to justify their existence as
relatively well-off and privileged “union leaders.”
Then in 1979, one disappointed union leader,
United Auto Workers President Douglas Fraser, accused the bosses of conducting
one-sided class warfare against all U.S. workers, despite the union tops buying
into “a general loyalty to an allegedly benign capitalism…”
Fraser concluded, “the business community, with
few exceptions, have chosen to wage a one-sided class war today in this
country—a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities,
the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our
society.
He went on: “The leaders of industry, commerce
and finance in the United States have broken and discarded the fragile,
unwritten compact previously existing during the past of period of growth and
progress.”
Fraser implied that the union movement should
return to the militant stance of the 1930s, when labor waged a class struggle
to organize the unorganized. But as labor commentator and one-time autoworker
Frank Lovell wrote in 1987, the “union bureaucracy—including Fraser and his UAW
successor—proved incapable. Union bureaucrats are conditioned to seek
collaboration with the employers. They do not understand how to fight against
the employers and do not believe in the wisdom or the success of class
struggles.”
The breakdown of the unwritten understanding
between organized labor’s tops on the one hand and representatives of big
business and their government servants on the other was fostered by the growing
intensification of international competition over profits, as the war-torn
industry and commerce of Europe and Japan were rebuilt. Despite having nearly
three decades to mobilize organized labor’s rank for a fightback, union
officials from Fraser to Appelbaum have failed to do so.
As Frank Lovell implied, the union officialdom
as a social layer has no intention, and can have no intention, of fighting
back. If a fightback takes place before organized labor is beyond salvaging, it
will be because the ranks found a way to break through the bureaucratic crust
that snuffs out grassroots militancy. But such militancy, in order to be
sustained, not merely episodic, will need a leadership from the trade union
left, itself mobilized to promote a class struggle response to the one-sided
class warfare workers have known all too well.